HR MANAGEMENT - Team Building Activities to Help Sales in the Workplace

Team Building Activities to Help Sales in the Workplace

by Stephanie Fagnani, Demand Media

Team-building activities can help sales teams hone their individual and collective closing skills.

Team-building activities can help sales teams learn about each other and strengthen their decision-making and communication skills. According to "Team Building Buzz," team-building activities are particularly useful when establishing a new sales force, as they can help create a feeling unity among the sales force members that have shared the same experiences.

Building Trust

Building interdependence and trust among work teams, particularly between colleagues who have trust issues, can help bring a cohesiveness to the sales force. Skills training organization Mind Tools recommends a team-building activity called "mine field" to help sales representatives learn to trust each other, which is an important variable when working together to close a sale. Various obstacles, like chairs, box or cones should be placed randomly around a large indoor or outdoor space, leaving enough room for a person to walk through. Divide work colleagues teams into pairs in which one person is blindfolded and asked to walk through the space while the other gives verbal instruction on how to navigate the field.

Role Playing

One of the most important duties of a sales team is to provide good customer relations when trying to pitch a product or service. Role playing, in which one group of sales representatives acts as themselves and the other group takes on the role of the customers, can help reinforce basic customer relations skills while also forcing the two teams to work together toward the common goal of pitching and selling a product. Essentially, the "sellers" should try to pitch a new product while the "customers" ask as many questions as they can think of regarding the product. Each group can work collectively to field questions and to brainstorm new ones that might resemble customer inquiries.

Get-to-Know-You Games

Sales representatives for the same company often are scattered across various regional territories and don't interact much with each other in person. One team-building activity that can help them all get to know each other is a version of the popular television game show "To Tell the Truth." In this game, each person makes up two truths about themselves and one lie and everyone has to guess which is the lie. This game helps teams get to know each other, according to "Inc."

Strategizing

Sales teams must always be mindful of the strategy it will take to pitch a service or product to a new, sometimes unknown client. The website Teambuilding Leader recommends an exercise called egg drop that forces groups to devise a strategy together. Using masking tape, a box of straws and a raw each, divide the sales force into small teams and instruct them to create a container out of the materials that will protect the egg from breaking after being dropped two or three floors down. Each straw costs $250 and every inch of masking tape is $100 and the teams have a mock budget of $5,000. The teams must remain under budget and, therefore, must plan a strategy before making a purchase.