5 Sales Team Building Activities for a Winning Culture

Sales team building activities improve communication, build trust, and strengthen relationships. They're a common way to improve teamwork across the board.

But, some team building activities are applied to organizations in a cookie-cutter format.

By planning unique team activities specifically for your sales team, you can help build the core skills your salespeople need to succeed!

5 Sales Team Building Activities for a Winning Culture

Looking to address a specific issue? Each activity below is categorized based on particular areas of improvement.

1. Presentation Skills

Could your team benefit from improved presentation skills? Incorporate that into team building!

Any of the standard construction-focused team building activities like the “egg drop” or “building a bridge” can help improve presentation skills.

After the team builds their project, ask them to present their creation in an engaging way.

If you don’t have the time or resources for construction-oriented sales team building activities, here's an alternative. Ask each person to bring something from their desk and pitch the benefits of using said object! It could be as simple as a pen or a coffee mug.

These activities work best if you divide the team into groups of two or three people. You can even do this over a webinar or conference call if you manage a remote team.

2. Communication Skills

Have you noticed problems with internal communication? If so, design sales team building activities that will help your team improve their communication skills.

Telephone Team Building Activity

Have the team sit around a table and give each person a notepad. Ask each person to write a word or phrase on the first page, then pass it to their right. Have them read what is written on the first page, turn the page, and draw what they read.

Next, have them pass it to the right so that the next person can try to figure out what was drawn. Repeat these steps until the notebooks return to their original places.

While this exercise doesn’t involve much communication between participants, it can spark a bigger conversation about communication problems and how you can all work together to improve them!

Watch this exercise:

Mine Field Team Building Activity

If you have more time and space, activities like the mine field exercise (when someone outside the “mine field” directs someone who is blindfolded through an obstacle course) can help the team work on communication in real time. Intentionally pairing together people who might have experienced previous communication issues can be helpful.

Back-To-Back Drawing Activity

If your team is remote, you can do a variant of the back-to-back drawing game. Ask one person to describe how to draw something without saying what it is and have the rest of the team follow the instructions. Compare the drawings at the end and see who was able to figure out what the person was describing!

3. Asking Good Questions

Asking good questions is one of the most important skills in selling, but it’s not always a focus in team building activities. If this is an area where your team needs improvement, here are some ideas.

Find Your Partner Activity

Put a name-tag with a name, job title, or noun on everyone’s backs and have them use yes/no questions to try to figure out who or what they are. You can add a level of complexity by using words that go in obvious pairs (salt & pepper, peanut butter & jelly, etc.) and having the team find their partner at the end!

What-One-Question Game

You could also do the “what-one-question” game, where you ask the team to work together in groups to identify the one question they could use to determine someone’s suitability for a specific situation, such as leading the company, joining the team, babysitting a child, or anything else.

Coming up with one perfect question is much harder than building a list of good questions – and it’s a great skill to have in sales.

If your team is remote, you could work together on this over a conference call. If you’re together in person, you could break your team into groups of 3 or 4 and then compare questions.

4. Listening Skills

Along with asking questions, listening is also one of the most important selling skills. Many sales team building activities can help improve listening.

You can add a listening element to any of the blindfold-style or construction-style activities by having one team member only communicate key information to one other person. Then, having that person communicate it to the rest of the team.

As a group, you can incorporate a listening exercise into any team meeting, in person or remote.

We believe listening is so important, we use active listening exercises in our sales and leadership training events! Watch the exercise in action below:

5. Teamwork

Team building is all about your team, and in sales that’s often forgotten.

Some teams seem to focus more on competing than on working together. But a team with a healthy winning culture is able to achieve more than a team that’s always competing!

Having each member of the team share things about themselves can be a great way for the team to get to know each other. This can be as complex as making and sharing vision boards or as simple as playing two truths and a lie!

Working together on a charity project can encourage your team to feel that they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. In-person events for Habitat for Humanity or park cleanup projects are great, but you can also have a remote team work together to fundraise for a charity or run events in their various locations.

Additionally, costume and decoration contests can be fun, and they can be done in-person or remotely. Costume contests can be individual or team-based, and asking teams to work together to decorate their work spaces can tell you a lot about them, too!

I hope this sparked some ideas for you as you plan new sales team building activities.

What are your favorite sales team building activities? Share them in the comments.