Sean Huckstep Check out 8 Ways to Host a Great Annual Sales Kickoff Meeting
Professional teams, especially sales teams thrive when they’re aligned and fired up about their team goals. If you haven’t decided a great way to set the tone for an entire team yet, consider hosting an annual sales kickoff. These types of meetings are a fun and engaging way to break up the routine of work and get your sales team invested in the next 12 months. See why kickoff meetings are important and tips for hosting your own below.
What are Sales Kickoffs and Why are They Important?
A sales kickoff meeting is an event, usually held annually, designed around bringing your entire sales team together to celebrate past successes, lay out your strategy, and share best practices. Sales strategy meetings are a great way to create strategic alignment across sales teams for goals, market strategies, areas for improvement, and focus on particular skill sets for the year.
Kickoff meetings are important because they encourage your team to build unity and include them more specifically in the goals you want your sales team to achieve. Check out how to make these meetings successful down below.
Tips for Hosting a Kickoff Meeting
Hosting an annual sales kickoff can look different for various sales teams and industries. But here are 8 guaranteed ways to make sure your meeting is successful and helpful to the development of your sales team. Use any or all of these tips to make sure you’ll achieve the results you want with your meeting.
- Choose between a day or overnight meeting. These kickoff meetings can be a 2 hour meeting or a multi-day experience depending on how much time you want to spend and what you want to cover as a team. We suggest an overnight trip to see how your team functions for a longer period of time outside of work.
- Venture beyond the office. Offsite meetings somewhere local or even further can be a great way to build more team unity outside of the normal day-to-day setting.
- Choose what time of year is best for your team. Depending on your selling season or industry, the best time of year for your kickoff may look different. For example, companies that do summer sales will do this but at the beginning of summer to really gear up for the busy season but many teams start the year off with their kickoff in January.
- Create a detailed agenda. You want to make the most of your time during these meetings, so creating an agenda will keep you organized and productive the entire time.
- Make it fun! Depending on where you choose to have your kickoff, you should include plenty of fun, non-work related activities to have fun as a team. This will result in everyone becoming closer and forming friendships that go beyond work.
- Use this as a teaching opportunity. Being with your team for an extended period of time is a great opportunity to teach and coach your reps on parts of the sales process your team may be lacking in based on previous data. Be sure to explain what you’re wanting the team to work on and why based on actual numbers or experience. This can be done as a team and broken down into a person-to-person lesson as well.
- Include input from the whole team. While it is important to have goals pre-determined as the manager or sales lead, make sure you allow the whole team to provide input on the yearly goals so they’re more invested in making it a strong year as well.
- Choose an applicable theme. Sales kickoff themes are a great way to focus the activities, goals, or plans you’ll be making. Here are some ideas we like: “Level Up” “Raise the Bar” “Next-Level” “No Limits” that you can use.
Start Planning Your Kickoff Now
What do you think about these tips? If you haven’t hosted a sales kickoff meeting, now is the perfect time to plan ahead and host one coming in January 2022. If your workplace is concerned about safety with Covid-19, virtual kickoff meetings are becoming more popular and are still a great alternative to an in-person meeting. What is your next sales meeting going to look like? Comment down below.
