Say no to death by slideshow: Alternate ways to SKO

Sales kickoff (SKO) is often the event of the sales year – it's a time to reflect on the past 12 months, as well as an opportunity to set expectations and build motivation for the following 12.

So let's paint a picture:

Hours have been spent creating and coordinating the agenda
Leadership are aligned and agreed
The venue is booked
The stage is set

Day 1 begins, and as your first presentation gets underway, you look out into the crowd and see… glazed over faces watching slide after slide tick over.

Sound familiar?

Let’s turn this around and put ourselves in the shoes of the sellers and leaders in attendance.

The reality is that our audience are expected to stay alert for 6-8 hours straight, watching various presenters with multiple PowerPoints – talk about information overload!

With around 50% of information being forgotten after 20 minutes, how can we avoid the work that has been put in being wasted?

Reducing slide decks

Now, I know what you're asking: "But PowerPoint is essential to landing my key messages!", to which I ask:

Is it essential, or has it become the crutch for most presenters?

The solution is simple, it's time to reduce the PowerPoint decks!

I say reduce because realistically, no SKO would be complete without at least one or two PowerPoints – they are the cornerstones of presentations for a reason.

However, there are ways to make your SKO messages land without relying on overly complicated and often over-produced presentations. 👇

Stick to a headline and a graphic

Reducing the number of words on a slide may seem an obvious point, but in reality most presenters become reliant on overexplaining themselves on each slide, using it as a prompt for themselves.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes – too many words not only clutter the slide, but confuses your key messages.

With an overarching theme, you're probably trying to get across, it's better to simplify than let the message get lost in a word salad.

Keep it short and increase the chance of digestion

Most SKO sessions are between 60 and 90 minutes. Mention a 90-minute lecture to anybody and you'll met with a grimace – factor in your audience being jetlagged, hungry, too hot or too cold, and their focus is immediately drifting.

The key: shorter is often better!

By limiting each session to between 30-45 minutes and then having people get up, move around, network and digest the information they have just heard, they commit more of those key messages to long term memory.

Equally, the person presenting feels they have everyone’s attention during the time they are on stage, creating a more relaxed, relatable environment.

Peer-to-peer helps to reinforce key messages in real world scenarios

Too often leadership or enablement see SKOs as an opportunity to put themselves at the front and centre of every session.

While leaders and enablers have a place at SKOs, the sore reality is most people in sales like to hear from each other. This is an enabler's greatest tool, a surefire way to ensure the right behaviours and actions are being propagated.

The real question is how best to facilitate these conversations and ensure they are meaningful.

There are multiple ways to execute a peer-to-peer session – it may be a workshop in small teams, or it may be presentations around success or overcoming a particular customer challenge.

Get creative and develop it with your audience in mind.

Get creative! Nobody said SKOs must be boring

Kick Offs are a fantastic way to bring people together, encourage networking and share ideas across teams learning from each other and building a strong foundation for the year ahead.

A piece that is often overlooked when developing the agenda is how to make the sessions engaging and enjoyable.

Delivering more engaging and memorable sessions is going to help your key messages be remembered beyond the SKO.

Most of these events are take between 3 days to 1 week, off site, all day and are quite intense. Adding an element of creativity adds that much-needed energy boost.

Being creative in how you design your session will only make it more successful:

Not sure how to land key concepts? Make it into a game!
Want to highlight good behaviours? Get people talking in teams and then feeding back.
Have a core sales skill that needs reinforcing? Develop a competitive edge that has a fun prize for a winning team.

Delivering your sessions in a creative and fun manner drives engagement and memorability. By doing, your audience are more likely to commit what you're speaking about to memory.

Reinforce, reinforce, reinforce!

It is a universally acknowledged truth that no matter how creative, how interactive or how peer-focused your SKOs are, key information will be forgotten as soon as people get back to work on Monday and real life customers start flooding their inboxes.

There is no way to fully mitigate this, but one way to drive home key concepts is to end every session with the three main takeaways.

Then, have your managers, your leaders, and yes, us enablers, keep repeating and reinforcing those concepts when everyone's back at their desks on Monday morning.

Do this through new mediums, refresher sessions, reminder videos, maybe even quarterly competitions.

However you do it, remember to keep reinforcing what you wanted sales to take away.

The role of enablement is to be a partner to sales and leadership, and a key element of this is reinforcing the messages that the business is delivering – in a way that is easy to digest and memorable.

It may begin at your SKO, but it should not end there.

Wrapping up

We started this article by saying no to death by PowerPoint, and at first this may seem a scary concept.

After all, we're all guilty of sharing PowerPoints to get our messages across, but 9 times of 10? It's mostly to show how much work we've done as individuals.

💡

Next time you’re planning your SKO, flip the script, put yourself in the shoes of an audience member and ask yourself “what would I enjoy?”

A key part of enablement is innovation, and if we’re not constantly challenging ourselves to think differently, how can we expect our sellers to?

So next time, you have your SKO kick off meeting, instead of breaking the agenda up into various different presentations, maybe take a step back and ask, “what are we trying to achieve, and is there a more engaging way for us to achieve this?”