In Conversation with Cloudera on Sales Enablement

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

 

sales enablement clouderaThis post is based on a webinar on how modern sales organizations leverage sales enablement for their competitive advantage. You can listen to the entire webinar

here

.

Cloudera is an open-source data management and analytics platform. Cloudera has enterprise customers in every vertical market including financial services, public sector, telecommunications, retail, and healthcare. The company has been scaling rapidly, and in just three years has grown its sales operations from a team of 11 reps based in North America to almost 200 reps globally. Supporting the sellers is an additional team of over 150 sales engineers, solution architects, business development and customer-facing staff.

As Cloudera’s sales team was growing rapidly it was experiencing several challenges that fell into two broad categories:

Consistent Messaging

With so many sales reps, one of Cloudera’s biggest challenges was conveying their message consistently and efficiently.  This was compounded by market and product issues, as Drew O’Brien, Field Operations noted,

“

Cloudera is in a market that’s changing very rapidly on so many different levels. The market right now is very, very hyped and as a result, you have all these different companies entering the market. They all have mixed and often conflicting messages, so how do you come up with something that resonates and cuts through the noise. Because we deal in open-source technology, the product changes rapidly because it’s developed by a worldwide pool of developers from all different walks of life, so things change very fast on that front. Now you add on top of all that rapid hiring, it’s extremely challenging to be crisp and clear.”

Onboarding

While Cloudera had a basic onboarding program in place, like many companies, they relied heavily on marketing to undertake many of their sales enablement activities. As the team grew it became apparent they needed a structured process to onboard sales reps to be as productive faster.

Sales enablement investment

Cloudera has invested heavily in sales enablement resources and put together a formidable team. This made all the difference according to O’Brien,

“

Investing in it [sales enablement] early, making that investment in the supporting infrastructure for our sales people while building a foundation rather than after we’ve built the house already was something that we did earlier than most companies do and it saved on a lot of things for us. Secondly actually building formal infrastructure and not relying on marketing and random half-hearted webinars and weekly web access at the end of our training.”

To help create their value proposition Cloudera put together a cross-functional team of sales and marketing leaders and business development individuals over a three-week process. Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales explains, “

Together we came up with an entire kind of value framework for how do we talk about what it is we do, the problems that we solve, and companies in different segments, whether they be different revenue segments or different industry, verticals or different geographies.”

“

If you involve all of those parties in the development process, in the creation process, they feel like, in many ways, they’re part-owner of it. And for sales teams, driving an option is a matter of getting it started and then, if you can show success and you can actually demonstrate that this indeed does make their lives easier and helps them be more effective, then it kind of begins to gain its own momentum. Because we involved marketing and product management and all those different account executives in the process, it became much easier for them to understand what it was we were doing,”

clarified O’Brien.

Following this process the business then developed assets and content in various different forms, that was disseminated and communicated so that alignment could occur. The alignment resulted in a common message that everyone in the sales team could use when talking about the business, its products and value.

Cloudera leveraged Mindtickle to elevate the readiness of their field sales team and provide them with the right information at the right time. “

You can’t have a field sales team be effective if you’re trying to give every little piece of information to them and have a rep know absolutely every little thing about your products and market. The exercise of readiness is acting like a filter, distilling what’s really important from a selling perspective.  What do reps really need to know, and make sure they know that and nothing more. If they need more than that, they can learn it as they need it or they can call another resource. That’s why you have systems engineers, professional services people and product managers so that when the time is right, you can bring in additional resources to help you out. So involving everybody in the process just helps solidify the mission, the goal, everybody’s on the same page, and for us, it’s been very, very effective so far,

” explains O’Brien.

More effective onboarding

While Cloudera already had a sales onboarding class in place they identified a need to make it more robust for their new hires. Krista Wiederhold, Sales Enablement Coordinator explains, “

We looked at

ways of improving it to be more effective, making it more engaging and role-based, moving a lot of the lecture to the first 30 days. So for us, we were kind of just grabbing what we already had in place, and making it better.”

