Tis the season to stay up until midnight watching tape-delayed highlights and sit glued to sports you wouldn’t watch the rest of the year (handball? really??).
But with eight selling days left in this year’s London Games, and a brand-new month starting today, here are four Olympics-themed ideas for motivating your inside sales team. Whether you manage a transactional sale, or need to focus your team on activities and pipeline-building to start the month, I hope these ideas spark something that drives early-month momentum for you in August.
1. Gymnastics
Notice that the men and women effectively compete in three overall categories – the team competition, the “all around” individual competition, and the individual “skills” competition. Put your inside sales teams in groups (they might already be organized this way with managers as a “team captain”) and have them compete with each other for a few days. In the Olympics, individual gymnasts qualify for the all-around competition during the team “qualifying” round, so use this portion to drive team and individual performance against whatever metrics make most sense.
To keep the competition and promotion alive after the team competition, combine the highest-performing reps in an “all around” competition while everyone across the floor competes in the skills portion. Instead of uneven bars, vaults and rings, have them compete on talk time, demos given, opportunities created, services add-ons, etc.
2. Soccer
Similar start, in that teams compete initially in groups. To lengthen the competition and promotion, do a first round for a couple days to qualify (some teams get into the Olympics, some don’t). Once they make the Olympic round, do a “group” round of competition before advancing the top two teams from each group into quarterfinals, semifinals and an overall final on the last day.
This competition works with groups or individuals, depending on the size of your inside sales team.
3. Swimming
Similar to soccer, but individual sales reps compete in trials as the first phase of the promotion, then “heats” in a second phase. The best performers make it into semifinals and finals based on the best “times”.
And similar to the gymnastics “skills” competition, consider breaking up different focus areas (talk time, etc.) as equivalent strokes – freestyle, backstroke, butterfly, etc. Get even more creative with an individual medley (combining skills) as well as relays.
4. Cycling
This also is both a team and individual competition. Cyclists also generally fall into two categories – sprinters and climbers. And although the Olympic road race is one long race (vs. various segments a la the Tour de France), you can still break the road race into multiple segments over several days (initial sprint, hills, laps, final sprint and/or time trial).
5. Weightlifting
This Olympic sport fascinates me, in that it’s all about one-upping the last guy to lift. The bar (no pun intended) keeps getting higher. Someone, for example, sets a killer talk-time score on Monday. Who can beat it on Tuesday?
