#611 - The Sales Leader SKO Survival Guide | JD Miller | 30MPC Hall of Fame

30 Minutes to President's Club | No-Nonsense Sales

In this episode, JD Miller provides a comprehensive guide for sales leaders to execute impactful Sales Kickoffs (SKO) that drive annual busi

Key takeaways

• Align SKO themes directly with the annual business plan, such as using 'Links in the Chain' to reinforce monthly deal consistency.
• Treat every minute of an SKO as a significant financial cost, utilizing countdown timers to prevent session overruns.

Main topics

• Sales Kickoff (SKOT) strategy
• Revenue leadership tactics

Notable quotes

Every minute of sales kickoff can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a tactical blueprint for transforming sales kick

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, if you're planning your next sales kickoff, 30MPC is here to help you. All week, we're doing SCO planning content to make your next sales kickoff actually fun and useful. And we put together the ultimate guide to planning your next SCO in collaboration with Katie Givens, who's the VP of enablement over at AwardCo. It's free, grab it in the show notes. And now we've got a fun episode today on surviving your next sales kickoff as a sales leader with JD Miller, Armand, and Mark. Enjoy. Speaker 4 (0:29) Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. My name is Armand Farouk, and I'm here with my co-host, Mark Casaglo. And today we have for another round on the show in one of the most timely podcasts you could possibly imagine. It is the one and only J.D. Miller. He is a multiple time CRO, most recently CRO over at Contata, and he is teaching us the do's and don'ts of sales kickoffs and sales kickoff season. Mark, why should people listen? Speaker 3 (0:57) I would wager, Armand, that fewer than 0.01 % of CROs are also movie screenwriters. But J.D. Miller just happens to be the rare animal that can run a huge, profitable, efficient revenue team and write a really endearing Hallmark Christmas movie script. But you know what he's done? He's put those two things together into creating the best SKO that you can possibly have. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Speaker 4 (1:26) All righty, JD, welcome back to the show. We start every leadership show with your top three actionable takeaways. And we start every year with a sales kickoff. So let's get your three actionable sales kickoff takeaways. JD, take it away. Speaker 2 (1:39) Kickoff item number one, choose an SKO theme that you can return to throughout the year. We're going to have a lot of people in a room for a lot of days, and it's very easy for them to lose track of what they were supposed to remember. But the one thing they will remember is what your theme was. And so I always like to choose a theme that really encapsulates all of the learnings and all of the parts of success that I want to instill in them for the rest of the year. I was at a company called Cantata, which is a musical themed name. And our biggest thing that we wanted our sellers to be able to do was to be braver in going to market and being more forthcoming, confident about the ROI that they could do. ever. And so we had a theme called Forte, which is a musical word for being loud. And then that Forte theme was reinforced in everything we did through Kickoff. So it was activities like going to dinner and finding musical instruments on your table, having a drummer come in and lead us through a making some noise kind of activity, a team building event. It was about having dancers come in and doing flamenco stomping and making music so that when people left Kickoff, hopefully they remember the training. They definitely remember the flamenco dancers and then couldn't have that conversation about, why were we making all that noise again? Oh yeah, it was about being bold and brave. Speaker 4 (2:49) JD told me he was going to do the flamenco dance later on this podcast. So you better hang on for the end of the episode. Bring us on number two. Speaker 2 (2:57) Number two, make personal connections with all of your sellers. When you're the CRO of a company of size. Everybody knows who you are, and at some point, the size of your team gets too large for you to know who they are. But it's really important for your sellers to feel that personal connection, and they really respond to it. I have a few tactical things that I do to help me make a personal connection with each of my sellers. The first is before I get to sales kickoff, I ask my managers to give me a quick rundown of their team members and anything important about those folks that they're going to want to hear me talk about. Maybe they welcomed a new baby. Maybe they achieved something really big. And then I get that put together in a photo flipbook. So when I'm on the plane on the way to sales kickoff, I'm looking at photos, I'm memorizing names, and I'm memorizing the stories that I want to talk to them about. At the event itself, a really well-designed name badge. They're color-coded according to the job that they're in. Their first name is in really bold letters so I can read it from across the room. And then other parts of the badge are going to show them things about where in the world they're from or other details so that when I get to break, I know I've got to go find Mark and I know I need to congratulate him on the launch of his new company. And so I'm looking for the purple bag with the big mark on it and can go wander the room really quickly and find that person and make that personal connection that he's looking for. Speaker 4 (4:13) What's number three? Number Speaker 2 (4:14) three is manage your time really effectively. When we think about not only the hotel cost and the food cost of SKO, but also the dollar amount that we're spending on people's salaries and the opportunity cost of sellers being out of the field, every minute of sales kickoff can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars. And we want to make sure that we get the most out of that spend. It starts by having a really great agenda, not putting anyone on stage unless they can tell you. what they're going to talk about and what the sellers are supposed to leave that session knowing how to do. And then looking at the cost of that session, whatever your training is, whatever the takeaway that it is that you want the sellers to have, do you really need 30 minutes for it? Can we do it in 20? Can we do it in 13? And can I really put you on stage for just that amount of time so that we're as impactful as possible? And then producing it is a lot like the Oscars. At the foot of the stage, there's a screen that's got a countdown timer letting you know how many minutes you have left to talk. As you get to your final three minutes, it starts flashing at you. When you get down to 30 seconds, it's a big red number that says you've got to stop. And as soon as it hits zero, just like the Oscars, music is playing. I'm walking out on stage and I'm shuffling you off to the side, even if you're the CEO, even if you're not done talking, because we've got something else equally important that we need to get to and spend our next thousand dollar minute on. Speaker 3 (5:33) A lot of salespeople have creativity, but sometimes they struggle like. putting it into certain contexts. And I think SKO is one of them. I know you have this theme about cantata and forte. That one is so perfect. You have another one that you did with links in the chain and stuff like that. Tell me a little bit about how does your thought process work to get to a theme like that? Speaker 2 (5:54) I think it actually begins by looking at your agenda and trying to decide what are you trying to accomplish in your SKO? What are the skills you're trying to teach? What are the lessons you want people to learn? And then creating a theme from there. I think a lot of people go wrong when they say, I've got a great hotel in New Orleans, and so my sales kickoff is going to be New Orleans themed. Actually, the theme has got to be about what is the thing that you're teaching at New Orleans, not where did I happen to be? We'll all remember a lot about New Orleans. But if I'm trying to teach cantata to be loud and bold or sellers to do links in the chain, it's really about what is the lesson that I want to keep reminding you about again and again is really where that needs to begin. Of course, AI these days are great brainstormers. So you can open up ChatGPT or Gemini and say, I'm launching a sales kickoff where I'm trying to tell my sellers, everyone needs to be able to sell something, a deal of any size every month of the year. And that's how we're going to get to success. And ChatGPT will give you five or six great ideas to iterate on. And that's actually how I wound up with this links in the chain. one was we wound up saying we're as strong as our weakest link. And every person who sells a deal every month, they get one more link and a little set of carabiners that we're going to hand them. And that became the theme of the kickoff. So suddenly people are walking around with these on their lanyards and some people have 30 chains long and some people just have one. But it's a really good reinforcement of, oh yeah, I've got to go sell something because that's about how we're going to succeed as a team. And then I also am really good at this because I have a great network of creative folks that I work with. I have an amazing event producer, but I've surrounded myself with marketers and event managers who do this for a living and are constantly coming to me and saying, I just saw another company's sales kickoff. They did this one thing. It worked really well. And that kind of goes in the bag of ideas that I'm always remembering and thinking about for the future. Speaker 3 (7:47) Like how far out to do something like this do you need to start planning