AI Role-Play for Solution Selling® Teams
Sales role-play practice built for teams trained on the Solution Selling® methodology
Your reps will sell to realistic and complex buying personas and archetypes. They stay in character, remember everything that has been said, and push back. Each buyer knows what is actually causing their problem and what it is costing the business, and will not say either of those things unless the rep asks properly. Until they do, the buyer will not listen to a word about your product.
LeaderCoreAI is an independent product and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Sales Performance International. Full trademark notice
Your reps have to earn the right to pitch
Every scenario runs on one rule. Until the buyer has said, in their own words, what is causing their problem and what it is costing them, they will not engage with anything the rep offers. Mention a feature too early and the buyer does what real buyers do: asks what it costs, says they are a long way from that decision, takes a polite note, and lets the meeting end.
Being likeable does not open the buyer up, and neither does being well prepared. What works is asking until the buyer explains the problem themselves. After that they take the rep seriously and will discuss anything the rep connects back to something they said. This is the part reps cannot practise with a colleague, because a colleague lets them off.
Every scenario starts at the second meeting
The buyer has already admitted they have a problem. Asking them to explain it again from the beginning wastes the meeting, and they will say so. Starting here leaves the rep enough time to find the real cause, agree what a fix would look like, and connect the right parts of your product to it.
Winning is not getting another meeting
The rep wins by getting the buyer to describe what a fixed version of their situation looks like, and by connecting only the relevant parts of your product to it. A warm, friendly meeting that ends without any of that scores badly, however pleasant it was.
How role-play sessions for Solution Selling® practitioners are graded
A sales manager can tell a rep that a call felt good. What they usually cannot tell them is exactly where it went wrong — that the rep pitched a solution before they had understood the problem.
The report tells them that. A few seconds after the rep ends the session, they get a score out of ten on each of the five skills listed below, and each skill counts the same toward the overall score. The report also says what the rep did well, what they got wrong, and what to do differently next time. Every score comes with the quote from the conversation that earned it.
Pain Diagnosis Before Prescription
Working out exactly what is going wrong and what it is costing the business, before suggesting anything. Finding the problem but never pricing it counts as half a job.
Solution Co-creation
Getting the buyer to describe what a fixed version of their situation looks like, instead of handing them a finished answer and asking whether they like it.
Capability-to-Pain Alignment
Connecting everything the rep offers back to something the buyer said. A run through the full feature list scores badly here by definition, however good the features are.
Stakeholder Awareness
Working out who else is affected by the problem and who else has a say in the decision, then selling to them too, rather than only to the person doing the talking.
Avoiding Feature-Led Selling
Not leading with features, specifications or a demo before the problem has been understood and priced.
The two habits this scoring punishes hardest are the two a confident salesperson has by default: jumping to the solution, and showing the buyer everything they have got. Pitching before the problem is understood costs the rep marks on two of the five skills at once, no matter how good the pitch was. And picking a harder difficulty level makes the buyers tougher, not the marking softer.
Six things to sell. Only two of them fit.
Before the meeting starts, the rep is given six real features they could offer. Two or three of them solve this buyer’s problem. The rest are perfectly good and completely beside the point. A rep who works through all six loses marks, and the buyer tells them so: “That’s interesting, but it isn’t the problem I have.”
Choosing to leave something out is the skill being tested. Most sales role-play rewards covering everything you sell. This one rewards knowing what not to bring up, and after the session the rep is asked about it directly: “Your offer had six parts to it. Which ones did you deliberately keep out of the conversation, and how did you decide?” Most reps have never had to answer that.
Every rep is also given a real problem with their own product
A six-month approval process the customer’s team has to sit through. A service garage fifteen miles outside the city. Retraining for every clinician who touches the device. Real products have drawbacks, so the practice ones do too, and the rep has to win the buyer over anyway.
Three examples from the library
Example scenarios from the practice library for Solution Selling® practitioners
Here are three of them. Every scenario is a specific company with named people in real jobs, and the rep reads a briefing before it starts. There are always two buyers in the room and they want different things. Neither of them is an obstacle to get past: they both have a fair point, and a rep who simply sides with one will lose the other. In one of the three below, one buyer is keeping something from the other, for reasons anyone would recognise.
