You found our list of the best virtual sales kickoff ideas.
Virtual sales kickoff ideas are concepts to try when your team meets to launch your new sales campaign. Examples include icebreaker games, virtual shark tank, and an award ceremony for top performers. These ideas allow the sales team to learn from each other’s experiences, develop product strategies, and share tips and tricks for success.
These ideas are similar to sales meeting ideas, Zoom meeting ideas, and out-of-the-box team meeting ideas.
This article includes:
- remote sales kickoff themes
- online sales kickoff games
- virtual sales kickoff meeting activities
- virtual sales kickoff event ideas
Let’s get started!
List of virtual sales kickoff ideas
An effective virtual sales kickoff is a means to engage your sales team. When planned properly, a virtual sales kickoff may unite and motivate your sales team and bring out their best performances. The following are virtual sales kickoff event ideas.
1. Sales Kickoff Schedule
Preparing a sales kickoff schedule is the first step when organizing a virtual sales kickoff. The success of your sales kickoff depends on the quality of the information shared at the kickoff, making this the single most crucial part of the preparation process.
When making your virtual sales kickoff agenda, you should focus on achieving goals like:
- Keeping your team focused on its mission in the next year
- Promoting interaction and networking amongst participants through virtual channels
- Inspiring and motivating your sales department
- Providing your sales staff with relevant information on training, sales enablement, and customer satisfaction
You may use these points as a springboard when creating the sales kickoff schedule. However, remember that your sales staff will need to retain this information for months after the event has passed, which means your goal should be to ensure maximum retention. You can use Google Docs to create the schedule or build a landing page for that purpose. All your team members should have the link to refer to the page anytime.
2. Virtual Sales Kickoff Theme
A theme or slogan for your virtual sales launch will help encourage and direct your sales force toward achieving your year objectives. Your sales staff has to be able to identify with, internalize, and commit to the remote sales kickoff themes as the year’s overarching objective. You can consider a simple, straightforward, catchy, concise, and optimistic slogan before settling on a theme.
Examples of sales kickoff themes include:
- All in!
- Above and Beyond
- Believe
- Accelerate
- Level Up!
- Fired Up!
- No Limits
- Raising the Bar
After selecting the theme, incorporate it throughout your virtual sales launch event’s virtual team-building activities and speaker topics. Your sales force is more likely to remember your message and stay motivated if you stick to a consistent theme throughout the year.
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3. Fun Virtual Icebreakers
Icebreakers are among the top online sales kickoff games. An icebreaker is a fun, interactive game that helps break the ice and get the audience excited about the coming event. The games will make your participants feel more at ease in unfamiliar settings, which may be challenging in the flurry of a virtual event. Icebreakers help engage individuals early on and help break through barriers later on during networking or business talks.
Examples of fun icebreakers to consider include:
- tricky questions
- brainstorming sales objections
- speed pitch
- sell me this pen
You can initiate relationships based on a shared passion with the right icebreaker questions and entertaining activities.
Check out this list of virtual icebreakers for meetings.
4. Live Sales Demos
Live sales demos are a dynamic way to engage your sales team during a virtual kickoff event. These demos provide a real-time, hands-on experience of your product or service. Demos allow your salespeople to see its features and benefits in action. These events also offer an opportunity to practice effective sales pitches. By holding live demos, you can teach sales experts how to showcase the value of your offerings to potential customers. Thus, sales demos are an invaluable learning experience for your team.
5. Customized Sales Playbooks
Customized sales playbooks are like personalized roadmaps for each salesperson’s success. During the kickoff event, workers can tailor these playbooks to address the unique strengths, weaknesses, and goals of individual team members. Playbooks outline strategies, tactics, and best practices for your organization’s sales process. By providing salespeople with these personalized resources, you help them set clear objectives and follow a structured path toward achieving their targets.
6. Sales Tech Showcase
A sales tech showcase helps introduce your team to the latest and most effective sales technologies and tools. This segment of the kickoff event can include live demonstrations and in-depth presentations. Attendees can learn about CRM systems, sales analytics tools, automation platforms, and other software solutions. By showcasing these technologies, you equip your team with the knowledge and tools to streamline their workflows. These showcases can also enhance workers’ ability to close deals effectively in a digital sales landscape.
