Categories: Sales Transformation | Sales Kickoff
This blog contains content from our Ultimate Sales Kickoff Resource Guide. Check out all of our sales kickoff resources, best practices, and tools here.
Sales Kickoffs are meant to get the sales team motivated toward a common goal for the upcoming year. Your upcoming SKO will be an important opportunity to instill this motivation and align your team to execute mission-critical sales activities.
Ensure the right outcomes and objectives are prioritized in your SKO agenda in a way that drives that company strategy. Set clear, measurable objectives for your SKO and, ultimately, your revenue team. After all, the SKO is just one or two weeks of the fiscal year. Clear objectives for the kickoff and beyond will be imperative to drive consistent sales performance in a complex selling environment.
Set your objectives now so you and your enablement team know what you have to achieve to drive revenue goals. Below are a few things to factor in when you begin to set clear objectives for your next sales kickoff.
1. Make them realistic
You may have high hopes for a sales kickoff, but you need to be realistic about how much people can absorb and how long it takes for them to absorb things. Make sure your objectives are realistic and can actually be achieved. Changing the entire mindset of your revenue teams is not a realistic objective for a two-day SKO event. But changing the process they use to qualify opportunities may be.
Think of one or two reasonable objectives, not five or six. Consider what sales activities will have the biggest impact on your reps' ability to close deals in the current economic climate. Having realistic objectives ensures that you are keeping the time, scope, and resources you have at the forefront. Remember, realistic objectives set you up for success.
2. Make them practical
Similar to making them realistic, make sure your SKO objectives are relevant and practical to what your revenue teams do every day. Your sales teams should be able to execute your objectives immediately after the sales kickoff. This practicality ensures that you can carry the momentum of the SKO event into the day-to-day grind of the organization.
Consider what success will look like for each group after the SKO: individual sellers, customer success, front-line managers, leadership, and the company overall. Giving practical directives based on what you’re trying to achieve from the SKO will make these action steps easier to execute and coach against. (Example: Each opportunity opened after the SKO needs to use MEDDICC qualification, or Managers need to use MEDDICC qualification to assess pipeline opportunities.)
3. Make your SKO objectives specific
Avoid any ambiguity around the purpose of your SKO and the expectations you’ll have for each team member moving forward. You’ve likely got mission-critical benchmarks in mind (increase average deal size, time-to-productivity, reduced churn, business predictability, etc.) Your kickoff should have specific objectives that align with those long-term revenue goals, as well as the overall company strategy. Work back from the end game to define specific objectives for your SKO that will help you achieve those benchmarks.
Your objectives should help you align the SKO activities, deliverables and training to what’s needed to equip your team to hit those long-term benchmarks. Ask yourself, “What’s critical for my salespeople and managers to know at this exact moment in time?” Some specific examples may be:
- Every salesperson is equipped to execute on MEDDICC the Monday after the SKO.
- Every manager will use the MEDDICC coaching process on every deal starting the following week.
- Find three new pipeline opportunities attached to the new product bundle in the next quarter.
4. Define short-term objectives for your SKO
Long-term goals help you define the purpose of your SKO and give you an end goal to work back from as you define your plan. However, at your SKO, you also need to have short-term goals to give your teams something to achieve in the initial weeks and months following your SKO. Given your long-term goals, what are those short-term wins you should see along the way?
Short-term goals can be used to highlight areas where teams or individuals have succeeded so you can easily lift up those supporting your initiative and share success stories. They can also help you immediately identify regions or teams that are struggling to execute so you can make adjustments before that team falls behind–leaving you off track toward hitting long-term objectives. Given the competitive landscape, both of these actions will be critical to driving ongoing motivation and sales impact in a complex selling environment.
When creating short-term goals, ensure they are actionable for your sales team to achieve immediately following your SKO. It could be that you want each sales rep to execute their next sales conversation using a new methodology you rolled out. Don't forget your managers. For example, if you launched or trained on MEDDICC, you’ll want your managers to use new MEDDICC fields in Salesforce immediately following the meeting. These short-term goals could be in conjunction with your long-term objective of improving your qualification process or selling higher in prospect organizations.
Based on what you plan to launch at your SKO, consider short-term goals or wins that will be your leading indicators that your organization is on track to achieve your larger objectives.
5. Make them measurable
Ensure you can validate ROI for your efforts.
Find a way to measure your identified objectives. What are the direct results of your SKO investment? If you don’t have a way to measure and monitor your objectives after the SKO, they will likely fall by the wayside. In this case, it will be difficult to validate the spend on SKO resources. Make sure you have a concrete way to quantify whether or not your long-term and short-term objectives have been achieved. Define specific measurements for each objective and how you will review/capture those measurements. Specify:
- The results or metrics you want to see.
- The time frame by which you want to see those results.
- How you will monitor and measure success on an ongoing basis.
Specifying the measurement of your objectives in this way will help you not just gain compliance, but drive effective execution of the concepts rolled out during your SKO.
For example, a short-term metric might be that you want 100% of sales reps to participate in one manager opportunity coaching session in the next month. Then, schedule a time to have an “all-manager” call to discuss the progress. An example of a long-term metric might be to have all regions improve time-to-productivity by 50% within six months of the SKO. Then, schedule monthly all-manager calls leading up to the six-month mark to share what’s working well, what’s not, and how managers are using SKO concepts to improve ramp time. The all-manager calls in both examples are key to ensuring they follow through on what’s being asked. After all, they don’t want to be the one manager without anything valuable to bring to the table.
To make measuring success easier on you and your team, consider integrations that you can use to gain line-of-sight into front-line execution and adoption. After you’ve rolled out your initiative or SKO, use that data to communicate the progress along the way. Boost seller engagement and results by highlighting what’s working, lifting up top performers, and sharing the results sellers have achieved by executing what they learned during the SKO.
Now, Make it Happen
In the current B2B selling environment marked by increased competition and stagnant demand, the SKO is a critical opportunity to fuel execution across your revenue teams. Don’t wait; start planning now. With clear outcomes in mind, define what’s next.
As you set your SKO objectives, use the information in our live webinar: Your Sales Kickoff: Common Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make. During the session, veteran sales leader Tim Caito will outline the common pitfalls to avoid and strategies leaders can leverage to execute an SKO event that delivers all year long. Register to watch live or on-demand here.
