The Key Considerations that Determine Your Annual Sales Meeting’s Structure, Theme, Agenda, and Location
Because your sales kickoff is the only annual gathering of the entire worldwide sales force, you want everyone to leave the meeting confidant about the company’s direction, trained on your new products, well-versed about the competition, and re-energized to get back into the field. After keynoting hundreds of sales kickoffs and sales meetings, I’d like to share 5 critical success factors to consider when planning your annual sales conference.
1. The Stage of Your Sales Organization
Sales organizations can be classified according to their maturity. Every sales organization can be classified based upon whether it is in a build, compete, maintain, extend, or cull stage. The build stage is when the sales organization is first establishing itself. If successful, it will proceed to a high-growth compete stage, and then to maintain stage that is contingent upon stable, predictable success. As the sales organization ages, it will either extend its prior success and enjoy longevity or suffer decline and be forced into the cull stage where it must reduce its size. The figure below shows the interrelationship between the sales organization stages, the challenges at each stage, and the company life cycle.
Because each stage encounters a unique set of challenges, the sales kickoff meeting goals, structure, and outcomes are completely different as well. The top sales challenge in the build stage is creating sufficient sales coverage and establishing a working sales model. Therefore, the focus of the sales kickoff is on learning the ever-evolving corporate presentation, studying the products, and building the organization’s sales intuition through extensive sharing of what’s working in the field. Most likely, this meeting will be conducted “assembly” style as one contiguous group and held the company headquarters or close nearby.
Conversely, a sales kickoff for a maintain stage company is quite different. The focus shifts from scaling the organization to maximizing sales productivity by lowering the cost of sales and increasing the average sales price. The sales organization is fully staffed with more tenured salespeople. They are segmented by the size of the company they call upon and industry vertical sales specialists cover finance, government, retail, distribution, healthcare, and so on. As a result, the sales kickoff should be structured to meet the needs of each segment and add value from the standpoint of the senior salesperson. As a result, this meeting will utilize breakout sessions and be held at a desirable location most likely far from headquarters.
2. Your Competitive Position in the Marketplace
In most industries, a single company controls the market. Compared to their competitors, they have a much larger marketshare, top-of-the-line products, greater marketing budget and reach, and more company caché. For salespeople who have to compete against these industry giants, life can be very intimidating indeed.
However, a B2B Buyer Persona Study I recently conducted provides some good news in this regard. Buyers aren’t necessarily fixated on the market leader and are more than willing to select second-tier competitors than one might expect. In fact, only 33% of participants indicated they prefer the most prestigious, best-known brand with the highest functionality and cost. Conversely, 63% said they would select a fairly well-known brand with 85% of the functionality at 80% of the cost. However, only 5% would select a relatively unknown brand with 75% of the functionality at 60% of the cost of the best-known brand as shown in the figure below.
The “push” versus “pull’ market characteristics that separate Product 3 from Product 1 dictate that completely different sales kickoffs be held. For example, Product 3’s salespeople must push themselves into new accounts by introducing their solution and its benefits to skeptical risk-adverse buyers (this requires extensive training and real-world knowledge transfer such as salesperson best practices panels). Conversely, Product 1 is such a well-known company their salespeople are pulled into new opportunities because of their market position.
3. The Deficiencies of Your Salespeople Across the Organization
Every sales organization has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, when B2B Buyer Persona Study participants were asked to evaluate the salespeople they met over the past year, only 54% could clearly explain how their solution positively impacted their business, only 31% are able to converse effectively with the senior executives of their company, and only 18% would be classified as trusted advisers whom they respect.
The sales kickoff presents a great opportunity to focus on your organization’s specific weaknesses in order to improve overall team performance. Unfortunately, some sales organizations haven’t truly identified their weaknesses accurately or quantified them with precision. As a result, an opportunity is lost. That’s one of the reasons I like to conduct extensive pre-meeting research, sales rep interviews, and online surveys of the sales organization before I keynote a company’s sales kickoff.
4. The Behavior of Your Buyers
In the final analysis, it is the quality of the salesperson that should be considered the deciding factor that determines which vendor wins the business. Because the salesperson sets the tone for the relationship with the prospective buyer. The buyer can think of a salesperson as someone who is trying to sell something, a supplier with whom they do business, a strategic partner who is of significant importance to their business, or a trusted advisor whose opinions on business and personal matters are sought out and listened to. Obviously, a trusted advisor enjoys significant advantages over the competing salespeople.
The missing agenda item at most every sales kickoff is an in-depth analysis of how B2B evaluators think and what’s really on their minds. What are their perceptions of the salespeople they meet and how do they ultimately choose between them? What are the dynamics of evaluation committee politics and group decision making? What are underlying psychological and behavioral tendencies of lower level evaluators versus c-suite decision makers? How do the different company departments (IT, finance, procurement, etc.) and vertical industries make their buying decisions? What are the circumstances that determine which vendor will be selected? This is the knowledge the sales teams crave.
5. Your Sales Organization’s Morale
I published a fascinating research report on The Gap Between High-performing and Under-performing Sales Organizations which confirmed that high-growth sales organizations have a higher level of morale. Fifty-six percent of high-performing team members indicated that their sales organization’s morale was higher than most sales organizations’ compared to only 11 percent of average and 21 percent of underperforming sales team members. Conversely, 35 percent of underperforming sales team members and 27 percent of average team members indicated that their sales organization’s morale was lower than most organizations’ as shown below.
What’s the level of your sales organization’s morale? Once again, the sales kickoff meeting provides a unique opportunity to make an immediate improvement. More than team building exercises or playing games, improving morale is a strategic initiative that consists of a series of planned messages and coordinated actions. The meeting location, theme, agenda, giveaways, and every presenter is a part of the morale improvement strategy. Please read my 2018 Sales Kickoff Planning Guide for more information, ideas, and best practices to help improve your team’s morale.
After keynoting hundreds of sales kickoffs and sales meetings, I’ve created a Sales Kickoff Meeting Planning Guide to help you conduct the perfect annual sales meeting.
2018 SALES KICKOFF PLANNING GUIDE
About the Author:
Steve W. Martin is the foremost expert on “Sales Linguistics,” the study of how customers use language during the complex decision-making process. His “Heavy Hitter” series of books on the human nature of complex sales has helped over 100,000 salespeople become top revenue producers. His latest book is titled Heavy Hitter I.T. Sales Strategy: Competitive Insights from Interviews with 1,000+ Key Information Technology Decision Makers and Top Technology Salespeople. Steve is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and teaches at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business MBA Program. You can learn more about Steve at www.stevewmartin.com.
