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The environment of corporate sales training in Australia has reached a tipping point, and that tipping point is boredom. 

http://www.stevecafeandcuisine.com/Masses of money and time are being wasted every quarter by companies trying to develop their sales consultants, only to find they’re paying as much attention to their sales trainers as children pay to green vegetables.

As a highly experienced business and leadership trainer, Angela Koning of Equenti has been on both sides of the trainer and trainee equation. Most recently, she decided to put both feet into the sales training environment and learn how to add even more value to her potential buyers – something she is continually looking to do for her market as a well-known leadership trainer.

The experience she had at a recent Consultative Sales Game live event with Darcy J Smyth and Steve Claydon radically changed the way she saw sales training forever, compared to what she had been used to in the past. “Usually, it’s just another seat lined up at another black-cloth coated table,” Angela says. “Another blue Kilometrico pen next to another A5 sized notepad with the host hotel’s faded logo across the top. Another carefully curated PDF printout with a set of last year’s slides ready to be launched into the trash the moment people leave the venue.” Angela says she has seen so many training sessions that seem to have one requirement: “Attend the training and get the box next to your name ticked”, something she’s seen so many ‘students’ master time and again since they joined the companies that have invested tens of thousands of dollars into professional ‘development’.

For a staggering percentage of Australian corporate sales consultants, this lackluster sales training experience is, unfortunately, the norm*. The result is an astounding amount of time and money wasted on sales training each and every quarter, only to repeat the same wasteful spending ad nauseam until the inspiration and motivation to expand and learn is forever sucked from them.

If this has become such a normality for the corporate training world, what’s required to save it from the depths of ‘Death by PowerPoint’ that so many have come to fear in the modern workplace? As Angela has now discovered, two disruptive sales trainers have reason to believe they’ve found the answer, and it requires us to do the one thing we love most, yet unfortunately, have almost forgotten how to do: play games.

Darcy J Smyth and Steve Claydon from Why Bravo have developed a revolutionary event called ‘The Consultative Sales Game’ – a games-based sales training event designed to completely transform people like Angela’s experience of training and development, sending their sales results through the roof as a result. As long-standing business owners and sales trainers themselves, Darcy and Steve say they were tired of seeing so many sales consultants and business owners attend training events that only focused on information delivery as opposed to actual human growth and development.

“Traditional trainings in the sales space are typically driven by giving as much information as possible – usually delivered by a textbook or PowerPoint slide”, Darcy says. “And that’s fine. There’s certainly a necessary place for that in some business spaces. It just poses two particular problems. The first is that it creates a boring and demotivating learning environment, meaning attendees of these trainings leave them even less inspired than they ever were before. The second is that the attendees can take on a whole lot of information, but then feel unable to actually put it into practice. All the information in the world is useless in the hands of someone who hasn’t been given an inspiring and engaging opportunity to implement it.”

The Consultative Sales Game was designed to answer one question: How can you create a sales training that people can’t help but be a different person after attending? Information is available via a near-instantaneous Google search.

But The Consultative Sales Game was designed to transform the way sales consultants and business owners perceived and solved problems for their buyers, placing them as the ultimate authority in their market. “We wanted a training people could actually put to practice immediately. A training that caused people to overcome what made them uncomfortable in the sales process in a supportive and exciting learning environment,” Steve says.

Because games are unique in the lightbulb moments they help their ‘players’ come to:

1. Games offer instant feedback as to whether a strategy will help a player win or not: Einstein posited that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. When it comes to games, if a player doesn’t win there obviously needs to be a change in their approach to playing the game. Yet so many sales consultants find themselves in the trap of trying the same strategy over and over again, only to fall short of the sales results they desire. Games allow sales consultants to instantly receive feedback on what needs to be changed in their sales approach, for them to achieve a new result.

2. We can’t hide from the feedback that a game gives us: When our Mum tells us to clean our room, we can either comply and tidy it up, or protest with a tantrum until the walls around the house fall down. In the same way, when we receive information we can either agree or disagree with the message on offer. But with the results of a game, there is nothing to do but realise the reality of the results we’ve achieved. There is no right or wrong, there is no me versus you, there is simply the strategy we use to play, and the undeniable results that strategy achieved. What we do with those results, and how we change accordingly, is up to us.

3. How we play games is often how we play life: When the pressure to achieve a result is on, our ‘default personality’ typically kicks in and we do what we need to do to win (or at least not lose!). Games give us the perfect environment to put our default personalities up to a mirror for instant self-awareness into how we are behaving in the real world. What we learn can immediately be applied to our approach to selling. In fact, true self-awareness means it’s impossible not to apply the change that’s needed for sales success moving forward.

Why Bravo is disrupting sales training at a time when the use of ‘gamification’ in business development is rising rapidly. Companies have been implementing the use of game theories to motivate and inspire their sales teams to victory, with the use of rewards at particular results and achievement levels being a prime example. But The Consultative Sales Game is innovative because it brings gasification into the sales training room.

With the world of sales training set for a major shakeup as the educational landscape continues to change, we can be sure that the use of ‘games’ as a profound learning tool will continue to lead the way for companies looking to invest in training and development that actually facilitates growth for their sales teams. ‘The Consultative Sales Game’ looks like it’s leading the field into the new world of education and professional development. To find out more, visit whybravo.com/events