HOW TO ENSURE YOUR NEXT SALES KICK-OFF MEETING IS A SUCCESS
When I was a director of marketing, working inside corporations, one of my key responsibilities was to ensure that our annual sales kickoff meeting was a complete success. I wanted everyone to leave the meeting trained on our new products, well-versed about the competition, and most importantly, re-energized to get back into the field to sell.
Over the next few months, thousands of companies will begin planning their annual sales meeting. Most assuredly, there will be lots of sleepless nights for the people who have to choose the location, facilities, and make sure all the details are in place to ensure the sales kickoff is a success.
Based upon my experiences, here's some information to help you plan the perfect sales kickoff:
Select a Sales Meeting Theme
The first step toward conducting a successful sales kickoff starts with choosing the right theme. One of the most important factors to keep in mind as you chose your Sales Meeting Theme is the level of the sales force’s morale. All sales forces go through periods of high and low morale. When morale is high, you can be more creative and take bigger risks with the theme you choose. However, I wouldn’t recommend an over-the-top theme during tough times.
Set the Agenda for the most important meeting of the year!
Regardless of whether your company calls it the annual sales meeting, yearly sales conference, or once-a-year sales rally, the annual sales kickoff meeting is the most important sales meeting of the year. The Sales Meeting’s agenda is one of the key factors that will determine the meeting’s overall success. The main objectives of the 2-3 days sales kickoff agenda are “Preparation and Renewed Motivation.” Since the meeting is short, there simply isn’t enough time to devote to detailed hands-on product training. Rather, higher level information should be presented and the more detailed material provided on a disk-on-key, or better yet, online over the company intranet.
When building the agenda, here are 4 areas to take into consideration:
Salesperson Success Stories: Most sales meetings don’t include one of the most important topics - salesperson success stories - about how they won their key accounts. These stories are very important because they provide models of successful salesperson behavior that can be emulated by the rest of the team.
Competitive Analysis: Most competitive analysis presentations given at sales meetings are too theoretical. They simply do not provide practical real-world strategies and tactics. Quite often, the marketing group that creates this session has never “sold.” As a result, their analysis is too simplistic or too generic to provide the silver bullets that the salespeople need. In addition, these presentations are built on the assumption that the customer is a logical, rational decision maker. In reality, the decision to buy any given product is a complex decision made by groups of people who have vastly different needs, personalities, and political aspirations. For all of these reasons, I strongly recommend that you conduct a true win-loss analysis where actual customer decision makers (from wins and losses) are interviewed before the meeting. The presentation of the study results is the best way to understand the decision making process of your customers and provides a true snapshot of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses.
Product Training: Here’s two facts that might surprise you. The average person truly hears only 7 minutes of every hour they spend listening and within 72 hours they forget 95% of what they’ve heard. Given this information, you should think twice before planning a long, exhaustive product training session. A better strategy is to “chunk” it. That is, break the session into chunks of time no longer than sixty minutes. Also, break up heavy technical chunks with lighter topics, completely different subject matter, or audience participation activities. This way, the attendees will remain mentally fresh and have higher retention.
FUN!!! Life’s too short not to have fun and some self-deprecating humor should always be on the agenda. Choose the right master of ceremony, and put together a funny line-up. Show that you don’t take yourself too seriously, have fun wherever you can, and always make sure there’s a great cocktail reception or a nice dinner outside the conference venue at the end of day!
IMPORTANT - Sales Meeting Key Takeaways
It’s very important that sales kickoff attendees are provided with meeting takeaways. First, all of the presentations and meeting information should be available online over the internet. Don’t fall into the trap of associating the success of your meeting to the thickness of the materials you hand out. Second, you should provide some type of sales skills self-improvement takeaway - a copy of book on advance sales strategies for example. Finally, always give company-logo’d giveaways - T-shirts, hats, pens, mouse pads, etc. Ideally, you would like your takeaways to tie into your meeting theme. Be sure not to skimp on the takeaways, because your annual sales kickoff is the most important sales meeting of the year.
