Fun Game to Learn Cross-Selling in Customer Service

When teach­ing your inside sales team how to cross-sell, many tech­niques are required for a smooth and suc­cess­ful trans­ac­tion. First, it’s impor­tant for the staff to under­stand sales as a ser­vice, where sell­ing is about serv­ing the customer—meeting their needs, solv­ing their prob­lems, ful­fill­ing their desires. If you can get your team to real­ize that premise, then you can move on to increase your prod­uct and/or ser­vice value to your cus­tomer and com­pany through cross-selling and up-selling. These strate­gies are essen­tially proac­tive forms of cus­tomer ser­vice. So how do you teach a team the nec­es­sary skills to cross-sell? Try a fun game. Play­ing games dur­ing train­ing can be a great way to make the day more inter­est­ing, break up monot­ony in the deliv­ery, and bring the staff together in a casual and relaxed manner.

Fol­low the direc­tions below, click on the link for the nec­es­sary tools to deliver the train­ing game, and have fun!

Direc­tions

Par­tic­i­pants are assigned to prod­ucts to rep­re­sent and they min­gle with each other to estab­lish as many “part­ner­ships” as they can, based on a com­mon­al­ity between their two prod­ucts. This game rein­forces cre­ative think­ing and the abil­ity to estab­lish rela­tion­ships between diverse objects. It’s ideal for employ­ees who need to cross-sell.

What You’ll Need

10–15 min­utes. One copy of the prod­uct list, here. A hat, bag or bas­ket. Par­tic­i­pants will also need paper and pens and may want a clip­board or hard sur­face for writing.

What To Do

Cut the copy of the prod­uct list into pieces so that you have 16 slips of paper, each with the name of one prod­uct. Put these in a hat or basket.

Tell par­tic­i­pants they’ll select a prod­uct to rep­re­sent and then they will go around the room to talk to other par­tic­i­pants to try to estab­lish part­ner­ships based on a com­mon­al­ity between their prod­ucts. The objec­tive is to cre­ate as many part­ner­ships as they can in the allot­ted time.

For exam­ple, some­one who sells oranges might be able to cre­ate a part­ner­ship with some­one who sells balls because their respec­tive prod­ucts are both round.

Par­tic­i­pants should work with one another to estab­lish rela­tion­ships between their prod­ucts, but they should not spend more than one to two min­utes with each poten­tial part­ner. None of the par­tic­i­pants will be able to estab­lish part­ner­ships with every­one they talk to. Each time they estab­lish a part­ner­ship, they should record their part­ner and the prod­uct rela­tion­ship on their piece of paper.

Once you’ve explained the game, ask par­tic­i­pants to draw a prod­uct from the hat and begin the game. After about ten min­utes, stop the game and ask for vol­un­teers to share their results.

Trainer Note

Count­less com­bi­na­tions are pos­si­ble. Here are just a few examples:

1. Things peo­ple use at work (tele­phone, books, paper, com­puter, eyeglasses)
2. Things peo­ple like to receive as gifts (flow­ers, cloth­ing, choco­lates, music)
3. Things peo­ple put on their cof­fee table at home (flow­ers, books)
4. Things peo­ple use to com­mu­ni­cate (tele­phones, com­put­ers, pens, paper, musi­cal instruments)
5. Things almost every­one owns (tele­phone, cars, books, shoes)

If You Have More Time

Ask par­tic­i­pants to work in small groups to develop “prod­uct part­ners” for their prod­ucts and services.

*Game con­tent copy­righted by McGraw-Hill in “The Big Book of Cus­tomer Ser­vice Train­ing Games,” writ­ten by Peggy Car­law and Vasudha Kath­leen Deming.