At the recent annual sales meeting for Upper Saddle River, NJ-based Prentice Hall Business Publishing, held at an Orlando resort, the main conference room was filled with adults paired off in front of laptops and competing at video games — in the middle of the session. No, the meeting didn't turn into a gamers convention, and the attendees weren't goofing off.
Believe it or not, the gamers were sales reps using a computer-based business simulator to practice selling a new accounting textbook to a virtual professor, Mary Green of fictitious River City College.
The reps practiced introducing themselves to the professor, finding out about customer needs, and positioning the product. She let them know if their pitches were effective or not, growing distant if they wandered off-topic or telling them to cool it if they got too aggressive.
Games like this, which one observer likened to "Xbox crossed with Zig Ziglar," are big in sales training nowadays. "Instead of a PowerPoint presentation with a talking head, people want learning that has a higher impact," said Rommin Adl, president and CEO of Strategic Management Group (SMG), in Philadelphia, which produces sales training programs.
"Soon, sales training modules will be downloadable on Game Boys, if they aren't already," said Michelle Nichols, a sales consultant in Reno, NV, and author of the "Savvy Selling" column for
BusinessWeek Online.
Nichols is kidding (sort of), but these games can be a trainer's best friend. By making learning fun, said SMG's Adl, salespeople retain more information, which in turn makes them more likely to change their selling behavior. Those two factors drive results — the whole point of training in the first place.
Adding an element of competition is also important for sales reps, who tend to have hard-driving, Type-A personalities. That's why the Gronstedt Group, the marketing agency that developed the training for Prentice Hall, had the reps go head to head on their laptops. Gronstedt can also do similar training for up to 4,000 people at a time. "We play the simulations on a big screen and give the audience electronic keypads to vote on what action they would take next," said Anders Gronstedt, president, North America, for the Broomfield, CO-based company.
Technology is hot, but games needn't be computer-based to be effective or fun. In addition to computer simulations, SMG makes customized board games (the company refers to them as "board simulations") where teams of salespeople square off at managing a business that mimicks one of their potential clients.
Moving around the board, they take, from pools of customers, money that they then allot to salaries, investments, and the like. Certain challenges come up — a new competitor or an unexpected regulatory situation — and the responses players make affect their business accordingly. "It gets them to walk a mile in their customers' moccasins, so that they can speak the same language, call on different levels of the organization, and better articulate solutions," explained Adl.
Companies that have used these games to train their salesforces are Texas Instruments, IBM, Juniper Networks, and real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.
Contact Sara J. Welch at [email protected]For ideas, tips, and tools for better meetings and events,
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