Only if you can change behavior!
It’s that time of year again. Sales leaders are starting to finalize their plans for the January 2012 kickoff events and most believe that a key element of each year’s festivities is a keynote speaker. You know the type – perhaps a disabled person who climbed Mt Everest. Or maybe this year someone who sailed around the world to share with us her “lessons learned” that can be applied by every sales rep to help them achieve their sales objective. Or…….and the list goes on!
I know why it happens – we want to make these meetings upbeat and motivational. We want to entertain our sales teams so that they believe that we are a great organization worthy of their continued loyalty. Perhaps it’s a way of encouraging our people who don’t get enough encouragement from their managers during the year and this is a great way to fill the gap. Regardless of the reason, I am convinced these speakers are generally too expensive and almost always non-impactful because they don’t help to change anyone’s behavior. Three days following the meeting (usually after the first weekend) they don’t remember one concept that they have committed to action and they know their manager will never follow up on any of what was shared.
My suggested: find a worthwhile keynote speaker that will help you launch a vision and a foundation for the coming year by adapting the CSO’s perspective on the sales team’s performance gaps to the message and “actionable” suggestions that are delivered. Here’s some examples:
- If we need to do a better job of qualifying prospects and spending time on the right accounts – we need to equip the sales people to do so and provide the tools/logic to do it well.
- If our aim is to help our sales teams to better manage and control the selling and buying process – teach them how to do so.
- If the reps don’t know how to manage the competitor tactics (without disparaging of course) – we need to arm them with the approach to do it better.
The good news – you can actually do this well without making it feel like another training event. The speaker should be entertaining, challenging, and motivational – but if that’s all they are you will have spent thousands of dollars and not gained the value you deserve.
I would welcome the opportunity to talk to any sales/marketing leader about how to determine if you have the right approach to your kickoff meeting – here’s a link to my website: www.betterwaystrategies.com
You can download a free copy of Peter Bourke’s newly published eBook UnSelling™: Sell Less … To Win More. The free eBook is available in several formats, including Kindle, Nook, iBook, PDF, and more.