It’s that time of year again! Quarter close, holidays, year-end close, 2014 planning, and annual sales kickoff time!
I for one love sales kick-offs. Maybe it’s the natural networker in me, maybe it’s the buzz you get – regardless, it starts the year off with positive momentum and excitement that sends the troops out ready to rock the year.
We just released a new guide: How to Have Killer Sales Kickoffs. The guide highlights four goals of the sales kickoff:
- Motivate – This is the opportunity for company and sales leaders to inspire and fire up the sales teams! This is where the most senior leadership in the company pays homage to Tony Robbins to drive enthusiasm and passion for what the company is about. The buzz the team receives from attending is priceless and often this is the only chance leadership has to motivate the entire team.
- Recognize – Sales reps have natural egos. The opportunity to be recognized in front of their peers sometimes only comes once a year. Even if they just get bragging rights, sales reps love to be on top and get recognized for it. The rest of the team benefits by knowing who is crushing it, and learning from their strategies and best practices.
- Communicate – So often, we share and send information, but don’t actually communicate anything. Between email, LinkedIn, Chatter, Facebook, chat, and every other communication method out there, messages become cluttered. The point gets lost. Priorities are blurred. This is an opportunity to focus your message and communicate key strategies and goals to align the sales teams focus.
- Train – New products, solutions, or strategies require us to learn and apply new information. What better way to train up your sales teams then together as a team so they can discuss how to apply the information they learn? We all can be a little better at what we do.
The guide also provides tips and best practices on how to ensure a great sales kickoff. While thoughtful preparation is integral to success, even more important is careful follow-up to reinforce strategies, skills, best practices, and keep that positive momentum going all year long.
We work with our customers to identify those tools needed to support reinforcement, and help them integrate them into their sales process, while making it dynamic to each specific selling situation for the sales rep. This ensures appropriate use of those tools and skills learned in the context of a specific opportunity, as well as establishing good behaviors for communicating value to your customers each and every time.
Good luck, I wish you the best success with your 2014 sales kickoff!