Being able to leverage technology was key to taking their onboarding program to a new level. Cloudera uses Mindtickle to prepare their reps for boot camp Nilsson explains, “

Because we have offloaded or off-boarded a lot of the content that our sales reps usually get during that week of onboarding training, we bring in people from all over the world to our corporate headquarters for this week-long onboarding. We have put 3 days of content into the pre-work in the form of videos and on-demand instructor-led video content, so when they come to Palo Alto we have a lot more time to do role plays, live presentations, and whiteboard, where they learn the content and retain it. For me that was a huge value add-in, just taking all the content you have and allowing your reps to consume it before they come.”

“Using Mindtickle we get feedback from employees, specifically there are ways to do polls and collect feedback in terms of what content’s helpful, what they need to learn next, so that’s the way we gather information from the field to test its effectiveness. Within the system, we also pull analytics and other metrics we can use to see how effective the enablement efforts we’re putting forward are working,”

continues Wiederhold. “

We can see how fast a rep is coming up to speed on particular topics. Being able to look back at the courses that they completed, exams we ran in Mindtickle or to really test them for the areas that they may need a little bit more help on. So we really look at it to get more insight into how we’re revving them up or how fast it takes them to close a deal, get their first meeting or assess them on areas of our product that they may need more education on. We look at the course analytics as well as how long it takes them to close a deal or land a meeting.”

Achieving objectives

The technology was key to Cloudera’s solution according to O’Brien, “

Invest in technology, like Mindtickle or something like that, to actually structure your programs and enablement practices in an organized way and that just methodically covers everything that you need to cover.”

Using a technology that can perform multiple functions in the process certainly made the process easier for the sales enablement team according to Wiederhold,

“Investing in systems that are going to help you accomplish and teach the field and make it easier for to meet them where they’re at. Also pick a tool that’s going to have integrations from a learner perspective, and that you can modify and make it a lot easier to consume materials. We personally use Mindtickle for onboarding as well as ongoing enablement.”

Technology has also played an important role in reporting and analytics for Cloudera. Mindtickle has enabled the sales enablement team to look at what their reps are doing, what courses they are watching and then reporting back to management on this.

“

When you see these reports, and they stack rank in the different regions, and the different segments by how many of their reps have completed versus started versus not started. That sends the message loud and clear to the field and everyone who has a stake. If you are a manager and you see yours at the bottom of the stack with respect to your reps learning one of our key new values drivers, then we’re providing a tool for our leaders to manage their teams. They can then go ahead and make sure their reps get the training,” continues Nilsson.

A final area where technology can really be leveraged is in certifying and testing reps. “

Most recently we’re rolling out certifications. We’re building courses on a particular topic and certifying the field on that course with an exam, or making them do a pitch presentation,”

explains O’Brien.

Results

“

Now we have a common framework and a common set of messages that 200 individual contributor sellers and the extended teams of sales engineers, solution architects, business development, inside sales, we’re all singing kind off the same hymn sheet, when it comes to who we are, what we do, and the problems we solve and the stories we tell,”

exclaims Nilsson.

 

“So when we’re out there, inspiring and teaching, it all sounds the same, from the CEO down to one of my SDRs. Today there’s a lot of excitement globally, just to be able to share stories because we’ve all have common terminology, language, and value drivers. It’s actually a wonderful place to be. Took us a while to get here, but now we feel poised as this very fast moving company that wants to continue to do that. We have a lot of hopes and dreams here at Cloudera and we definitely feel poised to be able to do that with all the things that we’ve invested in and around sales.”

ForeScout Combines Technology & Role Play for Successful Sales Onboarding [Podcast, Part 3]

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

In this 7-minute

interview Capovilla outlines:

  • How ForeScout’s 30 – 60 – 90-day onboarding program is structured;
  • What the pitch back is and how it’s used to keep new hires on track;
  • Her advice to new sales enablement directors on how to build an onboarding program from scratch; and
  • How ForeScout has leveraged technology in its onboarding.

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

forescout sales onboarding“

The best way to learn is to have the trainees apply concepts to real deals so we have them do teach back concepts. We do a lot  of these role plays where the trainees have to present what they’ve learned to their peers and it’s through that collaboration that the learning really starts happening.”

Renee Capovilla, Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, is reflecting back on what has been critical to ramp up their new sales hires quickly.  “Our goal is to really pack those first 90 days with a lot of learning and effective training and then get them out into their territory. But it’s about month six to nine that they start hitting their productivity targets.”

