5 Easy Sales Games to Play With Your Staff this Holiday Season

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2 5 Easy Sales Games to Play With Your Staff this Holiday Season By Bob and Susan Negen WhizBang! Training It s a well-known fact that positive reinforcement giving praise or rewards is the MOST POWERFUL way to get someone to do what you want them to do. The more you want certain behaviors to occur, the more important it is to reward your employees when they do them. Fortunately, giving rewards also happens to be really fun! Sales games are a simple and inexpensive way to reward your sales staff when they practice higher level selling skills. The key to making sales games work for you is to reward specific improvements in desired behaviors. You don t want to reward them for average, normal selling behaviors; you want to reward them for going above and beyond. For example, if the average items per sale in your store is 2.27 items, you should reward them for higher results like selling 4 or more items to a single customer or achieving a daily average of 3 items per sale or more. To hit those goals, they will have to try harder at adding-on with each and every customer. The key to making games work for your employees is to make them FUN and the rewards a stretch, but attainable. No one wants to play a game they can never win. Here are our Top 5 favorite sales games: #1: Pass The Buck This game has never failed to please our employees and it s so easy you can do it with no preparation at all! Pass the Buck works best on busy days when you ve got lots of employees on the floor and you want them all focused on selling. Game rules: Give the first person to make a sale a $20 dollar bill to hold (or a $10 bill, or a $50 bill depending on your store and how hard you want your staff to play.) When someone makes a bigger sale than the first sale they get passed the buck. The next time an even larger sale is made the buck gets passed again. The person who has the highest sale that day is left holding the buck and gets to take home the $20! We love this contest for six very specific reasons: 1. It s really fun. 2. It s super simple. 1

3 3. It encourages lots of add-ons. 4. It encourages up-selling. 5. It rewards great performance immediately. 6. It puts more money in the cash register! #2: Digging for Dollars Here s another great sales contest idea from one of our favorite retailers, a flower shop owner. Game Rules: She explains, Here s a contest we use to keep the team focused on busy days. A large jar is filled with $1 bills. Every time an employee adds-on to a sale, (in our case, balloons, candy, etc.) they get to take a bill from the jar. There is competition to see who can collect the most dollars, while giving everyone a chance to be a winner. Love it! Your whole staff is motivated to continue the specific behaviors you re looking for (adding-on) all day long, with every single sale, and everybody wins something. Perfect! #3: Sales Poker Sales Poker is a slightly more complicated game, but it sure is fun! Sales Poker is best played for multiple days, like a weekend or a whole week. That way everyone gets a chance to play and win. Game Rules: To play Sales Poker you ll need several decks of playing cards, a bulletin board in the back room that s big enough to post everyone s poker hands, and a grand prize. You ll also need a list of selling goals you want your employees to achieve with how many cards they get for reaching each goal. The harder the goal, the more cards they get. Here s a possible list to give you the idea but be creative and adjust to the specific needs of your store. The level of add-ons and dollars per sale should be higher than your average. You re trying to push them to do more than normal! Add-on two items one card Add on three or more items two cards Sale over $75 one card Sale over $150 two cards Sell three Christmas-themed items one card Sell a green-spotted turbo widget three cards Daily personal sales total of $2400 (or $300 per hour) three cards The game is pretty straightforward from here each time an employee achieves a selling goal they get to draw the number of cards indicated on your list and they post them on the bulletin board under their name. At the end of the game period the person with the best poker hand wins the grand prize! One of the great things about poker is that there is some element of luck. Even though the better salespeople will get more cards and therefore have better odds of winning, your top gun salesperson isn t necessarily a shoe-in to win. That keeps everyone motivated to play and sell. #4 Sales Bingo Another common game that works well on the sales floor is Bingo. Bingo is great because your employees will have to stretch ALL their selling skills, not just their favorites, to be a winner. 2

4 Game Rules: Design a Bingo card with different sales goals (like the ones listed in sales poker) or other selling behaviors you want to encourage in each square. When employees achieve one of the sales goals on their cards, they get a manager to initial their squares. You can decide if you want to do a single row as a BINGO, four corners, an X, or a full card! You can give a prize to everyone that gets a BINGO on the day of the game, with special prizes for the first row, first full card, etc. The idea is to keep your staff motivated to keep playing and therefore keep performing at high levels all day long. #5 Christmas Tree This game is so fun you could do it for a week or for the entire Christmas selling season from Black Friday to Christmas Eve! Game rules: Set up an artificial Christmas tree in the employee break room or your stockroom. Decorate it with lights and tinsel. (Everyone likes a fancy tree, right?) Next, get a bunch of old ornaments, or even pick up some ornaments from the dollar store, and paint a number on the bottom of each ornament. Decorate your tree with the ornaments. Get a bunch of game prizes. The prizes should be of varying value and varying types. Make sure you have at least a couple of REALLY good prizes that everyone will want to win. Make two lists of your prizes one that you post for your employees so they can see what they might win, and one to keep hidden in your desk with the prizes numbered (the same numbers as on your ornaments.) Create a list of selling goals like achieving a certain number of add-ons, selling an item of the day, or being the top-seller for the day or the week. When an employee reaches a sales goal, he or she gets to choose an ornament from the tree. The number on the bottom of the ornament they pick corresponds with their prize! The ornaments can be reused and prizes restocked throughout the selling season. Christmas Tree is obviously a great sales game for the holidays, but also think about how you might adapt this for other times of the year a basket of plastic Easter eggs with numbers inside them, a box of Valentine s Day chocolates with numbers underneath the candies (double prize!), or numbered plastic spiders on a huge fake web at Halloween. What Type of Prizes Should I Give? Your prizes could include cash, movie tickets, gift certificates to local restaurants, extra days off (after the holidays) with pay, or merchandise. But all your prizes don t have to be super-expensive. Sometimes employees simply enjoy playing sales games for the fun of competing with each other. Inexpensive prizes could be home-baked cookies, a long lunch break certificate, an employee of the month parking space, or scheduling preferences. Be creative! 3

5 Avoid Post-Contest Let Down One thing you should keep in mind when you run any kind of contest in your store is the dreaded post-contest let down. After all, where there are winners, there are also those who didn t win. One way of making everyone feel like a winner is to give the entire team a special small treat like a candy bar or a $5 gift card to the local coffee shop. But your staff may not be the only ones let down after the contest. You might feel some post-contest let down, too in the cash register! Your staff will naturally sell more than normal when they are motivated by a contest; that goes double when they get the foot traffic boost from the holidays. But when the contest is over, it is natural for your employees to drift back into their old sales habits. Your big challenge is to keep them selling at peak performance. A crucial step in maintaining sales throughout the year is continuous on-going sales training and coaching it s not an inborn skill, you have to teach the 6-step selling process. The Retail Mastery System has an entire kit devoted to selling, plus ten other critical retail skills. Start right now training your team to be sales superstars and then keep them hungry by playing for prizes you both win! Making your store more profitable will become much easier with a team of hungry sales hounds on the floor. BONUS! Your Print and Play Bingo card is on the next page. Just print as many as you need, fill in your sales achievements and play away! Bob and Susan Negen 233 Washington, #213 Grand Haven, MI Phone: Fax: info@whizbangtraining.com 4

6 Name: Sales Bingo! B I N G O 5