11 Fun Sales Games for Learning Skills Fast

Most employees don’t think fun sales training games are possible. To them, sales is work; there’s no time or way to enjoy it.

However, salespeople need motivation and benefit from an enjoyable—but still professional—work environment. You need to bridge that gap, and fun sales games can help.

Eighty percent of American consumers consider the combination of speed, convenience, and knowledgeable, friendly service to be the most important part of a positive customer experience. These five fun sales training games can strengthen your employees’ skills to ultimately deliver that experience.

6 Benefits to using games in sales training

Avoid holding yet another meeting that could’ve been an email. Instead, use sales training games to make conferences fun, and enjoy these added benefits too:

1. Builds relationships: Nothing helps team members come together like a friendly game or puzzle to solve. Gamifying your training incentivizes your team to work together and learn from each other. These connections are becoming more and more critical, according to O.C. Tanner’s 2021 Global Culture Report.
2. Engages your team: Another 9 AM meeting with a PowerPoint presentation? Yawn. A 9 AM meeting where your sales team gets to play games? We’re suddenly wide awake.
3. Provides feedback: Games are a great way for sales reps to quickly learn whether they’ve made the right or wrong move. Better yet, they help reps understand the skills and knowledge they need to acquire in order to move up a level.
4. Unleashes competitive spirit: There’s nothing wrong with friendly competition, and there are plenty of sales games that pit individual reps against each other to see who can reach a particular milestone first. Just make sure everyone knows that individual wins contribute to team wins too.
5. Boosts communication: When your team has to work together to win a game, communication is a must. Games help team members learn how to best communicate with each other and give them a chance to learn more about each other outside the normal workplace scope.
6. Encourages learning: Include your company’s products or services in the games you choose, and you set the stage for your sales team to learn the ins and outs of your offerings. Even team veterans may find insights based on how others perceive, explain, and sell the products.‍
7. Rewards success: Sales games create opportune moments to reward your sales professionals. Just do me a favor and leave the ice cream sandwiches at home. Instead, use a gamification platform like Arcade to automate sales games and let your team choose rewards that mean the most to them.

11 Sales meeting games to use with your team

1. Bounty

Personal challenges and goals provide inspiration and motivation and put much less pressure on apprehensive salespeople. Bounty encourages employees to work toward sales goals in a gamified competition of just one person.

The game is straightforward: Set some quantifiable objectives and challenge the salesperson to reach the numbers. These goals don’t need to be strictly sales-related; they can be as simple as initiating contact with customers in the store or getting people to sign up for a rewards program. Bounty is easier with a gamification app, which tracks progress and lets employees redeem rewards right from their smartphones.

2. Every Time

Here’s a game that can be played individually, as a group, or with competing teams. The premise is easy and similar to Bounty: Every time a specific sales action is made by an employee, it’s tallied into a running total. At the end of the day, week, month, or quarter—whichever time frame you prefer—the totals are compared among teams and/or previous results.

Whether you play Every Time for rewards (possibly redeemable via an employee performance platform) or just bragging rights, the game is great for increasing sales, building employee camaraderie, and generating excitement.

Struggling to run sales games that lift performance? Learn how to design effective, exciting games by downloading our guide.

3. Description Jamboree

Every sales pitch needs some creativity, even when you’re reading from a rehearsed script. Salespeople must be able to pivot when necessary, addressing questions and reactions from the customer on the fly. They must also be able to describe what they’re selling in different ways. Description Jamboree gives salespeople a way to develop and improve that creativity.

The game is simple: Gather your team and pick a random object in the room. Then, challenge everyone to pitch notable features of that random object to the group and why it’s indispensable. A stapler, for example, uses advanced technology to bring together project parameters. That’s over the top—but that’s the point.

Descriptions can be as theatrical and dramatic as possible. Whenever someone can’t come up with a new attribute, they’re out. Continue with the same object or select something new, eliminating participants until only one person remains. Description Jamboree can feel silly at times, but it’s a fun way to ramp up your team’s creativity.

4. Cold Calls

For salespeople, cold calls might be the least appealing part of their jobs. However, cold calls are often important tools for businesses, and employees need to be confident and smooth when speaking with potential customers. This game is great for slow days when phones are quiet and your employees will have time to make calls.

Employees will work in teams of two, sharing one phone. They take turns making a cold call on speakerphone, with the caller attempting to earn points while the other listens in, keeps score, and writes down additional feedback. Points are scored for achieving various goals, which could include:

• Scheduling a follow-up call
• Going a minute without saying “um” or “uh”
• Making the recipient laugh
• Getting the recipient to ask a question about your product or service
• Getting an email address
• Closing a sale

Gamifying cold calls in this way takes some of the apprehension out of the process for employees. Salespeople keep score for each other but also provide feedback and encouragement that benefits them in the long run.

5. Bingo

Create your own 5-by-5 bingo cards with 24 sales-related actions (the middle can remain a free space) and hand them out to your staff. They’ll mark off their cards as they complete the actions, which can include tasks such as selling an accessory, greeting 10 customers in an hour, getting a customer to provide an email address, and so on

If you’re really committed, each card can be different so that no employee has the same path to bingo. What makes this game so thorough is that you’ll need to come up with at least 24 items to fill the card. That gets employees thinking about all the things they should be considering each time a customer walks through the door.

Bingo can be played just for fun or for prizes. Again, a top-notch gamification app such as Arcade makes rewards for fun sales games easy. Employees can choose items such as digital gift cards right from their phones, then celebrate or brag about their victories to their coworkers through our chat functionality. Contact us to learn more about our platform and schedule a demo.

6. What’s in the box?

Ever watched the Can You Feel It? game on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon?” This game is similar. It involves two people, one of whom has a box with a random object inside. Player One knows what’s in the box, but Player Two has no idea what it is. 

To figure out what’s inside the box, Player Two must ask Player One questions — but they’re limited to 10 questions, which must be open-ended. This helps sales reps learn how to craft open-ended questions that can help them better understand a prospect’s needs.

7. Sell me this pen

Yup, we took this idea from “Wolf of Wall Street.” Set up a scenario where your sales reps have to sell you a mundane object — a pen is a great place to start. This game encourages teams to figure out the problem that the product or service they’re selling solves.

8. Elevator pitch

Grab a stopwatch and challenge your sales team to pitch one of the company’s products or services in 60 seconds or less. Want to push the creative envelope? You can shake things up and give your team a random product to sell instead.

9. Sales Guess Who?

Assign each team member an identity, then split them into pairs. Taking turns, one team member acts as the prospect using the identity you assigned them while the other acts as the salesperson who must ask questions to discover the identity (and therefore challenges) the prospect faces.

This game helps team members build relationships and communication skills on top of foundational sales skills.

10. Prospect sleuths

Group your salespeople into small teams and assign each one a prospective client who’s never done business with your company before. Each team should be given a limited amount of time to dig up as much information as they can about the prospect. Whoever manages to unearth the most data wins — you could also give awards for the most surprising tidbit of data.

This game teaches sales reps how to use social media platforms, like LinkedIn, and other tools to discover phone numbers, connections, education, job titles, and more data critical for making sales calls.

11. Objections master

Gather a list of the most common objections your sales team hears, then write each one down on individual slips of paper. Have each rep draw an objection from a hat, then come up with a response to the objective in two minutes or less. The rest of the team then rates their response and offers feedback, making this a group-wide learning experience.