Make your team 10% more effective: a fresh approach to sales kick-off events
As a new year begins, tech companies worldwide are gearing up for annual sales kick-off (SKO) events. These high-profile gatherings aim to galvanise sales teams behind a shared vision, highlight new product developments, and equip teams with the tools they need to excel. Ultimately, the objective is to get everyone aligned and energised to hit aggressive revenue targets.
Ensuring SKOs deliver tangible results is critical to sales success, with millions on the line. But despite significant investment, many fall short of their potential. The issue isn't a lack of effort; considerable time and money is spent making SKOs exciting events. However, they often fail to ensure their messages stick and translate into genuine behaviour change.
To truly maximise the commercial impact of SKOs, we need to reframe their purpose and adopt a fresh perspective towards event design. What if the aim wasn't just to host a good event? What if the objective is to make 100% of your sales force 10% more effective? Imagine the ripple effect that could have on your bottom line.
To make this a reality, we must tap into the science behind human behaviour.
Improving performance with behavioural science
What does this really mean?
In the run-up to an SKO, sales leadership teams plan carefully and invest in strategy, tools, and techniques to focus on and improve collective sales efforts. The biggest challenge, however, is ensuring this plan lands well with the people tasked with sticking to it and delivering it.
An effective SKO needs to deliver on two key outcomes. Attendees need to remember key information (strategic changes or new targeting approaches) and then do what you have entrusted them to (such as adapting and applying new sales techniques or using the latest software and tools).
Most SKOs attempt to achieve these goals in a single day. However, to deliver sustained performance improvement, the information imparted in an SKO must resonate with people in the long term. It must stick in their memories for the rest of the year and trigger them to change their behaviours accordingly.
Using practical, tactical experience and environmental design, we can tap into the deep-seated biases in the human brain to engineer memory and behaviour change based on an SKO's objectives.
Here are four key outcomes behavioural science can help your SKO deliver:
- Boosting attendance with FOMO
If 10% of your sales force misses the event, its impact is immediately reduced by 10%. But compelling attendance isn't just about mandating participation. Forced attendance can backfire, leaving attendees feeling psychologically defensive and disengaged.
Instead, you can use psychological techniques in invitational communications to raise perceptions of the event's value and create a genuine fear of missing out (FOMO). Maybe you highlight an all-star lineup of speakers, including a mix of professional motivational speakers and high-profile internal personalities, like your business's founder or CEO. Perhaps you include unexpected and exclusive agenda items, such as externally run workshops with limited spaces. The goal is to frame the event as a once-in-a-lifetime moment that no one will want to miss.
This approach ensures that attendees arrive physically and mentally prepared to engage.
- Making messages unforgettable
People can't remember everything from a day packed with presentations. To ensure core messages stick, we focus on creating key memorable moments. Inspired by the behavioural science concept of the 'peak-end rule' (a psychological bias that suggests people remember whole experiences based only on their most intense moments and their end), these moments act as windows for broader recall.
By creatively embedding essential information within these emotional peaks, supported by the power of next-level event technologies, you ensure attendees are inspired and retain what matters most. It's about establishing the must-remember pieces of information and then thinking creatively to hardwire this information into the minds of our audience through dynamic programming.
- Driving process change with the illusion of control
If you want to change behaviours by developing and enforcing new processes, there is a smart way to increase compliance drastically. And that is simply to give the people you are trying to direct a small amount of control and influence over the design of the process.
Thanks to a bias known as 'the illusion of control', something as simple as co-creating a process name or defining incentives during SKO workshops can lead to transformational buy-in and long-term success.
- Creating continuous behaviour change
SKOs should never be treated as isolated events. Sales leadership is an ongoing process, and improving team outcomes should be seen as a connected journey with multiple opportunities to drive change in team behaviour before, during and after the event. By connecting the SKO to a broader, ongoing communications strategy, you can reinforce the event's core ideas and ensure continuous behaviour change throughout the year.
Measuring success
Of course, if we reframe the ambition of SKOs, we also need to rethink how we measure their success. It's tempting to evaluate them purely by looking at sales performance. However, authentic success lies in measuring the specific behaviour changes you set out to achieve.
For example, track adoption rates if you want teams to adopt a new CRM tool. If increasing customer communication is the goal, measure outreach frequency. These metrics should be baked into the event's design from the beginning and evaluated in the weeks and months following.
This approach is how sales leads can ensure the best return on investment. When designed with behavioural science principles in mind, SKOs become more than just high-energy events; they become catalysts for lasting change. They can be the trigger that makes your sales force 10% more effective over the next 12 months, driving meaningful business outcomes in the long term.
