How Do You Run an Effective Role Play?

Matt Lewers: Hello, and welcome back to the Blueprint Round Table. I’m joined by my business partners, Krissy and Emily. This week’s question, how do you run an effective role play in sales hiring? And Emily, I’ll kick it to you first.

Emily Bell: Yeah. So, first thing is you have to make sure that you’re setting the stage with the right expectations. So especially for, you know, your more junior roles that you would be assessing this type of model in? I would say making sure that they have the information ahead of time. And also level setting internal interviewer expectations.

Emily Bell: There is not a single salesperson alive that is never not bombed a cold call. So keeping that in mind that even the most incredible salespeople out there have had an off day. And so it’s really assessing for very specific things. And even if they do bomb, how they recover from that is an indicator that they would be really solid for the role.

Emily Bell: So I think not necessarily taking all of the responses at face value, but assessing for things like how coachable were they to feedback after the role play. You know, how were they able to handle very short, concise answers from the other person? Were they able to ask open-ended questions? So assessing for natural style versus a perfect execution is probably the best approach the most effective if you’re going to incorporate that into interior interview process.

Krissy Manzano: I mean, I’d echo everything that you said. I think role plays are very effective with junior level type roles. For senior level ones, they would either probably do very well or it’d be a little awkward that you’re doing a junior level exercise with them. They need presentations. You need to take them to another level to see how they present.

Krissy Manzano: But for junior level ones, I mean, you really need to understand, like you said, what are the skills that you were looking for and what is considered coachable and what’s not, right? Like, as a, you know, when people say, I want them to be confident, and a lot of people mistake confidence with perfection, right?

Krissy Manzano: So if I am interviewing for a job that I want, and I’m a junior employee especially, right? I don’t have a lot of years of experience under my belt. I’m here to prove myself. I believe in myself, but I’m nervous talking to my hiring manager who I know is judging me. Very different than when I make a cold call to someone that doesn’t know me, doesn’t see my face, and is not gonna be able to judge, to some extent, right? And so, and I also get better and better with my message, right? I like get that down in practice.

Krissy Manzano: So I think expecting people to be perfect or not show nervousness are the wrong skills or how they perform the wrong type of performance measurements to look at, right? Now it also can show you, I think what’s valuable about it is like where you can coach people like you talked about Emily and what is again, coachable, right?

Krissy Manzano: Are they taking instant feedback or are they someone that really knocked you out of the park in the beginning? Hey, this might be someone that doesn’t need as much coaching and can really like hit the ground running a little bit faster. Are they active listeners or do they just, you know, is that something you’re gonna have to work on with them?

Krissy Manzano: Right? And so knowing what skills are coachable and which ones aren’t, right? And you know, in some cases there are a lot, right? But if someone is just, someone just gave like a one word answer every time. That would probably not be something that would be worth coaching versus you know, if you have five other candidates who are willing to like, you know, really kind of go into it and you might just have to make them a little bit more concise.

Krissy Manzano: So yeah.

Matt Lewers: Yeah. I’m gonna, I’m just gonna uplevel one part of the conversation for moment. I’m seeing, I know we’re all seeing quite a few for CSM roles, right? In the SAAS space for CSM, AM roles. We’re seeing quite a few, call it what it is, but it ultimately a mocked QBR, right? In a or in a mocked QBR is a role play because you are reading out the QBR to the hiring managers on the other side of the table, and the, if anybody’s listening here and you’re doing that or you’re, if you’re going into that from an interviewee perspective, something that we’re seeing is frequently missed. And Emily, this is tied back to you talking about setting the table, setting the stage.

Matt Lewers: In a lot of these mock QBRs, the hiring managers aren’t providing the titles or personas that they’re trying to play, right? So you, if you’re trying to prepare for that and you’re selling financial software, you’ll assume you’re probably talking to somebody with a financial persona. But if you go in and are, you’re assuming that, and the hiring manager’s sitting across the table and they are playing themselves, then there’s gonna be, there could be a gap there.

Matt Lewers: So if you’re a hiring manager, make sure you clearly do a couple things. You give relevant data, maybe give some background for the QBR outside of just here’s four or five slides. Put together some stuff. Give them data to represent a real client, maybe a real client recently that was positive or negative interaction, right?

