Last updated on October 18th, 2025 at 06:20 am
Want to improve your sales skills?
Today we will share three sales training exercises that can help you do that!
- Why Is Sales Roleplaying the Second Best Way to Practice Your Sales Skills?
- Sales Training Exercise #1: Roleplay Cold Calls
- Sales Training Exercise #2: Roleplay Discovery Calls
- Sales Training Exercise #3: Roleplay Product Demos
- Bonus: Record and Analyze Your Sales Roleplaying Sessions
- Want to Learn How to Generate UNLIMITED Sales Leads?
Why Is Sales Roleplaying the Second Best Way to Practice Your Sales Skills?
Let’s be honest:
The best way to practice your sales skills is to pitch your product or service to your dream customers. Nothing can replace the real thing!
That being said, the second best way to practice your sales skills is to set up roleplaying sessions where you play yourself and the other person plays a potential customer.
It’s best to do this with colleagues because they are familiar with the offer, the target audience, the sales frameworks that you are using, etc.
Roleplaying with your colleagues also allows you to switch roles. Roleplaying can be surprisingly beneficial because it can help you better understand the perspective of the people that you are selling to. How does it feel to be on the other end of those sales calls?
If you are a junior salesperson, you can simply ask other junior salespeople if they are interested in roleplaying sales calls. This line of work tends to attract ambitious individuals who want to improve as fast as possible so finding someone who also wants to work on their sales skills shouldn’t be a problem!
However, if you are the only junior salesperson at the company, then other salespeople might not be interested in this because it wouldn’t benefit them as much.
In that case, you can ask a friend or a family member to roleplay sales calls with you. Of course, you will need to explain who your dream customers are, what problems they are struggling with, and what potential objections they might have.
While they won’t be able to play the potential customer’s role as convincingly as a fellow salesperson would, the upside of that is that it will add an element of volatility to these exercises. How so?
A friend or a family member who wants to help you but doesn’t quite understand the product or service you are selling is more likely to ask you some random question completely out of the blue. This can help you practice thinking on your feet!
Also, if you can’t get anyone in your social circle to roleplay sales calls with you, you can always hire someone to do it. Post an ad on freelance job boards like Upwork. It shouldn’t be difficult to find someone who will answer your “cold calls”, get on Zoom for “discovery calls”, and watch your “product demos” for $15/hour. It’s easy money, right?
Sales Training Exercise #1: Roleplay Cold Calls
We recommend using Patrick Dang’s five-step cold calling framework:
- Research. Make sure to do your homework. Does it even make sense to call this person?
- Building rapport. You have to first get them to like you if you want them to listen to what you have to say. And that starts with the right tonality, cadence of speech, energy level, etc.
- Setting the agenda for the call. Explain why you are calling, show them the value that you bring, and give them a reason to stay on the call until the end.
- Uncovering pains. Ask questions to understand the problem that they are struggling with, see if you can help them solve it, and figure out the best way to position your product or service so that it would be obvious to them why they should buy it.
- The next step. Say, if your next step is a discovery call, you can end the cold call by setting it up.
You might also want to watch this video where Patrick explains this framework in detail and provides an example:
Get good at implementing this framework first then start optimizing it once you accumulate enough cold calling experience to begin noticing patterns in potential customers’ responses.
When you are roleplaying cold calls, you should actually call the other person. Talking to someone face-to-face is completely different than talking to them on the phone so it makes sense to start using the latter medium right from the get-go. This is especially important if you have phone call anxiety!
Prioritize practicing the most likely cold call scenarios. Beyond that, you can ask the other person to occasionally throw you a curveball to mix things up. Cold calls tend to be short so you should be able to get a lot of practice with just a few hours of roleplaying!
Sales Training Exercise #2: Roleplay Discovery Calls
We recommend using this discovery call framework:
- Begin the call with rapport-building small talk.
- Set the agenda for the call and ask the potential customer for permission to get started.
- Reiterate what you have learned from your previous cold call conversation and ask them if you understood their situation correctly.
- Ask more questions to understand their situation better and determine whether they meet the five classic lead qualification criteria (need, interest, budget, timing, authority).
- Explain how your product or service can help them solve the problem that they are struggling with. Make sure to position it in a way that addresses the pain points that you have uncovered.
- Preemptively address the most common objections and then answer any questions that they might have.
- End the call by encouraging them to take the next step. That next step will depend on how your sales pipeline is structured. You might be able to close the sale then and there or you might need to schedule another call so that you could do a demo.
When you are roleplaying discovery calls, you should use the software that you will be using for real discovery calls (e.g. if you will do discovery calls over Zoom, then roleplay them on Zoom as well).
