It's a Two Way Street!
Summary:
Instead of framing the kick-off as a long presentation to your sales team, frame it as a series of conversations by the team that addresses things they want to know or see
Feedback from the team can be formal or informal – forms can be incredibly insightful, but rarely get filled out. Conversations with the team can yield good information but can be difficult to pivot to a structured part of the agenda
When creating presentations and breakout sessions, make sure that team members feel they have adequate constructive input on the content
There's No I in Team
A successful sales kickoff isn’t something that sales managers and sales enablement leaders put on for the sales team as a large presentation, It’s really a group coming forward to present and create the kickoff together. This is an important perspective shift – looking at the sales kickoff as something SE does FOR the sales team is going to kill a lot of participation and engagement, because it’s going to feel more like a long presentation, which people can tune out or kind of just passively listen to. Instead, you’re going to want to get buy in from the entire team – fortunately this can be easy to do:
You can start with the more formal route. Create a survey, see what people’s thoughts are, and create content around that, tagging and working with people who have specific interests or thoughts or presentations to help put it on.
You can also be informal – have discussions in slack or teams and see what people are interested in. It’s important with this route to make the conversation constructive, opening up questions can very quickly lead to a big complaining session about things people don’t like, and they’d like changed, which is not going to be helpful in any way.
By keeping things in a constructive light, but making sure that the entire team feels responsible for the sales kickoff, you’re ultimately going to have a better outcome, get more engagement and quite frankly, have a better time.
