Why we practise with role play before you talk to a client
I've watched IBs with perfect material go blank at the first objection. They had the script, they'd read it, they'd even highlighted it. And when the lead wrote something that wasn't on the page, they didn't know what to say. That's why role play for IBs is part of the academy: we practise before a conversation costs a client.
A script is information; a conversation is a skill
Information transfers by reading. A skill doesn't: it transfers by doing, failing and correcting. Nobody learned to swim by studying arm movements, and nobody learns to handle an objection by reading the right answer.
This explains something you see all the time in this business: two IBs with exactly the same material get different results. It isn't the material. It's that one has used it under pressure and the other has only read it.
What I correct most in a session
A role play is a simulation: I play the client and you play the IB, and the full format is on the academy page. What isn't on the page is what happens when we stop. After many sessions, the corrections are almost always one of these three:
- Speed: you answer before the client finishes the sentence, and you reply to what you thought you heard.
- Defence: when the client hesitates, you justify yourself instead of asking.
- Offer: you sell in the second message, when you still don't know who you're talking to.
None of the three shows up while reading the script. They show up when someone answers something you didn't expect — and here, getting it wrong doesn't cost you a client.
We practise the scenarios that come up most and get avoided most:
- The first contact, when someone distrusts you and says so to your face.
- The lead who left you on read six days ago.
- The client who's just lost money and writes that this doesn't work.
The last two connect with two articles, because they're the ones that break the most portfolios: the silence mistaken for a no is in your best commissions, and a client's first days in why they deposit and withdraw.
Why almost nobody practises
It isn't laziness. It's two very human things:
- Believing you already know it, because you understood it when you read it. Understanding and being able are different.
- Embarrassment at getting it wrong in front of someone. That's exactly why it works.
The second one is the important one. We're all going to get that conversation wrong at some point: the only decision you have is whether the mistake happens in a session with me or in front of the person who was going to be your client. One of the two is free.
What a session looks like
The format is always the same and it's on the academy page: we pick the scenario, first I do it, then you, we stop, I correct two things and we run the same scene again. That last step is the whole method: repeating with one correction on top is what turns a sentence you read into a sentence that comes out on its own.
They're one-on-one sessions, live and never recorded. Nobody else listens.
Start today, without a session
Pick the conversation you avoid most. Write your first line, say it out loud —to someone or to your phone— and listen for where you hesitate. That exact point, not the script, is what gets practised. Repeat it three times. If by the third you're still changing the sentence, that's your scenario for the first session.
You'll notice something uncomfortable: reading it came out perfectly and saying it didn't. That gap is what separates the two IBs from the start, and it's the only one that closes with practice.
On what to do when a lead stops replying —the most practised scenario— I wrote here: Your best commissions are in a conversation you're not having. And what a session looks like from the inside, in what one IB saw in thirty minutes of role play.
Role play: practise with me, not with your clients
In IB ACADEMY, every stage has its role play scenario, and we work through them one on one as you progress. We pick the scenario by your stage —or you bring a real conversation you struggle with—, we run it, I correct two things and we repeat it until it comes out on its own.
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I work with the IBs in our network so their community grows with a system, not with improvisation: attract, support, retain and organise a portfolio. Here I write about that work, with no income promises.