The 5 Ps of an Engaging SKO

Let's talk about SKOs. I know, just hearing those three letters probably makes you want to reach for a bottle of aspirin. But here's the thing, as long as you start with a very clear purpose, you can turn what otherwise might be a dreaded annual event into a very powerful catalyst for your sales and marketing teams.

So how do we get there? Start with asking yourself, what's the one big thing you want your sales team, your marketing team to walk away with? Is it a specific sales strategy or initiative? Or maybe a new sales motion? Or is it a company-wide goal or objective? Or a new product or service launch?

Use this to develop an overall theme or purpose for your SKO and then you can make sure everything else is in support of that primary purpose. Here's a quick exercise. Write down your top SKO objective as you know it right now. You can pause this video and think about it for a couple minutes and then come back.

Is it clear? Is it measurable? Is it in line with your larger corporate strategy? If not, let's chat and help make sure that you've got the right purpose for a powerful SKO this year.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Actually, I don't want to talk about an elephant. I just want to talk about the room, or rather the place that you pick for your SKO. That room, that place can have such an impact on the overall experience. And it's why it can feel like such a daunting decision.

Part of the problem is you have more options than ever before. You could have a destination SKO. You could have a virtual SKO. You could have an SKO in your office. You could have a hybrid SKO. But whatever you pick, that place needs to accomplish two things. First of all, it needs to eliminate distraction.

Your people need to be able to leave everything behind and focus on what really makes them great at the work that they do. And number two, that place needs to leave your team thinking differently. How are they going to come away refreshed? How are they going to come away with a new idea?

How will they have a fresh perspective on their job? I'd like for you to do something for me. I have a little challenge. I want you to think about the best experience you ever had in a work setting. This could be at an SKO. It could just be a normal work day. Think about the place.

Think about the whole experience and how that setting made it unique. Now, you might want to just pause this video. I want you to take out a sheet of paper and write two columns. In one column, put everything about the place that helped make that so memorable. Then in the other column, I want you to think about how you could take all that memorableness and bring it to life in your SKO.

How does that influence your choice of place? I would love to see the list that you brainstormed. If you want to talk about it, schedule some time.

Let's get practical for a second. How many times do you think a seller leaves a sales kickoff and they wonder to themselves, well, that was nice. But how's that really going to help me? Help me generate a new opportunity or close more deals all too often, right? Look, your team doesn't need another TED Talk.

They definitely don't want more product training. What they do need are tools, effective strategies, knowledge and information that they can put into practice right away when they get home from SKO. That's what I call a practicality gap. It's good to share a vision. It is good to get them excited and inspired for the upcoming year, but it's just as important to equip them.

Equip your team to get off to a fast start and build momentum and they'll thank you. So here's the call to action. As you review your SKO agenda, if you're not equipping the team and you can't answer for yourself what they should do immediately after that session or when they get home, then you may have a gap.

Reach out. We're here to help.

Okay, picture this. It's the second day of your SKO. It's about two o'clock in the afternoon and you walk into the back of a breakout room and you see a few of your participants nodding off. Sound too familiar? I think we've all experienced that. We've seen that and we want to avoid that in your SKO.

So here's a simple way to do that and that is to plan for intentional cadence or rhythm or pulse of engagement throughout your SKO to maintain those energy levels throughout. So a good way to think about that is the best DJ you've seen. So he or she doesn't just pump out high-energy music the entire time, right?

That would exhaust everybody. Nor would you want to have a bunch of slow songs back to back, right? So they do a great job of managing the energy in the environment with fast songs, high-energy songs, slow songs, some songs that are great to dance to, some that are great to sing along to, etc.

So think about being the DJ of your SKO and managing that pulse. A few practical tips are just to think about the design or the spirit of each of the sessions. So from a keynote standpoint, you can balance some educational keynotes, right? With some more motivational or entertaining keynotes. When you think about the actual sessions or the tracks, you want to balance the different types of those and that can span from having some that are more knowledge transfer that are typical 45 minutes and balance that against having some that are 60 minutes with some audience participation through polling and chat and even 80-minute sessions that have some breakout exercises and some application, whether it be applying it to deals or accounts or doing some role playing, but high expectation of application and engagement of your audience.

Then once you think about those different types, you can strategically place them throughout potentially low-energy times like the afternoon slump after lunch, about an hour after lunch, we kind of all, right? And so that's when you might want to plan some of those more engaging or experiential or interactive type sessions. Hopefully that gives you some good tips to go on.

So think about your schedule. Think about the time slots and think about proactively managing the pulse of engagement throughout.

Here's a number that should bother anybody planning a sales kickoff this year. We surveyed over 400 leaders and found that 59% said that the new sales behavior faded within 90 days after the kickoff. That means the impact that you hope to have on the organization for most teams is not even going to last a quarter.

And that's usually not because the SKO was bad, it's because there was no plan for what happens the Monday following. So I'd ask you to think about SKOs a little bit differently. In addition to thinking about what goes on at the event, spend just as much time thinking about what goes on after the event.

Think about what change you want to effect in the field in the first 90 days following your sales kickoff and put a plan together to enable the team to implement the new strategies, the new tactics, the new disciplines to drive new business performance. So how do you do that? I would start with thinking about what impact do you want the team to make this year?

What outcomes are you looking for? And as part of the SKO, what new content, tools, training, guidance are they getting to help them drive that new behavior that lead to that new performance and then determine how are you going to measure that? And I would look at it in two dimensions. One is leading indicators.

So rather than waiting until the end of the year to see if you made your number, think about activity-based metrics that you can monitor to see if you are heading in the right direction. So are the managers coaching to the new process, the new message? Are the teams getting certified on new skills or new behaviors?

Are they actually applying what they learned from kickoff in their territories, their accounts and their deals? Those are great leading indicators you can dial in to make sure you're headed in the right direction. And then of course, your typical sales performance metrics at the end of the year, increased win rates, accelerated deal cycles, improved average deal sizes, those can all be measured along the way quarter by quarter.

And then the last tip that I would share with you is to really get serious about reinforcing those key knowledge, skills and disciplines that you're really trying to enable across the field with reinforcement and continuous improvement cycles. Get involved in terms of a continuous cadence of monitoring the leading indicators to find out what's working and what's not and where there might be a need for additional reinforcement or enablement or coaching from the sales managers and put that mechanism in place.

Don't rely on just enablement to reinforce and remind people, but bring first-line management into the fold and make sure they're coaching to the objectives, coaching to the process, coaching to the message, coaching to the application as appropriate in their teams, territories, accounts and deals. And now when that's put all together, you'll be able to report back on the leading indicators and the trailing performance metrics to really see the impact that this year's SKO has made.

And you'll have some great insight into the return on that investment beyond just everybody had a lot of fun at the sales kickoff and enjoyed the keynotes or enjoyed the guest speaker or the nighttime activities. And lastly, if helpful, be sure to take advantage of our free guide in terms of making sure that you've got a follow-on post-SKO plan for managers, sales leaders, sales reps and enablement leaders to help make sure that your SKO is the best it can be.