15 Fun Sales Meeting Ideas to Motivate Your Team
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A sales meeting, usually held weekly or bi-weekly, is a gathering of the sales department to discuss pipeline updates, big wins, obstacles, and so on. It is essential to guide every salesperson toward increasing the organization's sales performance.
Nevertheless, a surprising fact is that most salespeople are disinterested in participating in sales meetings. As the team leader, how do you motivate these disinterested team members to attend and contribute to these sessions?
This article will explore extensive fun sales meeting ideas to breathe life into your sales gatherings and offer valuable training.
Why do sales reps hate team meetings?
After asking the sales department in Notta this question, we received numerous responses. However, the most consistent was "It was a waste of time," and the second was "It was boring."
To a sales rep, every minute matters as they battle highly demanding schedules and long lists of daily objectives. To them, spending time on tasks unrelated to selling is frustrating. Unfortunately, meetings fall into this category for most salespeople.
The latest meeting statistics show that 83% of employees spend up to 1/3 of their workweek in meetings. And we must admit that though essential, meetings are not welcome.
Fortunately, you can turn the situation around by injecting fun and creativity into your gatherings. Here are 15 sales meeting ideas to get you started.
15 fun and motivational sales meeting ideas
"Boring sales meetings are a time killer." - I said that!
Productive sales meetings are those whose teams are focused, motivated, and engaged throughout. While this is hard to come by, you can work on it with your team. Here are some ideas that can help boost participant engagement, improve retention, and break the monotony of routine gatherings.
Section 1: Icebreakers
Icebreakers are activities or games that can kick-start a meeting and break tensions, awkward silences, and social barriers. It creates an inclusive environment for social interaction in in-house and virtual meetings.
1. Use icebreaker questions
A question is one of the easiest ways to start a conversation and know about your team members. You would be surprised at how much your coworkers are willing to share about themselves only if you asked. Do not make it awkward. Ask fun icebreaker questions that will help you understand your team better. For example:
If you were an animal, what type would it be and why?
What superpower would you like to have?
If you were a TV host, which celebrity would you want to host and why?
There are no limitations to the questions you can ask; you only need to be creative. Ask about food, cars, people, anything here goes.
2. Sales role-play
A sales role-play is a training tool that prepares new hires and reminds old ones how to perform their roles by acting out real-world scenarios. It's an incredible way to help sales reps overcome challenges.
Here are the steps to performing a role-play:
Choose the sales reps who will act it out and define their roles.
Present them with a scenario that involves completing an important task, such as handling an objection, negotiating a price with a client, or revising a stalled deal.
Give them time to plan and have them present before the rest of the team.
Role-playing is a fun way to train your team. Including a session at the start of a meeting will liven up the atmosphere, creating a fun and supportive environment. However, you must plan and inform your team about it days before the event.
3. Trivia competition
A trivia competition is a game where players answer quick-fire questions. It nourishes the relationship among your sales reps by establishing collaboration amid healthy competition. The team that answers correctly gets awarded points. The overall total points will determine the winner.
To conduct it in your sales meeting:
First, plan the questions for the game. Include a mix of educational and fun sales meeting topics.
Divide the meeting attendees into teams with an equal number of participants.
Please provide them with buzzers they can use when they want to answer the question; the team that buzzes first answers.
Ask the questions and record the score.
Once you get the results, reward the winning team.
Section 2: Learning and Development
One of the many reasons sales reps consider meetings unproductive time-sinks is the lack of a clear purpose. You can, however, correct this by introducing activities that facilitate learning and development.
4. Sales training workshops
The regularly scheduled sales meetings are the perfect avenue to hold a sales training workshop where the various departments learn from each other. The marketing team can get insights from the operations team, and the finance team can learn from the sales team and vice versa. To plan this out:
Share a departmental invitation early in advance, asking each department what they would like to learn from each other.
Once you have the various topics, share them with the departmental heads and ask each to propose a speaker to address the chosen issue.
Include the discussion topics and speakers in the agenda and share widely.
5. Sales pitch improv
A sales pitch improv session in your sales meeting is a fun way to help your team improve their pitch adaptability skills.
