Everything You Need to Know About Planning a Sales Kick-Off
Everything You Need to Know About Planning a Sales Kick-Off
BoomPop Team · 11/7/2024
What is an SKO?
A sales kick-off is designed specifically to energize and reinvigorate the revenue organization and sales team, with a focus on sales goals, key metrics, and incentives and how they support the company’s overall annual strategy, alongside product, services, or features roadmaps, sales training and process alignment, team recognition and awards, and a heavy dose of team building, motivation, and inspiration.
Alongside a strong annual company kickoff, a sales kickoff is strategically aligned to drive sales momentum, diving deeper into both the sales fundamentals everyone on the team should be following as well as what’s new and exciting for the year - from programs designed to reward hitting or exceeding goals to new and interesting things to share with customers and prospects.
To help you deliver an impactful and inspiring sales event, let’s dive into everything you need to know to plan a successful sales kick-off for Q1!
1. Start Your SKO Planning Early
Surprise, surprise! You should start planning a Q1 SKO in Q4 of the previous year (or even earlier!) And Q4 can already be a busy time of year, full of end of year holiday gatherings and retreats, not to mention more company holidays, which means fewer workdays than most quarters! The earlier you can start planning a Q1 sales kickoff, the better.
In your planning, consider making key timely decisions as early as possible:
Location: Will you host your sales kickoff offsite or even make it a destination trip?
Venue: Selecting vendors including hotel and meeting space is key.
Group Travel: The sooner your attendee list is finalized the better, so group travel needs can be properly scoped and arrangements booked, so last-minute costs don’t eat up too much of your budget.
Timeline: How many days will your SKO take, including travel and meeting time?
Dates: Looking across team and company calendars, what dates will you set aside?
Planning early allows you to establish and coordinate speakers and confirm which departments will be contributing to the one-day or multi-day kick-off presentations.
This also gives leadership and teams like Marketing, Product, and Customer Success enough time to gather content and necessary information to share in preparation of the sales kickoff. Then, you can shift in to next order priorities on your plan, like
Calendars: The sooner you can send a placeholder save the date to everyone on your team, the easier it will be to ensure everyone is able to attend
Speakers: Which leaders and experts - whether internal or external - absolutely need to be in attendance? Get their confirmation ASAP, and flesh out programming details later.
Communication: The earlier you plan, the more time you have to get your team excited for the year ahead!
2. Establish Clear Goals for Your Sales Kickoff
Goals about sharing goals? You heard that right! Yes, you’ll be talking a lot about goals at your SKO, from company goals to team goals to individual goals. So it’s absolutely essential to define clear goals – for this event itself.
Think about not only what you want to accomplish, but how you’ll measure the success of this meeting itself. What does success look like after the SKO is complete? How will you know if this event made an impact?
Consider the following:
Inspiring and energizing your team.
How can you measure it? Think about both qualitative methods like conversations, energy in the room, and post-event 1x1 feedback, as well as quantitative methods like post-event surveys, impact on company pulse surveys, or other key metrics you track that indicate team engagement.
Successfully introducing new products or services.
How can you measure it? Talk with key internal leaders to see what metrics make sense for your team, from product adoption numbers to product or solution mentions on sales calls. You might also consider following up with fun pop quizzes or “homework” style checks for the first few weeks after your SKO. Reinforcing these messages can take time!
Internal and operational avancements and resolutions.
How can you measure it? From creating alignment across teams to closing gaps in processes, operations, or systems, your SKO is a great time to actively address key issues and provide remedies. Look at how you’ll measure progress here, and consider internal ways you can measure the impact of your SKO too. How often are people bridging up problems or issues? How quickly are those being resolved? SKOs offer a huge opportunity for reinforcing - or creating - a culture of trust and honesty, which can truly pay dividends. Think about how you can measure this impact, too, whether with powerful anecdotes or by measuring the cumulative impact of issues that get highlighted and then resolved.
Outlining key strategies to meet or exceed sales targets.
How can you measure it? Think about ways you can measure key behavior shifts or strategies your team launches at your SKO. For example, if you launch a new sales software, measure how often your team is logging in and actually using it. If you launch a new sales material, look at ultiization numbers and host post-launch debrief sessions to see how people are using it.
Driving key sales metrics across teams.
How can you measure it? Be clear with your team about the metrics you’ll be tracking to hit key goals across all relevant teams, initiatives, and objectives. From hitting new business sales numbers to growing customer accounts to expanding into new markets and beyond. Set the expectation with your team about what and how you’ll measure success, and be consistent with reporting on those numbers.
3. Create an Impactful Agenda
With your goals clearly defined, you’re ready to build out the agenda for your SKO. It should be balance of general sessions, breakout discussions, and interactive elements that solidify the takeaways and learnings.
Here’s what a typical SKO agenda may look like:
Opening Session: Led by senior leadership, this session sets the vision for the year or drills down into the sales aspects if company goals have already been shared across the team. The CEO, CRO, or head of sales often kicks things off with a motivational speech, highlighting the company’s broader goals for the year ahead and how the sales team can impact these objectives.
