Categories: Sales Leadership | Sales Process | Sales Kickoff
The sales kickoff is a galvanizing moment for a sales organization, rallying the team around their purpose, strategy and goals for the year. As a sales leader, you've likely been a part of many of these kickoff events, and you may be familiar with the quick fizzle that sometimes happens once everyone gets back to their daily responsibilities. Driving behavior change with a SKO is no small feat, but consider the stakes - increasing competition, aggressive sales objectives, and highly guarded budgets - can you afford to invest in an event that doesn't move the needle on your business objectives for the year?
Ensure your sales kickoff event makes it out of the conference room (or Zoom meeting) and into the day-to-day activities to drive meaningful impact on revenue. The key to ensuring SKO success beyond the event is to understand what it takes from the sales reps, managers and yourself as the leader to drive lasting outcomes. Then, commit to making it happen.
We call owning the leadership of your sales initiative “Leading from the Front”. The most successful companies we work with have heads of sales and senior leaders who lead from the front.
When leaders neglect to lead from the front, they fail to achieve lasting results. Avoid making the same common mistakes with the below strategies.
When Leaders Fail to Lead from the Front
As a sales leader, if you want to see a measurable return on your investment from the sales kickoff, you can’t delegate the ownership and development of the entire initiative. It's up to you to dictate the priorities and objectives that the event will communicate, and provide guidance on how they will be conveyed. When you delegate the decision-making to your enablement team, you leave yourself vulnerable to being left in the dark and/or in disagreement with the message of your event. How can you be sure that this event will drive your most business-critical objectives if you don't take a hand in guiding its creation?
If you don’t have a hand in developing or reviewing the critical concepts of your SKO, you’ll lack belief and passion for it altogether. This lack of interest will speak volumes to your sales team.
Where you can succeed:
Lead from the front by staying involved in the development and review of the methodologies, training and content that are tied to your sales kickoff.
Own the responsibility of ensuring the critical concepts of your sales kickoff are relevant and customized to your sales organization’s execution challenges. The more applicable the methodologies, tools, content and training are to your sales team's daily activities, the more likely they’ll be able to perform these activities successfully. It starts with your input, support and dedication.
In our engagements with clients, the sales leaders who come to workshops (instead of sending delegates) are better equipped to get executive-level buy-in, support and input on what’s being developed. They’re also better equipped to move faster toward launch and execute a transformation initiative with minimal internal roadblocks. By achieving alignment and support from cross-functional leaders they’re able to implement an initiative that helps their sales organization avoid process bottlenecks and setbacks.
An aligned and effective sales transformation is achievable for these sales leaders because they have access to company decision-makers and have power and influence to make strategic decisions of their own. They leverage both of these capabilities when reviewing deliverables or determining transformation criteria, to ensure the kickoff aligns to the business goals of the company and optimizes how sales leverages cross-functional resources and teams.
Where leaders often fail: Not gaining manager commitment and support
Front-line managers play one of the biggest roles in driving the longevity of your sales kickoff concepts. They’re critical to ongoing success because managers have the power to reinforce key criteria on the front lines, in live opportunities. If your front-line sales managers don’t see how the initiative will benefit them or don’t believe your organization is truly going to run the business in this new way — they will likely neglect to change their behavior, which will impact the actions of their team members. This type of ambiguity occurs when sales leaders fail to lead from the front in a way that gets managers bought in early on.
Put yourself in the shoes of your sales managers trying to hit their numbers while facing up to a change in strategy. If staying where they are is less painful to them than making the change, they’re likely going to avoid the extra hassle altogether and continue with what’s familiar. It’s human nature. Why change when it’s easier not to, when no one is pressuring you to, and when you don’t see a clear benefit to you?
Your front- and second-line managers have to see the value in your SKO initiative and act in support of it, day in and day out. Their action in support of the business change will breed further action from their reps on the front line, extending the life of your sales kickoff priorities and ensuring new concepts actually get executed on.
Where you can succeed:
Lead from the front. Make training managers on new processes, content and tools a priority. Train them how to coach. Get your managers to commit to making the change and reinforcing critical concepts so their sales reps will follow suit.
As a sales leader, you have to lead from the front, long before the event to get managers to know and see how invested you’ll be in implementing strategic change. Leaders who prepare, launch and reinforce their sales kickoff initiatives with the “do as I say, not as I do” mentality will quickly find out the hard way that their initiative won’t stick. If you’re going to get your managers and therefore your front-line sales reps executing on your initiative, you’ve got to show your commitment to the new strategies and priorities you're presenting in your SKO intiative.
When your sales managers see the benefit to running the business in this new or evolved way, they’ll be more committed to driving results.
Help managers lead from the front by:
- Getting them to clearly see the value of your initiative and how it will benefit them specifically
- Ensuring they articulate the importance of your initiative to their sales teams
- Providing them with a management cadence to ensure they can and will execute
It’s much easier to hold second and front-line managers responsible for driving ongoing reinforcement and adoption if you’ve got a plan already in place to ensure their success. This article provides valuable insights you can use to plan ahead and equip your managers to drive measurable SKO results.
Where leaders often fail: Too focused on the training vs. the entire transformation
When planning a SKO, it can be easy to focus more on the event and less on what happens before and after. Your SKO event is when the concepts are communicated, but it's not actually when the change or alignment takes place. It's the launchpad - the kickoff - to a new approach and set of behaviors you want to achieve with your sales team to advance the company's biggest objectives for the year.
The reality is the training event is only a brief moment in time. When your sales teams log off or return home afterward, how can you ensure they’ve retained what they need to succeed? How will they be equipped to continue to drive consistent results one, two, three months down the line? How did the event prepare your managers to reinforce critical concepts or onboard new hires using new methodologies and processes?
Where you can succeed:
Lead from the front by thinking beyond the training event and instead, committing to a broader sales initiative aimed at solving your biggest sales execution challenges. Once you’ve defined what’s next for your sales teams, invest in your best opportunity to launch it effectively and drive ongoing adoption.
One of our founders, Grant Wilson, loves to share this quote with our customers: “Don’t buy the house if you can’t afford the insurance.”
The spirit heads of sales and senior leaders are meant to take from this is: why invest in a sales kickoff event if you’re not going to put in the time and resources to ensure it sticks?
Lead from the front by doing your research and ensuring you’re investing in the right priorities for your sales team. After all, with tough competition out there and likely coveted company resources, you need to ensure that your sales team is spending their time on high-value activities that will lead to closed deals.
Ensure you’re launching a results-driven sales initiative to course-correct this year’s execution setbacks by:
- Working back from the end goal to define critical gaps in your sales team’s ability to execute
- Aligning your sales kickoff objectives and agenda to the company's revenue strategy
- Getting buy-in from the executive leadership team on your sales kickoff initiatives
- Planning ahead to prepare a ready-to-launch adoption and reinforcement plan
- Leveraging a partner to help you avoid common setbacks and achieve results faster
Don't Let Your SKO Fall Flat
With increasing competition in the market and a fluctuating economy, your sales team needs a high level of execution to achieve revenue goals in the coming year. The sales kickoff is a critical time to equip them with the right tools, skills, and mindset to win bigger and more consistently. Can you afford not to maximize this opportunity?
We've worked with dozens of sales organizations to execute sales kickoffs that drive lasting revenue. There are a few common missteps that we see sales leaders and enablement teams make that can cause their SKO to fall short of the desired impact. Tim Caito, Senior Partner in Force Management, will host an upcoming discussion, sharing four of these often-overlooked actions as well as critical items for leaders to plan a kickoff that moves the needle. Sign up to join us.
