The Best Kind Of Sales Training Nothing beats role-playing as a form of training. Even compared to live “on the phones” training, my favorite thing about role playing is that you can stop and redo a whole or part of a session time and time again, until someone gets it. You can use role-playing to train people on calls, demos or live presentations. How To Do It First, include role-playing in your new hire training, and in your regular team trainings. Let’s use a role-playing call as an example of how to do it. A scenario is created and described to the group. Let’s say an SDR is going to call on the VP Marketing at a division of General Electric. Or perhaps they are conducting a discovery call with two executives from that division. The trainee is selected. One or more people are selected to pretend to be the prospect company. (You can have different people in different roles on a single call or demo: CEO, VP Sales, etc). Send off the person to be trained, back to their cube or another room. Everyone else goes into a conference room. This includes the others on the sales team, so they can listen in. The trainee dials into the conference room… and off you go! The training lead should challenge the trainee, but not make it so hard that they get frustrated and don’t learn anything. You’ll find that it is easier than you think to get into the role, especially if you have any good actors. (By the way, don’t fail to notice the “creative types”!)