The phrase "teamwork makes the dream work" really hits home when you think about sales teams. To get a team fired up, you need a good dose of energy, a spark of creativity, and a bit of fun. But maintaining that motivation can get challenging, especially when your sales team works remotely. Luckily, there are many online tools out there to keep everyone's spirits up.
Let's explore 28 sales team building activities that will boost morale, improve teamwork, and, most importantly, ramp up your sales!
Personal development workshops are tailored sessions designed to enhance each team member's skills and capabilities. They offer a safe environment for members to learn, share experiences, and set personal goals, ultimately contributing to a more empowered and self-aware sales team.
Why it's great for your sales team: Joining personal development workshops gives them the power to grow and improve at what they do. This helps everyone feel more confident and sell more effectively.
Goal-setting sessions encourage members to reflect on their personal ambitions and align them with the team's targets. During these meetings, each team member should set personal and professional objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Why it's great for your sales team: Setting goals means everyone knows what they're working towards. It makes people responsible for their work and aligns their efforts with the team's targets. This way, everyone's focused and working smarter, not harder. Plus, it brings the team together, giving everyone a shared purpose.
One-on-one coaching sessions provide a dedicated space for personal attention from a mentor or coach. They focus on areas such as sales tactics, product knowledge, and overcoming specific challenges.
Why it's great for your sales team: Personal coaching gives you the support you need, points out what you can do better, and speeds up your career growth. These sessions help each salesperson with unique problems while also strengthening the sales team’s confidence.
Virtual coffee breaks are a simple yet effective way to keep your sales team connected and relaxed. These scheduled virtual events allow team members to grab their favorite beverage and log into a video call without any agenda related to work. It's an opportunity to chat, share personal stories, or enjoy a laugh together.
Why it's great for your sales team: These coffee break sessions help everyone get along better, strengthen friendships, and create a happier team vibe. They make everyone feel included and valued, making working together smoother and more fun.
Set a monthly schedule to choose and read a book related to sales strategies, motivational stories, or self-improvement, and then gather (virtually or in-person) to discuss insights and learnings.
Why it's great for your sales team: This activity encourages continuous learning, exposes the team to new perspectives, and stimulates insightful discussions that can inspire innovative sales approaches. It’s also a great way to exchange ideas and discuss using what employees know in their jobs. It could spark some creative solutions for the challenges you face.
Incorporate short, guided meditations or breathing exercises to help your team get centered and calm before starting work or during breaks.
Why it's great for your sales team: Regular mindfulness exercises can significantly improve mental well-being, increase productivity, and foster resilience among your sales team members. These activities help reduce stress, improve concentration, and enable better decision-making, all of which are crucial traits for a successful salesperson.
Design tailored workshops aimed at fortifying relationships and enhancing communication within your team. These sessions can range from problem-solving activities to collaborative projects that demand teamwork and innovative thinking.
Why it's great for your sales team: Team-building workshops help sales teams work better together. They build trust, teamwork, and a sense of unity. When everyone works together to overcome challenges and celebrates wins, it brings people closer and boosts team spirit.
Introduce friendly sales contests. These contests could vary, from hitting the highest sales figures in a week to acquiring the most new clients over a month. Ensure these competitions are designed with fairness in mind, encouraging involvement from every team member, no matter their experience level.
Why it's great for your sales team: Sales competitions improve performance by inspiring team members to surpass their previous records and established sales goals. These contests uplift morale by acknowledging and rewarding accomplishments, cultivating a constructive competitive atmosphere among the team.
Cross-training sessions are interactive modules where team members learn different aspects of the business outside their usual roles, such as marketing strategies, customer service protocols, or product development insights.
Why it's great for your sales team: Interactive employee training enriches your team's skillsets and fosters a culture of ongoing growth and collaborative support. It motivates team members to appreciate and leverage each other's strengths and contributions, forging a more unified and adaptable sales force. With broader knowledge and skills, your team is well-equipped to navigate challenges and innovate in sales tactics, which improves team effectiveness.
Start a peer recognition program for your sales team to celebrate their achievements. Team members can nominate peers for awards like "Best Customer Service" or "Top Sales Performer" monthly. Announce awards in weekly meetings or on digital platforms.
Why it's great for your sales team: This peer recognition program boosts morale and motivation by recognizing team members' hard work and dedication. It creates a culture of appreciation and support, driving excellence and peer support. The program increases team engagement, creating a more cohesive and productive work environment.