A hospital's implanted cardiac devices lose manufacturer support in six months. The CFO accepts there is a problem and wants a price for replacements. The head of cardiology is in the meeting for the first time, and knows why this was missed. It is not the reason the CFO would give.
A city's fleet-maintenance contract goes out to tender next quarter. The procurement manager has invited you in to help write the specification, and tells you plainly she is asking two other bidders the same questions. She has already decided what the fix should be, and it would cause the same problem again.
A four-day delay releasing a batch made a pharmaceutical shipment late and put the plant's paper records under scrutiny. The quality manager knows exactly what happened. The plant director, who has spent a month answering head office's questions, does not.
When a rep gets it wrong here, it feels like a good meeting
Nobody gets thrown out. A rep who has not done the work gets a friendly buyer asking them to send a full written proposal for the team to review. It feels like progress. It goes into the CRM as progress. The deal is over. Every rep who has been selling for more than a year recognises it.
These three are examples only. Request a demo to be walked through the rest of the library.
Just a few examples
The buyers your reps will be up against
Every buyer comes from a cast of B2B characters, each with their own priorities, their own worries, and their own way of behaving when the pressure goes up. Three of them are below. Because there are always two in the room, your reps have to handle both at once: being interrupted, being ganged up on, and being pulled in two directions.
The Skeptical CFO
Watches the money, hates risk, has no time, and wants proof of everything.
The Procurement Negotiator
Runs a process, pushes on price, and reads every line about terms and risk.
The Hands-On End User
Has to use the thing every day, and has been let down by a change before.
The full cast is larger. Request a demo to meet the rest.
How the practice works
Read the brief
The rep reads what happened with this account before today, what the buyer has already admitted, the six things they can offer, and the one real drawback of their product. Then they choose a difficulty level, from Simple to Extreme.
Hold the meeting
A live conversation with two AI buyers who stay in character and never put words in the rep’s mouth. Things happen part-way through to tempt the rep into mistakes: a deadline that invites them to quote a price early, a competitor’s quote slid across the desk. If the rep gets stuck they can ask a built-in coach for a hint, and that exchange is left out of the scoring. The system enforces that, rather than us just promising it.
Read the report
The rep ends the session and the report arrives a few seconds later: the overall score, the five skill scores with quotes to back them up, what to fix, and the question about what they chose to leave out. Every report they have done is kept in one place, so they can see whether they are getting better.
Harder levels give the buyer a harder problem
At the lower levels, the buyer has a reasonable-sounding explanation for what went wrong and sticks to it unless the rep digs. Higher up, they push for a price or a decision before they have explained the problem at all.
Higher still, the buyer arrives having already decided what to buy, usually from a competitor, and is proud of the decision. Arguing that your product is better is the mistake. The way through is to get them talking about what their chosen answer would not fix.
At the top level the two buyers openly disagree with each other, and nothing the rep is carrying will suit them both. The best they can do is get the two buyers to agree on what the problem is, offer the one feature that speaks to it, and say plainly that the rest of the offer can wait for another meeting.
What does not change is the marking. The same behaviours are required and scored the same way at every level, so nobody gets an easier ride by moving up.
What does change is what a good score is worth. Selling well to a buyer who has already picked a competitor is a far harder thing than selling well to one who is merely cautious, and the platform treats it that way: certificates rank by difficulty before score, so a strong result high up the ladder outranks a bigger number at Simple. Working up the levels is how a rep shows they have genuinely mastered the method.
What counts as getting it wrong
None of these are a matter of opinion about how the call felt. Each one is written into the scoring, along with the skills it costs the rep marks on.
