Why Role Plays are the Best Bet for Effective Sales Training

Written by Team LiqvidMarch 28, 2022
Blog

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

How right on point Von Goethe is. Selling has never been simple or straightforward. All the prospects have unique needs, personalities, buying motivations; which means no single sales script or strategy will work for all. So, no matter how many lessons or books a salesperson can cram, they can never learn the true skill, unless they practice in the field.

And that’s what makes sales training so hard to put into practice. But there’s a solution – role plays. Role-play training exercises have long been recognized as a powerful training tool in sales. Role plays are a proven way to boost the performance of sales teams by enhancing their confidence in new product features and benefits and how to handle objections in a safe environment.

When you give your new sales hires different role-playing scenarios, you’re helping them develop their conflict resolution skills, build empathy, handle rejections, and learn to perform under pressure. They also learn how to improvise under different scenarios.

Role play scenarios in sales

In the sales profession, there are broadly four main scenarios, or you can say, customers, a salesperson will encounter.

1. Complaining or argumentative customer

This is a must-have scenario in any of your role play training exercises. A customer can be angry for a host of reasons – unsatisfactory service, delay in refund, defective product, etc. And as a salesperson, you can’t escape such customers and will have to deal with them as no one wants unhappy customers. The role play exercises must involve a good amount of info about products as well as offers, campaigns in running, so the sales reps can counter customers’ arguments positively and effectively.

2. Undecided customer

Sometimes, even after giving it your best shot, few customers will always be undecided. The objections could be focused on features, service, or pricing. In some situations, the customer actually likes the product but is not in a position to authorize the purchase. Role play exercises in this scenario must be about how sales reps can do their homework right. You must discuss how your business is validating leads and how to properly categorize leads in their proper categories.

3. Nitty-gritty customer

This type of customer is detail-oriented and will do their own thorough research before making a purchase. Role play exercises to handle such customers must focus on specific questions that’d need further education. Such exercises would also help your reps deal with the unknown, and at the same time, you can assess your reps’ knowledge about the brand and its products.

4. Tech-savvy customer

Such customers are extremely tech-savvy and are one step ahead of the sales reps when it comes to products, features, and functionalities. You might think that you have covered all your bases about your business and that of the competitors. But there’ll always be one tiny detail that you’d miss out. Role play exercises for such customers would involve in-depth scenarios about the products, including even the tiniest, unnoticeable details. Such exercises would force your reps to think out of the box.

How to create effective role-playing scenarios?

Once you know the different types of customers you encounter in your business, you can chalk out a strategy to create effective role play scenarios that will help your sales teams to come out on top of their game.

Here are some tips that you can use to make the role plays effective:

  • Use a script: It’s ok to let your sales teams use a script while hashing out exercises. It’d enhance their confidence levels and give them fair opportunities to succeed in a role. Once they are comfortable enough, they will switch to improvisation during the exercises.
  • Rejection happens: It’s very important to help your sales reps understand that rejection is a part of the game and they must not take it personally. Ideate some scenarios with rejection to enable reps to handle it better. And share your stories with your team; it would humanize rejections.
  • Take notes: The point of an effective role play scenario is to not interrupt your reps during the exercise. You must take notes and allow the reps to steer the conversation on their own. This helps them to think on their feet.
  • Test listening skills: Listening is an extremely important skill every salesperson must-have. In the role play exercises, interject some false information about your products or services to test your reps’ listening skills. Their response can help you to coach them better.
  • Negotiation scenarios: Most of the customers want a good bargain and will ask for it. Develop negotiation skills in your reps through role play scenarios by creating situations where buyers would deliberately ask for a lower price based on competitor pricing or budget. You can leverage artificial intelligence to evaluate such role plays because it identifies the number of filler words used, tone, and confidence, which are typically more difficult to provide feedback on without concrete data.

Role plays for effective sales training

Role plays encourage sales reps to think more critically about the products and services and to see situations from a different perspective. If done right, role plays can motivate reps in a fun and engaging way. But for that to happen, role plays should be content-focused, match the business objectives, and be relevant to real-world situations.

However, creating role plays for online sales training needs more than understanding real-life scenarios and business objectives. Especially if you are building more than one-off custom sales training module, you need templates to streamline the development process and create a consistent learning experience. Organizations widely deploy our interactive templates for role plays to create business simulations and branching scenarios really fast and affordable. They are customizable and can be used for any industry and audience.

We work through a compelling storytelling technique and use several motion graphics and talking head videos to make your role plays effective and boost engagement and performance. There is no need to provide boring digital catalogs or customary page-turner sales training courses when you can offer interactive role plays that can be accessed remotely across devices. Talk to us if you want to refresh your sales training program.

