Corporate team outings · Sales & planning teams · Totem VR Arena
There was a sales forecast on the table.
There were numbers on laptops.
There were targets, projections, conversion rates and a fairly serious discussion about what the next quarter might look like.
And then someone put on a VR headset and completely missed a target that was sitting approximately three feet in front of them.
That was when the room started laughing.
But let’s go back a little.
A sales and planning team from a Bengaluru company (let’s call them Team X) arrived at Totem in Koramangala for what was supposed to be their quarterly planning session and team outing.
The idea was simple.
Get everyone out of the office.
Find somewhere comfortable enough to sit down, have a conversation, look at the numbers, discuss the next quarter and then do something genuinely fun together.
The team walked in expecting a gaming arena.
What caught their attention first, however, wasn’t the VR.
It was the space.
The cosy lounge. The relaxed atmosphere. The feeling that this wasn’t another conference room that happened to have a few gaming machines in it.
Laptops came out.
Coffee was poured.
The team settled in.
And for a while, Totem looked less like a VR arena and more like a very unconventional planning room.
For sales teams, quarterly forecasting is rarely just about putting numbers into a spreadsheet.
It is about asking questions.
Which accounts are likely to close?
Where are we overestimating?
Which opportunities need more attention?
What happens if one major deal moves to the next quarter?
Where do we need to change our approach?
For Team X, the first part of their visit was exactly that.
They went through their numbers.
They discussed their quarterly targets.
They looked at their pipeline.
They challenged assumptions.
They talked about what the next few months could look like.
And then came the moment when someone said:
“Okay. Enough numbers. Let’s play.”
The laptops closed.
The headsets came out.
And suddenly, the same people who had spent the last hour debating percentages were standing inside an entirely different world.
This is where a corporate outing at Totem becomes a little different.
Free-roam VR doesn’t feel like sitting at a gaming station and taking turns.
Teams physically enter the same virtual environment. They move around, communicate, react to what is happening around them and make decisions together.
The conversation changes immediately.
Five minutes earlier:
“What’s our realistic Q4 conversion?”
Five minutes later:
“LEFT! LEFT! WATCH OUT!”
Someone is trying to figure out what to do next.
Someone else has already run ahead.
Another person is shouting instructions.
And someone who had confidently presented a very detailed sales strategy earlier is now asking:
“Why is nobody listening to me?”
That contrast is precisely what makes experiences like this memorable.
The team isn’t being told to collaborate.
They’re simply given something worth figuring out together.
After the first VR session, the team returned to the lounge.
And something interesting happened.
The conversation didn’t stop.
It changed.
Someone started comparing what had happened inside the game with the way the team had approached their planning discussion.
One person had taken charge.
Another had spotted something everyone else had missed.
Someone had reacted too quickly.
Someone else had stayed calm.
And, inevitably, somebody brought up the fact that the person who had been the most confident about hitting their real-world sales targets had somehow struggled to hit a target in VR.
That became the joke of the afternoon.
“You’re closing million-rupee deals but you can’t hit a virtual target?”
The person in question wasn’t particularly impressed.
But everyone else was.
And that’s the kind of moment that tends to survive long after a corporate outing ends.
Not a posed photograph.
Not a catered lunch.
A story.
The interesting thing about using a venue like Totem for sales planning isn’t that VR somehow makes forecasting better.
It doesn’t.
A forecast is still a forecast.
The numbers still need to be analysed.
The pipeline still needs to be reviewed.
The targets still need to be set.
What changes is the environment around the conversation.
Instead of spending an entire day moving between a meeting room and a restaurant, a sales or planning team can build an experience around the work they already need to do.
Plan. Play. Debrief. Plan again.
That rhythm can make an otherwise routine quarterly meeting feel completely different.
A morning can begin with the numbers.
The middle of the day can involve an immersive VR experience.
The conversation can continue over food, games and laughs.
And the afternoon can return to the things that actually matter to the business.
Most corporate team building activities start with the activity.
At Totem, the activity can become part of a much bigger day.
A sales team could arrive for:
Quarterly sales forecasting
Annual planning
Territory planning
Pipeline reviews
Sales strategy discussions
New-quarter kick-offs
Employee engagement activities
Team celebrations
And then step away from the spreadsheets for an entirely different kind of challenge.
The beauty is in the contrast.
One minute you’re discussing whether a deal is 60% or 80% likely to close.
The next minute you’re trying to figure out why your teammate just ran in the opposite direction.
One moment you’re talking about hitting your annual target.
The next, you’re trying to hit an imaginary target with a virtual weapon.
And eventually, everyone has something to laugh about.
A corporate team outing doesn’t always need to have a complicated agenda.
Sometimes, it just needs to give people enough space to do something they wouldn’t normally do together.
The sales manager sees the person who is usually quiet in meetings become incredibly competitive.
The planner who spends all day working with spreadsheets suddenly becomes the team’s best problem-solver.
The person who consistently hits every sales target discovers that virtual targets are a completely different story.
And people who normally interact through emails, dashboards and meetings suddenly have a shared experience to talk about.
That’s employee engagement without a presentation about employee engagement.
That’s team building without a team-building worksheet.
And that’s what makes an outing memorable.
By the end of the day, Team X had done what they came to do.
The quarterly numbers had been discussed.
The planning conversation had happened.
The team had spent time together.
But somewhere along the way, the outing had become more than a meeting outside the office.
There was a new inside joke.
A few unexpected rivalries.
A couple of stories that would probably come up in the next sales meeting.
And one particularly unfortunate reminder that being good at hitting sales targets doesn’t automatically make you good at hitting virtual ones.
Perhaps that’s the real advantage of stepping outside the office.
You don’t always need to stop talking about work.
Sometimes, you just need to talk about it somewhere completely different.
Then put on a headset and see what happens.
If you’re still figuring out the logistics, our guide on planning a corporate team outing in Bangalore covers venue, format and group size before you get to the fun part.
If you’re planning a sales team outing, quarterly planning day, annual planning session, employee engagement activity or corporate team-building experience in Bengaluru, Totem gives teams the flexibility to combine focused conversations with an immersive experience. Come for the planning, stay for the games, and leave with a few stories your next quarterly review probably won’t have on the agenda.