Want to know a great way to squander a sales opportunity? Let your salespeople practice proper sales techniques and good decision-making, in front of prospects. Yes, you can teach salespeople in a classroom, or through meeting-style role-plays, but is your sales training and sales process translating into real performance gains? These common problems stem from the same source — and there is a solution.
Skill Acquisition Drives Performance
Sales performance is about acquiring skill. Traditional learning does not lead to optimal performance – only skill acquisition does. Practice is important when honing a new skill – just not with real prospects! To translate your sales training into practical application and real skill acquisition, you need to allow your salespeople to practice in realistic situations, ideally with expert coaches mentoring them to achieve optimal performance.
We know what you’re thinking — you get that we’re talking about role-playing — but how much is it going to cost to do live role-plays, and where are the expert coaches going to come from? Role-playing with mentors to acquire skill works, but time with a mentor is limited and not scalable. What’s the solution?
Virtual Role-Play Technology to Boost Sales Performance
Syandus solved the problem by combining cognitive science learning methodologies, with modern game technology to create virtual role-plays.
Attributes of Syandus Virtual Role-Plays:
- Real, interactive sales conversations, and decisions with responsive virtual reps and prospects, all based on your proprietary products and sales processes, branded to you, for your team. Continuous virtual coaching and mentoring throughout the experience, with expert micro-coaching at every decision point, based on your sales processes and products.
- Easy to deploy across your sales force, who have access on any device, including phones.
- Detailed metrics on how your team is performing, and where they need the most mentoring.
The Cognitive Science Behind Virtual Role-Plays
Successful skill acquisition is grounded in cognitive learning science. You may already be incorporating some of these principles in your live training. We found that infusing virtual game technology into the learning experience enabled us to bring many of these concepts to life, in digital form:
Experiential learning shows us that practicing in realistic virtual situations can translate to real-world behaviors. Practice alone is not enough however; its effectiveness improves dramatically with the incorporation of active coaching.
Cognitive apprenticeship serves as a powerful foundation to drive performance. One of its major benefits is that it exposes the learner to the mental models of experts, so they can start to recognize optimal decision patterns. This is best done through coaching, and in our case, virtual coaching.
Cognitive flexibility theory, shows us that success in applying strategies in fluid, real-world applications like sales training, requires that we practice decision-making from multiple perspectives.
By combining these cognitive learning methodologies with technology, we can create an authentic virtual experience that improves real-world performance.
If you would like to increase the performance of your sales organization, consider virtual learning technology that gives your salespeople access to one-on-one coaching, and a realistic selling environment where they can practice optimal sales strategies.
About Syandus: Virtual immersive learning technology that transforms knowledge into real-world performance. We immerse participants in realistic virtual situations with one-on-one expert coaching that gives them experience making optimal decisions. Syandus Learning Modules combine cognitive science principles, the realism of game technology, and our customer’s proprietary content, to deliver rapid skill acquisition. Modules are cloud-based for easy deployment, fully trackable with embedded analytics, and can be used on any web-enabled device.
