It’s a new year and companies will begin planning their annual sales kick off meetings to have everyone start on the same page. Having planned a multitude of annual sales meetings, we’ve put together a few key don’t-miss-tips here for your sales kick off and a couple of theme ideas for you to center them on.
Sports themes are popular because they emphasize team work and reaching a challenge to collectively to reach your goals. Examples of such themes are “Swinging to Success” with a baseball theme, so your sales team can try and make a home run each inning. Closely following the new year is the super bowl, with that in mind, a football theme would be a great, remind your team that “The 4th quarter is ours!” or you can use a boxing theme and have it centered around the tagline, “Challenger to Champion”. Here’s a photo of some jerseys we made for a company’s sales kick-off.
What a lot of annual meetings have issues with is keeping their audience engaged and presenting the information in a way that can enrapture their sales team, resulting in a higher retention rate of the year’s product information. Instead of giving a long presentation on your products, make an activity out of it. You can arrange the company’s different products around the room in different information booths where each booth will conduct a small training session. Themes that would be great here are traveling themes, such as “A world of opportunities” and each booth can different locations whether it be countries or cities that are important to the company. Destination examples can be areas where you would like to focus on driving sales for that quarter as a reminder of improvement and the goals at hand, or places that are already flourishing in the company to remind your team of the great work they’re doing. Having small details like this will increase the retention rate among your team but will also make this an engaging, fun activity for your sales department. Another advantage of this is that it gives your sales team the opportunity to learn the new product features or product lines at their own pace with the special perk of being able to ask questions in a small group setting, whether they’re new to the company or old, everyone gets the same chance. 
Not everyone can meet their sales quotas every year and sales representatives can become disgruntled with themselves and fall into a sales rut, neither of which would drive any profitability towards your company’s sales goals. A lot of trending design tactics for this is to create anonymous safe spaces such as chalkboard walls with personal messages people can leave with their own trials so your reps can see that it does happen to everyone at some point in their career. You can emphasize that these are learning steps and reboot their morale so they can begin this year with a brighter and better outlook for their goals.
There is a great amount of pressure looming around sales kick-off meetings because they set the standards for your company’s goals. If you’d like to alleviate the stress of planning, contact us at Exhilarate so you don’t have to worry about a thing.