Strategies to Increase Sales: Selecting Specific and Measurable Commitments to Action

One of the most important things you can do to ensure success of your sales kickoff is to have a plan for reinforcing the concepts, processes and/or tools you’re rolling out at the event. One of the best ways to ensure that reinforcement happens is to have specific calls-to-action at the end of the event. Too often, these CTAs are throwaways. They’re tossed on a slide at the end of the final day. The presenter rushes through them while everyone fidgets, anxiously awaiting to get to the airport or to the bar. Do yourself a favor. Spend time crafting the CTAs and ensure you’re rolling them out in a way that they actually completed.

Depending on your company, you may have a number of different roles attending your sales kickoff. (Hopefully, you have also identified clear objectives and reasons for them attending). Therefore, ensure your CTAs are relevant to the role. How are their day-to-day activities going to be different after the event? What are your expectations around those changes? Make your CTAs relevant to what they do every day. Your CTAs for your inside sales reps, for example, are likely going to be different from those that you’re giving your managers. Ensuring they’re relevant to specific roles will help improve the likelihood they’ll actually get completed.

Make Them Specific

Let’s say you’re rolling out a new messaging methodology. A CTA shouldn’t just be “use the methodology”. That’s obvious and way too general. Making your CTAs specific gives you the benchmarks you need as a leader to ensure that they’re actually being done. One example may be to use the pre-call planning template on your next sales call and have your manager review it before the call and debrief afterwards.

Make Sure You Can Measure Them

The key to having CTAs that are actually completed and not dismissed, is to ensure you have a way to measure they’re actually being done. How can you inspect them? Adding fields in Salesforce, equipping your managers to ensure the new process is being followed, using an elearning system post-event, are all ways that our clients have set up measurable CTAs.

Have a Plan for Follow-Up

Measurable CTAs are important, but so is the plan for following up on those insights. What are the activities that your managers and fellow VPs need to do in order to follow-up on the completion of the CTAs? How are you addressing any challenges that have come up post kickoff?

Remember, there's a reason you're having the sales kickoff. Spending careful time conceptualizing and reinforcing the CTAs to ensure you get the intended result.