Host virtual happy hours as a casual and fun way for team members to unwind, socialize, and bond outside of work. These can be scheduled at the end of the week or after accomplishing significant milestones, including activities like trivia, casual chats, and themed get-togethers.
Why it's great for your sales team: Virtual happy hours promote camaraderie, strengthen relationships, and boost team morale. They offer a much-needed break from the routine, allowing team members to connect personally and enhancing teamwork and collaboration in the work environment.
Hold regular brainstorming sessions that allow team members to come together and generate innovative sales strategies. These meetings encourage the free flow of ideas, promoting creativity and diverse thinking.
Why it's great for your sales team: Brainstorming sessions are very important for fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. They empower team members to contribute their ideas and feel valued, enhancing their commitment and engagement. This collaborative approach generates ideas for improving sales techniques and strategies.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
Schedule calls to thank customers personally for their business, express appreciation for their trust, and ask about their satisfaction with your services or products.
Why it's great for your sales team: These appreciation calls significantly strengthen customer relationships, fostering a sense of loyalty and gratitude that often translates into repeated business and referrals. Actively engaging in this way improves the company's image in the eyes of customers. It also lays a solid foundation for long-term customer retention, resulting in a loyal customer base that is vital to sustained sales success.
Offer online demonstrations to showcase your products or services to potential customers effectively. These virtual product demos allow for a personalized and interactive presentation tailored to each potential client's specific needs and questions.
Why it's great for your sales team: These demonstrations are a powerful tool to enhance customer understanding and engagement with your offerings. They allow your sales team to highlight features and benefits directly, answer real-time questions, and address any concerns, creating a more persuasive and compelling sales pitch. This interactive approach strengthens the customer's connection to the product and significantly increases the likelihood of closing sales, boosting your team's performance and success rates.
Host educational webinars and workshops to give your customers valuable insights and practical solutions to their challenges. These sessions can cover a range of topics relevant to your industry, from how-to guides and best practices to industry trends and innovations.
Why it's great for your sales team: Sharing expertise and offering advice through these educational sessions helps your team position itself as an industry expert, building credibility and trust with your audience. This approach increases customer loyalty and attracts potential leads interested in your depth of knowledge and solutions. These educational interactions also provide a platform for your sales team to directly engage with customers and prospects, fostering relationships that can lead to new sales opportunities and contribute to the team's success.
Organize regular sessions to collect feedback directly from your customers, focusing on understanding their needs, preferences, and any pain points they might be experiencing with your products or services. This direct feedback channel is important for gauging customer satisfaction and identifying areas for improvement.
Why it's great for your sales team: Customer feedback sessions offer your team invaluable insights that can inform product development, improve customer service strategies, and fine-tune sales approaches. Understanding customer experiences and expectations directly from the source enables your team to address concerns more effectively, tailor offerings to better meet customer needs, and ultimately drive higher satisfaction rates.
Encourage your sales professionals to engage with customers through likes, comments, and shares on social media platforms. This direct interaction humanizes your brand and builds a lively and engaged community around your products or services.
Why it's great for your sales team: This strategy significantly increases brand visibility by encouraging users to engage more frequently with your content, spreading awareness to a broader audience. It fosters community and loyalty around your brand, making customers feel valued and heard. Active social media engagement can also drive more traffic to your website, leading to increased lead-generation opportunities and ultimately contributing to sales growth.
Organize special events, like exclusive dinners or networking meetups, as a gesture of gratitude towards your clients. These events serve as an excellent opportunity to personally connect with clients in a relaxed and social setting, showing them how much their business means to your company.
Why it's great for your sales team: Client appreciation events are a great team building activity for sales teams. These events help strengthen client relationships, foster loyalty, and reinforce their decision to do business with you. They provide a personal touch that can significantly increase client satisfaction and engagement. These events also offer an ideal environment for clients to share their positive experiences with others, potentially generating referrals and opening new doors for your sales team.
Host virtual trivia nights where team members can unwind and engage in friendly competition by answering fun trivia questions. This team building exercise for sales teams can be centered around industry-related questions, general knowledge, or even fun facts about your company and team members.
Why it's great for your sales team: Participating in virtual trivia sessions helps promote team cohesion and increase morale, which are critical components for a motivated sales force. It also serves as an effective communication icebreaker, encouraging sales reps to interact more freely and supportively in their daily work environment.
Organize online gaming tournaments that allow your team members to engage in friendly competition, playing popular video games in a structured yet relaxed setting. This activity provides an enjoyable break from work and fosters camaraderie among participants.