- •Pitching a solution before understanding the problem
- •Finding the problem but never asking what it costs the business
- •Asking about the consequences but never about the cause
- •Offering features the buyer never asked about
- •Arguing against the competitor the buyer has already picked, instead of reopening the problem
- •Treating the person doing the talking as the only one who matters
International sales teams practice Solution Selling® in up to 42 languages
Reps can hold the conversation in one of 42 languages and read the report in another. A rep’s scores and transcripts are private to them, and L&D sees how the team is doing overall rather than any one person’s results. All AI processing happens in the EU, and the platform was built for GDPR from the start. Spoken practice, where the rep talks and each buyer answers in their own voice, is available as an add-on.
Role-play practice for Solution Selling® practitioners: frequently asked questions
Is this an official Solution Selling® course?
No. LeaderCoreAI is an independent product. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Sales Performance International, and finishing our scenarios does not certify anyone in the methodology. Your training provider teaches your team how to sell this way. We give them somewhere to practise it as often as they like, and a way to find out how they are doing.
Do our reps need to be trained on Solution Selling® before using it?
It is built for teams who have already had the training, because the scoring assumes the rep is trying to sell this way. A rep who has not been trained still gets a full report with quotes and advice, but it is worth most when the practice matches the training the team was given.
How is a role-play session scored?
Out of ten on each of five skills, each worth the same: Pain Diagnosis Before Prescription, Solution Co-creation, Capability-to-Pain Alignment, Stakeholder Awareness, and Avoiding Feature-Led Selling. Those five are built from a list of specific things we look for, good and bad, and every score has to be backed by a quote from the conversation. The report also gives an overall score, what the rep did well, what to fix, and what to try next time. It arrives a few seconds after they finish.
What happens if a rep pitches before understanding the problem?
They lose marks on two of the five skills at once, however good the pitch was. We are scoring whether the rep followed the method, not how well they present. That is the difference between this and generic sales feedback.
Why would a rep lose marks for offering something genuinely good?
Because it did not solve this buyer's problem. Each rep is given six real features they could offer, and only two or three of them fit. Working through all six reads as not listening, and the buyer will say so. Afterwards the rep is asked which parts of the offer they left out on purpose, and why they decided that.
Does a higher difficulty level mean easier marking?
No. There are five levels, from Simple to Extreme. A higher level gives the buyer a harder problem and makes them tougher to sell to, but the marking rules do not change: the same behaviours are required and scored the same way. What changes is what the score is worth. An eight earned at Extreme is a bigger achievement than an eight at Simple, and the platform treats it that way. Certificates rank by difficulty before score, and harder levels are worth more on the leaderboard.
How is this different from your question-led discovery library?
Same platform, different idea of a good call. In the question-led discovery library, getting the buyer to commit to a specific next step is one of the five skills we score. Here it is not. What we score instead is whether the buyer ended up describing what a fixed situation looks like, with only the relevant parts of your product attached to it. Each customer gets whichever library matches the training their team had.
Can a rep practise a real deal they are working on?
Yes. A rep describes a conversation they have coming up, answers some questions about it, and gets a scenario built from it. It is private to them and stays off the leaderboard.
Who can see an individual rep's scores?
Only that rep. Managers, HR and L&D can see how the team is doing as a whole, never one person's scores or transcripts. The leaderboard only ranks people against colleagues in their own company, and uses made-up display names unless someone chooses to show their real one. That is what makes it safe to fail.
Do you have libraries for other sales methodologies?
We have one for question-led discovery selling as well, and libraries for insight-led selling and mutual-qualification selling are being built. We also build libraries around a company's own method. Tell us what your team was trained on.
How do we get access?
Through a company subscription. There is no sign-up page: accounts are set up by us, either as part of a subscription or as an approved trial. Ask for a demo and we will set up an evaluation.
Explore LeaderCore: Sales
LeaderCore: Sales
How the whole product works, across every sales method we cover.
Question-led discovery practice
Our other library available now, for teams trained to build the need through questioning.
All sales methodology libraries
One library per method, so the practice matches the training your team was actually given.
Give your reps a buyer who makes them do the work
Ask for a demo and we will walk you through the library. Or tell us what your team was trained on, and we will build one to match.
Solution Selling® is a registered trademark of Sales Performance International, LLC. LeaderCoreAI is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by that organization.