We Let Our Sales Team Crush a Car
Let me take you back to 2013. Back before experiential became a buzzword (a very important buzzword) in events.
Our marketing team was either at headquarters in Battle Creek, Nebraska or our favorite coffee shop in Vermillion, South Dakota planning our annual National Sales Meeting. The event always included covering pricing and launching sales programs for the year. Both were important, but they were never the part we obsessed over because they were the easy part.
We obsessed over figuring out the best offsite adventure. Here are a few experiences we planned:
We let our sales team drive tanks and crush a car in a town of 700 in Minnesota. The real win was letting our most seasoned salesperson be the one who got to crush the car.
In Minnesota, we also took the group to Extreme Sandbox, a place that turned construction equipment into a team sport. Excavators. Bulldozers. Timed challenges.
In Kansas we ran tire-changing contests on a race car and raced go-karts.
In Nebraska, we hosted a gravel road get-down in a town of 1100 people with a live band playing on a flatbed trailer in a gravel parking lot.
I mentioned the locations on purpose. People assume the best offsites only exist in big cities or on the beaten path. They don’t. Talk to locals during your site visit and do research. You might uncover a small-town gem no one saw coming.
At the time our goal was to get the sales team to do something unexpected or that they wouldn’t do on their own. Guess what people talked about afterward? Not the agenda or slide deck (although when they got back to business I am sure they were hot topics). They talked about the tanks, the excavators, the bulldozers, the band in the gravel lot and the racecar they changed tires on.
When you give attendees an opportunity to experience something with their coworkers or fellow event attendees, you build camaraderie in a way breakout sessions can't.
Does your event depend on sponsorship dollars?
If your event depends on sponsorship dollars, have you considered building experiences into your sponsorship packages and letting your sponsors attend versus just putting their logo on a sign or on a thank you slide and calling it a day?
Let sponsors be part of the experience. People don’t remember screens. They remember who was standing next to them when they crushed a car.
Your next event doesn’t need to be bigger. It just needs to include a shared experience. Some of the most memorable offsite experiences I’ve planned happened in towns most people would drive right past. So keep in mind, creativity often beats zip code when it comes to event experiences.