Categories: Sales Leadership | Sales Kickoff | CRO Best Practices
The sales kickoff is often one of the biggest investments of the year. The event not only requires budget, it also takes a large share of resources in terms of time and commitment from your go-to-market and enablement teams. That also means our focus is largely on planning and executing the event - but what happens after the SKO? As your teams wrap up the event and start focusing on revenue-driving activities, do you have a plan to ensure that you can drive clear return for this investment in a way that is relevant to your company's top priorities and revenue goals for the year?
Force Management has worked with hundreds of organizations to help them execute sales kickoffs that advance their strategic revenue goals. Today, we're calling on insights from three of our veteran facilitators who design, plan and lead kickoff training events that get results. Here are the leadership actions after the sales kickoff that they've seen drive positive business outcomes.
1. Create a Structured Plan for Reinforcement
"If you expect your people to train themselves after the SKO, you're probably not doing it right."
- Antonella O'Day, Managing Director, Facilitation
Sales kickoffs are a galvanizing moment to rally your revenue team behind the strategy and goals for the year. But one of the biggest SKO mistakes a leader can make is expecting motivation and teambuilding to drive results throughout the year. Team alignment is critical for a strong go-to-market motion, but what happens when your teams leave the event? They go back to working in silos, they fall back into old habits, they check the new process boxes.
If you want your SKO to support your organizational objectives for the year, laying out a structured plan for ongoing reinforcement is critical. In a conversation about post-SKO actions for leaders, Antonella O'Day points out that peoples' memory of a few days of training quickly deteriorates. Continuous learning and reinforcement is vital to ensuring adoption of your SKO initiatives. Antonella recommends structured reinforcement - beyond self-guided worksheets and videos - that gets your teams actively involved in learning and applying new strategies.
Now that you've successfully executed your event, do you have a schedule and curriculum for keeping new standards and priorities top-of-mind across your revenue team? Hear Antonella's advice in the podcast clip below, or listen to the full podcast.
2. Set Specific Objectives and Timelines to Measure ROI
"I measure [SKO impact] based on the outcomes produced relative to the strategic direction."
- Tim Caito, Senior Partner
Force Management facilitation leader Tim Caito recently had a webinar discussion revolving around driving measurable ROI from the sales kickoff. He acknowledges that SKO goals are often qualitative and not tied to the strategic priorities for the year. Consider your recent or upcoming SKO - how will success be measured? Is there a plan to monitor ongoing performance after the event to course-correct any challenges before your revenue team gets too far off track?
As you define your plan to assess performance, think about a few things that will be the most important for your teams to do/apply to every opportunity to drive your core revenue objectives. Whether it’s pipeline gen, moving deals through the funnel, capturing high-value opportunities, etc. — define two or three things that will make an impact on your biggest priorities and find ways to drive accountability to ensure these sessions happen and are valuable for those involved.
Then, Tim advises leaders to determine and clearly communicate how success will be measured to ensure managers and salespeople know what’s expected of them. Whether that's territory activity, deals stage advancement or documented qualification of deal value; outline the leading indicators for success and how to course-correct.
As a leader, proving the ROI of your team's activities is critical to your success. Ensure you have set up the structure to demonstrate ROI from the sales kickoff. Here's a clip from Tim's conversation:
3. Equip Managers to Execute and Coach to Key Initiatives
"Anybody who leads a team of leaders... [their] job is to create culture and standards."
- Brian Walsh, Managing Director, Facilitation & Delivery
No matter how powerful or well-received your sales kickoff is, coaching is the factor that will make or break its long-term success. Your front-line managers are the ones who will ensure your revenue strategy is executed in day-to-day activities. As a leader, your role is to provide them with the blueprint and skillset for success as a coach. Brian Walsh underlined this point in a webinar conversation, The New Rules for Your SKO in a Changing Economic Landscape.
When provided with new goals and strategies, it's easy for coaches to default to inspection, running their reps through a checklist of required behaviors. Brian emphasizes the need for leaders to equip managers to communicate the "why" behind each new process to gain buy-in from their teams, and reinforce the coaching skills needed to guide their teams to success. Deal reviews and forecast meetings become ineffective when they are treated as enforcement rather than coaching opportunities.
If you haven't already had your event, consider how you can prepare managers ahead of your SKO. If you're coming off of your SKO, ensure managers have a clear directive on how to reinforce and evaluate your go-to-market strategy with their teams. Is there a unified management rhythm for how often each manager performs activities like deal coaching, territory planning and reporting? Is there agreement between managers about what great coaching looks like? Do managers have clear benchmarks and standards to coach to?
Brian describes how leaders can equip managers to drive SKO outcomes in the below clip.
Our Facilitators Are Sellers First
At Force Management, we developed a proven methodology that's for sellers, by sellers. Every member of our facilitation team has had decades of success as a rep, manager and sales leader. They understand the challenges of executing the revenue growth strategy at the seller level, and they're passionate about helping sales organizations deliver value to their customers at scale. Find out why our customers say our team of facilitators has been key to their results.
