By Kristen Hayer
Most of the training I’ve sat through, and plenty of what I’ve delivered, is built around information. Someone presents, or you watch a recorded course, or you get a deck to read, and you leave knowing more than when you started. A course on giving tough feedback is a good example. You can walk out with a solid framework and never once have said the words out loud to someone who gets defensive. That’s the gap immersive training fills, and I don’t think leaders use it nearly as much as they could. The simpler formats take far less time to prepare than you’d expect.
Why Practice Beats Information
Nobody learns to handle a tense conversation with an executive by reading about one. Skills like persuading a skeptical colleague or deciding what to tackle first when everything feels urgent get better with practice, and the first few attempts are usually rough. An immersive format lets people have those rough attempts where a mistake is cheap. The board member is a colleague playing a part, so the worst outcome is an awkward moment and a good conversation afterward.
What It Looked Like at ZeroIn
At ChurnZero’s ZeroIn conference earlier this month, I ran a 90-minute workshop called “Defend the Number.” The audience was customer success leaders, and I wanted them to work on something closer to a real business problem than a typical conference session offers. About 30 people formed five teams of six, and each team had to build and defend a story to a board about a company’s retention number.
To get there, they had to collect clues from characters stationed around the room who played finance, sales, product, operations, and HR. Teams could visit the stations in any order, but skipping one meant going without something they needed. Some characters held back what they knew until a team earned it. The HR character, for example, wouldn’t share anything until a team could explain how it would describe a layoff to the board. That was where the teams differed most, and the winning team handled it best. Three teams advanced to a final round, and the scoring rewarded the quality of the story as much as the accuracy of the number.
The session went well, with strong engagement from start to finish, and the parts that didn’t go as planned taught me the most. I’d built in a disqualification rule for any team that overcommitted on its number, and no team triggered it. Most teams found the main clues, but very few found the bonus ones. Plan to adjust any exercise after the first run, because you won’t know how people will respond to your rules until you watch them work through it.
What Immersive Training Can’t Do
The larger formats take more preparation than a slide deck, and none of them replaces teaching. People need something to practice, so if your team doesn’t have a defined process or a shared way of talking about the work, an exercise will mostly show you what’s missing. That’s useful to learn, but it’s a different job than training. Some people also dread being put on the spot, so give them a team to share the load or a role that isn’t themselves.
Exercises Worth Trying
The right exercise depends on what you want people to do differently when they get back to work, so match the format to the skill. Here are the formats I’d consider:
Immersive experiences: A capstone project or an escape-room-style scenario, like the workshop above, gives a team a problem to solve together. These take the most preparation, and they’re best for building judgment, working across functions, and presenting under pressure.
Role playing: A colleague plays a customer, a peer, or an executive with a goal of their own. This takes the least preparation, so it’s the easiest place to start, and it fits conversations with real emotional weight.
Homework assignments on real work: Ask people to apply a new skill to an actual responsibility and report back. This connects the training to the job and keeps it from staying theoretical.
Case study analysis: Work through a real or fictional situation and decide what to do. This teaches people to diagnose a problem before they act.
Peer teaching: Ask someone to teach a concept to the group. Explaining it forces a person to organize what they know, and it shows you where the gaps are.
Making Any of Them Work
Whatever format you pick, the exercise needs a clear objective, so people know what they’re practicing, and some pressure, usually from a time limit or from information they have to go find. A small stake helps, whether that’s a competition or just a presentation to peers, because people engage differently when someone is watching. The debrief matters most. That’s where the group looks at what they decided and why, and it’s the first thing to disappear when a session runs long, so schedule it before you start. Then ask each person to take one thing from the exercise and try it on the job the following week, since that’s what connects practice to real work.
Where to Start
You don’t need 30 people and a room full of characters. Pick one skill your team needs, write a short scenario, and run it with a colleague playing the other side. Then talk about what happened. It fits in a team meeting, and what you learn about where your people are will tell you what to practice next.
The Success League is a customer success training and consulting firm. If you’re looking for a unique and engaging program for your next team meeting or kick-off, we’d love to help! Contact us here. To view our full offerings, visit TheSuccessLeague.io.
Kristen Hayer - Kristen is the Founder & CEO of The Success League, a global, customer-focused consulting and training firm. Kristen’s background includes leading award-winning sales, marketing, and customer success teams in early and growth-stage tech companies. She is the host of several podcasts on CS and leadership, and has written over 100 articles on the field of customer success. The book she recently co-authored with 5 other CS thought leaders - The Customer Success Talent Playbook - hit #1 on Amazon in 5 categories. Kristen received her MBA from the University of Washington and splits her time between San Diego and San Felipe, Mexico.