The sales kickoff is a rare opportunity to teach, encourage, equip, and motivate your front-line salespeople. You affirm your commitment to them, honor their achievements, and assure them that more excellent opportunities await them.
What is a sales kickoff?
A sales kickoff is an annual corporate event (usually in January) for your entire sales team. In sales kickoff, you can motivate reps, managers, and leaders to aim bigger and work better. You are celebrating wins and honoring people. You are laying out your sales strategies and setting the tone for the next 12 months.
In sales kickoff, you are getting everyone fired up to hit their goals.
Why do team building?
Your sales kickoff is a celebration of what you’ve done and the opportunities you can achieve. In our experience, having team building activities not only enlivens people. It helps boost morale, build team trust and rapport, and ensure the entire organization understands the priorities and roadmap for the year ahead.
Well-design team-building activities create a shared experience of making small wins, building confidence, and demonstrating what everyone can achieve when working together.
Sales Kick-off Agenda
A sales kickoff is like storytelling. You encourage people to make small wins through team-building games that remind them of their capabilities. Then, you show them your directions, tell them how you intend to get it done and motivate them to take their first steps.
Of course, a talk from a motivational speaker can help. But if you’ll make a speaker deliver the speech while your salespeople are cold, it is the same as sending them to a lecture or sales seminar.
Team building electrifies engagement.
I recommend this program flow during your sales kickoff.
Team Building Activities
Hire a team-building facilitator who can design team-building games aligned with your theme and objectives. Team-building activities can be metaphors for the behaviors you want people to start practicing to win.
Breaking The Records is a three-hour team-building program I design for sales kickoff. I used it for medical representatives, insurance agents, and car salespeople.
Make the games easy and simple enough to energize them for the whole event. Make your activities teach them how to aim higher, plan better, and work together.
Where You Are Today (States of Sales)
Build trust. Tell people what you have achieved against your last kickoff. You all made commitments during the last kickoff.
Tell them what happened. Share your challenges, failures, and, more importantly, your wins. Share what you have learned, and hint at the adjustments you’ll make.
As I have mentioned, it is like storytelling.
Product Updates
Make people get excited about new product updates. New products are new opportunities. It means that your organization is growing.
If you don’t have new products, you can discuss new product prices or new customer incentives. But don’t make it boring.
You have energized the group during your team building and States of Sales.
Sales Strategy
A sales kickoff is an opportunity to tell your salespeople how you intend to grow and scale. Show them that you did the homework for them too.
Tell the steps to ensure everyone gets to where you want to go. It is your first call to action to move from X to Y in 12 months.
You can make this interactive too. For example, you can create a mini-workshop where people can demonstrate how they intend to apply new strategies.
You can extend this into powerful learning sessions.
Success Stories
The success stories are often placed at the end of the event. However, these are the success stories of the last year. Of course, the best place for this is before you present your sales strategy. But in the Philippines, salespeople are used to having it at the end.
Typically, this segment is devoted to awards and recognition.
You can use success stories to educate and motivate salespeople. Allow successful salespeople to share their stories, highlighting the practices and attitudes the listeners can learn from them.
Hire a speech coach to teach them how to deliver their speeches more effectively.
Challenge Talk
It is typical for organizations to hire motivational speakers to fire up salespeople. Of course, you can still do that. But you can do that right after the team building.
The last person salespeople need to hear is the leader of your organization. The challenge talk is a speech that encourages everyone to commit themselves to break their records and winning together.
Team Building for Sales Kickoff
We can design team-building programs for your next sales kickoff. I have a pool of facilitators who can make 500 or more people dance, play team-building games, and collaborate to achieve common goals.
We hold team-building programs in Metro Manila, Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, Quezon, Bulacan, Pampanga, Bataan, Pangasinan, and La Union.
