Leveling Up your Sales Playbook: Unlocking the Power of Discomfort, Practice and Roleplay with Jonathan Mahan

The environment created by sales leaders often puts an emphasis on showing competency rather than practicing and growing skills. This can make reps nervous and can lead to them performing worse than they would in a real customer situation. 

Roleplay often takes the form of a live group setting or a training module which can be recorded to be assessed. This is not practice, and is more like a test. Traditional practice in other disciplines zooms in on particular motions and gives immediate feedback on how to do it differently.

As Jonathan Mahan explained, role-playing is an effective way to build skills, but it is often used incorrectly in sales. To make role-playing worthwhile, the focus should be on small, specific areas.

As he has given this example, when practicing discovery, the rules of the game are different when role-playing versus when engaging with a real customer. To make role-playing effective, reps should focus on a specific area and focus on immediate feedback and repetition. This type of practice, referred to as deliberate practice, helps build competency from one repetition to the next.

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