Ramping up new sales hires so quickly is no mean feat and Capovilla puts it down to a combination of effective learning and smart use of technology. “You want to know how they are using [their learning] on a sales call and the only way you’re going to know that is if they tell you. So the pitch back is so important for us, to hear what they are going to say when they get to the customer, a great way to reinforce the learning through listening,” she says explaining the importance of online role plays.

When prompted to explain her secret to success she offered humbly, “I think what I might have as an advantage is the fact that I enabled the technology sooner rather than later. Don’t feel intimidated to add technology early on, because it won’t just help with the cycle time.”

How ForeScout Achieved Sales Delivering a Consistent Pitch [ Podcast, Part 2]

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

In this 5-minute

interview Capovilla outlines:

  • What their 30 – 3 – 30 corporate pitches are;
  • What is covered in ForeScout’s corporate pitch certification program; and
  • How their scorecard works to ensure all their new reps are on the pitch.

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

sales excellence forescoutAs Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, Renee Capovilla was set an ambitious goal. “The goal was that when asked about ForeScout and what ForeScout did –  a consistent message would come out. And so we have this corporate pitch program which serves as a framework to which we present our capabilities, our differentiators and our value to our customers.”

Capovilla not only took on the challenge but developed a company-wide corporate pitch certification program. But this isn’t just a quick elevator pitch. It’s a detailed three-part process that all sales reps are required to be certified in within their first 30 days.

“It enables that discussion around the security buyer’s challenge, we present use cases, the current infrastructure gaps that could be occurring and then we help walk the customer through how Forescout can uniquely address each one of them.

It’s really more than just a pitch. It’s taking our customers on a journey of our security platform.”
Listen now

to hear how Capovilla introduced and implemented a company-wide corporate pitch certification program.

How Field Sales Enablement Differs from Inside Sales Enablement

Shyam HN on December 5, 2016

Sales Enablement needs of field reps are far more complex than that of inside sales teams. Inside teams are in close proximity to their managers and mentors. Field reps, more often than not, are left to their own devices to ensure their readiness to close a deal.

Difference_between_inside_sales_enablement_field_salesKnowledge baselining and message calibration

For large events such as onboarding or a new product launch, businesses often prefer to interact in person so field reps are flown in, taking them away from valuable selling time at considerable expense. As inside teams are often located in the same place, these initiatives still require an investment of time, but it’s generally far less disruptive than for their field counterparts.

It’s one thing to fly reps in, but to then convey a large volume of information and expect them to digest it, take it back to the field and apply it is a big ask. The forgetting curve kicks in if there is not adequate reinforcement, which often means the new knowledge isn’t applied in sales conversations. As inside reps are in close contact with their peers and their manager, there is more opportunity for these issues to be identified and addressed quickly. That’s why it’s more important to consider how to make baselining and calibration more effective for field sales teams.

One way that’s proved to be effective, while also making use of the valuable time in the office, is to use a

flipped classroom

. This approach allows you to actually calibrate and get the reps on the message rather than just talking them through it from a lectern. Where it’s possible, like before a sales kickoff, you can even give them some pre-work so they already have some background knowledge before attending the sessions.

Refreshing

To overcome the forgetting curve refreshing is important for both field and inside sales reps, and the same techniques are effective for both teams. The main difference for field sales reps is that the way the information is reinforced needs to fit in with their work day. This is where leveraging technology that enables reinforcement initiatives to be mobile is helpful. The technologies can be applied just as readily to inside sales, which makes it more efficient for the sales enablement team as well.

Communication

Because field reps are often physically isolated from their colleagues and managers, communication plays a crucial role in their sales readiness. And when you’re communicating something you want to ensure that every update is applied to sales conversations in a consistent way across the region. Because sales managers can’t have these conversations in person with their field reps technology is the best bridge to meet this challenge. But before turning to technology, it’s important to have clarity on what type of behavior you’re hoping to achieve and how the information needs to be used by the reps, as this will dictate the design of your communication program.

For example, if your team’s win rate vis a vis a competitor is on the decline and you learn some new insights about the competitor that may be useful, you need to determine the most effective way to communicate this. One way could be to just tell them the information like “Competitor X has launched a new feature”. This disseminates the information but doesn’t help you understand or control how each of your reps uses the information.