 This article was first published on eLearning Industry.  

Read More
Digital English Lab

Simulation-based Learning: 3 Reasons Why It Works

Written by Team LiqvidNovember 29, 2021
Blog

Simulation-based learning has been around for such a long time now that it has become commonplace. Several industries are using it:

  • Aviation – Pilots in training use flight simulators to get familiar with plane controls and practice flying in different weather and landing conditions.
  • Math – Mathematicians and economists are using simulations to study probabilities and statistics in a theoretical event.
  • Manufacturing – Such plants now have simulation tools to plan, design, and train automated processes and manufacturing systems.
  • Medical – Med students are using simulations to practice surgeries, crisis interventions, and administer prescriptions.

In the eLearning industry, the pandemic only accelerated simulation-based learning. Here are some real-life examples that can help you understand.

1. Recently, the University of South Australia conducted several simulated activities in-person when the campuses reopened. Several simulated scenarios (computed tomography sim, vacbag manufacture, tattooing, personal protective equipment, etc.) enabled the university to achieve all clinical placement learning outcomes.

2. Glendale Community College in California has developed a tax simulation game for a microeconomics principles course. It teaches students to explain the link between a tax system and income distribution, identify the distributional effects of different taxes, and justify the chosen tax incidence. Students can set federal, state, and local taxes.

3. BBC developed an interesting simulation on the refugee experience mirroring the Syrian refugee crisis triggered in 2015 to help students understand the experience of the refugees and the dilemmas they faced while fleeing to Europe.

What is simulated learning anyways?

Let’s get deep into what is a simulated learning experience. You can think of simulation as a novel teaching method that tests your knowledge and skill levels by placing you in immersive problem-solving scenarios. In a simulation, usually, the instructor defines the parameters, with the end-goal being to create a safe environment for hands-on learning experiences.

Simulated training is being used in several industries to teach learners the skills needed in the real world, as we saw from the examples above. A simulation is considered effective if it answers your question, “If I do this, what happens?”

In a simulation you can test out different scenarios to see what works through a trial-and-error approach, giving you the knowledge and confidence to apply your new skills in the real world. And today, with the help of video recordings and advanced analytics, the instructor can analyze training sessions, identify errors, and discuss alternative approaches with learners.

Why simulated learning works?

Three solid reasons why it works.

1. Practical learning: How many times have you all heard this in school – “Practical is always better than theory.” And there is merit to that. Simulations can give you practical experience in the real world and prepare you well. As a med student, you can learn to perform operations and understand human anatomy better through 3-D simulations. Or, if you’re a business school student, you can learn about building better products, market, sell and service them. Bottom line, you can focus on crisis resource management and develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes in a safe and secure environment.

2. Instant feedback and a great retention aid: Learning-based simulations offer real-time and prompt feedback. You can get constructive and instant feedback, which helps you improve your skills. You can also try new, alternative skills or methods to improve old methods and test new tools. Plus, simulations make learning fun for you. Think of how much you retain from watching a fun video on machine learning algorithms rather than reading a long pdf file filled with numbers and graphs. Simulation-based learning programs equip you to better understand the actions you can take in a situation, which validates the results of training and makes it effective.

3. Collaborative skills: Perhaps, another most significant benefit of simulation-based learning is developing your collaborative skills in a fun way. In a simulated environment, you are introduced to several real-life scenarios, which would need you to collaborate with other members of your team. You also get insights into your own behavior.

The future of simulation-based learning

With Virtual Reality simulators becoming more accessible, less expensive, and increasingly realistic, simulation-based learning are the go-to mode for bridging the gap between structured training and real-life experiences.

Today learners are digital technology natives, so their expectation is that training will challenge them, immerse them into a personalized learning journey. Simulation-based learning helps meet that learner expectations by offering VR experiences, 3D-avatar based learning environments or AI-based role-play simulations.

This helps to accelerate the learning curve of learners in a simulated environment, reproducing real-life conditions without time or space limitations and much fewer risks than real environments. It’s also supported by a recent study, supported by the Korea World Bank Partnerships Facility. The study shows that VR training is, on average, more effective than traditional training, developing students’ technical, practical, and socio-emotional skills. And the results are particularly promising in the fields of health and safety, engineering, and technical education.

How can Liqvid help?

Training simulations should not be created in isolation. Businesses need a robust learning management system for delivery and analytics to loop in feedback and continuous improvement of the learner. We have been creating simulations for educational institutions for a few years, and the demand has been increasing since the pandemic hit us.

