When executed properly, a sales kickoff (SKO) can energize your reps and align the team on a shared goal.
Yet, creating a successful kickoff is often easier said than done. You have to start with clear business goals and meeting objectives. You also have to consider the relevance of your educational content as well as the variety of session types included on the agenda.
The Essential Elements of a Successful Sales Kickoff
A standout sales kickoff (SKO) brings together the right mix of motivation, strategy, and connection. To deliver an event that truly resonates with your sales team, consider weaving in the following core components.
Reflection
Every impactful SKO begins by acknowledging the past year, honoring achievements, learning from challenges, and highlighting standout moments. Recognizing both individual and team accomplishments boosts morale, reinforces a winning culture, and sets a confident tone for the year ahead.
Engagement & Team Building
Your team’s greatest strength is its people. Build engagement by encouraging collaboration, creative thinking, and peer-to-peer learning. Breakout discussions, shared problem-solving, and team-based activities cultivate stronger relationships and help individuals learn from each other in a relaxed, supportive environment.
Cross-Department Collaboration
A cohesive customer journey depends on alignment across the organization. Bringing together sales, marketing, product, and customer success during the SKO opens avenues for better communication and shared goals. These cross-functional touchpoints foster unity and streamline collaboration throughout the year.
Empowering Education
Your sales team performs best when they’re informed and prepared. Equip them with up-to-date product knowledge, competitive insights, and market trends. Interactive training sessions, hands-on workshops, and role-play scenarios help sharpen skills and ensure everyone feels confident facing customer conversations.
Motivation
An unforgettable SKO should leave your team inspired and energized. Think dynamic speakers, exciting experiences, and celebratory moments that spark momentum. High-energy programming sets the tone for the months ahead and helps launch your sales force into the new cycle with enthusiasm and drive.
No matter how many new updates you introduce or how many educational sessions you hold, no sales kickoff is complete without something fun and engaging. It can’t be an afterthought, though. You have to build the event from the bottom up with team-building in mind.
Read on for a list of the most practical event ideas for sales meetings, from scavenger hunts and company tournaments to pitch showdowns.
1. Traditional or Digital Scavenger Hunt
Because it merges fun, friendly competition, and teamwork, a scavenger hunt is hands-down one of the best choices for corporate events in general. And it’s an even more fitting choice for SKOs.
It just checks all the right boxes. When you think about it, you realize that you need something on-theme, celebratory, and educational for an effective SKO.
Even if you self-run the game, it’s easy to create a hunt that matches your theme for the day.
However, if you want to take the hassle out of the equation, you can let cityHUNT customize the experience for you. You’ll discuss your theme and goals with an Adventure Consultant, who will then send you a selection of tailor-made proposals.
As for the celebratory aspect, you don’t have to limit yourself to the traditional team difference.
We like to think of celebration as the final puzzle piece and what makes it truly memorable. That’s why part of the cityHUNT experience is the Afterglow, where we send thank-you emails with all the photos and videos of the event.
The educational aspect isn’t forgotten, either. When done right, a corporate scavenger hunt can foster critical thinking, communication skills, and creativity.
After all, the experience involves solving riddles, pushing one’s limits, and working together to gather points. Bonus points of the clues revolve around relevant sales topics, such as strategies and product knowledge.
Note that traditional scavenger hunts give your team a chance to explore hidden gems in the city. But it’s also possible to keep it confined to the office space if this works best for your event.
And if you have remote staff, you can opt for a digital hunt and use an app (like the cityHUNT’s app) to streamline the logistics. In this case, your hunters can either explore their city and take photos/videos or just move around their own homes, completing missions as they go.
2. Escape Room
Escape rooms are another immersive event idea that will get your team bonding and working together. Between solving puzzles and uncovering clues, it has a lot in common with scavenger hunts.
If you’re looking for something budget-friendly for your upcoming sales meeting, consider office-based escape challenges. Yes, it’s possible to create a full escape room experience in your own office.
All you need is a themed narrative that incorporates existing rooms and equipment. For instance, your break room could double as a science lab. A blend of invisible ink, sequencing tasks, and combination locks on the cabinets will get the job done as well.
