Sales Performance Simulations
A Sales Simulation is a total immersion sales training experience that replicates your marketplace. Your Sales Simulation is specifically designed and crafted for your organization using as a starting point a number of validated design models. During the sales simulation participants:
- Experience an entire sales cycle from opportunity identification to the selection of the winning team
- Compete against other teams
- Receive in-depth feedback on sales skills and sales strategy throughout the sales cycle
- Integrate all their previous sales training and product training
What is a Sales Simulation?
When you face the challenge of winning a major account sales opportunity, it's not just about making great sales calls – it's about making great sales calls, on the right people, at the right time, with the right message. Sales excellence must be sustained over an extended period of time in a wide variety of ever changing market situations.
During a Sales Simulation participants continuously face and meet this challenge. Each sales team must develop an overall account strategy and then modify it as the simulation progresses, circumstances change, and their strategy becomes outdated. In the end, a competitive shoot-out determines the sales team that best navigated the complex buying process.
A Sales Simulation replicates the type of opportunities that you want your sales teams to pursue. How? You determine the nature of the opportunity the sales teams will be pursuing, thus providing the strategic focus and overarching architecture to serve as a backdrop for the Sales Simulation.
What makes a Sales Simulation unique?
A Sales Simulation is unique from other sales training programs in two ways: the degree to which it is customized and how participants learn. Let's take a brief look at each.
First, like most sales training programs, a Sales Simulation is customized to your marketplace. In today's world, that is a given, not a differentiator. But there is something about the way a Sales Simulation is customized that is a significant differentiator: you identify the specific business situation you want your sales team to experience and a company is created to allow the sales teams to tackle that business situation. Working with Sales Momentum®, you define a series of choice parameters that will apply to the simulated company, such as: the competitors and their position in the account, marketplace changes, and common objections. Finally, you determine the individuals within the simulated company on whom the sales teams will have the opportunity to make calls.
Finally the Sales Simulation is designed to be updated in real time. This means it is easy to update the story to incorporate new initiatives your company introduces or changes that occur in your marketplace.
Second, because the Sales Simulation is an experiential program, learning occurs at three primary points:
- Strategy Planning Sessions. During each session, a Strategy Advisor works with each team reinforcing strategic planning principles and strategy tools used in your company.
- Sales Calls. Following each sales call, the sales team members observing the call, along with a faculty member provide call-specific feedback.
- Presentation or Strategy Session. Here, each sales team gets to see “their competitors” – an opportunity we rarely enjoy in real life. Yet, by observing the other presentations, each team becomes acutely aware of the different solutions proposed, differences in sale strategies, and differences in information obtained during the sales calls.
When Would a Sales Simulation be helpful?
A Sales Simulation can take multiple forms, range from one-day to three days, and can be used at various levels of the sales training hierarchy. For example, it can be used at the foundational level in conjunction with the Selling Fundamentals or Account Strategy programs. This is particularly appropriate when it is important to focus the application of the skill sets on a high priority market segment or a unique sales challenge.
Another common scenario is when a company has in place a set of existing programs in call execution and sales strategy but it is clear an additional step is necessary to improve sales performance. A Sales Simulation works particularly well in such cases because it is designed to be compatible with any existing sales performance models – it builds on the sales training foundation you have in place without creating a common language conflict.
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