Prioritize practicing the most likely discovery call scenarios, especially responding to the most common objections and answering frequently asked questions.
Discovery calls tend to be much less volatile than cold calls so you don’t need intentional curveballs, though you’ll probably still get a few unintentional ones if you are practicing with anyone other than your colleagues.
Discovery calls also tend to be much longer than cold calls, typically between 30 and 45 minutes, so if you can only dedicate a few hours for discovery call roleplaying, you’ll probably only be able to do a few proper sessions, especially if you switch roles. But even those few sessions can help you improve your sales skills!
Sales Training Exercise #3: Roleplay Product Demos
With some offers, you can close the sale at the end of the discovery call, meanwhile with others, you need to schedule another call to do a product demo.
If your offer falls into the latter category, it makes sense to roleplay not just cold calls and discovery calls but also product demos.
The best way to structure the demo will depend on the product that you are selling but generally, this structure tends to work well:
- Appeal to emotions. How will this product make the potential customer’s life better? Share a story designed to illustrate that.
- Appeal to logic. What makes this product the best solution to the problem that the potential customer is struggling with? Discuss features, integrations, pricing, customer support, ease of migrating, etc.
- Appeal to fear. Why should the potential customer buy this product now? You need to introduce scarcity and urgency (e.g. make them a limited-time offer).
Here’s how our co-founder Russell explains this sales framework:
You also want to provide social proof. Ideally, that should be a case study on how your product helped someone achieve the same result that the person you are talking to wants to achieve.
Finally, you should be prepared to answer any questions they might have, which will probably be more specific to their particular situation than the questions that they asked during the previous calls.
When you are roleplaying product demos, you should use the software that you will be using for the actual demos.
Typically, product demos are structured as presentations, with a Q&A session at the end followed by a call to action. They tend to last around 45 – 60 minutes.
You can practice the presentation part by yourself but roleplaying the entire demo a few times can help you build confidence and get better at answering the most frequently asked questions.
Bonus: Record and Analyze Your Sales Roleplaying Sessions
Roleplaying sales calls is immensely valuable in and of itself but if you want to get the most out of it, you should record your sales roleplaying sessions so that you could analyze them later.
Going through those recordings can help you spot issues that can be extraordinarily hard to catch when all you have is your first-person perspective:
- Low energy. You might be coming across as tired, bored, or lacking in enthusiasm.
- Wrong cadence of speech. You might be talking either too fast or too slow.
- Filler sounds and words. Your speech might be littered with filler sounds such as “umm” or filler words such as “like”.
- Awkward body language. You might look super tense and awkward on video calls.
- Condescending body language. You might have unconscious habits that don’t serve you, such as rolling your eyes when someone presents an objection or asks a question.
- Body language ticks. You might have various ticks that you unconsciously developed as a way to deal with discomfort in conversations (e.g. picking invisible lint off your clothes, looking to the side although no one is there, etc.).
- Staring at yourself. You might be used to looking at yourself during video calls instead of looking at the camera. Not a big deal when talking to friends and family but can be a problem when talking to potential customers. It can seem like you are avoiding eye contact, which the other person might subconsciously register as you being sketchy. Meanwhile, looking directly at the camera creates the illusion of eye contact, which can help you come across as more trustworthy.
…etc.
Analyzing these recordings can also help you figure out what you need to improve in terms of structure, wording, etc.
Say, you might feel that you answered a specific question clearly but once you listen to the playback you may realize that the answer you gave was kind of convoluted. If that question comes up often, you need to come up with a concise answer and practice it.
Finally, listening to these recordings can help you get a sense of the overall “vibe” that you are giving off. Are you coming across as a likable individual? Likability is extremely important in sales!
Want to Learn How to Generate UNLIMITED Sales Leads?
Lead generation is the most common bottleneck in sales pipelines.
The problem with cold calling is that you are setting yourself up for an uphill battle when you call a stranger out of the blue.
They will probably be at least somewhat annoyed because you interrupted whatever it is that they were doing and on guard because they know that you want to sell them something. And that’s assuming that they answer your call to begin with!
A much better way to fill up your sales pipeline with leads is to create a system designed to attract potential customers. Get them to come to you instead of chasing after them!
You can learn how to do that by joining our 5 Day Lead Challenge where our co-founder Russell Brunson will walk you through building a lead generation funnel step-by-step.
You will:
- Create your first lead magnet.
- Build your first lead generation funnel.
- Set up a six-email welcome sequence.
…and launch your funnel in just five days!
So don’t hesitate. Take action now. It can change your life!
Join Our 5 Day Lead Challenge Today!
P.S. This challenge is completely FREE!