A few years back I was working for www.white-springs.com. I got to know the sales training and technology space very well. I found that there was something missing from sales training that exists in other disciplines. Sports, performing arts, even law and medicine, all have a place to practice. Sales in any meaningful sense does not. Sales could and should but reps and managers do everything they can to avoid it. It's called roleplay.
While still part of White Springs, I created a new brand called Bambu. The name came from the Chinese proverb about planting a bamboo seed and having to spend a very long time caring for it with seemingly no results. That care, however, pays dividend in the long run when the plant shoots up super strong, super tall, and super fast.
The goal of Bambu was to be a practice field for sales people. Sales learners would log into a tool that was essentially a pipeline management tool, or very light CRM. They'd be met with 5 or 6 new opportunities. Their goal was to pick up the leads and carry them through an entire sales process to a win. They'd have to do everything including the mechanics of the process. By "mechanics" I mean the stuff like email reach-out, scheduling meetings, getting NDA's signed... all the stuff that no one teaches. They'd roleplay each stage with real live humans. I'd hired some actors to play the buyers - they were all certified sales coaches. They'd have multiple calls per deal. They would lose some deals right off the bat. It was a really great experience.
We rolled it out to several US Universities including University of Wisconsin, Oklahoma State University and Texas A&M. It was clunky, not gonna lie. It wont come as a surprise to many but getting students excited about sales roleplay is pretty tough. That said, though, we had some amazing responses. Some folks got really stuck in. I've added a couple of videos below from several students I worked with. To prove I didn't write the reviews for them, one of them mentions my wife... i've never been married :)
Comments