CoverStory
January marks the start of the national sales meeting season for many life sciences organizations. These meetings are more than annual kickoff events, they’re critical opportunities to launch new products and commercial strategies, celebrate past successes and build alignment and excitement around strategic sales goals.
Each national sales meeting requires a significant investment of time and resources, making it imperative to design every touchpoint to maximize impact. QuidelOrtho’s sales enablement & training team recognized an opportunity to reimagine the impact of our 2025 North America Sales Meeting (NASM), seeking to go beyond content-heavy lectures and focus on real skill development. Our goal was twofold: align all sales teams to our customer-centric sales process and demonstrate QuidelOrtho’s commitment to the growth and development of its sales force.
To achieve this, our learning and development team worked with TiER1 Performance. Together, we crafted a series of interactive breakouts that challenged teams to work together to sharpen their sales skills in a safe, fun and engaging environment. Each breakout reflected a critical phase of the QuidelOrtho sales process, culminating in a team-based role-playing simulation that required participants to demonstrate everything they had learned in the previous breakouts.
Not only did the breakouts cultivate greater collaboration and knowledge sharing among our sales teams during the NASM, but they also equipped team members with invaluable skills and insights that they could apply to their roles right away — ultimately fueling performance beyond the event.
At QuidelOrtho, we aim to build lasting partnerships with customers by designing every interaction to be efficient and impactful. Because the North America commercial region includes a dispersed sales force across the U.S. and Canada, we needed to create clarity around QuidelOrtho’s commitment to customer excellence and align all sales teams to our customer-centric sales process.
“We’re committed to creating a culture of care, empathy and efficiency for our customers. Our sales representatives serve as trusted advisors to healthcare providers who are looking for innovative solutions that enable them to focus on what’s most important, their patients,” says Kathy Sharpe, director of sales enablement and training at QuidelOrtho. “That’s why we purposefully chose to leverage the breakouts at our 2025 NASM to build the core skills needed to deliver an excellent customer experience throughout the entire buying journey.”
Leveraging an experience design framework, we began by identifying specific moments that matter, outlining what we wanted sales representatives to think, feel and do as a result of the NASM experience. We then mapped these moments into our QuidelOrtho sales process, which helped us identify the core skills that sales representatives need at each phase. From there, we crafted learning objectives for each breakout that supported the development of these core skills, and then we embedded fun and engagement into each activity — without minimizing the focus on skill development.
As you plan your next national sales meeting, consider the following tips for crafting meaningful, skill-focused breakouts that drive engagement and lasting performance improvement:
Align learning objectives with a central process to create a cohesive thread across separate breakout sessions.
Embed fun and engagement into your learning experience strategy — without diminishing the focus on skill development.
Design skills-practice activities for common sales scenarios that can be repurposed after the event.
Create a safe, low-risk environment where teams can practice realistic role-play scenarios.
Aligning the breakouts to critical phases of the QuidelOrtho sales process enabled us to create a cohesive learning experience across three separate time blocks. We designed each breakout activity to build on each other.
The first two breakout activities, for example, focused on understanding customer needs and effective customer communication, respectively. The third breakout activity involved a role-playing simulation that mirrored the entire sales process, requiring teams to apply the skills they developed during the first two breakout activities.
Here’s how the breakouts flowed together:
Learning Objective: Deeply understand customer needs.
Core Skills: Pre-call planning, asking questions and active listening
Activity: The Elevate breakout was designed to prepare sales representatives to explore customer needs with curiosity and uncover unmet needs. It opened with a facilitated discussion on the importance of exploring unmet customer needs and the challenges involved.
Then, participants watched four “Day in the Lab” video clips depicting realistic customer scenarios. Following each video, participants discussed the customer needs they noticed with the team members at their table, with discussions facilitated by table captains.
After the videos had been discussed among the small groups, the room facilitator led a debrief with the full group. After a short break, every participant then drafted a pre-call plan for their next “sales call” and worked with members at their table to upgrade their plan.
The breakout concluded with a facilitated debrief, and participants used the mobile app configured for the NASM to draw out key insights.
Learning Objective: Communicate value relative to customer needs.
