5 Online Sales Training Games and Activities

Sales training can be boring — but sales training games can spice up a personal-development day and save everyone from another interminable PowerPoint deck.

Now that you’re heading into Q3 and Q4, you’re probably looking for ways to reignite your sales strategy and motivate both yourself and your sales team, so you can finish 2020 on a high note, despite the challenges you’ve likely faced this year. Now is a great time to try something new.

Have you been thinking about engaging your team in some sales training games and activities? In this article, we’ll share some of our favorites, so you can try them out with your team members and start improving your sales results.

1. Try a social scavenger hunt to sharpen people skills.

Popular at bachelorette parties, a social scavenger hunt involves a group of players going to a public area and talking to strangers to obtain “items” on a predetermined list of goals.

So one “item” might be “get a selfie with a stranger,” and that would be worth a certain number of points. Maybe “finding a stranger with an out-of-state” home town would net you points, as would getting a stranger to sing a bar from their favorite song.

COVID-19 and social distancing have made these sorts of games difficult, but they can be adapted to the internet era. Try focusing your social scavenger hunt inward and making it a game your team can play on Slack. Create a time limit — maybe 10 minutes — where everyone has to fill out their social scavenger checklist from other members of the team through messaging or video chat.

Here are a few possible questions and items for an interior, digital social scavenger hunt:

• Find a team member whose parents live in a different country than the team member.
• Get a screenshot of a team member wearing a funny hat.
• Collect three screenshots of team members’ pets.
• Get a team member’s favorite meme.
• Get a video of a team member trying to moonwalk.
• Find a team member who’s never seen a Marvel movie.

Questions like this are not only great for training team members to be more social and persuasive, but they also have the secondary effect of increasing esprit de corps among the sales team. Small talk has been proved to increase teamwork, job satisfaction, and even brain function.

2. Who has the best sales resources?

If your salespeople are truly passionate about their work, then they’re likely listening to sales podcasts, watching sales YouTube channels, and subscribing to some great sales-related industry newsletters.

Are they sharing these tools with each other? Invite your salespeople to make a list of some of their favorite resources. Then you can compile everyone’s favorite resources into a downloadable ebook. Everyone on the team should commit themselves to checking out at least one new resource.

Then, have the team vote on the resources, which seem the best, the most fun, the most useful. Then, reward the team member with the most votes!

3. Turn sales research into a competition.

One way to help your salespeople improve their effectiveness is to invite them to do some competitive research. You can even turn this into a team-building exercise by assigning your salespeople to teams, and each team has to research one competitor.

At the end of the research period, each team can present the information to the other salespeople, so everyone can learn from the efforts.

Then, you can decide, or you can create a team of managers or senior salespeople to judge who had the best research. For an extra twist, have two teams research the same competitor. Then, the game becomes like Boggle: any bits of data or interesting facts about the competitor that both teams have in common get deleted, and only unique info from each team is counted for points.

4. Assess recordings of sales calls.

You can do this exercise one-on-one with your sales team members. Sit in a room with one of your salespeople, and listen to one of their recorded sales calls together. As the call is playing, you can pause the recording and point out both the positive and negative aspects of the call.

During this exercise, you should invite your salesperson to take notes, and then make an action plan for how he or she can improve in the future.

5. Make mentorship into a team sport.

Do your experienced salespeople ever interact with your new hires? Within your organization, you can provide mentorship opportunities, so your newbies can learn from the pros who are already winning at sales.

Don’t assume that this exchange of information is already happening naturally within your organization. Sometimes you need to facilitate it in a more formal way.

But how do you make a game out of mentorship? You can use any of the games listed above (like the social scavenger hunt) to show the sales team how new hires perform. Then, mentors can “pick teams,” alternating between new hires, creating mentorship teams to compete in the future. Each of these teams would be led by a mentor who could help newer salespeople, and these teams could “battle” in future sales training games. This creates pride in their “team,” along with a playful common enemy to work hard to beat.

Which of these ideas seems the most appropriate for your organization? How do you imagine your salespeople responding to these activities and training games?