Choose Your Own Adventure

Recent college graduates are a key recruiting pool for Honda dealerships looking for new sales consultants. They are young, energetic, and passionate. But, most of them have limited to no sales experience. And they are about to engage with a very particular, sometimes difficult customer—the new or used car buyer.

To enhance their existing new hire curriculum, Honda wanted to deliver a webinar that would help new sales consultants apply their proprietary sales process as well as conversational skills and objection handling techniques.

Zimmet Group created a “Choose Your Own Adventure”–style, virtual in-dealership webinar that not only surpassed Honda’s expectations, but set a new bar for webinar excellence within the company.

Zimmet Group recognized that, for most of the participants, thinking on your feet and responding correctly in the moment are among the most difficult parts of the sales conversation—especially for a new salesperson. Because of this, it was vital that every aspect of the webinar feel live and dynamic.

First, a facilitator taught the audience a set of skills and best practices they could use to overcome customer objections. Then, using live polling, the audience secretly selected a type of objection they wanted to see a sales top-performer overcome.

The scenarios were then role-played live with a sales consultant and a customer. We told the customer, but not the sales consultant, which objection to demonstrate. The sales consultant would then enter a showroom environment, greet a customer who knew the objection, and have to think on his or her feet (in front of the live webinar audience) about how to apply the objection-handling techniques.

Zimmet Group designed and produced the entire webinar event. After the live event, we also recorded additional branching scenarios for future use to help simplify logistics and lower costs when the webinar was rolled out to the rest of North America.

In the webinar, participants voted in real time on the topics they wanted to cover and how the scenarios should play out. Although a facilitator guided the event, the learners drove and directed the program. Live feed webcams provided a constant tie between the facilitator and participants, and we encouraged the use of live chat to foster collaboration on best practices.

Following the webinar, participants were surveyed on how effectively it prepared them for having sales conversations and handling objections. The webinar scored a perfect 100%.

In addition, engagement techniques used in the webinar, such as branching role-play scenarios and live interaction between facilitator and audience, have since been used in other Honda webinars.