How to Develop & Role Play Effective Sales Presentations

You can improve sales techniques through role playing exercises

Use role-playing for sales training as a way to sharpen sales skills and ensure more uniformity in each salesman’s technique. Role-playing is both a visual representation of a situation and a participative technique. To develop an effective sales presentation, you need input from an experienced salesman in the specific field to help you re-create and anticipate what the costumer will say and do.

Instructions

Use Team's Experience

1. Draw on the knowledge of the sales force. If your sales team has experience selling a particular product or working in a specific industry, ask them to share the most common questions or most difficult situations they have encountered. You will use these stories to create scenes that different role-players can play out. Also ask them to share what works best for them, share the solutions they have created, or the best way they have dealt with the difficult situations. Let the team learn from each other.

2. Model your sales presentation. If you have a specific idea of how you think the sales presentation should go, have one of your salesmen play the costumer and you play the salesman. Show them exactly what the sales presentation is supposed to look like, and let them experience the costumer side of the dialogue by answering honestly.

3. Let them play both roles. Have your salesmen play their part with another salesman as the costumer, then have them switch roles. Do this several times with difficult and easy scenarios.

4. Incorporate feedback. Have one pair of students play out a sales scene in front of the rest of the group, and ask the group what they thought was positive about the performances. Then ask the role-players themselves how they felt they did. This is a good way to let the role-players critique themselves, and hearing the positive feedback from the class first makes their self-evaluation more meaningful. Then ask the rest of the class what they could have done better. Have the role players re-create the scene incorporating the class’s feedback (including your own). Incorporating the feedback in this manner avoids putting your salesmen in the defensive. Feedback from peers is often more easily accepted than feedback solely from a superior.

5. Record the presentations. Set up a video camera to record every presentation, including all the feedback. This allows each role-player to see themselves objectively and make further improvements.

References

• AllBusiness: Role-Playing is an Effective Sales Training Tool