Why sales roleplay is twice as effective as interviewing.

RolePlay in Sales interviews

When we interview someone, we subconsciously decide the outcome within the first 10 seconds and spend the rest of the interview confirming that initial decision. This is known as confirmation bias and it is one of the many areas that make much of the interview process worthless.

According to Laszlo Bock in his book, “Work Rules!” The best predictor of how someone will perform in each job is to review a work sample. Bock refers us to the 1998 publication of Frank Schmidt and John Hunter about, “a meta-analysis of 85 years of research on how well assessments predict performance. They looked at 19 different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired.”

The top predictor of future performance was the work sample, with an r2 of .29. In plain English this means that a work sample can help predict how well a person will do 29% percent of the time. He compares this to reference checks which can predict 7%, work experience which predicts 3%, and standard (unstructured) interviewing which has an r2 of .14

The extrapolation here is that roleplay in a sales interview is twice as effective as an interview and 10 times more effective than work history.

But what exactly does an effective roleplay entail? There is no single answer as roleplay can be used at multiple parts of the process for multiple roles and reasons.

Why are Roleplays so effective?

Roleplays give us several areas to truly evaluate the capability of a salesperson. A well planned out roleplay is not asking someone to “sell me this pencil”. A roleplay can let the interview team evaluate research capabilities, questioning skills, adherence to and understanding of the sales process, coachability and more. Most roleplays are done on the spot and are effective but miss critical opportunities to understand how the newest potential member of the sales team will perform.

A good roleplay is like a murder-mystery kit. The reason you need a kit is that creating one from scratch is really difficult. You need to identify roles, the product, how to research it, how to present your pitch. Because this is so much work most people just say, pitch me on your product, or take a simple concept and pitch me on that.

If you want someone to build you the full roleplay, specifically for your sales process, product and environment, I can do that, but if you want to get started, here are a number of easy shortcuts and ways to get some of the benefit.

Phone-based roleplay vs in-person roleplays

Roleplays are almost always done in person. Your roleplay should match your sales process. If you are evaluating SDR’s your roleplay should be about getting the right person on the phone. If you are looking for inside salespeople, there should be a web-based presentation and if you close your deals in the boardroom, bring the rep into your boardroom. When you create your roleplays, they need to match your process

Early-stage vs late-stage roleplays

Early-stage roleplays can be very effective. Matt Millen from Sapper Consulting uses a great exercise called Stand & Deliver. Matt starts by complimenting the candidate on their current success and then says, “I gotta hear the pitch”. If they stammer, stutter or make excuses, He knows immediately that this is a candidate whose resume and skills are not in alignment. According to Matt, people who do well here, inevitably do well through the rest of his process.

In the later stages of the hiring process, a more detailed and involved roleplay can be used. In my process, roleplay is the final evaluation stage and requires a commitment on the part of the applicant to research and present. The amount of time required is typically 1 to 2 hours. Someone who spends 15 minutes and someone who spends 15 hours are often red-flag candidates.

Product vs Service considerations

If you sell a managed service or a product your approach and process will be very different. This needs to be accounted for. A successful roleplay will mirror the product or service, but make it simple enough that the candidate can wrap their arms around the concepts in 15 minutes. This simplified offering needs to be described in sufficient detail so the applicant can “sell it” right away. General pricing information needs to be included as a SaaS offering and an airplane have inherently different approaches.

Research and discovery

Most sales jobs have a sales ratio of about 33%. Two-thirds of their time is spent on meetings, research, prep, and discovery.  Your roleplay should follow this model and encourage research and discovery. Give the applicant enough clues to get started but don’t show them the path they need to take. Identify decision-makers in the process and give them “roles” as if they were prospective clients. If you sell a SaaS-based sales solution that interfaces with HR and Finance, you will need to create roles for a CFO and a Head of HR role in addition to the CRO role. These roles are played by members of your hiring team and each needs to know what to offer in terms of help and what things to look for in order to decide when to stonewall. The right research and discovery skills show the applicant exactly what they need to do to close the sale. The wrong ones lead them down the wrong path.

Coaching Opportunity

In addition to understanding the product, the players and the pitch, a candidate needs to be coachable. A coachable sales rep is one who wants to improve. One who wants to figure out how to be better every day. A key part of the pitch is to offer some coaching advice. As they complete the pitch you want to give them honest feedback and give them one or two areas in which to improve. After doing this, select a small part of the pitch and ask them to redo it. If they run straight through making the same mistakes you know they are less coachable than if they make the effort or better yet, crush it.

Mistakes, mistakes, and more mistakes

You are asking the candidate to figure a lot of things out. You need to understand that they will make mistakes through the process. You are not looking for them to nail the pricing or delivery schedule. You want to know if they have the core capabilities to do the job.  Many evaluators get tripped up on the fact that a rep mispronounces a name or fumbles the product details. These things don’t matter – you are looking for how they approach the task, how well they navigate the sales process and how coachable they are.

Standard Review Process

One of the best ways to avoid confirmation bias in this part of the candidate evaluation is to review their work in a structured manner. When my kids get a project in school, they come home with the project details and the grading rubric. My 6th grader knows exactly how they will be graded, but the 6-figure salesperson I’m going to invest a year in is asked to sell me a pencil.

The rubric should be part of the assignment given to the applicant and should certainly be used by each evaluator of the project. If you would like to see a sample grading rubric, just shoot me a note and I will send one to you

So what does it look like?

When you tie all the pieces together, there is a separate roleplay for each separate job type. It is based on the requirements of the job and the ways that reps research and deliver their sales pitch.  Each candidate is sent an email or given an outline describing what you are looking for from them and setting a timeline for the work to be done. You are asking them to recreate your sales process but in a simplified universe of buying.

The work a candidate puts into the roleplay, including research and preparation should typically be no more than 2 hours. (If they are not willing to go through this process do you really want them on your team?) They then deliver the results of their research in a similar manner as they will sell. (Phone, web conference or in-person). The hiring team searches for coaching opportunities and evaluates the process on a uniform scorecard to help avoid bias and get the best analysis of the candidate's capabilities.

Why do all this?

The real reason is, YOU CAN’T AFFORD NOT TO.

55% of salespeople fail within 18 months. That comes with a direct cost of well over $100,000 and an indirect (read pipeline and opportunity cost) typically in the millions. This failure rate is the reason that most companies have a small percentage of salespeople carrying the largest amount of quota. (20% of the team usually brings in 60% of the revenue)

Using a roleplay is not particularly time-consuming but building the right one can be. If you want a fast way to add roleplay today, use “Stand and Deliver”. If you want to see what your version might look like, send me an email and we can review your requirements and get you started on a much better evaluation process when hiring salespeople.