5 Reasons Why Your Sales Role-Playing Doesn’t Work
A Sales Tips Blog subscriber recently wrote to me:
“…As a new sales rep, I used to dread role-plays. Those were typically done with a manager, and that pressure was far greater for me than meeting with a CEO. Perhaps you can give some ideas for both Sales Managers and less experienced Sales Professionals on how to improve those teaching/learning opportunities…
“Thanks again for all the great sales blog thoughts! Trevor A.”
Why Most Sales Role-Playing Exercises Are Junk
1. Sales managers normally handle role-plays, as Trevor notes. This adds a level of anxiety that isn’t present in real selling environments. We tend to perform for the sales manager instead of exercising our real world selling skills.
2. Customers and sales professionals are usually sitting face-to-face during telephone role-plays. How many customers have picture phones which provide body language cues?
3. For role-plays to be a true learning experience, most sales managers think they need an audience. They want the whole group to learn something. How often do we make sales calls with 20 people observing? The worst examples of this are role-plays done with the participants using microphones in front of an audience of hundreds. Get real.
4. Every call we make is not a first call, yet almost all role-plays are first calls. Great, the sales professional can repeatedly demonstrate the ability to introduce himself or herself; now what?
5. In virtually every role-play I’ve observed (too many), the person who is acting as the customer plays it either as a pushover or an extremely difficult person. In the real world of sales, we operate 98% of the time in-between those extremes.
Sales Tips For Role-Plays That Actually Teach Something
- Bring in a real customer. It doesn’t get any more authentic. Every selling organization has customers that would be more than willing to help in this area. I’ve done it myself with great success. Most sales managers don’t do this because it takes planning and they’re afraid of what they might hear as feedback from the customer.
- Use real customer scenarios when staging a role-play. Instead of creating a make-believe customer on the fly, gather information from a real customer and use them for the role-play. This makes things more believable.
- The sales manager needs to play the role of the sales professional sometimes (I love seeing sales managers sweat when the tables are turned). Salesperson to salesperson role-plays work well too. Sales managers need to avoid playing the role of the customer.
- Participants need to sit back to back when conducting telephone role-plays. This precludes any body-language input.
- Lose the audience and conduct role-plays with just the customer, salesperson and possibly one other person. Don’t always conduct them in a conference room either. Use a real office and have the customer sit behind the desk.
- Practice 2nd, 3rd and 4th calls to customers. A contract signing role-play is critical, yet almost never done.
- When playing a customer, pick the middle of the road on the nice-guy vs. bad-guy continuum. This is the temperament level we normally encounter with customers.
Sales Blog Wrap Up
Hope this helps, Trevor, and thanks for your question.
©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer
Related posts:
- Sales Manager and Sales Representative, Working Together
- 3 Different Ways To Make Sales Calls With Your Manager
- Dysfunctional Work Environments
Tags: manager, sales-training, skills
We'd like to hear your feedback on this post - feel free to comment below!
December 10th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Great feedback on how to improve role playing! Thanks for this.
But, I have a question. Why do so many people think role playing is effective at all? Wouldn’t straight up real time coaching accomplish so much more? If you want to coach a field rep, go on calls (but remember to zip it up as they are doing the selling not you) and if you are coaching inside sales reps double jack in on their calls.
Is role playing just something management uses to short cut the time they spend coaching? Would love to hear others thoughts and thanks again!
December 10th, 2009 at 11:56 am
In the famous words of Allen Iverson: “Practice?! Are we really talking about practice?”
While I agree real life is the best way to learn, we all need to learn the basics first.
All of us know the regular objections or challenges we encounter, and personally if I am selling a new product, I would like to to practice overcoming those objections if possible internally before hearing them for the first time from a customer. Scott, outlines some excellent ideas on how to improve that challenging process.
I would agree real life calls are vital, but do not think it is a ‘one or the other’ question.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Trish, the one major advantage to role-playing is that you can control the variables. For example, if I have a sales professional who has trouble making executive presentations then that is what we need to work on. It might take weeks or months to get to the point where you could coach someone in this situation. Role-playing allows us to jump right to the trouble area. Also, it’s not always the best idea to learn critical skills while doing and miss selling opportunities.
Scott
December 11th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Trevor and Scott…agree with both your points. My question had less to do with the value of role playing and more to do with the fact that I have seen it used in place of coaching. Sales is not a controlled environment so a combination of both role playing (controlled by you) and live coaching (controlled by the buyer) seems to make the most sense.
My questions stemmed from the fact that I have seen Sales Managers role play once or twice a year and think they have done an effective job of personnel development. We encourage sales management to provide their sales managers with the bandwidth and expertise they need to make coaching/role playing a priority. Was trying to get at that issue…obviously did not articulate it well….
Once again, great post with great data. Thanks.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Great point Trish. I agree completely.
It is refreshing to hear others are working on the same things, and considering how to do a better job than the folks who taught us.
December 20th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Really interesting article Scott, as well as the previous comments. Although I agree with much of what you said regarding creating better role-playing envioments, I do think it’s critical that as professionals we learn to embrace ‘effective’ role plays. I think we have to be careful not to let poor role plays done by poor planners/managers/coaches, etc to dictate our general feelings to the tremendous practice. Also, in some of the seminars I’ve taught, the role-plays have had an incredible impact on the audience. So often speakers get in front of an audience and talk about how they do things, but the audience just can’t generalize what they’re saying. At least with a roll-play, they can get a partial glimpse. Again, thank you for the article and thoughts on the important subject.
April 13th, 2010 at 3:34 am
[...] take it totally over-the-top to make it as entertaining as possible. Either way, the point of the role play is almost always lost to the bumbling or over-acting. You spend most of the debrief explaining what should have [...]