Some effective ways that this could be communicated include videoing an example of how the information could be leveraged in a customer discussion. Alternatively, you could set a small mission for your reps, where they video how they would handle a customer objection using the competitor information. This provides you with a way to actually see how they apply the information and provide actionable feedback.

Another aspect that can be helpful is reverse communication. Again technology can be leveraged to poll reps to obtain their feedback on important issues. This can also increase engagement by giving them an opportunity to be heard.

Similarly, success stories are another great way to share information peer to peer. So if a rep in Boston has a big win they can make a short video explaining how they did it so reps in San Francisco can learn and use those special nuggets in their customer conversations.

Coaching and Accountability

Coaching is very challenging for managers of field sales teams, but it’s critical for reps to receive actionable feedback on their command of message and process. As managers aren’t able to monitor or see what their field reps are doing every day, technology is an important tool that can help them coach and evaluate performance effectively.

In many companies, sales enablement looks after organization-wide coaching and accountability initiatives, but there’s still a large role for sales managers in one on one coaching. For example, there may be local factors that influence customer conversations, such as a specific competitor, that require coaching on message. In these instances, technology allows managers to set localized missions to train their people. They may select a specific topic for a week and roll out a role play for the reps that it’s relevant to. The manager can then evaluate them and provide feedback at an individual level, even if they’re in a different city, state or country. It’s a powerful way to incrementally improve the performance of their team members and identify and address weaknesses before they become larger issues.


How Modern Sales Organizations Leverage Sales Enablement for their Competitive Advantage [Webinar]

Shankar Ganapathy on September 19, 2016

webinar-mindtickle_500x500_listen-now“If you can structure and enable your sales team to get out of a bad deal early or bring it home to Papa as quickly as possible, then you have enabled your sales team to do the right thing at the right time.

This objective is at the core of Cloudera’s sales enablement strategy according to Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales, who has helped the company scale from a team of just 11 salespeople to a global selling operation with 200 sellers and over 150 sales engineers, solution architects, business development and customer-facing individuals. In this webinar you will learn:

  • How to methodically onboard your people and make them productive sooner
  • Benefits of creating an infrastructure that supports enablement initiatives
  • Sales enablement activities that drive conversion from discovery to final sale
  • How to ensure sales reps are consistently on the message to deliver a best in class customer experience, and
  • How Cloudera leverages sales enablement as their competitive advantage

Listen now

to hear the Cloudera team, along with our VP Sales, Marc Wendling, and Max Altschuler from Sales Hacker, talk about how a modern sales organization can leverage sales enablement to bring value to their customers and prospects consistently and efficiently.

Avalara’s 5 Levels of Sales Certification [Podcast, Episode 3]

Daniel Kuperman on August 8, 2016

In this 12-minute

interview Marcouiller outlines:

  • How Avalara transformed its enablement and onboarding program to scale
  • His five-level process for onboarding and certifying new sales hires, and
  • How Avalara has structured its five unique sales teams while maintaining the same corporate look and feel

Listen now

to hear how Marcouiller manages the challenges of scaling and enabling five leading sales teams at once.

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud or find it here.

Sales Excellence Chuck“Sales enablement is the foundation pillar, saw sharpener and keeper of the flame.”

That’s how Chuck Marcouiller views his role as Director of Sales Learning at Avalara. With a sales force of 325 people scattered across 5 countries and numerous cities, Avalara has managed to achieve scale and maintain enviable growth rates of between 40 – 60% year on year.

“My role is to ensure that each member of the sales team has the foundational skills when they come on board, and then and as they progress they continue to sharpen their skills weekly and make sure that they stay grounded in our strong corporate culture,” explains Marcouiller. “Managing five different sales forces, each unique with their different skill sets and different needs, yet trying to get them to look and feel as if they’re one Avalara, gets to be a bit of a challenge.”

“For us sales excellence really is having a marketplace leading highly capable sales force, creating customers at a rate that meets or exceeds our growth plan. And sales enablement is providing the training and tools that meet the salesforce’ needs to meet the needs of our customers and adapt to the ever-changing marketplace dynamic.”

