sales kickoff

You led a great sales kickoff — now what?



After you have planned a valuable and realistic sales kickoff that proved effective for rallying your salespeople around new ways to connect with the customer, you cannot lose the momentum throughout the rest of the year.

These three leadership principles can keep your salespeople’s skills sharp and strategies effective for engaging the customer throughout the whole year.

Accountability

According to a Harvard Business Review report, one out of every two leaders fails at accountability. I have shared in the past about how to hold your team accountable, and I want to extend it to sales kickoffs and beyond.

Once you instill new skills and concepts into your sales team and provide them with actionable goals to strive to meet, and everyone leaves the sales kickoff fueled up to go after it, to serve the customer — it is up to you, the leader, to make sure that same fire behind the eyes is glowing come June, come October. You need to follow-up and ensure your team absorbed key concepts and messaging.

Coaching

Along these same lines, learning is never once and done. It is a continuous journey – a lifetime for the most successful. Seek-out opportunities for sales exercises and role-plays, for training discussions and practice sessions on one-on-ones or ride-alongs.

The onus of coaching does not fall on you alone as the head of sales, but is should be provided by the organization. Empower your leadership team, and especially the front-line managers. Coach them to coach and take task off their plate that free them to invest more in the individuals on their team.

Reinforcement

Is the sales kickoff your only time you get your sales team together? Or do you have a cadence of sales meetings?

Many gather their sales teams, at least regionally, for quarterly or mid-year meetings that spans half a day to a day to ask questions like:

  • What are you doing to meet our overall objectives?
  • How did you perform this last quarter?
  • Have the concepts you learned in the sales kickoff stuck?

Learn more about how Mereo can help your sales team engage your customer in relevant conversations throughout the entire year.

SALES ENABLEMENT SOLUTIONS