Game sales training

A sales training and onboarding plan consolidates role expectations, training timelines, and resources into one place for your newly hired salespeople. You can use it to build out a more detailed and specific onboarding plan for your organization. Complacency can kill in a sales job, so encourage salespeople to listen to sales podcasts and subscribe to newsletters from the best sales blogs , regardless of where they are in their career.

As the industry shifts and new thought leaders emerge, reps can use the knowledge from these publications to stay in touch with new best practices and continuously build their knowledge base. I once spoke to a software engineer who described his job as "coming in and figuring out how to break our software every day.

Then, have them develop — on their own or in groups — the most convincing counters to those objections. For example, HubSpot Academy has a free Inbound Sales Certification and Course available online, including insights and advice from industry experts. The course has been taken thousands of times and can be a helpful step in making salespeople better at their jobs.

Hosting panels with salespeople in your org that highlight their stories of success can serve as guidance and inspiration to both new and existing salespeople. However, what might be even more valuable is a sales failure panel. More importantly, they can explain what they learned and how they addressed the problem next time.

Sometimes referred to as " What did you hear? Listen to the call alongside your rep, with each of you writing down what you heard that could have been said better, or what was said that stuck out in a great way. Compare notes to see how attentive your rep is and to hear their opinion on how the call went. This equips reps to go into calls with more confidence, the right vocabulary, and a clear direction in which to take the conversation.

The presentation could follow one of your buyer personas realizing their problem, looking for solutions, how they stumbled upon your business, and what made them choose to do business with you. You might even have an entire competitive analysis team. However, your new sales hire might not know all of your comparative strengths and weaknesses, even though those points may come up on their very first sales call.

Having reps conduct their own competitive analysis offers many benefits for you and your company. For example:. The existing rep can walk new hires through the day-to-day of the job, show what success looks like, and serve as a mentor for personal and professional growth. Dan Tyre , a sales director here at HubSpot, recommends a tactic to foster self-reflection and personal growth in new hires.

He suggests new reps set up a written list or spreadsheet of the three "potholes" they fall into each day, as a way of holding themselves accountable, taking risks, and reviewing growth opportunities. Even the most seasoned reps need a little help breaking the ice with new contacts and prospects.

While it may sound simple, there is an art and a science to using this method to keep contacts engaged. Spend some time with your team taking them through different engagement methods to help them avoid being ghosted by their contacts. This could also be a great time to have some of your senior reps share best practices with newer members of the team. Image Source. If your sales team needs a more robust solution for keeping the conversation going, consider training your team to use software such as Icebreaker by UpContent.

Icebreaker integrates directly with your CRM to track and log the effectiveness of third-party content shared with your leads. Sales teams need time and space to interact and bond in non-competitive ways. Strengthen your team with these engaging games that anyone can participate in. As real-life investor and crook Jordan Belfort, Leonardo DiCaprio delivers this line to a group of colleagues in an impromptu selling exercise, challenging them to create a need in the eyes of a potential buyer.

The challenge could involve picking anything in the room or office. Task your reps with identifying what the problem is to which the obscure item is the solution. From there, in a mock selling situation with a prospect either another new rep or someone on the training team , have the rep try to get the prospect to identify the need themselves, and provide the solution in this case, the obscure product. If your business sells multiple products, software, or upgrades, make a list of the key ones.

Then, write out a one or two-sentence scenario where a potential customer would benefit from it. Shuffle both lists and have salespeople match the problem to the solution so they can determine when someone is a good candidate for a certain solution. As an added bonus, this can serve as an introduction for new hires to employees from other departments. At the end of your training, quiz new hires on five to 10 different categories, with each category containing five questions of increasing difficulty and point value.

This game is particularly effective with a big onboarding class or for retraining a large group of existing reps. E-pitch competitions are a staple for new hire training, as they force reps to get the value of a product out clearly and quickly.

However, you can also run e-pitch competitions for continued sales training, putting random objects or ideas in a hat and challenging existing salespeople to pick one at random and brainstorm a pitch to work on their public speaking, persuasion, and brevity skills. One of the best ways for your reps to retain information could be for you to reinforce it during the training.

Sales training games help companies revitalize their training strategies and see stronger sales figures. Players encounter trivia answers in categories and must respond quickly in the form of a question.

Jeopardy-style games are excellent for helping sales reps learn new information and reinforce important concepts. The trivia can be anything that relates to your sales team: sales figures, client details, company policies, industry facts. As the host unveils each answer, reps compete to come up with the right questions. Trivia games use audience-response technology to determine who buzzed in first, which clue is up next, and other complex details of gameplay.

Your team can also try games that are similar to Jeopardy , but have a somewhat slower-moving format, like Who Wants to be a Millionaire? In fact Salesforce research shows that getting answers wrong, and then learning the correct answers, is actually better for information retention.

Another excellent format for sales training games is Fastest Finger. This fast-paced competition gets hearts pumping and creates healthy competition. Keypads track which contestant, or team of contestants, pressed the button first.

The one with the fastest finger gets a shot at giving the right answer. Sales is a lot like that. Sales books may sound slick, but you need practice to hone your skills. Games offer a fun, true-to-life learning experience. Becoming the best sales person you can be requires perpetual practice. You need to study the game mentally, physically and emotionally pretty much every single day of your life. Games make education experiential. They bolster the sharing of theoretical knowledge and reinforce its application in an enjoyable setting.

They allow us to interact, make choices and compete playfully. They make us learn more and take pleasure in it. Goal: Correctly applying sales techniques on random products.

Purpose: Learning sales techniques by heart. Requirements: Letter spinning wheel , pen and paper, logical thinking. As the name suggests, this game works pretty much like Scattergories. Difference is, in our game the categories translate to steps of a direct sales technique with clear structure. I suggest Features - advantages - benefits , Gather - respond - deliver - close and Questioning the status quo for a start.

The technique has to be set before the game. Instructions: At the start of each round, one player spins the wheel and thinks of any product beginning with the letter that came up. After five minutes, or less for higher difficulty, teams or individual players decide for and announce questions for each category column. A neutral game master then fills them in on the game sheet publicly, on a laptop plus beamer or on a chalkboard.

Then all players discuss whether an answer was correct. Discussion stage is about argumenting for or against an answer, thereby discussing the sales technique behind it. For every answer found to be correct by the "jury," a player or team gets 10 points.

The overall best answer per column per round is rewarded with 20 points. Goal: Delivering a persuasive sales pitch for a generic product. Purpose: Learning to create need for a product. Requirements: Letter spinning wheel, creativity. Selling generic products is an advanced challenge because they lack unique features. You can easily advertise a novel describing how its edgy humor will have readers rolling on the floor.

Try to sell a pen? Dailius R. Wilson wrote a clever post in which he explains different ways to nail generic product sales. Try it out in this game. Instructions: Work in pairs. One player is the customer and chooses a product after spinning the letter wheel, the other has to sell it to her. Consider the most generic products, items like the classic pen, a toothpick, a blank signpost or a dish scrubber. A round is won when the sale is convincing.

Goal: Receiving a memento from a stranger. Purpose: Learning to approach strangers with confidence.