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The strength of your sales team as a whole is the foundation upon which individual sales reps succeed. Strong sales teams support their members, create learning opportunities, and encourage everyone to continue growing for the company and for the customer.
As a result, team building is essential for making sure your sales team reaches its goals together. Thankfully, there are plenty of great team-building exercises you can employ.
Below, we provide 11 smart team-building exercises that will make your sales team stronger—as well as some suggestions on tools that can help.
How PhoneBurner Supports Sales Teams
Before we dive into the list, it’s important to mention that using the right software can also help bring your team together and amplify their efforts. We designed PhoneBurner with features that make it easier for sales teams to succeed, including:
- Over 200+ integrations with virtual salesfloor and CRM software
- Live leaderboards to help sales managers track team performance and inspire healthy competition.
- A power dialer that helps reps reach up to 4x as many prospects and improves live answer rates.
Try PhoneBurner for free here—then continue reading for our list of easy and effective ways to build a stronger sales team.
1. Use a Virtual Salesfloor
A virtual salesfloor provides a shared online platform where team members can make live calls together. Smart controls provide valuable coaching and collaboration opportunities without active reps interrupting or distracting each other.
Virtual salesfloors enhance focus for reps while streamlining organization for team leaders. They can also be immensely useful if you manage a remote team with members in different physical locations.
PhoneBurner includes integrations with popular virtual salesfloor software—learn more on our CallBlitz integration page.
2. Go to a Conference
There’s a reason why sales conferences are so well attended and used to build successful teams: they work. Taking your sales team to a conference allows for learning and professional growth, but it also keeps everyone on the same page regarding strategies, initiatives and goals.
In-person events are ideal for building camaraderie, especially for remote teams who don't often meet face to face. However, online conferences or webinars are certainly an option as well.
3. Let the Games Begin
Educational research has proven over and over again that people often retain knowledge better when learning is turned into a game
Gamification can improve general sales performance and motivation as well.
Using a live leaderboard—a reporting tool that updates KPIs in real-time—such as calls made, talk time, and appointments set—is a great way to do this.
You can make your sales games competitive, collaborative, or simply fun. Whatever path you choose, ensure that the game isn't too serious so as to detract from your goal of building unity.
4. Feed Your Team Spirit
Food is one of those rare things in life that virtually everyone is interested in and enjoys. So why not use it to help in your team-building efforts?
Consider taking your team out to lunch, or cater a sales meeting as a reward every so often. Arrange a best-tasting dessert competition in the office, or make it photo-based (cupcake competition anyone? best halloween-themed food) for your remote team.
Our team uses Slack to host food/food-photo competitions and people really enjoy them!
Above was a winning entry in our Festive Eats competition, featuring the PhoneBurner logo made of cheese and basil!
5. Now Work It Off
As much fun as it can be to build bonds over food, you also want to promote good health and fitness. Besides, athletics is a great way to promote teamwork and leadership. It also helps with focus when the exercise is done.
Office leagues, team hikes, and friendly competitions are all great options. Once again, creating a Slack channel for fitness challenges works really well.
6. Giving Pays Off
Another way to build bonds is through charitable giving activities. You can keep it simple by encouraging people to fund-raise for an agreed-upon cause. Or just allow team members to donate privately to a cause they believe in—perhaps offering to match contributions. PhoneBurner double matches up to $500 in annual donations, per employee.
Even if the efforts are independent, they contribute to a positive company culture or work environment.
If your sales team lives locally, you can even go the extra mile and organize an event where team members come together to do something positive in the community. These events can also help your team members develop empathy, which is a key component of successful sales calls.
Learn More: Why Empathy is Critical for Sales Calls and How to Develop It
7. Escape the Office
Why not escape the office for an afternoon of team building? Off-site activities allow team members to build meaningful connections by working together in new ways. This can help foster trust and genuine friendship between reps, which makes future collaboration at work smoother.
An escape room challenge is a cooperative and fun activity that requires everyone to come together to solve puzzles. A scavenger hunt is another great option.
8. Award Nights
Consider a quarterly or annual award night to recognize achievements from individuals and teams. These events can be full of pomp or as relaxed as you'd like. Either way, they are a great opportunity to acknowledge and reward your team.
Awards don't just have to be for sales performance. You can recognize attendance, improvement, mindset, productivity, helpfulness, leadership, dedication, and more. Bring out the best in your team by showing them all of the different ways they can succeed.
9. Mock Presentations
Break up your sales team into groups. Then give each group the challenge of "selling" something related to your product or service to the rest of the team. Like in a debate, each team has to take a different side.
- Why feature X/Y/Z is the best feature.
- The best success story, and why.
- Why your product is better than that of competitor X/Y/Z.
- Why X/Y/Z is the best sales resource to use.
- X/Y/Z is the most effective sales outreach method.
Each team has to research and create a compelling argument for their side. In addition to helping them become better presenters, they also get to hear some valuable, well-researched selling points or sales methods that they can then use going forward.
Presentations can be made during a sales meeting, or for a remote team, conducted via video conference. Any way you do it, it’s a great opportunity for your team members to practice the conversation skills that drive successful sales calls.
10. "Channel" Your Sales
Does your company use Slack or another collaborative messenger application? Create a channel for your sales team to ask questions, address concerns, and discuss strategy. It's a fantastic, and very simple way for team members to learn, lead, and build relationships.
11. Best Sales-Related _____
This idea is simple whether your team is in an office or working remotely.
Task people on your team to come up with the best sales-related:
- Joke
- Meme
- Podcast episode
- YouTube Video
- Motivational Quote
- Blog Post or Article
If you have a small team, everyone can participate. If you have a big team, choose a handful of participants each time. The sales manager can pick a winner, or let the team vote. Either way, the team gets to consume relevant content that's either enjoyable, educational, or both.
Make Your Sales Team Stronger
No matter how you do it, building up your team through group activities promotes personal connections and sales success. When sales professionals feel like they are part of a team, they are more likely to support both personal and company-wide success.
The exercises above are a great way to start building stronger bonds between your sales reps—but using the right technology can also provide key support. Start a free trial of PhoneBurner today and see how it can empower your team to reach new heights.
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