Cornak: the sales serious game about managing a customer portfolio

The game puts the player in a remote future as a newly hired salesperson at the Cube Company, where the star products are the red cube and its blue variation. An experienced colleague helps the new hire. The setting is deliberately far from everyday work, to encourage a fresh view and willingness to take risks.

Over a one-year scenario the player receives a customer portfolio and changes it to meet the objectives set by a manager. Every month the player plans actions and then holds a debriefing meeting with the manager to agree a plan for the next month. Five objectives drive the game: number of sales, product mix, customer structure, number of new customers and quality of the commercial relationship. Monthly events such as inventory shortages, new competitors and seminars disrupt the plan and force a change of strategy.

Waypoint Conseil, a consultancy specialized in sales performance, partnered on development. The game is meant for inexperienced sales staff and for experienced professionals who want to improve, because it shows how planning and consequences connect in a way day-to-day pressure hides. At launch it was adopted by the French subsidiary of the German group Heraeus, the recruitment specialist Expectra and business schools ESSEC Cergy-Pontoise and IAE Paris.

Waypoint Conseil's associate director, Jerome Berger, described the gap the game targets. Under daily pressure people tend to examine the situation, the relevance of their objectives and the market offer, but seldom the effectiveness of their own commercial approach. Succubus Interactive was one of the gold medal winners of the 2013 International Serious Play Awards, and Cornak was its entry in the Business category.

The address of Succubus Interactive, succubus.fr, does not load in November 2026 because a secure connection cannot be established. The address cornak.com opens on the website of a French training company named Cornak, which sells soft skills, sales and management courses and reports 17 years of experience. Its home page does not mention the game, and nothing found links the two, so the game's availability is unconfirmed.

The Cornak training company lists courses in soft skills, sales and management, tailored projects, and a method page on its teaching approach. It names client cases such as MGEN, Veepee, EQUASENS, ISAGRI, Komet and Laboratoires Pred, and reports 2,247 trainees and 19,880 training hours in 2024, 21 trainers and ratings based on 500 trainee reviews.