How to coach your team through role plays
If you ask me what the best way to coach a salesperson is, I would say 100 times that it is through role play.
Role play is a technique in which individuals act out different scenarios or roles to practice specific skills.
It helps coach your sales team on specific topics and moments of your sales cycle.
You can role-play discovery calls, cold calling, objection handling, pricing negotiation, renewal, or upsell.
Role plays are very useful during pivotal moments of your sales organization, such as:
Onboarding: When onboarding new team members, you should have role-play sessions with them to graduate and get them on the phone. I would never have somebody who recently joined my team go on the phone if they have not graduated from a series of role plays.
GTM pivot: If you are pivoting your go-to-market strategy, entering a new industry, or launching a new product, role plays are a great way to practice and refine the new narrative.
Underperformance: If somebody is struggling in their sales cycle, they can gain lots of greatness from role-play sessions.
Preparation
Set up the role-play sessions in advance with your team members.
Agree on a series of role plays to deliver in a given period.
Start from the beginning of your sales cycle, then move to demo, negotiation, upsell, renewal, etc. Always use the same brief.
Oh yes, the brief! Ask your team members to send a quick brief in advance.
You (aka the prospect/customer in the role play) should always act in the same way and play the same character.
Execution
Role-play everything, from the beginning to the end. The camera should be on, and greetings and icebreakers are included. Remember to take notes during the session. Do not stop the role-play until it's finished.
Feedback
At the end of the session, always ask your team member how it went.
Try to understand if they are aware of the output and if they can quickly recognise the things that went well and the ones that did not go so well.
Provide feedback with the following framework:
Start doing: Here's what the person should start doing that they are not doing right now.
Stop doing: Here's what they should stop doing, things that went wrong go here.
Continue doing: This is the good part, things that went well and they should keep doing go here.
Be very specific when giving feedback, i.e. at this time you said this, I felt this, I would have done that, etc.
Finally, for the next role play, always remember to identify the feedback given in prior sessions and see if the team member has taken them on board.
In case they didn’t, it's a red flag, meaning your team member is not coachable or has trouble progressing through your feedback.
In case they did, well, it worked! You have a great rep who's ready to take on live calls and nail them since their very first one.
