Teaching your employees new skills and abilities with sales training games is one of the best ways to boost the success of your workforce. We all know sales is an environment brimming with pressure and stress, adding a little fun into sales training activities can make all the difference.
Not only do sales training games help to increase engagement and productivity among employees, but they can also actively help your sales teams become more effective in their roles.
Here’s everything you need to know about the power of sales training games.
What are Sales Training Games?
Sales training games are essentially fun, “gamified” activities that improve the skills of your sales rep. With sales games, rather than trying to teach your teams with documents and how-to guides, you get every team member involved in collaborative, interactive experiences.
Sales training games can help with everything from teaching your team members how to craft the perfect sales pitch, to ensuring they’re confident enough to overcome objections.
There are countless different ways to use games to build sales skills. Some companies host competitions where team members can earn points and prizes for every successful cold call, or prospecting process.
Others use role play to simulate parts of the sales process and build team confidence. Used correctly, these sales training ideas will help your teams to cultivate new skills, build stronger bonds with other members of the sales team, and feel more connected to your business.
8 Great Games to Build Sales Skills
There are plenty of different great games out there you can experiment with to teach your teams new sales strategies and skills. You’re probably already familiar with a few games used in sales training programs, such as “sell me this pen”. Here are some other amazing ideas to explore.
- Pitch Tournaments
These games are a great way to teach every sales rep how to craft the ultimate sales pitch. They show professionals the importance of learning the needs and pain points of a potential customer before they try to start the sales cycle.
During a pitch tournament, you’ll present your team with a variety of random objects, such as sticky notes, calculators, paper clips, and files. Then, ask sales professionals to team up and decide which will play the customer, and which will play the seller.
The seller then picks a random item, and attempts to give an “elevator” pitch to the customer, learning about their specific needs and requirements before they begin the pitch. After a few minutes, ask the potential customer to rate how effective the pitch actually was.
- The Sales Sleuth
Similar to the tournament pitching game, the Sales Sleuth game focuses on teaching professionals the sales skills they need for the prospecting and pitching parts of the sales cycle. The idea is to encourage team members to invest as much time as possible into getting to know their prospects.
Once again, you’ll let your team members pair up, and decide which one will be the prospect and which will be the seller. The prospect then lists the challenges their character might face. Give the seller a while to collect as much data from the prospect as possible.
The detective or “sleuth” who manages to build the best rapport with the prospect, and get the most information for their sales strategies will win the round. This will teach your sellers how to ask practical questions, and dive deeper into customer pain points and goals.
- Role Play Champions
Role play champions is an excellent way to teach your employees how to handle the various nuances of the entire sales process. In the game, team members pair up and act out different scenarios, starting with a sales rep calling the prospect.
The sales rep who acts as the “customer” will present numerous challenges to the sale. They’ll share objections and problems they have with making a purchase, so the sales professional has to work harder to win the deal. For instance, the prospect might be unwilling to make a purchase at a specific time, have a low budget, or not understand the benefits of the product.
This game allows employees to learn more about the challenges they might face during sales calls and conversations, so they can come up with a better strategy for success. It also helps team members to build confidence, by presenting them with challenges in a safe environment.
- Gamified Cold Calling
Gamified cold calling is an excellent way to actively add a little entertainment to one of the most exhausting parts of the sales process. For this activity, you’ll ask your players make cold calls to prospects for a while, while other employees monitor them.
Provide the employees listening in on the call with a list of “points” they can assign to the caller, based on things they do. For instance, you might offer:
- 50 points for scheduling a follow up call
- 50 points for getting an email address
- 200 points for closing a deal
- 20 points for speaking for a minute without saying “um”
- 30 points for making the prospect laugh
At the end of each session, add up all the scores and reward the seller who has the highest point total. Then take a moment to discuss why the call was so successful with the rest of the team.
- Stranger Chats
Many sales strategies rely on the confidence to approach a complete stranger and convince them to take part in a conversation. Even the most advanced sales manager can have trouble with this at times. Stranger chats is a training game that encourages your team members to be more confident.
You’ll start by giving each team member a specific goal to achieve when they’re connecting with a prospect. For instance, they might need to find out the customer’s favorite color, favorite food, or ideal holiday destination.
The great thing about this sales strategy is that it doesn’t just teach professionals how to interact with prospects, it helps them to build emotional connections and rapport. Using these training exercises, you can show professionals how important rapport really is to the sales process.
- Sales Jeopardy
Sales Jeopardy is essentially a quiz-style game, that focuses on ensuring professionals can retain and use the knowledge they earn throughout their sales strategies. You can find Jeopardy slideshow templates online you can use to add topics and answers, then share the screen with participants.
The idea is to present professionals with common answers to questions, such as “low budget” and see if they can come up with the source of the answer “What is: a common objection to sales?”
You can also adapt this game to make it more specific to your own sales processes and strategies. For instance, you could include product categories related to your company’s offering, your customer stats, your business values, and so on.
- The Dice Game
Landing successful sales can be a time-consuming and exhausting process. Sales professionals need to learn the more time they spend interacting with prospects, the more sales they’re likely to make. The dice game is a great way to teach this.
Start by grouping your participants into teams of up to 8 players, and give each group a die and a 30-second timer. Let each group’s team take a record of how many players manage to get a “6” when rolling a die, and the number of times they need to roll to get this result.
It’s a relatively straightforward process, but it will show your players that the chances of making a sale (or achieving a specific goal) increases with consistent efforts. It also shows sellers they need to continue jumping into action consistently if they want to get the best results.
- Tenacity Target
Finally, many sales professionals come across prospects who aren’t willing to buy. When dealing with these prospects, reps need tenacity and endurance. Tenacity target teaches professionals to be creative at coming up with ideas to convert a lead.
In this game, your participants will form a circle. One person will name a product or service from the company’s portfolio, and the person next to them needs to share a positive attribute of that solution. Everyone takes a turn naming a benefit, until one person runs out of ideas.
When someone runs out of ideas, they’re out of the game. The idea of this strategy is that it should teach your professionals how to keep coming up with new ways to sell the benefits of your solution when under pressure. It cultivates creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Gamify your Sales Training Activities
Sales training games are an excellent way to invest in the ongoing education of your sales reps, while still adding a little bit of fun into the business environment. With gamified sales activities, you can harness the skills you want your employees to have, without leaving them overwhelmed.
If you want to discover the benefits of a gamified sales environment for yourself, consider joining the Hard Skill Exchange, or visit Hypcccycl to start experimenting with online sales games.
