5 x Practice Sales Activities To Close Easier

One of the most effective things you can do with your sales team, is to introduce activities to practice sales conversations and other sales tasks to improve their effectiveness.

 

Team meetings can sometimes feel a bit stale and repetitive.

 

Although this is completely normal, it’s still very important to have regular sessions with your team, as it keeps communication healthy, and creates an opportunity to up skill their training and abilities.

 

 

Not All Practice Sales Activities Are Equal

 

 

If you do a bit of Googling, you’ll find that there are a vast number of practice sales activities you can do with your team.

 

However – we don’t believe they’re all necessarily effective.

 

To get the most out of your practice sales activities, we believe that they have to be both fun, and also useful in a way that’ll increase your team’s sales capability.

 

Practicing sales for the sake of having fun is fine; however, these shouldn’t be reserved to replace your team meetings.

 

Our five prescribed practice sales activities will help you achieve both.

 

 

5 x Practice Sales Activities To Close Easier

 

 

#1 – Objection Handling

 

 

The first on our list of practice sales activities, is objection handling.

 

Many Sales Professionals if trained correctly, will use something like our five-step objection handling breakdown (that you can find here) to overcome sales objections.

 

However, to keep it fun – give them a sales objection and get them to break it down.

 

Some examples are:

 

• Call me in six months
• That doesn’t apply to us
• I’m just getting information
• I need to speak to my partner
• It’s too expensive
• Let me think about it
• I wasn’t planning on buying today

 

Related article: Overcoming Objections In Sales – A Step By Step Guide

 

 

#2 – Sell Me This Pen

 

 

Sell me this pen was made famous in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street and is another one of our practice sales activities we recommend you give a go.

 

Most people will start pitching their product or service; and speak to the features and benefits of what they’re selling.

 

As per our article in Entrepreneur; we call this Premature Presentation, and this approach harms your sales.

 

We should never pitch or present our product or service until we completely know what we’re prescribing will in fact help solve their problem.

 

This activity will help your Sales professionals approach it differently. To learn how to use the sell me this pen activity in more detail, read the linked article below.

 

Further reading: Sell Me This Pen – How Should You Respond?

 

 

#3 – Name The Competitor

 

 

Name the competitor makes our list of practice sales activities, because it’s a nice mix of trivia as well as it up skill’s their competitors knowledge.

 

Find out some interesting statistics and facts about your competitors and ask the question in a team setting.

 

This works in two ways.

 

First – it teaches your Sales Professionals about your competition, which is educational for a number of reasons.

 

Secondly – For them to win the game next time, they’ll need to do some extra research on the competition.

 

This will make them proactive in learning about what others in your space are doing, and what they can potentially do to stay ahead of the curve.

 

Related article: 8 x Sales Meeting Topics To Share With Your Team

 

 

#4 – Name The Client

 

 

This is probably our most favourite practice sales activities, because it’s got some excellent benefits that’ll enhance the way your sales team look at their clients.

 

The way this works, is similar to the game name the competitor. However instead of giving facts or stats about your competition, you give them random trivia about your clients.

 

Don’t just give them trivia about the business’s either; if you can give them about the actual people they deal with, that’ll be even better.

 

To get this information, simply let your clients know that you run regular activities and would like to run training games to help them enhance their communication skills.

 

Let them know you’d like to help them appreciate their clients even better, and some fun acts would be beneficial.

 

Your clients would appreciate this, because it’ll demonstrate that you’re being proactive to enhance their communication.

 

Furthermore, and probably the best benefit of running this type of sales training game, is that it’ll help your Sales Professionals see their clients as people – rather than just numbers.

 

So many Salespeople see clients as digits, metrics and KPI’s – when they’re everyday people who have experiences, goals, positives and negatives just like us.

 

By playing this sales training game, you’ll create rapport between your team and their clients, which will have some great benefits.

 

Related article: 8 x Goal Setting Workshop Exercises For Team Success

 

 

#5 – Practice Sales Questions

 

 

The next question; is another one of our practice sales activities, because it gets your sales team focusing on improving their sales probing questions.

 

The aim of our sales conversations should be to dig deep about their situation, pain points, their ideal outcome and results, and then bridge the gap from where they’re at to where they want to be.

 

Each type of topic should have a set number of questions to ask, so your team can dive deeper into learning about the emotional reason as to why they want to buy, rather than purely keeping the conversation logical.

 

This will improve their questioning ability, as well as their consultative sales approach.

 

Further reading: Sales Probing Questions – 20 x To Use Daily

 

 

Final Thoughts On Why You Should Practice Sales

 

 

It’s important to ensure you and your team practice sales in a safe and non-judgemental environment, so that everyone has a chance to improve without risking losing the sale.

 

Like anything in life when it comes to repetition; the more you practice sales, the more you’ll improve – and the easier you’ll close.

 

As mentioned – we strongly recommend that you also have a structure to your sales training.

 

 

Want To Close Sales Easier?

 

 

Are you committed to closing sales a lot easier, and consistently?

 

If so, you should check out our self-paced and affordable online sales training program; The 5% Sales Blueprint.

 

It’ll give you everything you need to close sales consistently.

 

To learn more, simply click on the link below for more information.

 

Our Online Sales Training Program – The 5% Sales Blueprint.