Guest Post: Second Nature is Smart Selling Tools’ Sales Tool of the Week

Smart Selling Tools recently reviewed Second Nature’s simulation solution for their weekly Sales Tech Review.  Second Nature was selected as the sales tools of the week and is one of the Top Sales Tools of the year for 2021. 

What is sales simulation software?

In sales simulation software, your sales reps hold two-way practice conversations and interact with an AI coach that simulates real life sales situations. This allows you to improve the proficiency of hundreds of sales reps at a time.

Why do you need sales simulation software?

If you have a broad base of products and they are sold to different personas and several different industries, across many different use cases, how can your reps be prepared to sell effectively in each and every situation?

Apart from AI sales simulation, there are just two alternative options.

Option 1: You could record each sales call and provide individual coaching, but that’s not scalable. It also falls short because one conversation reflects only one scenario. You want to know how well your reps are prepared for perhaps as many as a hundred or more scenarios.

Option 2: You could have them record practice pitches for each scenario, but with tens or hundreds of scenarios, that’s just not practical, and it’s not real. Pitch recordings are basically monologues, and delivering monologues isn’t selling.

Enter Second Nature’s AI sales coach that can play the role of a buyer in different scenarios to test for proficiency.

What is Second Nature’s pitch practice?

Second Nature helps large organizations with teams of about 50 or more salespeople to align their messaging, to make sure that everybody tells the same story in the same way, and to create that consistency of message across the board. If you watch my video review, you can hear those words spoken by “Jenny,” the simulated buyer.

Jenny asks questions and the rep responds, in a natural voice conversation in a simulated sales call. The AI sales coach can ask additional questions, even without any kind of programming. And the reps can ask Jenny questions as well, for example to practice discovery sales calls.

Immediate analysis of each session is automatically created so managers don’t have to watch hours of video, and reps can get instant feedback.

How Second Nature Works

Determine the target persona, goal and talking points

When the rep initiates a simulation with Second Nature, they first get to see who the target persona is, and what the goal is. For example, Jenny might tell them, “you are speaking with a sales enablement manager, and the goal is to convey the ROI and schedule a POC.”

Next, the rep can see the talking points that you want them to hit on during the call.

Four different simulation types

With Second Nature, you can run four different types of simulations, a video call simulation, a slide show presentation, screen share, and a webcam pitch simulation. And all of these are perfect for today’s remote selling environment, and the wide variety of use cases ensure that you’ll get a high ROI on your use of the solution.

Scores highlight proficiency gaps

Managers can see scores for each product line by team and team member, and accumulated scores for all teams across all simulations. It gets super interesting when you imagine comparing that data to actual revenue.

You can then ask questions like, which reps have never sold product X, and for those reps, what was their proficiency gap for that product? It’s really telling information that gives you actionable insight.

Scale sales proficiency improvements

The beauty of Second Nature’s sales training software comes from the scalability of proficiency improvements, the types of simulations, the broad set of use cases, like onboarding and rolling out new products and messaging, and the analytics for managers to zero in on exactly where their reps need one-on-one attention to improve. It’s the perfect way for reps to have actual practice discussions that are scored immediately so they can improve on their own and ace every sales call. It’s for those reasons I’ve named Second Nature our recommended sales technology of the week.

About Nancy Nardin

Nancy Nardin is the founder of Smart Selling Tools. She is recognized as the voice of authority on sales technology; backed by 30 years of sales expertise, Nancy is a pioneer in mobile selling – having sold for the world’s first laptop computer manufacturer, GRiD Systems, in Silicon Valley in the early 1980’s. Before launching Smart Selling Tools in 2009, Nancy served in sales leadership roles at leading analyst firms such as Gartner Group and IDC, selling into large accounts like Intel, HP, Microsoft, Apple, and Sun Micro. She also worked closely with many of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms.