Honing Sales Skills through Fun and Games

The Big Book of Sales Games
by Peggy Carlaw and Vasudha Kathleen Deming.
McGraw-Hill, 1999, 214 pages, $17.95.

As with the previous titles in McGraw-Hill's Big Book of Games series, don't be fooled by the elementary-school bookjacket. Written primarily for supervisors or managers of sales teams, The Big Book of Sales Games shows you how tomotivate your team through games that reinforce selling techniques. One game, for example, highlights the harm in usingjargon your customer won't understand. Another game is an exercise in communicating the features and benefits of a productquickly and effectively.

There are 50 games in this book, complete with handouts, overheads, and instructions. The authors have also identified anadditional 35 games that you can do with some modification if you're by yourself. The games cover 12 categories of sales,from motivation and product knowledge to problem solving and handling objections.

Selling Colors

For example, one exercise to develop spontaneous presentation skills is done by assigning each salesperson a color, whichhe or she then has to "sell" to the other participants. The salespeople can say or do whatever they want to convince the othersthat their color is the best choice. Then the group votes on the best presentation and talks about what made it effective.

Doing simple activities like these may seem a bit odd at first, even unprofessional. But the book is based on the assumptionthat people learn by doing, and the authors use fun as a tool to help salespeople put their skills to work much more naturallyand effectively.

Copyright © 1999 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

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