Core Skills: Positioning, handling objections and negotiating
Activity: To build on the skills developed around understanding customer needs in the Elevate breakout, the Empower breakout focused on enabling sales representatives to use customer-centered messaging to position and differentiate QuidelOrtho’s solutions relative to a customer’s unique needs. This required positioning solutions and navigating objections with empathy, which ultimately helps sales representatives build trust with customers.
Participants engaged in multiple rounds of a card game, similar to Apples to Apples® or Cards Against Humanity®, designed to help them practice effective customer communications. Each group seated at a table was provided with a deck that contained:
Customer conversation prompts.
Context cards that provide additional customer information.
Objection cards that feature real-world customer objections.
Judge cards that provide guidance on selecting the best response for each scenario, establishing clear criteria for what “good” looks like in objection handling.
At the start of each round, a judge — rotated among players — introduced the initial prompt. Everyone at the table wrote how they would respond to the customer in this scenario.
As context and objection cards surfaced, participants had to react in real time and rework their response. The judge then selected the best response at the table to declare a winner for that round, and everyone, including the judge, discussed the scenario as a group.
The participants who won the most rounds at each table were declared the winners. The breakout concluded with recognition of the winners from each table as well as a group debrief and share-out of key learnings.
Learning Objective: Apply skills to practice proposing and negotiating customer-centric, value-driven solutions that beat the competition.
Core Skills: All skills from the Elevate and Empower breakouts.
Activity: We designed this breakout to engage teams in a series of high-energy roleplay activities that mirror the critical phases of QuidelOrtho’s sales process. We intentionally designed this simulation to involve all participants — including technical and field representatives — and challenge them to combine their collective skills in a fun and safe team-based selling environment.
The first round focused on pre-call planning and discovery; the second round focused on messaging and objection handling; and the final round focused on solutioning and negotiation.
Here’s how it worked: More than 200 participants, divided into groups of 10-12 people, were spread across four rooms. Each room contained “pods” that consisted of three teams seated at three different tables. Each pod was competing to achieve the highest collective score in their room. Each round lasted about 60 minutes and followed a similar flow that involved team planning, role plays and light debriefs.
During the first two rounds, every team planned its approach to the roleplay scenario and then selected specific team members to engage with panelists who acted as the customers. Every team member was required to engage with the panelists before anyone was allowed to role play a second time; this required teams to think strategically about how to use their diverse skill sets.
Only one team engaged with the panelists at a time, allowing the other teams within the pod to learn from their approach and pivot as needed. Therefore, those who learned from the other teams in their pod had the best chance of being successful. At the end of the first two rounds, after all three teams engaged in their role plays, the panelists provided three scores (one score per team) using a specific set of criteria per round, and led teams through a quick debrief.
During the third round, the teams within each pod worked together to engage in a solutioning role play and then elected pod members to present their collective solution to the panelists. After the three rounds concluded, the highestscoring pod was declared the winner of that room. The room facilitator celebrated the winners before leading a debrief discussion, during which team members shared reactions and lessons learned from the entire breakout series.
“National sales meetings often involve role playing, but these experiences can invoke anxiety among teams if you don’t intentionally create an environment where they feel safe to fail and learn,” Sharpe says. “The first two breakouts helped create that safe space for our teams to practice and sharpen their skills, so that they felt confident and prepared to apply them during the role-play simulation. No one experienced the role-play simulation alone either; every person was part of a team, which very much reflects the team-selling environment our representatives work within every day.”
The feedback we received from our 2025 NASM was overwhelmingly positive and set the precedent for the design of future meetings. Several sales leaders shared that every future NASM “needs to be as interactive” and expressed appreciation for the intentional focus on practical skill development, engaging team building and competitive role playing. In fact, we used the “think, feel, do” experience design framework as a springboard for planning our 2026 NASM, which takes place this month and will feature similar activities.
“The theme for our 2025 NASM was Transcend, which symbolized our goal to take QuidelOrtho to new heights by leveling up the skills of our sales force,” Sharpe says. “I believe the customer-centric skills and experiences created at the 2025 meeting will continue to inspire and enable our sales force to move forward together as a united team that’s committed to creating a culture of care, empathy and efficiency for our customers.”
Sherri Rivera, MT (ASCP), is a certified Six Sigma green belt, and is senior sales enablement and training manager within the North America division at QuidelOrtho. Email her at sherri.rivera@quidelortho.com.
