The sales process · Sales enablement
Everybody agrees roleplay works and almost nobody in a small firm does it.
Meeting roleplay is two people acting out a sales conversation before it happens for real, with one playing the buyer. It is where a pitch, a question or an answer gets tested without a live order at risk. Ten minutes a week does more than a day-long workshop once a year.
Scope, fee, reporting and term are agreed in writing after we have read your brief and spoken to you.
In one paragraph
Meeting roleplay is two people acting out a sales conversation before it happens for real, with one playing the buyer. It is where a pitch, a question or an answer gets tested without a live order at risk. Ten minutes a week does more than a day-long workshop once a year.
Ask a forty-five-year-old sales engineer to pretend to be a customer while his colleagues watch. You will get a laugh, a joke in Kannada, and a reason why today is busy. Nobody wants to look foolish in front of the person who decides their increment, so the session slips to next week, and then to the week after.
The way around it is not a speech about why roleplay matters. It is to make the thing small enough that refusing looks stranger than doing it. Ten minutes, three people in the room, one narrow scene, and the owner goes first and is visibly bad at it.
This step exists because the sales pitch you wrote in the step before has never been said to somebody who pushes back. What survives here goes into the call scripts, which is the step after. What does not survive gets rewritten while it is still cheap.
Where this sits
Stage 5 of 10, sales enablement. What the person selling says, sends and answers with, written down instead of improvised.
- The stage before
- Lead generation
- The stage after
- Sales qualification
If you want this done for you
New joiners are trained by whichever senior rep has a free hour.
The work
What this step is actually like.
“The owner goes first, badly”
Whoever has the most to lose from looking silly has to lose it first. An owner who fumbles a scene in front of the team removes the reason everyone else was hiding. Do not rehearse beforehand, because the point is that the fumble is real.
“One scene, not a whole meeting”
Acting out an entire forty-minute meeting is exhausting and teaches nothing. Practise the first thirty seconds, or the moment the price is asked for, or the sentence after the buyer says he will think about it. Stop when the moment is over.
“The buyer has to be difficult, not impossible”
Played too kindly, the buyer agrees to everything and the session is theatre. Played as a monster, nobody learns anything except that the exercise is unfair. Give the person in the buyer's chair a card that says what they want, what worries them, and what they will not admit.
“Feedback from the buyer's chair only”
The only person who speaks afterwards is whoever played the buyer, and they say one thing that worked and one thing they would change. No scoring, no audience commentary, no appraisal language. The moment it starts to feel like a review, attendance dies and does not come back.
What we do
What you end up with.
The artefacts this step produces, what each one is for, and how you know it is finished.
A scene card
Half a page per scene, under four headings. Who you are and what mood you are in. What has just happened. What you will not give away, and what the seller is practising. For example, a clinic administrator in Jayanagar who has already been quoted by two other suppliers and has been told to keep the spend down.
Result: Two people can start a roleplay in under a minute without a briefing.
A ten-minute slot in a meeting that already exists
Put it at the front of the Monday morning meeting rather than in a new calendar invitation. A session that needs its own diary entry gets moved once and then forgotten.
Result: Practice happens weekly without anyone having to defend the time.
A roleplay log
Four columns in a shared sheet: the date, the scene, who played the buyer, and the one change everyone agreed. Two lines a week, written by whoever ran the session.
Result: You can see which scene keeps coming back, which is usually the one your team is losing on.
Scenes taken from deals you lost
After a lost enquiry, the salesperson writes down the sentence they could not answer. That sentence becomes next week's card, with the salesperson playing the buyer who said it.
Result: Practice stays about your actual buyers instead of a training manual's buyers.
Where this fits
Three pieces of sales work, in this order.
This work sits inside sales management. A target, a review routine and someone who owns the number.
Step 1
Sales audit
Find where deals are being lost and what to fix first.
Start here if you cannot say where orders are lost.
Step 2
Sales process design
One written way to sell, from first enquiry to repeat order.
Start here if every salesperson sells differently.
Step 3 · you are here
Sales management
A target, a review routine and someone who owns the number.
Start here if the team has targets and no routine.
FAQ
Questions owners ask before they call.
Not here? More answers, or ask on WhatsApp.
Our team finds this embarrassing. How do we start?
How long should a roleplay session be?
Should we record the sessions?
Is this not the same as sales training?
How much does it cost?
How long is the contract?
Who will actually do the work?
What do you need from us?
What if we are not happy with the work?
Where to go next
The work that carries this step further.
The rest of sales enablement
Or read the whole sales process in order.
Your next practical step
Tell us what you are trying to grow, and we will read it before we call.
Eight short steps, mostly taps. Skip anything you would rather answer on the call.