Sales Kick Off is here - remember the old rules, and add some new ones
Sales Kick Off (SKO) season just is not the same this year, for obvious reasons. A year ago, the @Xactly team gathered in Denver to get the latest product updates, learn about new solution bundles, marketing messaging, partner interaction, and … The annual lip-sync contest, often followed by karaoke, and many an impromptu meeting where the local bar staff would hit their own quotas. Of course, no SKO is complete without a few words of wisdom that would (or should) be shared:
Winners Play Hurt – which meant that no matter how late you were up, you better be there at the launch in the morning. Buyer and consumer beware after all. An open bar does not mean to have an open mouth…
Just because the company senior executives make themselves available to you in a casual, fun setting does NOT mean that you should take full advantage of that. The CLM – Career Limiting Move is real. The best protection is…
Everyone needs a wingman. That fellow employee who has your back. It is to direct you AWAY from the situation in the evening, or who is there in the morning to get another cup of coffee. Note that I really wish the hotels would stop with the demitasse cups – two shots of urn-based drip coffee just is not going to keep me going through hours of content – no matter how well the breakouts are set. Find your wingman, be a wingman.
Note that I used wingman the way I use y’all or dude – gender neutral and applied to all. Apologies for any inadvertent slights implied. After all, women in sales outperform their male peers.
This year is different. We are remote, taking advantage of platforms like Zoom and Zoom breakout rooms for managing our sales teams and for this year’s SKO. The company experts / leaders are pre-recording our presentations, or hoping that we can deliver them live before our home internet decides to show that “unstable” warning (I never know if the folks @Zoom are talking about me or my bandwidth). A few thoughts from someone who regularly presents at SKO events, online classes, and a multitude of webinars:
We know when you are not looking at the screen, or not paying attention in general. I recall the first time I spoke from the pulpit – it opened my eyes to what the pastor could see.
We LOVE your pets and kids. Bring them in, and see if your kids can take some notes. I had a high schooler take notes at a tech conference once, and their insights were valuable and helped me realize how much I relied on jargon and assumed institutional knowledge or jargon when speaking.
Multitasking means you are ignoring the event, the knowledge, and the trips and tricks. It will impact your performance in the upcoming year. Further, all of the research points towards a lack of ability to multi-task – at best a small percentage of people can task-switch, but you still lose the education and training. The temptation is high – but you will get called out on it either at the event, or later in the quarter when you start asking questions that were answered in a session you supposedly attended.
Be CAREFUL of how often you depend on the chat functions in either the online platform, or if you are using @Slack. The quick “what was that?” might work, but once you are carrying on a full conversation in online chat, you are back to task-switching. Plus, your question might be one that more people have but are afraid to ask.
There might be an online happy hour, but you are spending your own money. If you do partake with your team on a platform that might be recording, go back to the beginning of this article.
The universal SKO rule: Don’t Be That (insert your preferred pronoun).
