Categories: Sales Leadership | Adoption and Reinforcement | Sales Kickoff
Lasting SKO success takes more than a well-thought-out event. There are five actions successful sales leaders take to drive immediate and lasting results after the launch of a sales kickoff or training initiative. Actions that help sales teams start strong, finish ahead and accelerate revenue growth.
Whether you're approaching your sales kickoff or you've just wrapped up your event, these five actions will help you get the greatest return on investment and ensure your efforts drive results all year.
Five Actions Sales Leaders Take to Fuel Lasting SKO Success
If you’ve just spent a significant amount of time and resources launching an SKO, use these steps to maintain that investment in your talent and achieve sales impact. For greater detail on how to implement the following steps in your reinforcement plan, download our full playbook: "Five Actions that Fuel Lasting SKO Success".
1. Communicate Critical Concepts
Ongoing communication from sales leadership is pivotal to driving immediate action from managers and sellers as they get back into their day-to-day activities. Following your event, continue to be clear about the priority of your initiative. Ensure your sales team knows the specific actions they need to take one day, one week, one month after the launch of a sales kickoff or training initiative. Make it clear that execution and adoption around this critical sales initiative is a company-wide priority, and provide clear directives for what success looks like for each function within your broader revenue team. In the SKO Adoption playbook, we share a checklist you can use to evolve your SKO messaging and communicate critical concepts moving forward.
2. Lead From the Front
The success of a major sales initiative can take a variety of forms, depending on how leaders operationalize and reinforce their efforts. Successful change initiatives have champions that "Lead From the Front" and drive transformation at the individual, team and organizational levels. For the successful mobilization of your entire commercial organization to a common goal, it's important to align executive leaders and generate alignment on what success looks like and behaviors in each department that will lead to the achievement of the desired objectives. When you lead from the front, you practice extreme ownership of your strategic initiatives and demonstrate what cross-functional alignment looks like by collaborating with your leadership team to set the tone and mindset for execution. Consider the five leadership actions outlined in this resource: Five Leadership Behaviors that Drive a Revenue Mindset.
3. Provide Managers the Skills and Knowledge to Continually Reinforce
Even your best front-line managers may have difficulty reinforcing new sales behaviors and methodologies if they don't have the right tools and guidelines. Provide your valuable managers with the knowledge, skills, tools and resources to make an impact on rep adoption and ROI for your kickoff event.
When provided with new goals and methodologies, it's easy for coaches to default to inspection, running their reps through a checklist of required behaviors. Ensure that managers are equipped to communicate "the why" behind each new process, and reinforce the coaching skills needed to guide their teams to success. It's also important that you clearly define benchmarks, success indicators, and actions that will help your managers lead their teams to meet newly established objectives. This article explores how leaders can enable coaches through data and technology.
4. Develop a Communication Cadence for Managers and Sellers
Improve and influence manager-to-seller alignment by creating a cadence around great communication between your managers and sellers. Even if you’ve already got some type of cadence in place for deal and forecasting reviews, your managers may not have a set cadence for meetings with their reps, other than 30/60/90 day check-ins. Critical criteria can be missed in the gaps between each meeting, leading to stagnation of results from your event. Our adoption playbook dives deeper on how to implement a communication cadence that builds accountability around front-line adoption and execution.
5. Scale Success and Drive Measurable Results
The most successful sales leaders we’ve worked with focus on improving core areas of sales execution across their broader revenue team to further accelerate company growth and increase valuation. Your sales strategy relies on actions beyond your sales team: Marketing, Customer Success, Product, and Admin teams all participate in crafting the messaging and experience that leads to successful customer partnerships. Ensure you have a kickoff adoption plan that includes them, too. Our resource on Driving a Revenue Mindset explores how leaders can generate cross-functional alignment on core activities in the customer journey to achieve higher-level revenue execution.
Implement A Mindset That Drives Results
For your sales kickoff initiatives to take root, you need to cultivate a common mindset across your entire commercial organization. Ensure cross-functional alignment on your post-SKO execution plan using the strategies in our leadership guide, Driving the Revenue Mindset. It breaks down the three fundamental areas of alignment that are enabling today's top sales organizations to quickly clear organizational objectives and scale growth. Download it now to get started maximizing the impact of your sales strategy for the year.
