It's the national sales meeting and you've been asked, as one of the company's top salespeople, to share the secrets of your
SUCCESS.

You've thought hard about what works and what doesn't, prepared a batch of transparancies and polished your best road stories. You're deyed up and ready for your half hour of limelight. You take a deep breath, pull open the meeting room door and walk into...the Twilight Zone. 

Some manic clown at the front has your coworkers applauding on cue, as if they're a TV-show audience. then the music rises, the "audience" goes nuts, and a guy with a wireless microphone bounds on stage, talking to a nonexistent camera, introducing his guests-including you. Your manager steers you toward the stage as he pries your fingers off your bundle of transparencies. You won't be needing those, he says. 

You can see the host isn't the right guy, but surely you've stumbled onto the set of the Phil Donahue Show. "Phil" asks just the right questions, dives into the audience for more, even takes gag "phone-in" questions from Chretien, Trudeau and Mulroney soundalikes. Everyone has a ball and in just 40 minutes it's over: "Phil" has interviewed you and eight other reps in the time you thought that you alone would need for your little presentation. And somehow, you realize, you've said everything you had originally planned to say. 

Last January, Miles Canada Inc.'s Diagnostics Division, with the help of Larry Zaidlin Productions, a Toronto-based interactive-entertainment firm, delighted their audience (and surprised nine of the company's best reps) in just that fashion. "We shrunk three hours' worth of dry presentations into 40 minutes' worth of useful information, and all the reps loved it," says product manager Terry Dobson. It was the first time Miles Diagnostics had brought someone in to help them run the meeting. He says they'll do it again next year. 

As an adult activity, play is something our culture-and probably your comptroller-severely undervalues, but ask the attendees to rate your last sales conference or product launch. If they remember it at all, it's probably because they had a pretty good time. Entertainment can sugarcoat large amounts of hard information. And besides, with cheap and efficient alternatives like teleconferencing, email and fax, sharing information is by itself no longer sufficient reason to bring people together. Entertainment can accomplish something that can only be done face-to-face, as it did at Miles Diagnostics' sales meeting, something that can only happen when the particpants are having a good time: team-building. Nothing would have been more divisive than planting the "chosen" reps in front of a podium to lecture their less stellar colleagues, but since it was "Phil" and his high-energy antics, not the star reps, that had the spotlight, the talk-show format had the opposite effect-being on the same roller-coaster ride created a bond of camaraderie among the participants. 

Now more than ever, creating those bonds is essential to success. The recession's rampant downsizing has dissolved old, familiar employee teams; those who are spared often have new roles that are simultaneously more demanding and less static. A national or regional meeting is a real opportunity to give edgy staff a renewed sense of direction, along with the secure feeling of being part of a team. Such was the case at GEX Alsthom International. After a merger and two years of restructuring, the dust was still settling at GEX, the marketing arm of a manufacturer of energy and transportaion equipment that is based in Mississauga, Ont. At last year's sales conference the company decided that it would, for the first time, veer away from a strictly business agenda. 

"We hadn't had an opportunity to form the working relationshops that were needed and that had developed over the years-and we don't have years to form them again," says publicity manager Cindy Rice. "We were trying to escalate the feeling of camaraderie, escalate the feeling of teamwork by jump-starting it with a team-building session."