It teaches you how to improvise your sales pitch while maintaining the course of your conversation and building rapport with the listeners. Here is how:
Divide your team into groups and issue them with a standard presentation theme to prepare.
Each team should choose one member to present the pitch
Allow the meeting participants to ask questions based on the sales pitch
Allow everyone to vote for the best pitch from all the presentations.
6. Analyze sales recordings
There is always something new to learn from previous client encounters, and one of the best ways is to analyze the audio or video recordings of sales calls to gain insights.
You can choose a recording of a new sales rep to emphasize where to improve or a successful meeting with an experienced salesperson where other members can learn from.
By carefully examining the content and dynamics, your sales reps will identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in the sales process.
Tip: Using the right tool to record meetings is essential. While some tools only record audio for online meetings, the Notta meeting notetaker captures both meeting video and audio in high quality, allowing it to analyze customers’ facial expressions. This tool supports all major video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and MS Teams and keeps a permanent record easily accessible by all team members.
Notta offers the most integrated AI meeting notes, summaries, and action items so nothing gets missed.
7. Invite a guest speaker
Inviting a guest speaker is one of the best ways to liven the atmosphere of your sales meetings, improve the engagement of your sales reps, and provide essential insights that will help your team rethink their strategies.
Depending on your objective, the guest can be:
An expert sales trainer ready to instill fresh ideas in your team
A lifetime customer willing to offer their frank feedback
A board member who will talk about the company's performance, share case studies and tactics for success
Anyone who can share relatable, energetic stories that will inspire your team to achieve their goals
You may reach out to the guest speaker in mind and share your objective for the meeting so they can plan their speech accordingly.
8. Watch a sales TED talk
There is plenty of information you can find online about sales, but if you are looking to motivate your teams, nothing beats TED talks.
Each video is short and well-crafted, leaving you with critical lessons. The speakers share their test cases, experiences, scientific findings, and life lessons that listeners can use daily.
To include this in your meetings:
Choose a TED talk that resonates with the sales meeting topics you want your team to learn.
After watching the clip, highlight the key topics you want the team to discuss.
Once the meeting ends, ask the attendees to write down how they will implement what they have learned in their daily work lives.
9. Sales brainstorming sessions
In a brainstorming session, team members discuss and share ideas to help solve a problem or create a new direction. Including one of these sessions in your sales meetings is an incredible way to spark enthusiasm and identify new markets by identifying the untapped demographics
You can start your meeting by brainstorming before transitioning to any other planned activity. Some ways that can get you started include:
The five whys: This activity will help you reach the root of a problem by asking "why " successively. It will break down a problem down to the various root causes that relate to it.
An empathy map: This involves getting into the mind of the buyer persona and analyzing their motivations, experience, and concerns. This activity will help your team members identify an ideal customer in their first meeting.
10. Set up a team lunch and learning session
Who doesn't love food? A meeting that includes food and education is a sure bet to getting sales reps motivated to attend. These sessions provide an excellent avenue to cross-train coworkers, introduce new products to the team, and share any upcoming changes.
To execute a successful lunch and learn session, you want to:
Inform your sales team early in advance through a meeting memo.
Provide light snacks, appetizers, and drinks.
Appoint one of the sales reps to present, preferably a team lead.
Cover simple-to-grasp topics that have a specific objective.
Consider your remote team. For example, you may purchase a snack from a local joint for them.
Section 3: Motivation and Recognition
Sales reps love recognition for their work. And when done publicly, it boosts their morale, making them approach work more enthusiastically.
A sales meeting is one of the best avenues to recognize your team's efforts. The ripple effect of this action is felt widely in the organization because you create a positive environment where everyone strives to get recognition.
11. Celebrating success stories
Celebrating your team's success is more than mentioning and rewarding your sales reps. Analyze the wins to make them more impactful to your team. You can do this in your sales meeting as it will consume little time; 10 -15 minutes will be enough.
To do this:
Invite the sales rep who is getting recognition to the stage to share tips on how they did it.