5 Areas For Sales Development Managers to Focus Their Team Training

Shankar Ganapathy on August 8, 2016

On-the-job training and continuous professional development is a critical aspect of any sales development rep’s role within an organization. Ongoing training provides many benefits, including updated best practices and strategy, improved messaging, new prospecting methods, and ensured adoption of the latest tools and technologies to assist in the sales process.

Regardless of how savvy your sales development reps appear on the job, even your sales vets can benefit from revisiting skill training and building on their foundation of learning and understanding. We asked our own internal team of sales development reps at QuotaFactory where they felt they could benefit from additional training and found there were 5 key areas for sales development managers to focus their ongoing training efforts on:

1. The role of role play

It is natural for SDRs to experience call reluctance, especially when every phone call can be slightly different than the last. The sales development rep that frequently projects anxiety over picking up the phone and tends to rely heavily on email needs a confidence boost and perhaps, more phone training.

Solution: Improvising on a phone call is a skill that will come with time and practice. The best solution is to use role play. SDRs should role play with their manager as well as their peers. Assign each participant a different “persona” to challenge the SDR to adapt to new calling scenarios so they become more comfortable with the process.

Tip: Mindtickle has a role-play feature in which you can create real-life scenarios for your SDRs to train and also allows you to give them specific constructive feedback.

2. Keep employee morale up

Using the phone to prospect inevitably means dealing with a variety of personalities on a daily basis. Therefore, SDRs must hone their ability to control their emotional response in any given situation. Every day, SDRs must control their aggravation with rude or condescending prospects and must be able to rise above negativity to remain positive for the next dial and conversation. Mastering positivity goes hand in hand with learning how to manage patience when it comes to reaching the metrics required of every SDR. It can be tough to maintain enthusiasm when effort doesn’t match results.

Solution: As a sales development manager, you must be the outlet for your SDRs. Maintain a healthy relationship with them and let them know your door is always open. Talking through negative conversations can be just as beneficial as learning from the good ones. Also, it’s important that your SDRs take small incremental breaks from the phone whether it be to take a lap around the office, play a game of ping pong, or walk outside for a breather.  This helps retain their patience and resets their positivity for future calls.

3. Skills that can be mastered off the phone

SDRs have a lot less live conversations than they do dials on their report. This means that there is added pressure to make every live conversation count. Pressure equals nerves.

Solution: Practice and rework messaging strategies. Review objection handling, one-sentence “what we do” statements and key questions to ask to uncover pain points and maintain conversations. Continue with this practice until the rep’s tone of voice is even, the pace of conversation is moderate, and they can easily direct the conversation.

4. A well-documented and accessible playbook

We’ve all heard the statistic; salespeople spend way too much time on administrative tasks. Maintaining an effective and efficient daily schedule while also keeping track of accounts, call plans, and data can be overwhelming without a clearly defined process in place.

Solution: Daily structure is something your SDRs will need constant help with. Create and provide easy access to a sales playbook to define best practices. Try to automate and streamline this process for your entire team and keep all of the materials in a local place like within the Mindtickle platform.

5.Keep reminders handy

Handling an objection plus the added complication of nerves can result in some pretty quick talking. SDRs must master the skill of controlling the speed of their speech, no matter how badly the prospect on the other end of the line throws them off their game.

Solution: This is an important skill that can be acquired over time. Try posting a sticky note with the reminder to “SPEAK SLOWLY” on the SDRs computer screen. One-way call recording is also an effective training method, some reps may be surprised as to what they hear. The first step to fixing a problem is understanding and acknowledging the issue.

Insights from #SDSummit: Killing the Sales and Marketing Tech Stack

Daniel Kuperman on May 24, 2016

The SiriusDecisions Summit 2016 kicked off to a great start with a series of ‘foundations’ sessions talking about some of their core models and approaches. The first session I attended was the “Sales/Marketing/Product Technology”.

MT_Killing-salesHow do you select a technology? Which vendor should you work with? These are questions the session addressed. According to SiriusDecisions, you shouldn’t think about technology first, but assess your current capabilities inside the organization. How are you currently providing for that capability in the organization, where are you currently and where is the gap? This will help you focus on the specific capabilities you need a technology vendor to provide.

