Have you attended training sessions where you had to sit through presentations that felt like ‘death by powerpoint’? Sales reps sit through sales training sessions for hours together which makes them disinterested and disengaged with the training. As a result of this, the knowledge retention from these training sessions is going to be very low.

You can avoid this situation and make your sales training fun and enjoyable by adopting game-based training.

Games offer a fun, true-to-life, engaging and interactive learning experience. Teaching your employees how to sell by using games is one of the best investments you can make in your business. Incorporating games into training leads to higher engagement and interactivity of the learners.

Effective sales training games provide a way for your salespeople to practice their skills in an enjoyable setting. As a result, they will be able to sharpen their skills in the following areas:

• Audience identification

• Customer Problem definition

• Benefits and features description

• Critical questioning

• Sales closing techniques

Here is a list of popular sales training games that effectively spice up your sales training and improve your sales team’s performance.

1. S’up: Builds Confidence in Sales Reps.

Goal: Receiving a token from a stranger.

Purpose: Learning to approach strangers with confidence.

Requirements: Busy public place, pen and paper, camera, courage.

The point of this game is to build confidence when approaching strangers. S’up helps salespeople to overcome the reservation of talking to people they don’t know and asking for certain things.

The basics of S’up is for participants to approach strangers and ask them for tokens of varying significance. The more personal the token is, the higher will be the points. For example, a significant quote will earn the participant 20 points and a selfie will attract 30 points.

2. Gamified Cold Calls: Builds Confidence for Cold Calls.

Goal: Making successful and confident cold calls.

Purpose: Learning to cold call with confidence and a calm state of mind.

Requirements: Speakerphone, phone directory.

This game does not require a dedicated training schedule as this can be played at any time. The purpose of this game is to help employees make better sales calls. This game can take place if the team is having a slow day and needs a boost in morale.

The game is played by having the participants make sales calls on speaker phone while their colleagues and manager listen-in. The manager keeps a score of points based on different criteria, such as…

• Making the lead laugh: 20 points

• Scheduling a follow-up call: 20 points

• Capturing email address: 40 points

• Closing the deal: 100 points

The person who has scored the most points on a single call wins the game.

3. Sales Stamina: Develops the skill of describing the benefits of a product perfectly.

Goal: Not to run out of benefits while describing a product.

Purpose: Learning to develop an endless stream of ideas and being creative.

Requirements: Pen, paper, and creativity.

Salespeople often come across buyers who are really tough. They need thought-out win-over tactics. And it takes argumentative stamina and endurance to make it all the way through. This game develops salesperson’s endurance and makes the toughest of sales relatively easier to close.

For this game, kick-off a group discussion about how awesome a random product is. The participants then take turns naming qualities and aspects of the product until someone runs out of ideas. That person is out for that round. Last player remaining wins the game. For instance, it would go something like this for a laptop:

• “It comes in three different amazing colors.”
• “It feels light.”
• “It has a good memory space.”
• “it’s sleek.”
• …and so on and so forth.

4. Still don’t get it: Develops the ability to sell by understanding the customer’s psychology.

Goal: Getting directed by a stranger.

Purpose: Learning to push a stranger’s patience and still achieving what you want.

Requirements: Crowded public place, pen and paper.

The ability to read someone else’s mood and temperaments is extremely crucial in sales. Especially when salespeople are trying to find common ground with a potential customer. It is important to know how far they can go before the customer backs away.

For this game, ask the participants to hide their phones, play the role of a slow-witted tourist and ask strangers for directions. When they’re done, go on to ask for more and more. Participants can ask questions like…

• explain the directions again in more detail because they did not understand.

• draw a map of the location they want to be at.

• Ask for a phone number in case they get lost. . The participants lose points when strangers deny them one of their requests. So, it’s crucial to sense reactions and gauge how much they can ask for.

5. Scattegories for sales: Develops the skill of understanding and applying sales techniques while selling.

Goal: Correctly applying knowledge of sales techniques on random products.

Purpose: Learning sales techniques by heart and understanding it’s applications.

Requirements: pen, paper, logical thinking and paper cards.

As the name suggests, this game works pretty much similar to Scattegories. The difference is, in our game, the categories translate to steps of a direct sales technique with a clearly defined structure. The technique has to be set before the game begins.

At the beginning of each round, one player spins the wheel and thinks of any product beginning with the letter that came up.

After a designated period of time, teams or individual players decide for and announce questions for each category column. A neutral person not favoring either team then fills them in on the game sheet publicly, on a laptop plus beamer or on a chalkboard. Then all players discuss whether an answer was correct and what its applications are.

The salespeople are gauged on a point based system, based on the answers given and its applications. For example, for every correct answer, a player or team gets 10 points. The overall best answer per column per round is rewarded with 20 points.

6. Mr. David Schmidt: Shows the value of doing sales research.

Goal: To increase the participant’s awareness of the resources that are available for researching organizations and people.

Purpose: To show the value of doing optimal sales research.

Requirements: Whiteboard and Marker.

Divide the sales team into groups of 4-5 people. Next, tell each team that they will be sending in a representative to meet Mr. David Schmidt the CEO of a multinational corporation. Depending on the industry you are working in, the details of the organization can be morphed to suit your needs. These representatives are there to sell the products/services that your company offers. The idea is that they have to get as much information as possible about Mr.David Schmidt and the company he works for. Each group should come up with relevant information about the organization and its personnel. Below are some places where this information can be looked up.

• The company’s Website
• Wayback Machine to check for older site information and data.
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• CrunchBase
• Google

The idea of this game is that it is never acceptable to meet a client without accessing publicly available information and doing your homework. Knowing basic information about the client makes it much easier to close deals.

7. So, what’s my line again?: Demonstrates the importance of developing rapport with the client.

Goal: To encourage sales personnel to plan ahead for their sales calls.

Purpose: To demonstrate the utmost importance of establishing rapport with a client.

Requirements: Pen and a notebook.

This game enables the participants to find engaging conversation starters with the customers. For instance, the participants have earlier researched about Mr. David Schmidt and they have the following information about him.

• He is a graduate from UCLA and did his masters in finance.

• He has 4 kids and loves traveling

• His hobbies are playing the guitar and traveling

• He has worked in his current organization for the last 15 years.

• He just purchased a new property in LA.

• He strongly supports Democrats and donates consistently.

• Now, with this information, the participants have to come up with an engaging conversation that could help break the ice and develop a rapport with the client.

Try using some of these techniques to give life to your training programmes.

Learn how Poly runs sales training for their global sales teams through SmartWinnr

Click here to read how Poly runs their sales training program through SmartWinnr

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