Let’s be honest - sales kickoffs can sometimes get a bad rap. You’re pulling your revenue driving workforce away from the phones for a few days so it better be worth it.
While the rah-rah can be energizing, and a lot of fun, you want to ensure that your dollars are well spent and that your sellers leave a kickoff with tangible learnings and next steps. Landing strategy is absolutely essential, but you also need to ensure your sellers are equipped to have the right conversation, are up to date on your product offerings, and understand their client’s pain points.
Enter the secret ingredient: training. Not just any training, but training that will actually stick.
When I was at Microsoft, I helped create a training program for our sales team to help them sell to industry. We were trying to correct for pushing renewals at the expense of value and providing tangible tools to help our sellers understand their customers as a means to building relationships and long term success.
Today, I’d like to share some of the key learnings that I learned throughout the process of creating a sales training program, so that the next time you plan your sales kickoff, you can incorporate training that will make a difference to your bottom line.
1. What is the problem you’re trying to solve and how will the training achieve that?
Is there a new product feature that everyone needs to be trained on so they can talk about it or are there sales fundamentals like challenger selling or understanding your client that you’re trying to engrain? First, identify the opportunity and determine what level of training will be required to accomplish satisfactory results.
2. Voice of Customer or Partner:
Wherever possible, invite customers or partners to your training to provide a ‘voice of the field’ and bring the training to life. Do you have a client beta testing one of your solutions? Invite them to speak about their experience. You want your sales team to take away nuggets so the next time they’re on a customer call they can use it as a customer reference.
3. Make it hands on:
For our training, we had our sales team pick one of their current customers to focus on throughout the entire training. That way, all research tangibly helped them better understand and support their existing customer - from annual report research to understanding decision makers in the org. We then had them do all of the research during the training so there was no “homework,” just dedicated work time to better understand their customer’s pain points and opportunities for partnership.
4. Minimize slides:
Death by powerpoint is not the way to keep your team engaged. Share critical information up front but switch to personal research, group work, pitch practice, or customer interviews as quickly as possible to keep your team excited about the content.
5. Pitch perfect:
They say practice makes perfect! Pair up your team and have them practice the new pitch that they learned during the training - one can play the role of the customer and the other can play the role of the seller, and then swap. That way when they broach the topic on their next customer call, they’ve already practiced!
6. Be clear on training outcomes: Do you need to sell a new product, and if so, how much to prove impact? Set pipeline and revenue targets following the training so you can clearly track the impact and determine whether subsequent training is needed to land your plan.
7. Get management on board:
Change management is essential to long term adoption of anything learned in training sessions, and that starts at the top. Before you ever bring your team out for training, ensure you’ve properly trained and aligned your management team to the principles that you’re training on. Ensure they’re up to speed on the methodology that their teams will be expected to use as a result of the training, leverage data to track progress, and schedule frequent check-ins with them and their teams to ensure the changes are being implemented.
By following these steps, you should be able to craft a meaningful and engaging training that gives your sales team tangible actions and prepares them for the months and year ahead.
Want more ideas to maximize the agenda of your next SKO? Tasked with planning the logistics and need help? Zinnia is here to support your end-to-end SKO needs. Get started planning today!
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