The primary objectives of the B2B Sales Simulator is to:

Teach consultative sales skills by showing sales people what information to gather, how to use it at the appropriate levels within a customer organisation.

Improve their sales performance (e.g. be able to pitch based around business impact and ROI, while taking risk out of the system, rather than just talking about features and benefits or selling at a commodity level).

The B2B Sales Simulator is a single player online solution designed to improve consultative sales skills. The overall game design focuses on three distinct learning outcomes:

• Assess the current skills of the player, their knowledge and behaviors
• Instill within the player consultative and solution selling skills by showing where to gather the right information and how to apply it
• Reinforce any sales skills and behaviours learned in an accompanying blended learning program

The learning objectives are achieved by:

• Showing the importance of early business discovery using annual reports, Internet search engines etc. to attain adequate knowledge on a target customer, before making contact with them and throughout the sales process
• Teaching sales people about techniques for building up a map of the decision making process within the customer organisation
• Creating effective sales strategies for influencing the customer's decision making process
• Discovering, crafting and effectively selling the financial value of the solution
• Maximising the value of a particular sales account by crafting the best possible solution to meet customer needs, minimising the risk while shortening the overall sales cycle as much as possible

The B2B Sales Simulator provides various learning formats, environments and techniques in which to learn:

• Formal Meetings provide a mechanism in which to have conversations with customer representatives that unlock Sales Information Points (SIPs), through a sophisticated branching dialogue system
• The SIPs are an excellent mechanism for regulating the player's progress through the scenario, which avoids a common problem with this type of system - guessing the correct dialogue choice to succeed
• The dialogue system also allows the conversation to constantly switch the emphasis from the In Game Character asking a question/providing a prompt, to the Player asking a question (as would happen in a real-life conversation)
• Mini-games provide important variation to each dialogue strand, ensuring that the player is constantly paying attention rather than just selecting a random response and move on without reading. Some mini-games, such as such as 'Action Point' and 'Free Text Entry' provide important mechanisms to (a) Ensure the player is given appropriate direction and guidance for what to do next and (b)To ensure that a high level of comprehension has been achieved by the player by forcing them to perform calculations to work out things such as ROI, gross profit margin etc.
• Social Environments - the isometric mode emphasises the importance of the social side of the selling process by using a Sims-style 'visual' dialogue system to build up a rapport with individuals involved in the complex sales process to garner additional information from them that would be difficult to obtain in any other way
• Research - documents ensure that a level of research must be undertaken before the player begins the sales process and goes to each meeting by providing essential SIPs that can't be obtained any other way and by forcing the player to prioritise the information they have gathered prior to each sales call
• Progress Interpretation - The B2B Sales Simulator also provides the player with a unique insight into their own perception of how a particular meeting is progressing by the use of a platform game that provides a mind's eye view of this activity
• Final Presentation - provides an assessment for the overall scenario by allowing the player to present their final value proposition, with a score presented based on the value and efficiency of the final sale

The B2B Sales Simulator was built on TPLD's Business Simulator, other applications also built on the same system are the Project Management Trainer and the Requirements Capture Skills Trainer