Planning the beginning-of-the-year sales kickoff is no small task. In addition to the basic logistics of selecting a destination, blocking rooms and finding meeting space, there’s an unspoken pressure to top last year’s meeting. “How can we make it bigger and better?” “What guest speakers will inspire?” “What awards will mean the most to our top performers?”
What if you planned your meeting from the customer’s point of view? Here are five customer-centric ideas you can try:
1. Strategic account planning. At a kickoff meeting, time is often allotted to reviewing what additional products and services can be sold to increase revenue and further solidify the partnership. This is important work, but can quickly become insular — me, me, we. Our products, our services, our bottom line.
The reframe? Rethink about who you consider to be your strategic accounts in terms of “extremes and mainstreams.” Your mainstream customers could be those larger accounts that buy and enjoy a significant amount of your products and services. But you should also consider including some of your extreme customers: which customers are doing the most interesting things with your products and services? Invite them to join in a customer panel and ask them to talk about their strategic accounts.
2. Invite customers to recognize your top performers. Salespeople work hard — and your best salespeople can become easily isolated in the field. For these and many other reasons, it’s important to recognize your top performers in front of their peers. Consider inviting your top performers’ customers to speak about them — even give them an award. It’s probably the best praise your team could receive.
3. Spur innovation with analogous situations. Customers want to work with motivated sales professionals who can help them think outside the box. This is where analogs come in. Reflect on a specific issue your business is trying to overcome, and then consider completely different contexts where people have figured out a way to solve that same problem.
One team we worked with didn’t think they connected enough with their customers. They felt much of the work that enabled their customers’ success happened behind the scenes, which resulted in a loss of team motivation. The analog: This team’s meeting was being held in New Orleans, so we took them to visit one of Emeril Lagasse’s restaurants. Much like this team, chefs and sous chefs work behind the scene, and yet it’s their work that customers ultimately enjoy. The team spent time with the executive chef, several sous chefs and the general manager, interviewing them about their experiences. As a result, they started to think differently about how they could engage more with their customers and stay motivated.
4. Enhance product and marketing updates. During your meeting, close the gap between your company and your customers, as well as between your product developers, your marketers and your salespeople. Instead of inviting your marketing and product peers to download their latest and greatest, ask them to bring their news along with a sharpened pencil, and use kickoff time to connect product, marketing and your salespeople with customers. This works especially well with Tip No. 1 — your extreme and mainstream customers. Think of this as piloting conversations with customers about new offerings and getting real-time feedback from the people who matter the most — the ones who will buy it.
5. Skill-building. Our final tip relates to building the skill set of your salesforce. Salespeople are always looking for ways to hone their skills, improve their game and enjoy greater success. We like to send salespeople where they feel most comfortable — out in the field.
Research retail centers in the location of your kickoff. Look for retail centers and try to locate pairs within a common vertical that are low- and high-end. For example, Toys R Us and Build-a-Bear for children’s toys, a Chevy and a Tesla dealership for cars, and so on. This exercise is best done in pairs, and each pair’s assignment is to visit their two stores and pay careful attention to what increases or decreases customer engagement. We guarantee your teams will come back inspired by the amazing (and amazingly awful) things they experienced and will have fresh insights they can apply to their own customer relationships.
Thinking about your kickoff from your customer’s perspective can simplify and inspire your kickoff planning and lead to highly productive outcomes and a successful new year.
Ashley Welch and Justin Jones co-founded Somersault Innovation (somersaultinnovation.com), a Design Thinking consulting firm providing a unique approach to sales development. They are the authors of “Naked Sales: How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue.”
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