Get them to share the deal's specifics, including the problem they were solving and the process
They should also share the issues they ran into, their response, and the takeaways from the whole experience
After the presentation, give your team a chance to ask questions
Conclude the session by congratulating the sales rep and thanking everyone for participating
12. Gamification
Sales shouldn't always be a boring subject. You can make it fun by gamifying the whole experience. Here is how:
Divide the attendees into teams and give them all a goal to achieve.
Since symbolism matters, get a trophy to award the top performers or create a wall of fame featuring the winners' pictures.
The team that attains the set goal gets recognition throughout the company as the best sales team of the week and keeps the trophy.
Make the whole process a regular action in your weekly sales meetings.
Section 4: Online Sales Meeting Ideas for Remote Teams
Covid-19 threw a spanner into our everyday office life, allowing remote work to thrive. Now, it's more dominant than ever. At the start, there was plenty of talk about how work flexibility equates to productivity, but with time, different perceptions started to grow.
Microsoft did a study where 85% of managers lacked confidence in their employees' productivity levels. This brings us back here: How do you ensure your remote sales team is motivated enough to skyrocket their productivity levels? Here are some interactive sales meeting ideas you can try.
13. Introduce breakout rooms
A breakout room is a sub-session to your main meeting. It allows your teams to interact in smaller groups, fostering better communication and collaboration.
Each breakout room should have a team lead who notes what everyone says and compiles vital points to share in the central meeting.
When hosting a breakout room:
Plan it out early by dividing your sales reps into teams for each breakout room and choosing a facilitator.
Ensure there is an overall goal for the breakout session.
Establish a reasonable time limit.
Rotate the groups in every sales meeting where you host a breakout event.
14. Include fun interactive live polls
Live polls are a fun and interactive way to get people’s opinions about a particular topic. Using them in a sales meeting will get the attendees clicking and constantly checking to see the results. Since voting is private, it's one of the best ways to:
Make group decisions.
Learn more about each other
Get feedback about the meeting
Test the attendees on certain topics
Use these polls during the meeting to break the monotony and initiate engagement amongst the attendees. Remember to keep the questions simple and fun to raise the levels of interaction.
15. Plan a virtual retreat
A virtual retreat is an online get-together where your team shares new ideas, reflects on challenges, and uncovers customer insights. It's a session that allows you to break away from the usual activities to socialize and learn from each other.
Instead of having boring meetings every time where you only discuss numbers and pie charts, designate one sales meeting to take a virtual retreat with your team.
To plan one;
First, set your intention: What do you want to achieve from the retreat?
Outline what will happen in the meeting agenda. Include a mix of fun games and discussions to make the sessions engaging
Choose questions your sales reps can reflect on and share their ideas on
Set ground rules on how much time each person should use, allowing everyone enough to brainstorm and share
Boost sales meeting productivity with Notta
Every meeting with customers revolves around writing down notes, creating a summary, and following up, manually performing all these activities is inefficient and, most importantly, time-consuming.
You don't want to lose a sale just because you forgot a vital client requirement from the second meeting, do you?
To avoid such scenarios, embrace tools that can record the conversations and let your sales reps focus on activities leading to closing the sale. One such tool is Notta meeting assistant, here is how Notta can help:
Record and transcribe the meetings in real-time, so you can actively communicate with clients and review the full transcript afterward.
Generate automated summaries that include actional steps for all your meetings, saving you time to follow up.
Create a clip of the most important part and send it to stakeholders, so they don’t have to search through it.
Sync your meeting notes and recordings with the rest of your team for easy collaboration. The recordings can also serve as training materials.
This tool may be the holy grail your sales reps need to avoid time wastage and maximize productivity.
Easily schedule meetings, auto-record and transcribe meeting minutes, and summarize key action items — all with one tool!
Conclusion
“To be more productive, put on your thinking cap and ask – Is there any better way to do it?”
By making it this far, you have shown your willingness and desire to do something about your flailing sales meetings. Your team's productivity hinges on how well-motivated they are; as a team leader, that is your responsibility.
Always ask yourself, ‘What can we do better?’ and incorporate any plausible ideas into your next gathering. It doesn't always have to be serious. A little bit of fun can go a long way to bridging the existing gap and bringing your team together.
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