One of our recent projects was about developing a multi-player, virtual pharmacy simulation game for a polytechnic in Singapore to make their students proficient in routine tasks performed in a pharmacy – receiving, typing, packaging, and dispensing. And the result – improved engagement, better learning, and retention!

Several top vocational training and education institutes are widely using simulations for skill development. Contact us if you need a partner to help make your simulation-based learning needs a reality.

Read More
Advance Digital Language Lab

The Value of Simulation-based Learning in EdTech

Written by Team LiqvidOctober 26, 2021
Blog
  • A health simulation company offers computer simulations to help educate college students about substance use and sexual misconduct prevention.
  • The School of Nursing has introduced UNLV’s Poverty Simulation, an interprofessional education exercise to help students from Nursing, Medicine, and Dental Medicine understand the challenges of poverty and the resources and barriers connected with community services.
  • Students at the Michigan Tech Research Institute built an app simulation to enable scientists and engineers to measure hydraulic conductivity while simultaneously recording their data with ease and efficiency.

Examples like these show the growing importance of simulation-based learning in the EdTech world. 2020 was all about settling and getting used to the remote learning model. As online education and remote or hybrid workplace training continue to be the reality for most, simulation-based learning will find more acceptance.

Simulation-based learning offers learners a wide range of opportunities to deep dive into complex topics and practice skills. Let’s see how simulation has evolved over the years.

History of Simulation

Simulation training has been around for a very long time. Perhaps, the earliest application can be traced back to WWII when mathematicians John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam used newly developed computing techniques to model nuclear detonation for weapon design. Post this, the aviation industry completed aviation training in 1910 with the release of the first flight simulator.

Other industries soon followed. In the field of anesthesia in the late 1960s, full-body mannequin simulators were introduced based on work done by Denson and Abrahamson from the University of Southern California. From the 1970s, we began to see several computer-generated simulators.

Today, we’ve 3-D landscapes with the precise scale of landscapes in the real world. Simulation training has now expanded to a range of industries like healthcare, military, law enforcement, transportation, and more. But as we saw from the examples mentioned at the start, the recent strides of simulations in EdTech look most promising.

Let’s see how simulations are revolutionizing the EdTech space with several benefits for the learners.

8 Benefits of Simulations-based Learning

1. Practical learning: How many times have we heard the stuff – “Practical is always better than theory”? And there is merit to that. When your learners are aiming to be leaders in the business, simulations are one thing that can give them practical experience in the real world and prepare well. For instance, medical students can learn to perform operations and know human anatomy better through 3D simulations. Similarly, business school students would learn about running a business better with a simulation that can teach them to develop new products, market them, sell, and service them.

2. Instant feedback: The biggest advantage of simulations is real-time and prompt feedback. Trainers can provide constructive feedback, which offers learners opportunities to improve their skills. They can also try new, alternative skills or methods to improve old methods.

3. Collaborative skills: Perhaps, the single biggest benefit of simulation-based learning is seamless collaboration. Simulations introduce learners to several real-life scenarios, which require some cooperation between the participants. When simulated training solutions are implemented, learners often work with each other, which helps improve their teamwork abilities.

4. Retention aspect: Simulations make learning fun, which aids a lot when it comes to retention. Simulation-based learning programs equip learners to understand the actions they can take in a situation, which will, in turn, help them retain the concepts better. It also sort of validates the results of training and makes it effective.

5. Risk management: Simulation-based learning helps in risk management. Learners can be trained on the required concepts, and a business can test the efficacy and performance of the solution or product to learn what is working and what isn’t. this helps in risk management to a great extent.

6. Cost-effective: A simulation-based learning environment is always cost-effective compared to the real world. There are no travel or other admin costs involved in such an environment or in a remote setting to train the learners. Even the time and expenses are reduced significantly with improved retention and hands-on methods.

7. Multiple users: Of course, simulation-based learning supports multiple learners at one go; there’s no cap on the number of participants in the training, unlike a physical set-up.

8. Optimum resource utilization: Simulations can help in the management of resource utilization. Lesser resources are required to run a simulation compared to physical training sessions.

Simulations in EdTech – the Future is Bright

In today’s connected world, simulations can bridge the gap between structured training and real-life experiences. But creating simulations that stay true to the learning goals and are effective as well require expertise.

An experienced eLearning content development partner like Liqvid can help you design effective simulations with our end-to-end offerings. We have our own software development kit (SDK) consisting of several simulations templates that allow us to do rapid prototyping and development.

Our learning simulations are the preferred choice for global organizations with robust content authoring, LMS integration, and analytics. Contact us today to see how we can create interactive simulations for you.

Read More