Your Best Commercial Kick-Off Ever (No Taylor Swift Needed)

Start Planning Your Best Ever Sales or Commercial Kickoff

Blame it on Taylor Swift. The bar for live events is higher than ever. Rising expectations are also spilling over to corporate meetings. You're likely already feeling the pressure to deliver a world-class experience.

Commercial Kickoff, SKO, Launch Event. Whatever the name, participants want to be engaged. They're hungry for connection. And they demand relevance to the challenges they face as modern revenue teams.

Sales leaders too have higher-than-ever expectations. They're asking sharper questions about ROI. And they want to know what's comes next – how will the event drive behavior change and results?

Most every enablement team we know is already deep into event planning.

While budgets aren't at Taylor Swift concert levels, the degree of strategic thinking over design is greater than we've ever seen. If your team isn't reimagining the kickoff experience, you’re missing a significant opportunity. 

Today's kickoff experience requires more intentional planning and teaming across product, marketing, and sales. Most importantly, it demands strong leadership by enablement.

5 Ways to Improve the Impact of Kickoff 

There are five areas to focus on for optimizing your next kickoff: 

1: Adding by Subtracting

Bringing the team together once a year means lots of pressure to fill every minute. But endless mainstage presentations and breakouts running from breakfast to dinner are the last thing you want now.

Less is more. Find the agenda from your last kickoff. Now, delete 40% of it. We’re seeing draft agendas with about 60% of the usual available time being filled with formal content and presentations. 

Utilize the open time for more collaboration and connection-building. Avoid reinforcing role silos with too many separate tracks for AEs, CSMs, Tech or Product Specialists, Professional Services, etc.  

Be warned, this addition-through-subtraction approach presents challenges. It means some executive or function or pet topic won’t make the cut. Feelings will be hurt and political capital might get spent. Hold the line and stay focused.

2: Getting Everyone on the Same Page

Marketing, product, HR, finance, corporate strategy. So many stakeholders with so many things to firehose the sales team. Traditional agendas slotted-in every group. The result? Participants struggled to track with so many disjointed and often conflicting messages.

The agenda should flow like an interconnected story. The best enablement teams are driving this alignment by:

• Inviting all parties into the planning process early
• Tying each message to a clear red-thread revenue story (if that story isn’t abundantly clear, do whatever it takes to get leadership to clarify and document it)
• Empowering a 'content czar' with editorial rights to force the connections across sessions
• Over-prepping presenters until they can tie every one of their messages back to the main story

3: Balancing Intake with Application

Next generation kickoffs dedicate significant time to real work. They allocate large chunks of time and mental space so teams can bring concepts to life. This likely involves breakouts of account teams or like customer segments, verticals, or sales motions.

It starts with branding. Position the meeting as a “workshop”. Set the expectation that actual work will take place (not just passive information intake). In the same way, it’s not a “role-play” but a “real-play”. Make practice activities realistic and contextualized to common customer situations.

While quick table activities are good, larger agenda blocks give participants time to really wrestle with a new concept. In other words, don’t let participants off-the-hook with superficial understanding. Participants will need structure in their learning ‘walk’ from awareness to critical thinking.

• Introduce concepts early, starting with pre-meeting activities 
• Provide clear guidance for the selection of accounts and opportunities to use in application activities
• Strategically assign breakouts – balance like roles with diverse groupings, especially in team selling models
• Prepare managers to effectively lead group activities (including clear instructions and a dedicated prep session)
• Set post-kickoff accountability, including how and when others will review participant application activities (and implications for not following through)

4: Initiating the Wave of Enablement

The kickoff can't be a one-and-done event. It should be the starting point – literally, the kickoff – of the annual enablement plan. Too many treat kickoffs like the point of arrival vs. the point of departure.

This means utilizing the full enablement toolkit:

• Communicate the outline of the full enablement story – everything the sales team sees over the next year should sound familiar and consistent with that story
• Set expectations for how managers will reinforce the concepts going forward in their team meetings
• Define points of manager inspection and coaching

Measurement is key – it’s necessary for continuous improvement and is expected by leadership. Consider how you will measure, starting with engagement metrics all the way to full revenue impacts. Set 2-to-3-month milestones across the post-kickoff timeline. What’s sticking? Where are the disconnects? These insights will guide content refinements and additional programming needs.

5: Mixing in the Fun

You already know emotion and energy is a big component of adult engagement, learning, and retention. Don't ignore the need to deliver a total experience.

While your budget probably can't justify Taylor, make sure your agenda is light and fun. Find ways to infuse humor and less serious activities beyond just the evening or social events.

Break down the formal dynamic of a mainstage presenter and the passive audience member. Don’t let any presentation go more than 10 minutes without a point of interaction. These elements can run the gamut in complexity depending on the venue and attendee count.

Kickoffs that Deliver Results

Don’t buy into the myth that kickoffs can’t drive results near and long term. They can – and this year – they must (without Taylor Swift ticket prices).

Download our Leader's Guide to SKO Success. Click the image below.

Contact us to set up a virtual workshop where we can provide objective feedback on your draft agenda or help kick-start your planning. We’d love to share more ideas to make this year’s kickoff the best ever.