How To Use ChatFox Coffee Chats For Sales Role Play

As a business leader you always need new sales. Beating the competition means more than having the best product, it means having the best revenue strategy that will eat your competitors’ lunch. In today’s world of remote selling your team still needs all of the training and support that they needed when they were in the office, visiting customers, and going to conferences.

Besides the obvious lack of in-person time, there is another major challenge for sales leaders, providing the team support needed when your team is working independently. In an office, your sales team will naturally swap stories, get feedback, go for beers and get new ideas on how to tell your story. When these casual meetups do not happen there is a gap in your team’s knowledge. Remote team calendars tend to fill up fast because everything needs to be scheduled. Finding the time to coordinate conversations between your salespeople for knowledge sharing is the last thing to do on your list. There are video tools and other software out there that you can pay an arm and a leg for, but why not start with automated meetups to get your team talking?

Sales role playing helps your sales team in so many ways:

• It reinforces the corporate training that you paid big money for.
• It concretes your story.
• It helps each sales person perfect their pitch.
• It prepares your teams for objections.
• It helps seasoned reps share their personal knowledge.
• It’s fun!
• It helps sales teams try and implement new approaches.

I realize that it is hard to believe that something as simple, and often ignored, as sales role play can have so many benefits and add so much value.

“Why do so few teams do sales roles plays?”

I honestly don’t know why so few teams implement regular role plays. Probably because it is hard to find the time and it is hard to keep salespeople focused on things other than selling. Most reps won’t want to do it or will find excuses not to participate. Awkwardness perhaps?

Give it a try! I know that you will have some amazing breakthroughs in transferring knowledge, training new reps, improving skills, and building confidence in your sales team. Use ChatFox Coffee Chats to automate those impromptu sales team meetups so that they actually happen. You can do this by:

1. Setting up a sales training channel in Slack.
2. Setting a preferred (usually slower) day for the ChatFox Coffee Chats to happen.
3. Inviting your sales team to the channel.
4. Having every team member connect their calendar.
5. Set expectations and deliverables for role plays.
6. Let it run!

Coffee Chats will automatically pair up to 3 random people from the channel in a 15-minute chat at the cadence that you selected in the channel that you selected. All of the work will be taken out of the setup of the meeting. It will be your job to make sure that your team is taking advantage of the chats to improve their sales skills.

About ChatFox

ChatFox is a Slack chatbot that builds remote team culture. Remote teams that only engage through projects, tasks, and deadlines do not foster a culture around shared values and goals. Build a strong remote team culture, improve remote team productivity, and eliminate team member isolation. Use ChatFox Icebreakers to build rapport with team members, use ChatFox Coffee Chats to have meaningful conversations with people across your organization, or use ChatFox Shout Outs to recommend a colleague and endorse their skills. Unlike other remote team solutions, ChatFox looks at remote team culture from a strategic perspective and has created engaging chats for your team that provide management with insights into remote team engagement, skills, contributions, and mobility.