This is something that many salespeople may frown upon the idea of doing. “Role-playing? I have been doing Sales for 20 years I don’t need to waste my time with role-playing.” I cringed when I heard a salesperson say this because in many cases, this is the exact thing that they really needed to be doing! There are all sorts of different ways you can role-play a sales scenario with a sales rep. Where I found role-playing most helpful, was with rehearsing and playing out a specific conversation that would take place between the sales rep and the client. It paid dividends to take the time and do this in advance of the client call. This way we could prepare our responses based on WHATEVER the client responded to us with. Let me give you an example.
Jason, my rep, has an important follow-up call with his customer tomorrow. Jason has spent a lot of time working with his client over the last couple of months. This call is to understand where we stand, what happens next, and potentially moving ahead and getting a signed contract. Before Jason has this call, as Jason’s manager, I would get with Jason in advance of the call and we would put our heads together and talk through the exact questions that we wanted to ask and what the customer might respond back with. Questions such as, “Are we still on track with moving ahead in November? What other information is still needed for a decision? Did we get the green-light from above? What’s keeping us from moving forward? Can we get a signed contract this week?” These are important questions and we wanted to both be on the same page with the information that we wanted to get out of the call.
Isn’t it funny how often times when we ask these questions we get pretty vague or generic responses from the client? This is exactly what we were preparing and role-playing for. Jason and I wanted to prep ourselves mentally so that when the customer responded by saying, “We are really close, we just have a little more due diligence to do” (which is completely vague and has red flags all over), Jason and I were prepared for this and can immediately respond. Instead of just settling with that response with something like, “Sounds good,” we were prepared to respond with, “Excellent news. Help us understand what additional information you need before moving ahead. It’s not a loaded question or anything, we just want to understand exactly what you need.” Boom! This kind of response is going to uncover important additional details that we needed to know. (You see how asking clarifying questions like this is so important versus just saying, “okay, sounds good”)?
As Jason and I spent maybe 30 minutes or so role-playing, we were really preparing ourselves for pretty much any response the customer would give us to our questions. Instead of being surprised or just accepting what the client said, we would dig deeper and make the call with the client as valuable as we could in terms of really understanding our position and where things stand.
Role-playing like this should be done daily. It should be done routinely. Not just once a week or for a team meeting or something. Build role-playing into every scenario in every deal and do it as part of your routine activities. Chances are, that after the customer call, you will be calling your rep saying, “Wow, didn’t it pay off that we prepped ourselves before this call!?”
-Happy Selling!