The purpose of this study was to determine why these processes were taking so long and what techniques, if any, could be used to reduce process cycle times while controlling costs and increasing customer service. Reducing Cycle Time in Sales Training Through Role Playing Sales training is a key organizational process used by many firms to develop high quality salespeople into value-adding agents. The competitive nature of today's business environment dictates that management develop and strategically deploy these value-adding salespeople and, in doing so, generate additional revenue. This goal must be attained by the organization without spending additional time and money. Accordingly, sales trainers should develop specific training programs that contribute to the development of an efficient, value-adding sales force using fewer of the organization's resources.
Role play can help measure training effectiveness.
Organizations can use a trainee's performance in role play exercises as a partial predictor of readiness for field selling. Other things being equal, the better the role play performance in training, the faster the trainee moves to the next stage, field selling. The results of this study suggest cycle time improvements in sales training can be achieved by implementing effectively staged role play exercises. Our results indicate how organizations can save on training by reducing the time it takes to effectively train new salespeople. We also demonstrate that training enhancers can increase the revenue generating potential of these new salespeople.