How Your Company Can Deliver a Killer SKO

An engaging and impactful sales kickoff (SKO) event goes a long way in setting the tone for your sales team's performance in the coming year. At the same time, you want it to be more than just one big pep talk. You want content based on real data that provides your sales reps with actionable insights relevant and applicable to their day-to-day work, leading to tangible results.

In planning their next SKO, every client we have worked with looks to bring in a keynote speaker that can provide an outside perspective to their organization. The challenge here lies in finding a speaker whose keynote session checks all the boxes above.

As an organization that continuously surveys business leaders and buyers in the B2B market, SBI could be the partner you need to ensure your next SKO is both memorable and impactful. Armed with our own research data, we can provide your organization with an objective, third-party perspective based on insights that are directly relevant to the day-to-day work of your sales team.

Based on our latest research findings, we can cover two keynote topics, where your organization may choose to focus on either one or go with some combination of points from both topics.

1. Ease Buying Friction Using Headway Selling

We surveyed 643 buyers in the B2B space to understand and define the factors that influence their purchasing decisions. What we found was that more important than the product, pricing and brand itself, what mattered to buyers more was the whole GTM experience that is promised to them.

Suppliers that can help customers advance the evolution of their organization anticipate roadblocks in their journey and ensure team alignment with the customer’s direction, showing that they can help customers make continuous headway toward their future goals. When sales reps can bring this into their conversations with prospects and customers, we call it ‘headway selling’.

This is especially relevant to buyers today who may face severe levels of change within their organization and a lot of uncertainty over where their business will be in the future. Having partners that can help them make headway no matter what happens in the future is thus important and reassuring to the future growth of the organization.

When sales reps employ headway selling effectively, the survey responses from B2B buyers indicate a 47% increase in the likelihood of closing a deal. Additionally, respondents also said they were 143% more likely to close a bold purchase. What this means is that the buyer ended up spending 15% more than intended at the start of the engagement (a 15% larger deal size) and was also 62% more likely to demonstrate advocacy for your company.

2. The Highest-Productivity Seller Approaches

In another survey we did with sales reps and sales managers, we sought to identify and define the seller approaches most employed by individual sellers when they interact with buying decision teams in the context of headway selling and easing buyer friction. By studying and recognizing patterns across a long list of sales competencies and seller behaviors, we identified four distinct seller approaches, which we named Narrowing, Provoking, Translating, and Anticipating.

Going further into the research data, why these distinct seller approaches are important because we found that different approaches impacted changes in the average sales cycle and average deal size when sellers were focused on a particular approach.

Most notably, the Narrowing and Provoking approaches led to an increase in the average sales cycle by 20% and 22%, respectively, as compared to the Translating and Anticipating approaches, which typically achieved sales cycles that were shorter by 1% and 12%, respectively. Sellers who shifted to prioritize any of these four sales approaches would also find that they could achieve larger deal sizes by 7% to 16%, depending on which approach they employed.

Partner with SBI for an Impactful SKO

This is just a preview of what SBI can bring to your next SKO. We can work with your organization with the flexibility to figure out what works best for you, including potentially extended sessions for your team or smaller group workshops around either or both topics.

Through this collaboration, we hope to equip your team with not only the knowledge of what’s happening in the market and what will make the biggest impact, but actionable insights to prepare for what’s ahead and think about how to deploy what they learn from us.

Get in touch with us today to get started in planning for the success of your next SKO.