BrazilThe Next Organization develops marketing & sales game
The Next Organization’s Marketing & Sales Game has been used by industry-leading organisations such as Jaguar Land Rover and business schools including Aston Business School and Copenhagen Business School as a means of ramping up business development. Yasin Sahhar explains how the game can support growth.
After developing the game in-house, consulting firm The Next Organization has applied its Marketing & Sales Game across a range of its clients throughout Europe. The game has proven, according to Sahhar, “a great success”, allowing participants to blend theory and practice for the sake of deeper insights into optimal ways of working. “The goal is to bring people’s knowledge of marketing and sales-related concepts to the next level,” he explained.
The Marketing & Sales Game consists of various rounds. Each round inspires participants with existing and novel theories and concepts and tests them with challenging assignments. All assignments are centred around a real-life case, and participants work together in groups of three to six to solve the assignments.
Groups are assessed on hard and soft skills and qualitatively and quantitatively. In each round, each group receives tailored feedback about how they performed. As such, participants learn directly ‘on the job’ and may adapt their approach during the game.
The game closes with a pitch presentation wherein a ‘Dragon’s Den’ of three experts assess the groups. The group that performed best on all dimensions wins. “This creates a competitive edge to the game, just like in daily business and competing with competitors,” remarked Sahhar.
The game can be applied to any segment within marketing and sales, from market segmentation and customer journeys to defining market sales concepts such as market approaches. Sahhar: “In market segmentation, participants further delve into understanding customer segments and choosing appropriate segments. Subsequently, participants tap into the customer’s journey including characteristics like value-in-use, their needs and fitting channels. In the market approach, it is key to design an approach that effectively increases sales. All these rounds work towards a consolidated business plan and pitch.”
Ultimately, the Marketing & Sales Game stimulates on-the-job learning and collaboration, is fun for participants, and contributes to behavioural change. “Participants have a safe learning environment allowing them to make mistakes. Even though gamification is used for the game, it is fully based on real-life cases creating a true and unique experience,” said Sahhar.
The game’s modular build-up means that it can be tailored specifically towards the needs of an organisation. “As such, participants address challenges that are present within a company. This win-win situation ensures that participants can develop themselves and organisational challenges can be solved,” concluded Sahhar.
