What is the best alternative to a typical sales kickoff?

Q: What is the best alternative to a typical sales kickoff?

Replace the keynote-and-banquet model with structured, interactive game blocks that put the sales team in the action. The typical sales kickoff burns budget on slides nobody remembers and dinners that blur together. The best alternative makes the team the show.

The story

SideHustle is a comedy game show built around entrepreneurship. Teams of 4 to 5 brainstorm absurd-but-plausible business ideas, pitch them out loud in 60 seconds, and score on Funny + Fundable. The mechanics translate directly to a sales kickoff because pitching is what salespeople already do; we just remove the product and replace it with random prompts. The constraint forces creativity. The competition gets the room loud. We have used variations of this loop with classroom audiences at Mars Hill, the University of Oklahoma, Penn State, Xavier, and the University of Wisconsin, and the same loop works with sales teams because the underlying skill of generating, structuring, and delivering a pitch is identical. The kickoff that follows feels different because the team has already practiced together.

What it means

If your sales kickoff agenda is 80 percent slides and 20 percent dinner, flip it. Use the time block for structured game-based pitching practice. The team retains it because they participated, not because someone read them a strategy deck.

Try it

• Play free at playsidehustle.com
• See us live: Sept 25 at Pershing Hall in Austin. luma.com/playsidehustle
• Email team@playsidehustle.com