Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These include content, tools, knowledge, and the information needed to sell products and services. From onboarding and beyond, your sales team is only as strong as the support you provide in training and resources.
Reality based training, as the name implies, is training that is rooted in reality and geared to train your employees for everyday scenarios. If you want peak performance from your sales team, you need to integrate reality based training into your training. These scenarios allow your sales team to learn, practice, and hone their skills in a space that is safe from mistakes.
Below are 5 reality based training scenarios that can help prepare your sales team for anything.
Sales Pitch Practice
Improve your sales team members’ pitch in front of potential buyers. Allowing your sales team to practice their pitch independently with immediate feedback helps to build confidence before doing so before peers and, ultimately, customers.
3D virtual reality creates the perfect opportunity to do just that. Using VR, team members can fix any glitches in their pitches, and experience the body language and responses of potential customers.
Pitching at a Trade Show
Selling at a trade show booth is hard. Reality based simulations allow your sales team to practice selling your product to potential customers, so that they will be more prepared for the real event.
Sales interactions in VR aren’t constrained to the hardware. Not only are the thoughts and emotions that bubble up during VR experiences genuine, they are brought back into the physical world. As with sales pitch practices, the training and experience from VR will stay with your sales team long after the headset is gone.
Body Language and Rapport Building
In sales, body language can make or break a deal. Scenario based learning provides the opportunity to learn and practice body language, eye contact and building rapport.
Branching scenarios can help learners see the immediate response to their actions and respond accordingly before practicing with VR or their peers.
Prospect Meeting
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Scenario based training helps your team to practice everything that goes into making a solid first impression, landing more customers and closing more deals.
Virtual reality is a great way to practice meeting prospective clients. By putting themselves directly into a prospect meeting, your trainees will be able to experience the nerves that one inevitably feels when meeting a prospect client. These opportunities to fail without consequence make it more likely that your team members will nail prospect meetings and grow your client base.
Active Listening Exercises
Active listening is a skill. Your sales team should be focused on how they can solve a customer’s problem with your product or service. They simply cannot do that if they are not actively listening to your customer, instead of focusing solely on their reply. Reality based scenarios help your sales team practice actively listening.
Branching scenarios are a great way to incorporate active listening training. As your team member selects reactions to scenarios, it is evident whether or not they have truly listened to the needs of the customer. The trainee will then see the immediate consequences of their actions and receive feedback on what they could have done instead, or why their choice was best.
Reality based scenarios help sales teams to put themselves into real sales scenarios and experience the thoughts and feelings that happen throughout the sales process. Excellent salespeople are not only those that make the sale but create a long-lasting impact on the customer as well. Sales are more of an interpersonal connection between two people when sales trainees actually run these simulations multiple times and are faced with scenarios that they would be very likely to run into in the real world, it boosts their confidence and lets them handle making sales earlier with a lot more ease.
Are you ready to support your sales team with efficient and impactful sales training? Contact us today to learn more about how reality based training can increase sales for your company.
