Sales Kickoff Masterclass: The Ultimate Planning Guide

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

In this masterclass, sales enablement expert Katie Givens shares her comprehensive blueprint for designing high-impact Sales Kickoffs (SKOs)

Key takeaways

• A successful RKO should focus on five goals: culture building, inspiration, education, celebration, and jumpstarting the year.
• Themes must reflect reality; for example, using a 'True Grit' theme for a losing locker room to acknowledge challenges honestly.

Main topics

• RKO Strategic Goals
• Theme Development

Notable quotes

Most revenue or sales kickoffs are a complete waste of time and money for your sales organization.

Conclusion

This episode serves as a tactical guide for enablement leaders to tran

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Most revenue or sales kickoffs are a complete waste of time and money for your sales organization because a sales trainer will show up, spout out your reps for 48 hours, and then they don't remember a damn thing and you've lost an entire week of selling time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, Katie Givens has planned over 16 of the best revenue and sales kickoffs I've seen in my entire life, including the first one that I got to see her run at Carta, which was our first revenue kickoff ever, all the way to a thousand plus rep, massive revenue kickoff, in her experience as a top-notch sales enablement leader so today you are going to learn the exact steps that she uses in her secret beast planner to plan a truly great rko including number one the exact goals of what she wants to accomplish in RKO. Number two, how she thinks about selecting themes for an RKO. Number three, an example schedule of events for one of the past revenue kickoffs Katie ran recently. Number four, a breakdown of what to do in each of the most common sessions. And then lastly, number five, all of the key timelines and Speaker 2 (0:59) logistics that you need to plan a great revenue kickoff. Speaker 3 (1:03) And if you do it all right, you will leave with the exact blueprint to one, make sure that your RKO does not. blow up in planning phases, two, get your reps fired up, and then three, actually retain your top performers. Katie, welcome to the show. Thank Speaker 1 (1:15) you, Armand. I'm so excited to be here. I'm checking off a life bucket list right now, being on 30MPC with you, being a customer, all the amazing things working with you all. Speaker 3 (1:24) Alrighty, Katie. So fun fact for the audience is the first revenue kickoff that I was ever actually a part of was the one that you put together at Carta. And I want to start with just going into a revenue kickoff. What are some of the common goals or things you want to accomplish other than just a pure celebration when you are kicking off the year? There are five goals to an RKO. Speaker 1 (1:47) Yeah, I'm going to start with what I think is the most important one, which is culture building, or the one that actually really happens that you feel after a kickoff. And that is how do we build a really great sales culture where everyone is working together, they're inspired by one another, and they're ready to go out and hit the ground running. And so that culture building is a huge part of that. And we'll talk about how you design the event to really help create culture building. Inspiration is another. We want the reps to go out to the year and be like, I am so pumped to be working here right now and to tackle this market and to talk to our prospects and to solve their problems. The other one is education. And I think this is a lot of times where enablement leaders will overcorrect and the whole event will be about education. And it's a little of what you said in the intro of just knowledge jumping the whole entire time and no one's going to remember at all. for a numerous amount of reasons, including that you just don't remember everything that you hear in a two-day period. And so education is part of it, but it is not it. It's not everything. The next one is celebrate. We worked really hard. We worked so hard the last year. Whether we won, whether we lost, we were all working hard. And so let's celebrate that moment, remember it, and then move on so that we can go to number five and jumpstart the year, which is how do we actually do work at a kickoff to get us in a place where we are running by the time we hit. the next week in January. And the rest of the year, we're hitting our numbers a little bit faster and we're accelerating that. Speaker 3 (3:08) As we were in the prep, the two things that you called out to me that stood out the most were, number one, I remember at Carta, we had offices in New York, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. And you know very well that there wasn't always like super kumbaya between all of the offices. A lot of times there's remote workers and all of that stuff. And so RKO is oftentimes the only time in the year where you get to get the entire company together. And so one of the most underrated purposes of an RKO is to just get all of these people who wouldn't normally be in a room together for 72 hours, get them in a room together. That was number one. But then number two is using both education and jumpstarting the year. together was a key combination of you oftentimes know what the keys to success are going to be going into the year. And you can effectively use SKO or RKO to kickstart the education and set the tone for the year. You don't want to literally train all of, do all of the training for the year in RKO, but you can use RKO as your kickoff point or your literal momentum starter for the rest of the year of what you want to accomplish. Speaker 1 (4:17) Yes, and I'm excited to walk through detailed parts of an agenda where you can see some of that come to life as you start to build out an RKO to hit on all of these in different ways. One Speaker 3 (4:28) of the things that will dictate the agenda is the theme. So let's talk about jumpstarting the year because that's really where the themes come from. Speaker 3 (4:38) All right, so Katie came up with four common examples of theme buckets that you might have for your sales organization. So the four are your product might be changing. You might have a change in your sales motion. You might not be winning or you might be a winning. locker room. So let's talk through the first one. Katie, could you give an example of what you were trying to accomplish and an example theme for when the product was changing? So Speaker 1 (5:00) we had launched quite a few products. We'd made an acquisition in this one and we were moving towards a platform sale. The structure of the sales team was changing. Who they needed to work with cross-functionally was changing. And as you shift to that platform sale, a product sale, they had to learn how to be a different type of seller. And so we had to really teach them that team selling motion. And so it came across as a team one and it became a sporting event type of a vibe and a feeling to help people understand we are one team. And in order to sell multi-product, you have to be able to work with your CSM, your solutions engineer, et cetera, to drive forward every piece of that event around what it means to actually be a team and team sell when we're moving to a multi-product