Experiential learning is such a powerful driver of behaviour change because it translates directly into real-world application.  Salestrong utilise this by creating exciting and engaging experience-led scenarios, in which your sales people must hone and develop the skills they need to reach their potential and be highly effective in their everyday roles.

The Benefits of Experiential Sales Training

Experiential learning can be used to accelerate both soft and hard skills.  Using simulated and real-world environments, participants move beyond theory to practice, where they take part in decision-making, problem-solving and collaboration and experience for them selves the outcomes of those actions and decisions.

• Experiential learning brings theory and concepts to life by applying them to real-world situations with real results.  This significantly increases knowledge retention and real-world application.
• It promotes change-readiness and develops the ability to adapt to new situations.  Experiential learning presents learners with unfamiliar situations (or familiar situations which must be tackled in an unfamiliar way), requiring them to quickly adapt and flex their approach.
• It develops creativity and innovative thinking.
• ‘Mistakes’ can be made and learnt from in a safe controlled environment.
• Experiential learning passes ownership to learners, heightening gratification and increasing enthusiasm for continued learning.
• Experiential learning has a greater impact on mindset, which is critical for lasting behavioural change.
• Learner responses and behaviours can be easily observed to identify further areas for development.

Types of Experiential Sales Programme Available

During experiential training, learners complete tasks by trying, testing and experiencing outcomes for themselves.  When the learner is back in the ‘real-world’, their memory is instantly fired up whenever they find themselves facing the same/similar tasks.  The accompanying emotions of familiarity and comfort give the learner the confidence to more speedily and adeptly apply the learnt skills.

Because it is so effective when it comes to knowledge retention and application, you’ll find elements of experiential learning in a large number of our sales training interventions.  For those occasions when you want a greater emphasis on experience-lead learning, we offer a number of solutions:

 

Sales Conferences & Meetings – Sales conferences and meetings provide the perfect platform to ignite, align and up skill your sales teams.

Whether your audience is 6 or 600, we can help you design and deliver a session, or an entire meeting/conference agenda, that strengthens your core message and delivers the outcomes you’re looking to achieve, which might include:

• Launching a new strategy, programme or process.
• Bringing together a geographically diverse, disconnected or new team to promote team working and align them towards a shared collective goal.
• Injecting energy into the meeting/providing an engaging change of format.
• Accelerating and promoting specific key sales skills and processes.
• Introducing a competitive and fun element to the meeting.

To discuss your brief, please contact us.

 

Sales Simulations – Sales Simulations are app-based sales conversations, in which learners engage with customers and prospects at various stages of the sales process.

The learner controls the conversation, choosing how they wish to respond to the customer’s comments and questions.  Typically, the learner will have 3 options each time:

• a bad/incorrect response, which achieves a minus score,
• an acceptable response, which achieves a low score and
• the perfect response, which achieves the highest score.

These scores are collated as the learner moves through the simulation and mapped against specific competencies.  At the end of the simulation, the learner can see their overall score as well as viewing how they achieved against each individual competency, helping to identify areas for development.

You can choose whether your sales people complete these simulations as individuals, or in small teams.  You can also choose whether or not to add a competitive element, whereby individuals/small teams are pitted against one another and scores are displayed on a live leaderboard throughout the session.  Simulations work well for small groups of 6-12, right up to large conferences involving hundreds of people.

To ensure we create customer conversations that perfectly mirror typical interactions for your sales people, we incorporate your products/services and your customers into those simulations, either using one of your actual customers, or by creating a fictional company and its contacts that represent a target account for you.

Where you choose to use a fictional target customer, we will also design the supporting resources that a sales person would typically need to reference during the sales process, for example; financial reports, crm account plan records and even a website.

Let us have your brief and we’ll put forward some activities that we think will really get your people collaborating and achieve your aims for the session.

 

Role-play – Role-play is the closest you can get to replicating a real-world situation and therefore the intervention that tends to have the biggest impact on learner development and performance improvement.

Role-plays can take a number of different formats, including:

• Face to face or virtually (telephone/video), using specialist actors to play the customer roles.
• Face to face or virtually (telephone/video), using members of your team/organisation to play the customer roles.
• Forum-style in which scenarios are role-played to the entire group inviting observations and ‘corrections’ from the audience, re-playing until the ideal scenario is reached.

Working with you to develop a scenario, we’ll write a brief for every role, including observers.  That brief will include details around timings, resources, a detailed overview of the scenario and the desired outcomes of the role-play for that individual.

These role-played meetings can either focus on just one particular part of the sales process, or take your sales people through a series of conversations designed to reflect the entire sales process.

Role-plays are observed by experienced facilitators, who provide feedback to participants, enabling them to immediately refine and further practice their approach.

What to Expect

Expect the unexpected.  One of the reasons experiential learning is so impactful is because it moves participants into new and unfamiliar situations.

There is no ‘typical’ agenda when it comes to experiential learning, it very much depends on the skills you are looking to develop, your budget and your time-scale.  Please get in touch so that we can discuss your requirements.

What should I do next?

If you’d like to talk to us about our experiential sales training options or any of our other services, please give us a call on 01778 382733, email us at info@salestrong.co.uk, or head to our Contact page and leave us your details there.