Julie Thomas, President & CEO of ValueSelling Associates and a noted speaker, author and consultant.
A sales kickoff (SKO) meeting creates a vision for sales professionals of how they can be successful in the upcoming year. It’s a huge opportunity and one that can make a tremendous impact on your sales team.
Most SKO meetings have two main objectives. First, there is a look back to celebrate and reward accomplishments and progress over the past year. Award ceremonies and recognition are excellent ways to demonstrate gratitude for your sales team’s effort, sacrifice, work, grit and grind over the past year, especially at a time when sales teams are facing increasing pressure to do more with less.
The second main objective is to look forward to the next 12 to 18 months and share goals and plans for how the company can innovate, create value and be successful. This can include new product releases and new marketing and sales tools. Maybe you will roll out new incentives for clients or sales reps or unveil a realignment of territories or new coverage models. Often, if a company is planning a reorganization or restructuring, it can be explained in person at the SKO rather than relying on emails and video calls. These items should be all communicated and addressed in a way that is very positive to the reps.
I anticipate that AI will be an important topic discussed at many upcoming SKO meetings—and if it’s not a part of your agenda yet, I suggest you make room for it. Your team is likely already experimenting with GenAI tools, and this is your opportunity to introduce tools you’ve tested, educate them on how to use them effectively and discuss pitfalls to avoid when leveraging AI.
Is AI On Your Sales Kickoff Agenda?
An SKO meeting is an excellent time to introduce new sales tools and technology that can improve productivity, streamline processes or enhance customer engagement. The most significant of these continues to be AI-driven sales enablement tools—yet not all salespeople are comfortable using this technology or know how to use it to its fullest potential.
As discussed in the 2024 Annual Work Trend Index from Microsoft and LinkedIn, “We’ve come to the hard part of any tech disruption: moving past experimentation to business transformation.” The report explains that “organizations that apply AI to drive growth, manage costs, and deliver greater value to customers will pull ahead.”
In the survey, 79% of leaders agreed that their companies need to adopt AI to stay competitive, and 60% worry about the lack of a plan and vision to implement AI. Your sales kickoff meeting is a perfect time to define how AI can best support your sales teams and put training in place to help them leverage AI tools effectively.
AI For Sales: Empower Your Team With Smarter Tools
By now, we’ve realized that AI can reduce or remove mundane and low-value tasks for sales reps, helping to boost their productivity. We’ve also seen how integrating AI can enhance the sales coaching process while maintaining a human-to-human connection.
I love how George Tobias, VP team manager at Garner, puts it: “Sales leaders must combine the transformative power of AI with the uniquely human capabilities of their sellers to drive high-margin deals.” And, “New AI technology has the potential to significantly reduce seller responsibilities, but only if you are prepared to treat it as a full-fledged member of the team—not just a tool.”
One critical discussion point for SKO meetings is how to use AI as a technology partner to offload some of the administrative tasks and time-consuming research, keeping sales reps away from customer-facing activities. However, make sure to take this discussion to the next step. If AI can solve the productivity problem and free up sales reps to make more sales calls, do your reps have the right skills to exploit that advantage and be more effective? Or will they just be making more bad sales calls?
The integration of AI into sales coaching is an excellent way to increase your sales reps’ effectiveness. In a previous article, I outlined AI’s transformative impact on sales coaching and how it can be used to address common challenges such as limited practice by sales reps, insufficient time for managers to coach effectively, and the unconscious bias inherent in role-playing.
When used correctly, AI can prescribe the right learning interventions to create a personalized and individual learning journey for each sales professional. This meets the learners where they are and helps them to improve their skills. Yet, we know that if you want to build a skill, knowledge alone is insufficient. You must practice over time to hone that skill. When AI is applied to sales coaching, it can create a mechanism to enable that practice and make it more effective.
Conclusion
A successful sales kickoff meeting sets the tone for the year ahead by aligning the sales team with company goals, introducing new tools and strategies and celebrating past successes. As in-person gatherings return, your upcoming SKO offers a unique chance to not only reengage your team but also position them for future success with the right tools—especially AI. Integrating AI into your kickoff agenda will be crucial as it continues to reshape the sales landscape. By educating your team on how to leverage AI, you’re not just introducing new technology; you’re empowering them to be more productive, efficient and effective in their roles. The companies that succeed in today’s evolving market are those that combine the power of human connection with cutting-edge technology. Your SKO meeting is the perfect place to begin that journey.
By mixing informative content with interactive, hands-on experiences and a focus on practical takeaways, sales kickoff meetings can become energizing, equipping teams with the tools and motivation to hit the ground running for the year ahead.
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