The best sales kickoffs are oriented around one simple and powerful objective: enabling salespeople to engage more effectively with the customer.
Too often, sales kickoffs get hijacked by marketing or product teams. This is an event where these teams can interface with all of sales once a year — and the result, many times, is an over-eagerness to overload sales with as much information as possible while they have their eyes and ears and can lock them in a windowless room to data dump.
While the CEO, the CPO and the CMO all can and often do contribute to the sales kickoff meeting, this is a sales meeting. It belongs to the head of sales. And everything discussed, shared, rallied around, practiced should be done so in the context of how it relates to and enables sales to better connect with the customer.
So if the sales kickoff is not a time for
