What I Tell Clients Before I Do Their Sales Kickoff
A company called me a few months ago. They wanted me to come in and do a sales kickoff. Two days, the whole team, big energy to start the year.
I told them I’d do it.
I also told them they were probably wasting their money.
That’s always an awkward conversation. They’re expecting enthusiasm. They’ve already booked the venue. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know what happens after a sales kickoff: people go back to their desks and do exactly what they were doing before.
The content isn’t the problem.
It’s that a two day event doesn’t change habits.
Why Kickoffs Don’t Stick
Think about how skill actually develops. You do something. You get feedback. Keep doing that and eventually it becomes automatic.
A kickoff gives you information. It does not give you repetition with feedback. Those are completely different things.
I work with sales teams every week, not twice a year. And even with weekly sessions, the stuff that sticks is the stuff that gets practiced on real calls and debriefed afterward. The stuff that gets introduced once and never reinforced disappears in about ten days.
A kickoff that runs for two days and then hands people back to managers who aren’t coaching is not a training investment. It’s an event.
What I Did Instead
The kickoff I mentioned earlier. I decided I wasn’t going to do the usual stuff. No techniques. No slides full of process steps they’d forget before the flight home.
I spent an hour talking about identity.
Who are you. How are you wired. Because I’ve come to believe that’s the thing most salespeople haven’t figured out, and it’s the thing underneath almost every other problem. If someone doesn’t know who they are, they can’t sell from a place of confidence. They sell from a place of anxiety. And anxious salespeople discount, avoid hard conversations, and take every rejection personally.
I don’t know if it landed the way I hoped. But I know that giving them ten closing techniques to forget wasn’t going to change anything either.
What Coaching Actually Looks Like
If you want your team to get better, you need a manager who coaches them every week. Not reviews their pipeline. Not checks their activity metrics. Coaches them. Sits with them before important calls. Debriefs what happened afterward. Runs role plays on the scenarios they keep getting stuck on.
That’s what develops skill. Not the kickoff. The weekly repetition with someone who pays attention to how the work is being done.
The best sales manager I know was asked what he does all day. His answer: “All I do is coach.” His team keeps getting better. The teams around him plateau.
If you’re spending money on training without that infrastructure in place, you’re building on sand. The training has nowhere to go.
This is one of the things the book gets into directly. Not just what to train, but what has to be in place for training to actually work.
Grab a free copy here
Adam