7. Success Stories and Case Studies
Sharing success stories and customer case studies during the kickoff event is a powerful motivational tool. These stories show how your products or services have solved real-world customer problems. Case studies showcase the tangible benefits your products provide. Hearing about successful outcomes can inspire your sales team and demonstrate the value of what they are selling. Additionally, these studies provide practical examples of approaching different customer scenarios. Incorporating these stories and case studies into your event can reinforce the importance of workers’ roles.
8. Remote Tai Chi
Tai chi is a gentle and effective activity that can make you feel more at ease during the sales kickoff event. In part, Tai chi’s various benefits stem from its gentle motions, making it suitable for almost any individual. The only goal is to feel your energy and the air around you and move in harmony with them. There is no need to force your body into unnatural positions or to carry heavy weights.
If you want to improve your focus and memory retention during your event, giving yourself a good tai chi workout is a terrific way to get your blood pumping.
9. Team Storytelling
Your team’s significant accomplishments or individual triumphs may sometimes go unrecognized. Bringing these histories to light is an excellent exercise for promoting a culture of acknowledgment.
You can engage your team in a creative exercise by having them design a fake magazine cover celebrating a project, commercial success, or personal achievement. Employees can share a few words on a recent struggle or success that helped them or their team grow. You can also send your team members the necessary stationery and magazine templates ahead of time and have them start working on their stories. Setting aside about 30 minutes or an hour for this exercise during your launch meeting is advisable. Creating these stories will improve your team’s ability to foresee future triumphs, inspire one another, and plan for greater achievements over the coming months. In addition, employees may learn to care about one another and bond more deeply via shared experiences by sharing stories as a team.
10. Virtual Shark Tank
A simulated episode of “Shark Tank” would be perfect for your sales staff to practice their pitches and hone their improvisation skills. In this entertaining exercise, team members may practice their sales pitches and display their inner entrepreneurs. Using a digital platform makes it simpler to invite sales coaches and influencers to serve as judges, enriching the experience for participants.
For this activity, you can have your team members pair up and, with the help of photos and objects, invent a product and a sales presentation. The pitch should contain sections like:
- brand name
- tagline
- marketing plan
- business plan
- sales strategy
- reasons to invest
This exercise is a terrific way to get your team working together. The idea also encourages out-of-the-box thinking and can help to generate fresh ideas for marketing and sales campaigns. The judging panel should give each team detailed comments for improvement and choose a winner. You can also award small prizes.
11. Breakout Sessions
Fatigue can often occur during virtual meetings, and sales kickoffs might take longer than intended. Virtual breakout sessions are a fantastic method to keep your team engaged and productive during the whole conference. While the concept of a breakout session may not seem very new, the technique for handling it may have a significant impact.
Breakout rooms are a standard feature of most online event platforms. This feature encourages engaging conversations. However, it is often hard to strike up conversations in a huge gathering. Breakout rooms allow you to separate your large audience into smaller, more manageable groups.
A good idea for breakout sessions is hosting a lighting talk. The goal is to get your team thinking critically and working together by having each member talk on a specific subject for no more than five minutes. Topics may include cold calling strategies for remote prospects, advice on reaching quota while working remotely, and virtual sales meeting best practices.
Virtual improv-led breakout sessions may be an effective method of encouraging creative problem-solving and brainstorming.
Check out more breakout session ideas.
12. Gamification
During sales kickoff events, the sales leadership team often unveils the updated go-to-market plan for the following year. There will be a great deal of training that will help your sales team succeed. However, since this is an online sales launch event, your sales staff may get preoccupied with email and miss important announcements. Using gamification can help ensure an excellent learning experience. Examples of gamification ideas include:
- in-session trivia
- tour of the virtual exhibition hall
- virtual event bingo
- leaderboards
Making the activity fun will keep your sales team engaged during the session. Your sales staff and the entire firm will gain from this idea.