Matt Lewers: And see what they pull from the data. See what they’re able to kind of, put into the QBR based on the feedback, the scenario that you are teeing up as a hiring manager. And if you’re the hiring manager, tell them if you’re gonna play yourself, Matt Lewers, the hiring manager, or Matt Lewers, the CFO of this Fortune 500 company that you’re reading this QBR out to.

Matt Lewers: And then inversely, if you’re getting asked to do one of these mock presentations, which again are some type of role played for more, more senior strategic roles, a lot of times, don’t be afraid to ask questions. When you get the mock scenario, ask three or four questions back. If you’re not comfortable doing that, how are you ever gonna ask that Fortune 500 CFO the questions, right? Show your intelligence. Show your grace. Show that you’re a learner. There’s part of your, I’m seeking feedback before I even get an. Can you give me some additional criteria on these points? That’s always well received. And honestly, if you send that over and the hiring manager doesn’t give you those answers, are they really gonna be a partner for you when you join their team?

Matt Lewers: So I’ll pause there. I just wanted to talk about role plays.

Emily Bell: Way to up level. Have like two thoughts in particular off of that. So done. The last point. I would aagree with that. I think it’s also a strategy from a candidate’s point of view to have more touchpoints and FaceTime with the company. So you stand out, you’re gonna be on their mind, even if no, might even know the answer to it.

Emily Bell: Just say, “Hey, here’s the way that I’m interpreting this. Is this correct? I wanna make sure I get this right.” So it’s giving you the opportunity to show that you’re leading with curiosity. You’re open to communication and you stay top of mind. So in a competitive interview process like that could be that it factor that sets you apart.

Emily Bell: The other pieces, I think sometimes employers are hesitant to have too much information, especially if it’s like a senior position because they wanna see what the person brings to the table. But even Oscar-nominated actors are gonna have a script to follow and they interpret that based off of their skill and talent.

Emily Bell: So I think it’s like maybe a weird, you know, comparison, but like, it made me think like even people that are professionals in their chosen field have instructions that they can then interpret and make magic happen from. But without that it can, you never, you don’t know what you’re gonna get. And that’s not how companies ran.

Emily Bell: There’s standard processes in place, even in early series to be able to replicate and scale success. So, that really got me thinking on that. Thanks. Thanks for the shoutout,

Krissy Manzano: The one thing I’ll say, which might seem obvious, but I have seen it’s not always, even though it’s on the lower side of its happens just because a company says, “Present

Emily Bell: Yeah.

Krissy Manzano: Say it however you want.” You absolutely should put a deck together. And like

Emily Bell: 100 hundred percent.

Krissy Manzano: There was one time where we had someone show up and they just talked.

Krissy Manzano: This is not the moment to, that’s not the type of creativity that they’re looking for. they wanna see how you put a deck together and how you present that to your customers. You don’t and by the way, one other thing, try to match their website colors. That is something, it doesn’t have to be exactly the hex number, whatever, that will stand out, like attention to detail.

Krissy Manzano: And there are sometimes they’ll put in there like, we’re not looking for you to make the most beautiful powerpoint, but show the show me, you know me branding, right? That’ll stand out, show the detail, and then like y’all just said, ask questions. There are so many times that our hiring managers are hungry for them to come to them.

Krissy Manzano: Right. Don’t just ask a question to ask a question because then you actually could hurt yourself. I’ve been like, why? Like, if you’re like, can you tell me if you think that QBR stands for this? Like someone would be. Do they not know what a QBR is like? So don’t ask questions just to ask questions, but start getting into that exercise quickly so you can figure out what questions you genuinely have because you have a short period of time to do a QBR that probably would be something in a real world scenario that you would do, you know, in in an hour. But in hiring managers, I always think it’s great if you have them do a QBR based on a company they’ve already worked for, because it should give them a level of comfortability to show you what they’re capable of and how they inform and educate you.

Krissy Manzano: I’ve really thought that was very powerful with other clients of ours that have done that versus made up random scenario about their company because they’re not experts about their company yet.

Emily Bell: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Matt Lewers: Exactly. Well, thank you both for your thoughts. I know we’re at time here. This was very productive. I learned some things. Emily, I think you’ve got a LinkedIn post out of this. And Krissy, we got to see your beautiful smile quite a few times.

Krissy Manzano: You’re welcome.

Matt Lewers: All in all, great conversation.