Some salespeople have a love-hate relationship with role-playing. They know it exponentially improves their game, but feel stressed when practicing among their peers.
This is natural. A Stanford psychologist discovered that if a person is concerned about how he appears to a group, his ability to learn new & unfamiliar tasks is inhibited.
There’s a way to mitigate this. Consider your goals. In educational settings, psychologists say there are two main kinds of goals:
Learning goals: These motivate us to develop valued attributes
Performing goals: These motivate us to show others we possess these valued attributes (i.e., we know what we’re talking about)
In selling, one way to achieve both learning and performing goals is to practice stories in private (ideally on video) before role-playing them with peers.
Watching an expert’s story on video and then practicing it in the privacy of your home, office or closed conference room is the best way to learn and improve. Flying solo, it’s easy to iron out a story’s kinks and make it your own.
And it really works. One rep recently told us role-playing in private transformed his company’s weekly Story Workshop from a “dreaded moment” into a “learning moment.”
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Paul McGhee founded SharperAx in 2013. SharperAx develops role-play automation software.
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This article is the eighth excerpt from “10 Best Practices for a Great Storytelling Program,” an eBook written by Paul McGhee, based on years of research and practice in delivering great story programs. To download the entire eBook from Sharperax.com click here.
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