sale. Speaker 3 (5:42) Great. So what about the sales motion change? So Speaker 1 (5:44) we had mapped our customer journey. And we had looked at what it actually means to buy our product. That was changing our sales stages. That was changing our handoff processes, also changing how we spoke to our customer. This could also be a methodology change if you have one of those for your sales kickoff. And it was really shifting how we went to market. And so we went with breaking barriers. It was a Maverick type theme. We actually did a showing of Maverick because it was coming out that week. And it was teaching the team like things are going to feel different. but we're going to break barriers and we're going to show up in the market differently. Speaker 3 (6:15) Breaking barriers. We have this like maverick type of theme. And that's what we're going to talk about in terms of like the night of arrival. Like when you arrive at revenue kickoff, you start to feel like that theme. Before we get into that, let's talk about a not winning locker room situation. This Speaker 1 (6:30) is the hardest one. Any, any woman person has to plan a kickoff when you're not winning. It's hard because you're like, guys, let's get pumped. We missed. quota, the last three quarters, what are we going to do? And so this one gets hard to do. And the one thing that I've seen fit, and I've actually learned this from another enablement leader, was true grit. A country western vibe that's like, yeah, it's... getting hard and it's a little bit harder to be excited when you're not winning. But what can we do to push forward and persevere and really show true grit? And we defined what it meant. And everything was a country Western vibe, including the parties that we had. And it really focused on how do I set myself up for success to win as we move into the next quarter? What can we do to move the barriers that have been in our way out of our way? I'll Speaker 3 (7:15) just call out on this one that especially when in 2022, like the economy flipped, it always came off as extremely tone deaf if we planned this like massive rah-rah celebration as if nothing was going wrong. And it's not like we're a losing locker room, we're down the entire time, but I think there's something to be said around like, all right, we need to come in with a chip on our shoulder and we can still celebrate the individual successes, but it's a little bit of like a, we're going to get this done this year type of tone versus rah-rah, let's celebrate, everything is kumbaya when the reps know they're not getting paid. in an environment like this. I Speaker 1 (7:50) think that is the biggest one is that reps feel it. And I've seen that like fake theme where it's like, we're going to do this and we're winning. And reps are like, I'm feeling it and I'm not winning. This is how I get paid. So can we have an honest conversation about why? And there's different ways you can do that in like a breakout or a general session to help also the reps feel heard about things that are getting in their way of winning. Speaker 3 (8:09) Agreed. So let's talk about the winning locker room, which is the best case scenario. Speaker 1 (8:13) There's so many things you could do here. This is not an exhaustive list, but with winning, it's so nice. And so launch is just a fun, easy one. There's so many things you can do with a closing night party. There's things you can do in general session. It's your space vibe. We're launching into new frontiers. We're... doing something really awesome and it's unique, it's eclectic and it's exciting and you're winning. And it just gives you a really fun theme to go with. We've done airbrushed space tattoos at a closing night party that were glow in the dark. There's so many things you can do when you're winning, but launch is just one of the really great examples that we're just launching into the new year and we're going to continue to win. All Speaker 3 (8:47) right. So now let's go into an actual example. We're going to use the second one, the sales motion change, just because Oftentimes, sales kickoffs or revenue kickoffs are where people are introducing a new methodology or a big change to the way that they want to sell going into next year, whether it's just trying to get to power more, going more outbound, being in platform sale, etc. So Katie, there are three days that we're going to walk through in detail. Day number one is the night of arrival where you're just setting the vibe for everyone as they come in. Day number two is the general session day where you actually run things on the main stage. Day three is usually when you're doing a lot of the breakout and working sessions. And then lastly, at the end of that day, that's when you do the big celebration where you're typically announcing President's Club and all of that stuff. So as a recap, to remind you all, the situation that we are in is you are completely changing the customer journey and changing the sales motion. And so this is the Maverick theme. Speaker 3 (9:41) So Katie, let's talk about first what goes on when it comes to the night of arrival. So Speaker 1 (9:45) the night of arrival should feel like your theme. It's the first moment where people get to come and experience, oh, this is what RKO will look like. This is what it'll feel like. A lot of times what people will do is they'll be like, oh, just arrive, get in your hotel room. It's going to be busy today. So like, we'll see you later. And it takes away the ability to build culture immediately. You get in, you drop your bags, you come in, we've got food, and you can adjust what it looks like based on what you're trying to do. And so we had gotten a lot of feedback before this kickoff that there wasn't a lot of leadership transparency. And so we had a leadership happy hour. We had every executive in the room answering questions, talking. It was just appetizers. People were walking around. There was music. We've done a carnival before with stilt walkers and tarot card readers. Everything to just keep people excited. There's no agenda. There's no learning. It is just meet people from other offices you wouldn't talk to, get to know them, take pictures, have fun. Speaker 2 (10:38) Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC Closers Hub. There's a link in the show notes. If you are sick of non-actionable takes about AI and sales, you might be interested in attending my live session at Apollo Next on September 30th in San Francisco. Come and join if you want to join actionable sessions with teams like yours, if you want first looks at Apollo's biggest launches, and if you want to network with operators who are talking action, not academia. I promise that you are going to walk away with stuff that you can put into action right away, and you can register for free if you use our 30MPC link or code in the show notes. I will see you there. Today's show is brought to you by Outreach, the agentic AI platform for driving execution across every stage of your deal. Great sellers drive velocity at every stage of their sale, and one thing that's worked well for me is assigning redline deadlines to my prospects when we kick off vendor review. Even artificial micro-deadlines for things like first cut of redlines and security review helps my prospects get their internal team moving. We built a guide on how to