And if that seems too logistically demanding, you can always go for virtual versions of the game. Your entire sales team could connect over Zoom and play a live-streamed, in-store escape room.
One perk of both the virtual and the DIY route is that you can scale the game up and down as needed. Otherwise, finding in-person escape room venues that cater to large groups would have been rather tricky.
3. Themed Awards Ceremony
With a strong theme and fancy catering, you can create your own office gala. It can be a chance for people to bond and show off their most elaborate outfits. Think red carpet, masquerade balls, medieval-era attire, or mythic creatures.
The whole event doesn’t have to be about the costumes, though.
To make the event more meaningful and relevant, add an awards ceremony to the day. Since it’s common for SKO agendas to celebrate sales reps’ successes (closed deals, client acquisition, etc.), finding award-worthy contributions shouldn’t be that hard.
Companies with a fun work culture can also do a vote-based “Workplace Superlatives” segment. Here are some ideas to consider:
- Most Positive Salesperson
- Best Dressed
- Most Likely to Jam the Printer
- Fastest Coffee Refill
4. Skill-Sharing Workshop
Craft workshops and group classes are both excellent team meeting activities. They create a relaxing atmosphere that allows employees to get to know each other better.
A peer-to-peer learning or knowledge-sharing workshop is often the perfect choice.
The basic approach here is to set aside a couple of hours, during which sales reps volunteer to teach their teammates something new. Selling strategies, product intricacies, unique challenges, and handling objections are all good topics for the kickoff.
Alternatively, you can go specific to your sales goals and plans. For instance, leaders planning on deploying a new sales tool can have a rep cover the main functionalities and features.
Just don’t forget to encourage the volunteers to tailor the content to their respective regions and customer segments. This is particularly important for large corporations with sales teams all over the country.
5. Sales Pitch Competition
Everyone on the team has likely heard of the “Sell It to Me” team-building game. It’s when you ask employees to “sell” a random item to you as a way to test their marketing techniques. You could take it to the next level by turning your SKO into a full-on sales pitch showdown.
The pitch showdown is a great pick for team leaders who like the idea of a skill-sharing workshop but want to add more healthy competition to the mix. It also happens to be a chance for salespeople to learn from each other.
Side Note: You can merge the showdown with a scavenger hunt to create an educational and motivational sales meeting idea.
6. Team Tournaments
A make-shift game show is one of the most relaxed, fun staff meeting ideas there is. By adding tournament-style brackets and rounds, you can boost engagement levels. It’s okay to go to a full-on game show with a “host” and a prize pool, too.
You can go for a combination of the top office-friendly games to cater to all tastes and skill sets. Our top picks would be:
- Wheel of Fortune
- Jeopardy
- Scrabble
- Pandemic
- Workplace Feud
But since this is a sales meeting first and foremost, you’ll also need some educational elements. In general, it would be a good idea to let reps gather points from small tasks throughout the day. We recommend adding a trivia section full of product-related questions to help with that.
Don’t forget to keep track of the score and update the leaderboard as you go. A simple whiteboard will suffice. Before the event is over, don’t forget to tally up the points and announce the winning sales reps with a big celebration.
7. Company Olympics
If board games and game-show-style entertainment sound too relaxed for your workplace culture, consider turning the sales meeting into a company Olympics day.
Chair races, rubber band archery, and portable ping pong are all popular activities that you could play inside the office. If, however, your reps are down for actual sports, consider options like volleyball, basketball, mini golf, cycling, or even rock climbing.
We recommend splitting the event between indoor and outdoor activities. This way, you can have a variety of activities for your team, and the SKO event won’t feel boring.
Plus, you can always poll the reps in advance to see what sort of sports/games they’d like to include in the Olympics.
8. Team-Tailored Bingo Cards
There’s a chance that your reps have been working together for a while now. In this case, they likely already know each other inside and out. They probably have their inside jokes, too.
Consider creating a bingo card with all the top jokes, catch phrases, office lore, personality traits, and facts. You’ll hand out the cards at the beginning of the day. And the first to achieve bingo wins an extra hour for their lunch break for a couple of days.