Another interesting piece of advice is for you to not look at a technology purchase from an organizational perspective, but rather from an ecosystem perspective. What are the key processes and capabilities that are required to support your business? The focus of your technology selection has to be on strategy so that you can ask “how are vendors going to operationalize my requirements?”.

There are five key challenges most companies face when it comes to sales technology:

  1. Selection: Understanding and navigating the market to choose the vendor that best suits the organization’s needs
  2. Enablement: Training and up-leveling individuals and teams to use the tools and services
  3. Measurement and Reporting: Establishing and maintaining accurate and actionable measurement and reporting to make smarter decisions
  4. Alignment: Managing proliferation and maintaining a tech and service portfolio that serves the needs of the business, not just its components
  5. Roadmapping: Developing a proactive technology and service strategy as well as a planning approach that aligns with long-term business goals

Killing the “Tech Stack”

The best idea I heard on this session was that there shouldn’t be a ‘marketing stack’ and a ‘sales stack’, terms that have become prominent and used to show the point technologies companies are using in their sales and marketing organizations. The problem with this terminology is that it has a silo mentality, that sales should go and look for its own solution set while marketing should focus on its own needs. The SiriusDecisions analyst had a great point, saying that the technology should be aligned to both sales AND marketing needs. Food for thought.



How to Improve the Impact of Your Sales Kickoff

Shankar Ganapathy on April 26, 2016

Improve_Impact_sales_KickoffWhen it comes to planning your sales kickoff, the first step is setting your objectives for the event. Do you want to celebrate a great year or challenge your sales team to think differently? Are you reps in need of some motivation after a challenging year, or is training your main focus at the moment? Tom Snyder, Co-founder and Managing Partner of VorsightBP suggests, “Before you begin to plan the meeting what do you want people to be thinking, to know, to be looking at. How will you define, when that meeting is over, that it was successful?”
You want to make the most of having all your salespeople together, so your goals should really define every aspect of the event, from the theme to the agenda. We know it’s easy to stay, but it is possible to do. We’re here to show you how, based on four main objectives: Celebration, Motivation, Education, and Innovation.

1. Celebration

Objective

A celebratory sales kickoff is when you want to reward your team. As Tom Snyder, Co-founder and Managing Partner of VorsightBP puts it, “At a celebration kickoff you want people to feel appreciated. We had a great year. We’ve done a great job. We’re on top of our game. Let’s be proud of ourselves.”

Theme

Steve W Martin, Author of ‘Heavy Hitter’, says “When morale is high, you can be more creative and take bigger risks with the theme you choose.” Themes that allow the team to let loose, like a Night at the Oscars can enhance the mood and make everyone relax and have a little fun.

Speakers / Sessions

When choosing the type of sessions that you would have at a celebration kickoff, Snyder suggests, “Entertainment is the key component. So if you’re going to pick out a speaker or a group to come in make sure it’s about having a fun. If you’re going to do exercises make those about fun.”
“Take advantage of your team’s success by using it to create educational content that the whole team can use moving forward,” suggests Mohit Garg, Co-founder, and CRO of Mindtickle. “Video your award winners explaining what they did to achieve their success, and then share these best practices and success stories with the rest of the team after the event, using your online content library.”

Outcomes

When the celebration is your objective, Snyder suggests that “The outcomes are recognition and appreciation. It’s a transition, how do you transfer that celebration to the coming year.” Keeping this in mind, you can then build your sessions around these outcomes.

2. Motivation

Objective
New Call-to-action

You’ve had a challenging year, perhaps a new competitor has stepped on your turf and your salespeople are feeling a bit flat. Motivation is what they need from their sales kickoff, as Snyder puts it, “You need to do something different”.

Theme

To motivate your team, your theme needs to reflect concepts that are inspirational or instill a desire to pick themselves up and get back out to battle. Snyder suggests themes that focus on heroics are great for inspiring people. Other ideas could be around building the competitive spirit of your team, Steve W Martin suggests something like. “Survivor! Outwit, Outlast, Outplay!” to get the juices flowing again.

