Ten Tips For The (Pre)Sales Kick-Off

Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death (By Slides)

We have all lived through and sometimes barely survived the traditional offsite sales meeting. Everyone – sales, sales engineering, and random marketing, support, and development folks – is crammed into a large, dark, windowless room. Further torture is then applied using Death by PowerPoint for two to four days.

This article addresses the offsite sales (or training) meeting from a Sales Engineering point of view. We may maim a sacred cow or two and provide you with ideas about radically different ways of planning, organizing, and running these meetings. Of course, if you are perfectly content to have your brain and your rear end numbed by PowerPoint combined with uncomfortable seats and a possible hangover – you can stop reading right now.

The Top Ten Tips To Improve Offsite Sales Meetings for Sales Engineers.

1.???? Build A Mission Statement For The Meeting. It may be a novel idea, but why not decide precisely what you want to accomplish by the end of the meeting? Then, set up your agenda, content, and overall theme to match the mission statement. The vaguer and fluffier you make the mission, the more likely you are to send the audience into crashing boredom and buzzword bingo.

2.???? Try solving some problems instead. Every SE organization has its challenges and problems. Take the opportunity to address some of the problems, choose some within your control (or influence) to get fixed, and put together teams to work on each problem. Have them report the specific action items and steps they came up with to obtain a resolution. You can spend an afternoon doing this and gain major efficiency and morale boosts as a result.

3.???? Have a Break-Out Room for Pre-Sales Engineers. Many of these ideas deal with breaking the SE team out of the main sessions for anywhere from a few hours to several days. Provide a separate room for these sessions, equipped with power strips and configured for whiteboards, two projectors, and display screens.

4.???? It’s NOT an opportunity for corporate folks to satisfy their annual MBOs. Review the agenda carefully beforehand, and if someone is presenting just because they have requested “30 minutes with the sales force to share what they are doing,” – that is a strong indicator they are fulfilling an MBO. Put people on the agenda that YOU need to hear from – not because they want to speak AT you.

5.???? Set a standard presentation format. Ask your presenters (give the executive committee a pass if necessary) to utilize a standard format for their slides. This does not mean logo, color, and font. It means a “what this means to you” and a “what you should do/learn next” slide. Anyone who displays an organization chart or a slide with more than five bullets should be booed off the stage.

6.???? Set up a guru/expert track. Arrange for a few specialized sessions exclusively for the very senior or principal/master-level sales engineers. Make these by invitation only so you are catering to the top 10% of the organization to say ‘thank you’ and provide an incentive to the other 90%.

7.???? Promote healthy snacks and daylight. The last thing you want is to have people fall asleep during someone's talk, especially yours. You also do not want to accentuate the body's natural lull in energy after lunch. One way to reduce this risk is to avoid certain foods and drinks that make people sleepy. Tryptophan is nature’s sleeping pill. Turkey and dairy products are high in tryptophan. Fatty foods take longer to digest and sit in the stomach longer, just churning around, making people uncomfortable and tired. Finally, simple sugars give people a quick high, but some come down hard due to a sharp dip in blood sugar levels. Sitting in a dark room exacerbates all these effects.[1]

8.???? There are some things SEs do not need to know. Do not subject SEs to long and tedious discussions about legal contracts, pricing, and revenue recognition issues (unless that is, strangely, part of their job). Instead, refer to points #3 and #6 to use this time to dive deeper into some core competency skills.

9.???? Test and retest the content. If part of your mission statement (point #1) relates to education, ensure your audience has “got it.” I used to, much to the initial disgust of my SE team, run pop quizzes and competitions to ensure that information was retained and internalized. The prizes used to liven up the sessions, and I never had an issue with getting corporate folks to teach my team!

10. Invite outside speakers and star salespeople or managers to speak. Have the VP of sales or engineering come into an SE-only session and address the team. Also, consider inviting several more successful salespeople who work well with presales to come in and talk about some of their deals.

Summary

You may be reading this as an individual contributor and wonder what you can do to impact large corporate meetings. Pass this Talking Point up the management chain, but consider suggesting some of these points (in particular #2) for your next smaller area or district meeting. When they call attendance in the room, will you put your hand up in the air to signal “Present” or “Guilty”?

[1] Adapted from the ECG Newsletter : https://ecglink.com/library/ps/meals.html