To keep the game exciting, add a few squares with not-so-known facts. This way, reps will have to ask around and know each other on an ever deeper level.
9. VR Sets All-Day
Many companies are now using virtual reality to train their sales reps. VR programs can help employees spot new product placement opportunities. It’s also a chance to simulate real-world sales scenarios.
If you’re planning on bringing a VR element to your sales meeting, consider making the most of it by creating a VR-based event.
Your updates and educational sessions could all be virtual. Then, you can use the same VR sets for multiple entertainment segments throughout the day. Reps can work in groups to solve virtual puzzles or play party games, for example.
It’s also possible to do yoga and guided meditation in VR. This is a great way of getting the team moving, which is a huge plus for companies with employee wellness goals.
10. Sales Team vs. AI
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly common in the corporate world. You likely have several departments in your company already using AI tools.
Maybe your sales team is AI-powered. Perhaps you’re still toying with the idea. Either way, you can use the meeting as a chance to inspire your reps with a vs. AI competition.
Prepare beforehand by assigning tasks (answering product-related queries, sales call script, and data analysis) to your reps. On the day itself, you can compare your team’s work to the AI-generated results.
Odds are, your team will excel in many areas since the human touch is hard to replicate. But there might be a few tricks to learn from the AI tools as well. Open the discussion and let the reps decide which aspects they’d like to adopt in their own day-to-day operations.
For a bit of fun, add other categories to the competition. Think pop culture, puns, and wordplay.
11. The Desert Island
The desert island icebreaker game would be a perfect fit for SKOs with a survival theme. You’ll split your team into groups. The reps in each group will have to choose a certain number (3–5 is a good place to start) of items from a selection of items you’ll prepare in advance.
Later, they’ll have to brainstorm and present how they’ll use their items if they ever find themselves stranded on an island. Next, they can debate and defend their choices. If you have time, you can also allow them to re-evaluate their choice and even trade with other groups.
This sales team-building idea works your reps’ negotiation and creative reasoning muscles. It also happens to be a budget-friendly and logistically simple game.
For the item selection, you can go as crazy or obscure as you want. Tarps, lighter, rope, vegetable seeds, first aid kits, mosquito spray, and mirrors are all good options.
Remote sales reps can go the extra mile by switching their video background to something fitting.
12. Guess Who (The Sales Rep Version)
A week or so before the meeting, ask your sales reps to send in pictures of themselves as kids, along with a couple of interesting facts about themselves that most coworkers don’t know.
At the start of the meeting, show the reps a large board with a compilation of all photos and the printed facts.
Before wrapping up the day, hand out pieces of paper and ask the staff to match each coworker to the photo and facts they think belong to them. The person with the most correct guesses wins a small prize.
You can also let each rep take the floor briefly to talk about their photo and facts. Think of it as a sort of “Show and Tell” segment.
This team meeting idea is suitable for team leaders with crowded SKO agendas. It won’t take much time during the event, but it still creates a chance for team members to bond and share interests.
13. Give Back Day
Getting together and giving back to the community can bring team members together. Plus, reports show that Gen Z employees are less likely to leave their jobs if their leaders support a good cause.
So, the give back theme is a particularly fitting one for sales teams with lots of younger reps. That being said, you should poll your reps on their favorite charities and most worthy causes.
Your SKO event could then include a fundraiser for the top five charities. Alternatively, you could set aside a second day in the event and take time to volunteer as a team.
Side Note: You don’t have to give up other fun ideas just to give back to the community. For instance, you can do a scavenger hunt event and help others through cityHUNT’s Make Awesome For Others (MAFO) charitable initiative.
Work Events with cityHUNT
Ready to start planning the most memorable and fruitful sales kickoff event your reps have ever attended?
At cityHUNT, we think beyond entertainment. We’ve also explored other team-building activities over the years. And yet, we always come back to scavenger hunts. They’re just the most rewarding and inclusive options out there.
The cityHUNT team is flexible and operates corporate scavenger hunts in nearly every city across the United States. Get in touch with us today for a free quote.