13. Coworker Feud
Coworker Feud is a game modeled after the popular TV show Family Feud. The game can foster communication and healthy competition among employees. In most cases, the host is the one who does the research for the various topic suggestions. For example, you can add numbers from categories like animal behavior, human eating habits, and the solar system. Another option is to survey team members and their families and utilize the results as your data source.
A team leader acts as both the speaker and the buzzer. The team can confer on answers. Then, teams take turns trying to predict the most popular choices. The final point total determines the winner.
Here is a list of Coworker Feud questions.
14. The Bucket List Challenge
During this activity, give your staff five minutes to brainstorm activities to include on their bucket lists. Then have team members share this list with the group. As an employer, you may encourage teamwork by challenging coworkers who like similar pursuits.
For example, if you have many workers who either reside in the same city or will be participating in marathons simultaneously but in separate locations, have them commit to keeping each other responsible. Employees may encourage and keep tabs on one another. You can also use this approach to set sales quotas and contests.
When it comes to remote sales teams, the Bucket List Challenge is a great way to foster camaraderie and spark creativity and drive. Hearing about the goals of others is entertaining, especially if some group members have already accomplished some of the goals they have shared with the group.
15. Desert Island Scenario
For this activity, sort the salespeople into squads. The storyline is that each team is trapped on a deserted island with seven items, but they can only take three. These items should be as complicated and baffling as possible, so your team must rely on their collective intelligence and strategic planning skills.
These necessities include a bag of fruit and vegetable seeds, a pocket knife, a 100-foot rope, a sheet, a bucket, two gallons of kerosene, and writing materials. Each team can go into breakout rooms and discuss which options they want to pick. After the conversations, it is time to get on a group video call and discuss the results. In addition to fostering a spirit of healthy competition and enthusiasm among team members, such activities and exercises also help members perceive each other as colleagues.
16. The Guessing Game
To get to know your sales staff better, you can ask them to share some interesting facts about themselves. You can now gather the facts into a single document and share it with all team members. Each sales representative must determine which fact belongs to each team member and fill in the blank column next to each piece of information.
Besides the potential for hilarity, this game fosters teamwork and friendship among teammates. After every participant has given their best guesses, you can provide an answer key to reveal who made the right and wrong call.
Check out more guessing games for work.
17. Virtual Comedy Break
This activity allows you to have fun with your coworkers while building rapport and friendships. You can create a theme or challenge for the joke before your virtual sales kickoff. Joke themes may be office-related, competitor, and lunch-related humor. As the event progresses, you can ask different team members to share their comedy sketches. This activity will provide some humor and levity to your meeting.
Here is a list of virtual comedians.
18. Award Ceremony for Top Performers
At any sales kickoff event, it is vital to recognize and award prizes to top performers. With award ceremonies, you can publicly acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of highly productive workers and offer a powerful motivator for future success. The challenge is in recreating the atmosphere of a live awards show in a virtual setting. Creating the perfect atmosphere for a virtual awards ceremony is the first step in bringing employees together in friendly competition and joyful celebration.
Success celebrations are an integral part of every sales kickoff. Whether the launch is physical or virtual, this component should be part of your program. Almost every salesperson would appreciate a fine champagne to make a toast to the end of a long and fruitful year. You can send a bottle of wine to their homes before the event. You can also have a virtual concert or hire a motivational speaker. This idea will help you engage your sales team and capture their attention.
Check out this list of virtual award ceremony ideas for work.
Conclusion
A sales kickoff meeting is a terrific opportunity to demonstrate to your sales representatives that you have their backs and are as committed to their success. Whether online or in person, your sales kickoff meeting is a chance to bring your team back together, foster team spirit, and equip participants with the knowledge and skills they will need to thrive in today’s competitive market.
Over 80 percent of what sales staff learn in a launch meeting is forgotten within a matter of weeks, if not days, according to studies. A virtual sales kickoff allows you to record your presentations and discussions so that you may refer to them even if you cannot attend the live event. Your sales team can then review content for optimal retention. The virtual sales kickoff meeting activities can make the event highly memorable for participants.
For more tips, check out these lists of sales books and negotiation books.