Department Presentations: Then, other key departments like marketing, product, sales operations, and customer success provide updates on new initiatives, products, or campaigns that support these overall company and sales team goals. Each team explains how these efforts will support sales in the upcoming year. This is a great opportunities for attendees to ask questions and truly understand the collaborative efforts of the whole team to support sales.
Breakout Sessions: These sessions offer a chance for the sales team to go deeper in core areas, get coaching and support, learn and practice sales pitches and talk through ideas on applying what they’ve learned or how to address common challenges in the sales process. Common topics include product demos, role-playing customer interactions, and exploring new campaign strategies. Some teams even bring in specialized coaches to help teams polish up on certain skills, with tailored support for tenured sales team members all the way to the newest members of the team.
Recognition and Awards: Since motivation is a key objective for any sales kickoff, create ample space to celebrate the team’s achievements from the past year. This will rejuvenate the team and they will know that their hard work is appreciated and recognized by the broader group. This is also a great time to debut new incentive programs or details for regular incentives – like unveiling the prime international location for that year’s President’s Club!
Don’t forget to schedule breaks in between sessions so you don’t burn out your attendees, and make sure there’s also time built out for team building and connecting. Think of healthy snacks and beverages to provide to keep people energized and happy in between.
And since your sales team is likely always working deals, you may event bake out specific time in the agenda for working sessions, follow up, phone calls – so your sales team isn’t distracted from the important topics at hand.
4. Choosing the Right Location for Your SKO is Key
Location will be a critical question in your early planning stages as you’re thinking through your event budget, so read up about how to plan an offsite here, and consider these money-saving tips when planning an offsite SKO.
Our suggestion? Host your SKO as an offsite.
Selecting an inspiring offsite location for your SKO can add to the event’s energy and sense of reward, elevating the impact of your event. Hosting your SKO at a desirable travel destination is a fantastic opportunity to reinforce the company’s commitment to supporting the sales team's growth, recognizes the hard work from the past year for everyone on your team, and energizes your team to work hard to unlock the rewards of hitting this year’s goals!
Elevating your sales kickoff with an amazing offiste location and a thoughtful, premium event can really drive incredible forward momentum and excitement, and even some friendly competition across your team.
In fact, offsites have been shown to boost team productivity to the level of adding an extra month of productivity per employee each year.
Imagine the impact that could have on your sales goals!
5. Collaborate Across Teams for SKO Programming
While managing the logistics of putting an SKO together, make sure you have the proper time – and team – to focus on the programming of your SKO as well. What you’ll say during your SKO can’t be an afterthought. So make sure you can drive the right collaboration and focus on this key aspect of your SKO.
Many teams find working with a partner like BoomPop to coordinate the event planning logistics on their behalf - everything from research to hotel outreach to negotiation to budgeting, to booking AV, activities, photographers, guest speakers and ordering branded swag. With all these details (and more) in the hands of experts, internal SKO organizers can focus on planning, aligning, and managing everything that goes into the key messages and programming of each and every minute of your SKO. Not only does this approach save precious time and stress from the planning process, it can also add up to lots of savings as well.
Then, you can focus more of your time coordinating with key leaders and department heads, which in and of itself is a lot of work! As Q4 progresses, goals for the year are being finalized, product roadmaps being approved, and budgets being aligned. These will impact much of the key messaging for your SKO, but these decisions are often a moving target. Create an internal cross-department taskforce to focus on your SKO programming, along with a regular meeting cadence and list of key messages and milestones. Clearly assign sessions and presentation building to each owner, and bake in internal review cycles so that all key leaders are aligned. Determine the final reviewer of key facts and numbers, so all details are buttoned up and there are no surprises or inconsistencies at the event!
With a cross-functional team from stakeholders who may be presenting at the SKO – like marketing, rroduct, and customer success – as well as others whose input may be key, like finance, legal, or operations – you’ll be able to refine the right messages to deliver an SKO that successfully stays in alignment with company goals and sales goals – and helps your team achieve these goals!
6. Plan Your Post-Event SKO Process Ahead of Time
You may believe your sales event concludes after everyone goes home, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. After the SKO, it’s time for everyone to hit the ground running.
Set clear expectations for who is responsible for measuring each of the goals you set for your SKO through post-event surveys, dashboards, conversations, and more. Create a timeline and tasklist for reporting on these findings, since many are likely to span across the year.
Make sure the sales team is equipped to immediately begin engaging with the new strategies discussed at the kick-off. Do they have acces to all the right materials? Are they trained on all the new processes? Make sure follow-up is clearly assigned and enablement continues on a regular cadence.
Update or adapt meetings, reporting cadences, and agendas as needed. Make sure team leaders schedule promised follow-ups. Set a cadence of memetings with team leaders to report on key findings. And make sure every team’s agenda aligns with new processes and reporting structures. Enable team members and leaders to be able to report back on what is or is not going well with the new approach.
A thoughtful SKO follow-up strategy is critical to keeping the momentum alive, so your team remains motivated, reinvigorated and in alignment for the year ahead.
And that’s exactly what we want from an SKO!
Do you feel empowered to begin planning your next Sales kick-off? Planning a sales kick-off can be a time consuming process, which is why we are here to help. If you would like to schedule a call to discuss how we can help you plan an onsite or offsite event, we are here to help. Schedule a free consultation here.
