3 Digital Card Games for Sales Role-Plays in 2021

1. Uncovering Needs
2. Objection handling
3. Understanding the Buyer

Just because we’ve all gone digital during these crazy times doesn’t mean we can’t practice sales skills and when we’ve gone back to physical locations where we can sit across from one another, that still doesn’t mean we can’t practice our skills digitally. In fact, scheduled digital practice/game sessions are a great way to hone sales skills week after week or even daily instead of once a quarter at big sales event. Here are three sales subjects where digital card games can help build sales skills.

#1 Uncovering Needs

A critical sales skill is uncovering the actual needs of the potential client or customer. Sometimes this is simple but, often, it requires asking probing question.  A sales professional needs to ask the right questions at the right time, build rapport and trust and generating a productive dialogue. All those skills can be practiced with a scenario-based card game. Using a game instead of a straight role play exercise adds a bit of completion, focused the professionals thinking and helps the reps to commit to the experience because they want to do well for themselves and earn the highest points. One game design for playing “Uncovering Needs” is a digital card game. The players are divided into teams and then a card from the deck in the middle of the virtual table is flipped. The person who goes first must respond to prompts such as “why do you want to invest in a solution like this?” or “why have you waited until now to address this need?” or “what options have you tried and why aren’t they working?” Once they respond, the other players are able to vote on how effective the response was in terms of uncovering a need. The players can play cards that reinforce the right behavior or challenge an inappropriate response. Once the Uncovering Needs card game is over, the learning doesn’t stop. As a follow up to the game, it is possible to have a single player follow up game sent out. Once such game is where the sales professional is asked to put a series of questions in order from most effective question for uncovering needs to least effective question for uncovering needs. The follow up card game, after the first scenario card game, helps keep the knowledge, ideas and concept of asking the right questions for uncovering needs in the forefront of the professional’s mind. It’s also a fun way to encourage dialogue and thinking around the concept of uncovering needs.

#2 Objection handling

It’s tough to hear objection after objection and it can be tough, at times, to know just the right thing to say to overcome that objection out of left field or to have to respond to the same objection time and time again. Fortunately, there’s a digital card game for that as well. In this game the sales professional is asked to categories objections they find on cards as to “Type of Objection.” Often clients will have similar objections but state them differently and even though a sales rep might encounter many objections, there may only be a few actual reasons for these objections. If the sales professional can understand the reason for the objections, they can more adeptly over come them.  Using a scored sorting game where time is a factor helps the sales professionals hone in on the root causes of the objections. Once the sales team has properly sorted the objections, the next step is a role play where the reps have to think on their feet and overcome objections that are thrown at them. Here too a game can be helpful. In this sorting game, the entire team is online at once and a leader randomly picks a player and then flips a random card from the deck and the sales rep but respond to the objection. All the team hears the response, discusses the response and strategies what to do in a similar situation and then the next sales professional flips a card. This is a great activity for getting all the sales reps on the same page in terms of overcoming objections.

#3 Understanding the Buyer

In many situations, detailed knowledge of the buyer is critical for advancing the sale. Its critical to know your buyer and know how to craft a conversation to best leverage their needs and buying signals. You might want a sales game where you sort customers by type or characteristic. You might even use a game to identify characteristics of top prospects verses average prospects. The goal is to encourage the sales professional to think critically about classifying prospects and identifying the key traits that can be used to appropriately qualify a lead. You can even have the sales professional’s role play acting as various types of buyers from a friendly open buyer to someone who might not know exactly what they want to a hostile or unfriendly prospect. Buy adding a “mood” to the game card or another defining characteristic you can steer the role play in different directions.

Conclusion

Adding digital card games to your sales training portfolio is a smart training move. Games add engagement, a sense of fun and provide a frictionless way of having sales professionals perform role plays. We only touched on three subjects and game approaches in this article, but there are many, many more that can be used to help sales teams to practice and perfect their skills.