Speakers / Sessions

If you have a heroic theme, Snyder suggests, “The keynote speakers are like the personal hero, the sports hero, the military hero. The personal assignments and themes must also reflect this theme.” If your theme is more specific you can build your thematic sessions around that objective suggests Steve W Martin with this example, “One company wanted to focus their sales team on closing bigger deals. They selected a theme centered around baseball and used the tagline, “Swing for the Fences!” Throughout the meeting, they showed movie clips of the greatest home run hitters of all time. At their awards dinner, the vice president of sales presented inscribed baseball bats to the top sales performers.”

Outcomes

The outcome should tie into your theme, in Steve W Martin’s example above, “meeting attendees were given different colored company baseball hats and jerseys that designated which group they were part of for team-building exercises.” It’s also alright if your objective is a challenging one, in some instances in order to motivate Snyder even suggests that you may be looking for an outcome of nervousness.

3. Education

Objective

Perhaps you’ve just had a major product launch that your reps are struggling to sell, or you are scaling your team and have a lot of new hires, training them on specific sales skills (beyond the initial onboarding program) may be your primary sales kickoff objective. Snyder also notes, “You often see the rumors around, like we’re going to split up territories, these meetings are about dispensing with those rumors and announcing the new.”

Theme

The theme you choose will really be dependent on the type of training or skill development that you’re focusing on in this kickoff. For example, if your focus is on relationship building then perhaps your theme could be something like ‘Profit in Relationships’ or ‘Relationship Driven Results’. Alternatively, if your focus is on using data to improve performance, then you could use a theme that reflects like “Measure Yourself to Be the Best”.

Speakers / Sessions

To encourage and remove any unnecessary apprehension, Snyder suggests having a keynote session that, “talks about resolving the unknown. The speaker is often from the company, like the CEO or CFO. Someone who can come in and tell the truth.” This then opens the way for your reps to focus on the training without fear.
For the actual training sessions, “Make it as practical and as interactive as possible. Role play elevator pitches in front of each other, create a leaderboard and even crowdsource the best ones to be recorded and made available in their content library after the kickoff.” suggests Garg. If productivity is a big issue, Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing Inc suggests, “A best practices presentation on work efficiency (time management, email management, workflow optimization), coupled with reinforcement in the ensuing weeks and months.”

Outcomes

Learning and moving forward are the key outcomes of this type of kickoff. To ensure the new practices are adopted, Garg suggests “Continue to reinforce the concepts and ideas that were introduced at the kickoff in the weeks and months afterward. This may be by way of sound bites from the event, or quick quizzes that let you check how much information has been retained, or that requires some further work.” Steve W Martin also suggests providing something tangible to take away, like a book on advanced sales strategies.

4. Innovation

Objective

In the current business environment, nothing is constant. This makes innovation an important objective for many sales kickoffs. This doesn’t mean that your sales team has to be prepared to disrupt your industry, but as Snyder puts it, the objective is to tell your salespeople “We want you to approach the job differently. We want you to turn on your imagination and be creative. We have to think differently, we have to create a world for ourselves.”

Theme

Picking a theme that really matches the kind of innovation that you’re looking for. As Steve W Martin notes, “All sales forces go through periods of high and low morale. In this situation, the theme should be more commonsensical like “Better, Stronger, Faster,” which provides a platform that meeting presenters can use to talk about changes and upcoming improvements.” Other themes that he suggests include “Disrupt to Win” or “From Challengers to Champions”.

Speakers / Sessions

When choosing sessions, Snyder emphasizes the importance of providing data on why innovation is required, “Speakers are often industry speakers who’ve done research and can provide that data.” He also highlights the need to think differently, “We want to make sure we do teamwork and assignments in these kick-offs so people get the opportunity to work with the people they don’t really see. We get a lot of cross-pollination and creativity.”
“A powerful way to demonstrate innovative thinking is by crowdsourcing ideas and using video to for storytelling and success stories. Get your reps to show their peers how they thought out of the box and the impact it had on their prospects and customers. It’s both inspirational and aspirational,” explains Garg.

Outcomes

The key outcome here is to ensure that the innovative and creative thoughts aren’t left at the kickoff. Garg suggests, “Use sound bites of videos and presentations from the event and push these out over the following weeks and months. You can also use online social tools to encourage your reps to continue to share ideas with the broader team, regardless of their location. Sales managers can also reinforce the new ideas in their regular team meetings.”


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