In sales enablement, you spend a lot of time designing and rolling out training programs for your sales teams. But how much time do you spend to ensure sellers practice what they learned?
If you want your training to stick, practice should be essential to your sales enablement strategy. So, what’s the best way for a sales rep to practice a pitch?
Role-plays.
While training is typically passive learning, where the learner watches a video or reads a PDF, AI sales role-plays are an active form of learning and allow the learner to apply what they learned in a realistic selling scenario.
Like a pilot trains on a flight simulator, a sales rep can practice using role-plays. Be it a new messaging talk track or objection handling with a customer, sellers need to get comfortable using the talk track to perfect their game. And practice makes perfect.
While role-plays are typically rolled out at in-person events like an SKO or conference, AI can make them more scalable and more frequently used.
What is an AI sales role-play?
Traditionally, sellers do role-plays with their managers in person in a pre-defined scenario. Add AI to the mix, and AI can don multiple hats. While there are a few different flavors of AI role-plays available in the market today, Mindtickle role-plays use Copilot extensively in three distinct roles:
Copilot helps create the role-play scenario with just a few simple prompts.
Sellers can practice realistic selling scenarios with an AI buyer that has a distinct human-like voice and personality.
Copilot gives immediate qualitative and quantitative feedback, suggests areas for improvement, and even grades role-play submissions.
What are the benefits of AI role-plays for sales training and coaching?
AI-powered practice tools transform sales training, offering opportunities for sellers to hone their skills, boost deal sizes, and streamline role-plays. Here are some of the top benefits:
#1. Safe space to practice for sellers
When sellers role-play with their boss or sales leader, it can be a high-pressure situation that does not always yield the best results. But when sellers practice with an AI buyer, the pressure is off, and they can focus on mastering the pitch.
#2. Unlimited practice
Sellers can practice as often as they like with AI because AI doesn’t have any meetings to run, unlike their sales manager. We see sellers practice 4-6 times before they submit their role-play. Practice, not perfection, is the goal.
#3. Immediate feedback
Unlike in old-school role-plays where constructive feedback may be given in passing or not at all, Copilot gives sellers immediate qualitative and quantitative feedback and even suggests areas for improvement. Copilot assesses your rep’s sentiment, pace of speech, filler words used, and much more.
The scores create a gamified environment in which sellers want to keep trying until they have a product they’re satisfied with. This gamification works well for sellers who are, by nature, competitive.
#4. Increased deal sizes
Cisco held the largest pitch contest in its history for its security product line using Copilot and saw some fantastic results such as:
#5. Scalable role-plays
Most enablement practitioners love role-plays and see their value, but they find extensive exercises across large organizations extremely challenging to execute. It involves coordinating with several sales managers and getting their time to review the recorded role-plays.
AI can be extremely handy here because it removes this dependency on sales managers. It grades role-play submissions for you in a matter of minutes and has none of the bias that real managers may have.
Cisco saved 38 weeks of manager time by using AI to review role-plays from 3,500 sellers.
#6. Role-plays make practice possible
Passive learning doesn’t cut it when it comes to sales training. Listening to a product launch webinar training session doesn’t equip a seller to ask the right questions and use the right talk track when talking to real customers. Practice and reinforcement are a crucial part of your sales enablement strategy. While quizzes and assessments can help with reinforcements, practice is best served with AI role-plays.
How to create an AI role-play
Let’s explore the step-by-step process of crafting an AI-driven role-play that tackles specific problem areas within your sales strategy. From identifying the exact issues your team faces to building realistic scenarios and testing them for effectiveness, we’ll guide you through creating a role-play experience that delivers impactful results.
Identify problem areas
What are the problems your sellers, BDRs, or customer success managers are grappling with? Do they need help to qualify customers or is the problem around adopting a new sales methodology? Or do they need help to renew deals?
Whether the problem is at the top or at the bottom of the sales funnel, you can use role-plays to solve it.
Build out scenarios
You want to outline the typical scenario your reps face by listening to relevant customer conversations and talking to a few sellers. The scenario should typically cover:
- The buyer persona your sellers typically talk to
- The context in this case around discovery
- The goal your seller should try to achieve
- A time limit
For instance, if you are a car maker, your scenario may look something like this:
| AI persona | Context | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Male senior citizen looking for a second-hand yet safe and reliable car | You are a sales rep. Do a detailed discovery conversation to see if the buyer is a good fit. | Understand the buyer’s requirements, budget, and financing eligibility and suggest some suitable options. Time limit: 5 mins. |
Test the role-play
Once you have built out the role-play, send it to a few internal testers to ensure everything works just how you want it to. These could be folks within the sales enablement team or a few friendly sellers willing to give you feedback.
Allow reps to practice
Once you are happy with the initial results, you can roll this out to your field and allow them to practice the scenario as often as they like.
Interactive role plays using Mindtickle Copilot
In Mindtickle’s interactive AI role-plays, we have used Copilot as a creator, an AI buyer persona to practice with, and a coach to evaluate and give feedback on role-plays.
We serve different personas ranging from BDRs, sellers, and partners to customer success managers. Our customers have used AI role-plays for a range of use cases such as:
- Onboarding new reps
- Cold calling practice
- Discovery calls
- Objection handling
- Competitive displacement and much more…
As you move forward, consider how AI can be integrated into your sales enablement strategy to meet and exceed your training goals. Embracing this technology empowers your team, optimizes performance, and makes reps more productive.
Mindtickle Copilot in Action
Ready to see how Copilot powers better role-plays and gets your sellers ready for real-world scenarios?
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By Helen Waite
By Rahul Mathew