Design an Effective Sales Kickoff Meeting that Sales People Want
Do you know how to design an effective sales kickoff (SKO)? What would make your sales kickoff high performing? Unfortunately, not enough people know how to design an effective sales kickoff — one that you and your sales team find valuable and worth their time.
From our perspective, an effective sales kickoff helps sales managers, leaders, and their teams to better execute their go-to-market sales strategy in order to improve revenues, margins, win rates, portfolio mixes, deal sizes, sales cycles, and/or customer satisfaction.
Six Tips on How to Design an Effective Sales Kickoff
If you’re serious about helping your sales team be more successful as a result of your sales kickoff, here are six tips on how to design an effective kickoff for your sales team:
Once you identify how success of the sales kickoff will be measured, you can then design a plan to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
— Do you need to create strategic sales clarity?
— Do you need to shift your sales culture?
— Do you need to introduce new products or solutions?
— Do you need to reward people differently?
— Do you need to teach new sales skills, sales methodologies, sales processes, or sales systems?
You get the point. To design an effective sales kickoff, you must start with the end in mind.
Do you have the right talent to execute your sales plan? Talent gaps could be caused by anything from their attitude, their activity level, their learning aptitude, or their cultural fit. Focus on the critical few areas that would have the greatest impact on achieving your desired outcomes.
Recent research by Bain found that the active engagement of stakeholders during the strategy design phase has the highest correlation to strategies being successfully implemented. We know that the same is true with sales kickoffs. Are enough of the right people involved in the design of your sales kickoff?
Avoid delegating your sales kickoff to an assistant or a busy sales rep who will fill the agenda with ineffective business sales training, expensive speakers, or touchy-feely teambuilding activities not tied to explicit business priorities. Invest the time and resources to get your sales kickoff right.
Sales coaches should help with pre-call planning, shadow reps on calls, debrief sales calls, and give constructive feedback to move deals forward in a way that makes sense.
The Bottom Line
Sure, a sales kickoff should review past performance, clarify targets and rewards, highlight new offerings, build relationships, and motivate the team. But the core focus of any sales kickoff should be to create higher levels of sales performance. Do your sales kickoffs set your sales team up for success?
To learn more about how to create higher levels of sales performance, download The 6 Top Reasons Business Sales Training Initiatives Fail
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