Why it's great for your sales team: Participating in online gaming tournaments can significantly contribute to building team camaraderie, as it brings individuals together in a fun and competitive environment. This form of engagement helps relieve stress, break down work-related barriers, and encourage open communication and collaboration.
Team Jigsaw is one of the most engaging team building activities for a sales team. The participants collaborate to solve jigsaw puzzles within a set time frame. This requires focusing on the individual pieces and how they fit into the bigger picture, mirroring the collaborative nature of sales projects.
Why it's great for your sales team: Team Jigsaw pushes individuals to express their ideas, listen to others, and work together towards a common goal, fostering a collaborative team environment. This activity directly translates into better team performance in sales projects, where understanding different perspectives and combining efforts are key to achieving success.
Organize a talent show where team members showcase their unique talents and hobbies. This event can include performances like singing, dancing, magic tricks, and stand-up comedy, allowing individuals to express themselves beyond their professional roles.
Why it's great for your sales team: Talent show promotes team bonding by offering a platform for employees to connect on a personal and emotional level, sharing aspects of their lives that are usually not visible in the workplace. It boosts morale by celebrating the team's diversity and creativity, creating a positive, inclusive work environment.
The Human Knot is one of the best employee engagement activities for your sales team. It's a physical and mental exercise where team members stand in a circle, reach across to intertwine hands with different members, and then work collaboratively to untangle themselves without letting go of each other's hands. This activity demands communication, patience, and strategy as the team navigates through the puzzle they've created.
Why it's great for your sales team: Engaging in the Human Knot activity improves essential skills that are valuable in the sales environment. It improves communication as team members must verbally guide each other through the steps to untangle the knot. Problem-solving skills are tested, requiring creative thinking and patience, mirroring the process of navigating complex sales challenges. Most importantly, it fosters teamwork and trust, as participants must work closely and rely on one another to achieve their goals.
In Blind Drawing, team members are paired up, with one person as the describer and the other as the drawer. The describer is given an object or picture to describe without naming it, while the drawer attempts to sketch the description without seeing the original object. After a set time, the drawings are shared and compared to the original objects, often leading to amusing results and insights.
Why it's great for your sales team: Blind Drawing improves communication abilities, as describers must find creative, clear, and precise ways to convey visual information verbally. The activity requires teamwork and trust, as the drawer relies entirely on the describer's instructions. It also fosters creativity, encouraging both parties to think outside the box to achieve their goal.
Photo by Ling App
Attend online seminars on sales techniques, product knowledge, and industry trends. These sessions are often led by industry experts and provide valuable insights into the latest sales strategies and tools.
Why it's great for your sales team: Sales training webinars ensure that everyone stays updated on the latest best practices and industry trends, fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Regular attendance can significantly improve sales performance as team members apply new techniques and gain insights from these sessions.
Virtual and in-person networking events enable your team to connect with professionals within the sales industry. These events are opportunities to meet like-minded individuals, exchange ideas, and foster professional relationships.
Why it's great for your sales team: Industry networking events are important for expanding professional networks, which can be invaluable for creating opportunities for collaboration and developing partnerships. Interacting with peers and leaders in the field enables team members to get insights into emerging industry trends and best practices. This exposure keeps the team updated on developments and inspires innovative approaches to sales strategies and problem-solving within your organization.
Encourage your team members to listen to a curated selection of podcasts focusing on sales strategies, business insights, or personal growth. These podcasts can offer a wealth of knowledge from seasoned professionals and thought leaders. Whether on their commute, during a workout, or while taking a break, listening to podcasts can be convenient for your team to stay informed and inspired.
Why it's great for your sales team: Regularly listening to podcasts can significantly benefit your sales team by providing continuous learning opportunities outside of the traditional training environment. It offers access to a diverse range of perspectives and innovative ideas that can spark creativity, improve problem-solving skills, and improve sales tactics.
Your sales team members can enroll in online courses related to sales techniques, leadership skills, or industry-specific topics. These courses are often flexible, allowing participants to learn at their own pace and on their own schedule. They cover different subjects, from advanced sales strategies to effective team management and sector-specific insights, providing a comprehensive approach to professional development.
Why it's great for your sales team: Online courses offer structured learning opportunities, improve professional competencies, and keep the team aligned with the latest industry standards. This learning mode promotes discipline and self-motivation as individuals take initiative in their personal and professional growth. Acquiring new skills through these courses can also improve performance, sales tactics, innovation, and team leadership abilities. It invests in your team's future success, ensuring they remain competitive and effective in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
