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.
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It encourages lots of add-ons.
It encourages up-selling.
It rewards great performance immediately.
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!
•
•
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•
•
•
•
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.
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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!
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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 49417
Phone: 616-842-4237
Fax: 616-842-2977
E-mail: [email protected]
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Sales Bingo!
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