Categories: Sales Kickoff | Economic Change
As a new fiscal year approaches, sales leaders face a critical task: setting the right priorities for your Sales Kickoff event. The past year may have presented new challenges for your sales team, whether due to external market factors or internal changes as your organization scales to pursue greater revenue. Those challenges can be opportunities for your team to learn and strengthen your approach in the coming year.
We’ve identified five common challenges among sales teams we’ve worked with this year: building and converting pipeline, low deal margins, never-ending sales cycles, difficulty expanding renewals, and operating at scale.
If those sound familiar, keep reading - because we’re breaking down the best SKO focus to combat each of these issues and come out on top in the coming year.
Building and Converting Pipeline
If your team struggles to attract and convert leads in the current economic landscape, your focus should be on driving elite execution of the sales fundamentals. Investing in seller skills and processes is crucial to protecting your pipeline against economic factors. Consider implementing a training initiative at your SKO, along with tools to ensure lasting adoption. Not only will this kind of event support new logo acquisition and drive your revenue goals, it will show your sales force that you are invested in their success, boosting morale and commitment.
Missing Out on Margin
When your team is grappling with budget concerns and often resorts to discounting to secure deals, it may be time to shift focus toward how you communicate your value. It’s critical that sales leaders in this position give their sellers the language needed to elevate the sales conversation away from features and into business impact. We recommend developing and launching an updated value messaging framework at the SKO. Updating your value message to respond to new customer needs will encourage a customer-first sales process, which can lead to larger deal sizes across the board.
Never-Ending Sales Cycles
Deals that seem to stall, quarter after quarter, can significantly impact productivity and your ability to forecast, and this scenario is becoming all the more common with buyer budget concerns due to the economy. If your team is getting stuck in negotiation or surprised by new stakeholders or requirements late in the game, it’s time to assess your qualification process. Use your SKO as an opportunity to define what a great deal looks like and provide a process for consistent qualification using a system like MEDDICC. A customized qualification system can help you close more deals faster and be a game-changer for efficiency.
Land, But Can’t Expand
If your deal size and renewals plateau, failing to meet your growth goals, it's time to focus on connecting with customers. Your SKO is a great time for cross-functional collaboration, so use it to apply learnings from customer success to your sales process and train on new methods for deep discovery. The key is to make your solution a must-have and increase the value you provide for customers. If you do this, you can expect reduced customer churn and increased recurring revenue across the board.
Operating at Scale
For those looking to establish operating rhythms to enhance efficiency and support growth, the best SKO focus is aligning your organization for next-level execution. Level up your results with enhanced top-down and cross-functional alignment. That means getting buy-in from cross-functional executive teams, clearly defining the role and rhythm for front-line managers, and providing individual contributors with the tools they need to succeed and a clear roadmap to success. By providing these elements at your SKO, you can ensure your strategy makes it into the day-to-day operations and directly drives your desired organizational outcomes.
Engineer Your Best SKO
As you plan your Sales Kickoff for 2024, addressing the specific challenges you faced in the past year head-on is key to the kind of sales evolution that drives the success of top industry players. That’s why we created an infographic guide to break down the specific steps taken by elite leaders to improve upon past performance. Download the guide for more personalized strategic steps you can take to make this SKO, and year, your best yet.
