6 TIPS TO PLANNING SALES KICKOFF EVENTS IN 2023

   6 TIPS TO PLANNING SALES KICKOFF EVENTS IN 2023

1.  Communications and Marketing

Even though you’re marketing to an internal audience, it’s still highly important to build a communication and marketing plan. Attendees don’t just need to know when and where the event is, but also what’s expected of them and what they’ll get out of it. The communications and connections should drive attendee excitement and anticipation to participate.

2.  Venue

Like most events, the venue is a key focus for planners and sets the tone of the experience. Where will the event take place? At a hotel, a conference centre, corporate headquarters, or somewhere else?

25% of planners will include a hybrid component to their Sales kick-offs (SKO) plus 6% making it fully virtual. Then comes the question of which technologies and features will be needed and used to really engage and excite the audience.

3.  Content 

How will your content be delivered? Depending on the goals of the stakeholders and the event’s format. i.e., live, hybrid or virtual. Planners should consider various strategies for sharing education and information. Whether the event is live, pre-recorded, or on-demand. There could be a combination of strategies based on the different sessions that you’re hosting.

4.  Community

One of the most important pillars of SKO planning is community. Your company has a culture; your sales-team has a culture as well. The community around the SKO genuinely helps to build that sales-team culture. Culture-building has become more critical for companies that haven’t held a face-to-face kick-off event in a couple years and for those that have adopted a distributed-workforce model. For many SKO attendees in 2023, it will be their first time meeting their colleagues in person.

5.  Partners

Don’t forget your suppliers and partners in the SKO planning process. It is important to drive awareness across your sales team of the partnerships that you have in place, and how they might be able to leverage those with customers. So, there’s a lot of education involved there. Think about how you can incorporate who the partners are, what they do, and how they help your  organization.  6.  Insights
Early in the planning process, think about what sort of data you want to get out of the SKO. As an internal event, it might not be the same return on investment that you look for with an external event, but there’s certainly a lot of data that you’re producing, and its data that you can track to report and measure on a return on investment.

Content per meetingnet.com