If you are a salesperson you will no doubt have been asked to practise role plays and most probably grumbled about the experience. If you are a sales manager, you have no doubt been grumbled at by your sales team when suggesting practising role plays! Here’s some proof that practising sales conversations can and does help you achieve incredible results in your sales calls.
Last week, Objective Assessment caught up with a company who have been enrolled on one of our sales training programs. As part of their training with us they had spent time role playing the scenario they would face with a particularly important new prospect. As a result, when the meeting took place they were asked to become a supplier of the company, a leading bespoke supplier into the London building industry, working in some of the most upmarket apartment buildings in London.
Here’s what Jonathan had to say about how much the role play helped:
It really enabled me to drill into the detail of the company I was visiting – what they specialise in, their core values, their typical clients, their visions and long-term plans.This helped to structure questions around these details so I could find out what was important to them. Some of the questions I asked were:
- “What kind of expectation comes with clients who spend upwards of £20,000 on your product?’” (We correctly guessed this as the average spend for they installed products).
- “Do you think your overall finish currently matches this expectation?”
- “What impression does your finishing features give to your clients?”
This allowed me to steer the conversation in a way that it didn’t become a product/commodity based discussion. Instead, the conversation was aligning with their vision to ‘become, through merit of our works, the number one bespoke supplier for the contract sector in the UK.’
I learnt that paramount to supporting them fulfil their vision was the need for an extremely high level of service. I was able to use other client examples to support this and I dug deeper as to the implications of them not receiving a great service – most of their business is repeat/recommendation and letting clients down would have severe consequences.
What I learned from the role play:
I was prepared to listen to the conversation but often struggled to dig into detail.
I inadvertently entered my own head and kept jumping from point to point without focussing on important details that the prospect was telling me.
Whilst my questions were being answered I was too busy thinking of the next question, rather than thoroughly processing what I was being told.
My key takeaways that I have tried to implement:
Preparing questions is great but don’t allow this to be a ‘template’ whereby it becomes the format of the meeting and you simply reel off a load of cleverly worded questions.
The crucial thing is to utilise the answers given to these questions to dig for detail.
·Great questioning is useless without actually listening to the answer and focussing on detail – sounds obvious but this is exactly what I was missing!
If you would like to find out more about how our sales training programmes may help your sales team grow find out more using the link below or get in touch for a no-obligation chat.