Improve your sales team's PERFORMANCE through rigorous and sustained PRACTICE

Hello Sales Reset Leader

In this week’s companion Weekly Sales Reset email for front-line salespeople, we focus on the value of sustained and rigorous practice.

We emphasise the difference between PERFORMANCE and PRACTICE.

Professional sportspeople and musicians know that the highest performance levels are only possible through sustained and effective practice.

But many salespeople never practice. And yet they want to perform.

This is a vast topic. In this edition of Sales Reset Leaders, we will look at just one aspect: How you might use role-play in most of your coaching sessions with team members:

• In significant opportunity and deal reviews

• Preparing for significant meetings

• In developing a team member’s skill in a particular area

We’ll start by addressing your team members’ inevitable concerns about role-play.

The rest of this email newsletter assumes you have read this week’s edition of Weekly Sales Reset:

• Title: Learning and Earning, Faster and Better | Part 2

• Subtitle: How to improve your sales results with structured practice

How to improve your team's results this week

• Why do salespeople hate role-play?

  • It’s not the real world

  • Bad experiences, or the fear of bad experiences

  • Role-play exposes the reality of current skill lev …

• How to use role-play

• Recommended coaching session agenda about practici …

• Role-Play Recommendations

• Leadership Reflective Practice

Why do salespeople hate role-play?

Not all salespeople hate role-play.

It’s typically more like about 98%. 😀

I want to help you enable every sales team member to embrace and welcome role-play. I hope you and your team learn from experience that role-play is one of the best things you can do to help your team members achieve their sales goals!

But let’s start with the big challenge. Why does role-play have such a bad reputation?

In the current edition of Weekly Sales Reset, I’ve outlined some reasons salespeople have negative emotional responses to role-play.

Let’s take this further. Here are some additional concerns and some ways to respond to these concerns.

It’s not the real world

• Some team members might say that role-play is not real.

• If they lack ability in a role-play scenario, they might claim to have the ability “in the real world”.

• From experience, I can say this is rarely the case. But who likes this to be pointed out?!

• The more experience you and your team members gain using role-play, the more you will all find that role-play can feel very real indeed.

Bad experiences, or the fear of bad experiences

• As I outline in Weekly Sales Reset, some team members might have had bad role-play experiences, or they might have heard about such bad experiences or be able to imagine such experiences.

• Please don’t underestimate the emotional intensity of role-play for some of your team members.

• For some people, putting themselves into a situation of potential failure and embarrassment can be an enormous issue.

• Their concerns are multiplied if role-play is in front of their peers. I strongly recommend that, initially, role-play is almost always done in the smallest of groups of just two or three people.

• For a self-confident sales team leader, it can sometimes be challenging to empathise sufficiently with team members who might feel intense anxiety about role-playing.

Role-play exposes the reality of current skill levels

• This is the big one!

• If somebody has developed strong competencies, these competencies will be available to them in role-play.

• If they haven’t, they won’t!!

• So long as some care is taken in designing how role-play is used, role-play reveals current levels of actual ability.

• In role-play, people often realise that although they know something, they can’t yet do that thing!

• The most straightforward example to illustrate this point is to look at open questions. I’m guessing that all of your team members believe they know all about open questions. It’s likely that few of your team members can use open questions habitually, with precision, fluency and ease to coach their customers.

How to use role-play

You now know that we're HUGE role-play fans!

Well-designed and practical role-play is one of the best ways to practice Sales Reset skills.

Here are our simple guidelines for role-play:

• Fun - Ideally, there's lots of laughter in good role-play because we're having fun experimenting with new approaches.

• Frequent - Role-play should be used frequently to improve skills, prepare for important conversations, and debrief significant meetings. It should be an everyday way of practising, not something reserved for rare occasions.

• Short - Role-play is almost always better in brief snippets of conversations, typically no more than 2-4 minutes. This is long enough to experiment with skills before reviewing performance and then having another go. If you’ve only got 20 minutes available for role-play, it’s best to have 2-3 goes at each of the most essential bits rather than a single conversation that can’t be reviewed effectively.

• Small - Role-playing in larger groups can be intimidating and risky for various reasons. We recommend that most role-playing be done in pairs or perhaps in a small group of three, with one person acting as an observer.

• Real—Using real, current customer situations for your role-plays is almost always better than relying on scripted scenarios. This is faster, easier, and more relevant, enabling participants to remain in their roles rather than referring to briefing documents.

• Swapping Roles - It's best when participants can play both buying and selling roles. It's not good when a sales team leader is always the buyer!

You will get recommendations for specific role-plays focused on the week's theme in every edition of Sales Reset Leaders.

Recommended coaching session agenda about practicing and role-play

Before leading your coaching sessions on practicing, especially with role-play, ask your team members to review the current edition of Weekly Sales Reset.

Give yourself time to reflect on WIIFM, “What’s in for me,” and empathise with your team members about how they might be sufficiently motivated to practice and engage in role-play.

Here’s this week’s recommended coaching session agenda:

1. Start with a brief review of their experience and results from their previous coaching session.

2. Ask this team member for their observations about the value of practice, especially using role-play.

3. Identify and prioritise a small range of specific practical things that this team member can do differently and better by practicing.

4. Spend some time role-playing!

5. Finish your coaching session with agreed and specific action conclusions.

Role-Play Recommendations

1. Stuck Opportunity: Select the most significant opportunity in your team member’s pipeline that looks stuck. Identify the most important stakeholder. Role-play the conversation with this stakeholder about the evidence of the opportunity being stuck.

2. Significant Meeting in the FUTURE: Select the most important meeting on your team member’s calendar in the coming days. Coach them about the meeting's objectives, agenda, and likely outcomes. Then, role-play critical moments of this meeting.

3. Recent significant meeting in the PAST: Select the most important meeting in the recent past, which did not end as positively as hoped. Coach them about the meeting's objectives, agenda, and outcomes, with the benefit of knowing what happened. Review what could have gone better and how that might have been achieved. Then, role-play these critical moments of this meeting.

Leadership Reflective Practice

Reflective practice is a crucial component of continuous professional development. That’s why we end every newsletter with prompts for your reflective practice on the theme of each week’s newsletter.

You can copy and paste these prompts into a recurring weekly activity, perhaps scheduled for the close of business on a Friday.

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this edition of Sales Reset Leaders valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Here’s a link to a page explaining how these weekly Sales Reset Leaders newsletters are designed to help you improve your sales team's results every week with structured coaching and practice.

Please feel free to unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of this email if these newsletters are no longer valuable to you!

Community of Practice

Ask Questions, Share Your Experience

If you have any questions or experience to share:

• LinkedIn Group - Join our World-Class Customer Success Selling Group on LinkedIn to ask questions or comment.

• Sales Reset Together Community - Click here to learn more about our private community of members committed to achieving and maintaining their Sales Reset.

Do your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?