Our role-play facilitators interact -- as customers -- with your sales team members, helping them to improve prospecting, qualification, objection handling, trust-building and closing skills. Our facilitators respond with questions and concerns during any part of the sales process, including cold calls and follow-ups. These conversations may occur face-to-face or over the phone. We can also facilitate sales presentations to a group.
In a risk-free environment, your sales team members will learn the benefits of applying improvisation's key tenets of active listening, "Yes, And...", and building a relationship that's based on mutual respect and trust. In addition to sales management oversight of role-play scenarios, peer-level co-workers may also watch, so that they may learn from the experiences of others.
Expertly handling conflict requires skill, understanding and patience. Our role-play facilitators play the role of a variety of customers -- including dissatisfied ones -- giving your customer service professionals opportunities to guide each scenario toward a positive resolution.
These scenarios may be structured as either over-the-phone or face-to-face, giving your team members a wide variety of experiences from which they can learn and improve their customer service skills.
From conducting interviews to evaluating employee performance, role-play scenarios are valuable for organizations seeking to improve how their human resources policies and procedures are implemented and reinforced.
Acting as job candidates, our role-play facilitators enable HR staff and hiring managers to conduct mock interviews. When facilitators are asked about their history of handling professional challenges in the past, they respond naturally. Facilitators also ask realistic follow-up questions of your interviewers.
Acting as employees, role-play facilitators provide opportunities for managers to practice how they critique performance and manage objectives. Scenarios are often observed by other managers, giving them additional benefits of insight.
Advantage Improv facilitators can also role-play peer-to-peer scenarios focused on sexual harassment prevention.
Preparation for role-play starts with Advantage Improv facilitators speaking with you (management) to determine the desired results. We then identify and understand the roles played by organization participants (ex: managers and staff) and non-organization participants (ex: customers and job candidates). Facilitators are able to play both organization and non-organization roles.
Preparing your staff for role-play begins with addressing their expectations and possible apprehensions about the process. You may consider defining role-play not as a test, but rather as a fast (and often fun) way to develop effective responses to an unpredictable variety of communications. Describing role-play as athletes practicing for a competition may be helpful. The objective in role-play is not to win, but to improve skill sets.
The structure of role-play begins with defining the elements of each scenario or interaction between two or more parties. Elements include initial dialog, responses (desired, typical and worst-case), conversation options "tree" (if this, then that), and conversation wrap-up. Note that this is a framework, not a script. When preparing the framework, it's sometimes helpful to break down and role-play smaller dialog components, as opposed to a full, beginning-to-end interaction.
After preparation, role-play scenarios are scheduled. The duration of each scenario may range from five to twenty minutes. Our facilitators will improvise the actual dialogue, incorporating a variety of personality types. Management may or may not be present during each participant/facilitator role-play scenario. Participants may be allowed to repeat sections of a scenario, if they feel their initial response wasn't their best.
If a group of participants are involved in the same role-play process, Advantage Improv will conduct some fun, improvised, ice-breaker exercises at the beginning.
As the role-play scenarios begin, our facilitators leverage their improvisation and acting skills, helping to challenge participants and improve their competencies and effectiveness. Participant responses to the challenges are evaluated after scenarios end, and management may ask participants to repeat a scenario.
When all scenarios are concluded, management will likely conduct a debriefing session. During this review of the role-plays and discussion of how to improve current processes, management may begin by asking participants for their feedback. Participants may share what they would do differently in the future. Peers and other observers may be asked to share their views on improvements. At management's discretion, Advantage Improv role-play facilitators will also provide additional feedback.
Finally, management will identify which aspects of the role-played communications are currently effective, and which areas to target for improvement.
Licensed relationship counselors have successfully used role-play for many years. Role reversal exercises help one partner to understand how their words and actions affect the other. Both partners learn how to communicate from a basis of active listening and compassion, which has short- and long-term benefits to the relationship.
Military, police and fire departments use role-play to prepare personnel for critical situations. (Side note: Advantage Improv is a veteran-owned business.) Hospitals use role-play to improve disease and injury diagnosis. Trial lawyers use role-play to prepare witnesses. The bottom line: role-play is an effective tool for a variety of applications.
Contact Advantage Improv to learn more about how our role-play services can help your team.
