Sales Kickoff Meeting

Running a successful sales kick-off meeting is one of the most crucial yearly events that you'll ever run in your company. When done right, it will help align the team with the company objectives and get excited to hit these goals.

What is a sales kick off meeting?

A sales kickoff meeting is an in-person or virtual event that brings together the entire sales team to celebrate past success, learn new strategies, and get motivated.

Organizing fun and powerful sales kickoff meeting are worth investing in, as sales directly affect the company's revenue and your sales team's morale and motivation. While it is technically labeled as a meeting, it needs a little more creativity and flair than any other meeting type. Add fun breakout sessions, invite guest speakers and organize fun games that promote healthy competition.

Tips on How to Run a Sales Kick-Off Meeting

Are you wondering how to kick off a sales meeting? Or, what makes a sales kick-off meeting successful? First, you have to define what success means to you. Does success mean simply covering all the agenda? Or are you aiming for something more, such as how the team feels? Here are three goals and a few tips on how you can implement them; but first, don't forget your sales kick off speech to start the meeting!

Educate

• Talk about a new strategy or tool
• Invite someone from the Product Team to talk about new and exciting features
• Hold workshops to improve crucial sales skills, such as writing an excellent cold email

Engage

• Include breaks withs lots of opportunity to network
• Invite your most successful customers and let your team ask questions
• Host fun and interactive break out sessions

Energize

• Invite a motivational speaker
• Ask your most successful sales representative to share their story
• Hold a short awards ceremony for top performers

What's Inside This Sales Kick-Off Meeting Agenda Template

What should you include in your sales kick-off meeting agenda? First, it's essential to get the basics down. You might feel pressure to make it super fun and exciting that you end up overlooking the main reason for organizing the meeting in the first place: to equip your sales team with the best tools and strategies so they can succeed, and it all starts with a virtual sales kickoff agenda.

The good news is we've done the heavy lifting for you with this sales kickoff agenda example free template, which covers all the basics, from sharing all the critical updates to organizing fun breaks. Use it as it is, or add more sections depending on your style. The great thing about this template is that it works perfectly when planning a virtual sales kick off meeting. You can work with the team on the sales kick off agenda asynchronously, too.

Sales Kick-off Meeting

Start strong with an inspirational anecdote or a fun icebreaker team building activity. Share the most important goals for the company and how it relates to sales. Lastly, let everyone know what to expect from the event.

Team Building & Networking

This is the fun part where you can bring everyone together. It can be structured or unstructured networking time, but make sure to set a timer to stay on schedule. For a virtual session, this is where Zoom's rooms are handy.

Reviewing the past year

Discuss key achievements with specific numbers from the past year. If you're doing an awards ceremony, this is the best time to do it. Don't forget to mention if there are lowlights or insights.

Outline Objectives

Remind everyone about the company objectives and how it ties specifically to sales.

For example:

• Increase MRR by 20% each month
• Increase inbound lead to sales conversion rate from 6% to 15%

Lunch Break

Time to eat, freshen up, and get in on some unstructured networking time.

Guest contributor

This is optional, but spending the time and resources for the right guest speaker can be extremely valuable in educating and energizing your team. Here, you can invite a successful customer that can share their experience about the product and allow the sales team to ask questions.

Updates

A simple section where you can talk about all the updates that affect the sales team. Any new features to highlight? Does the Marketing Team have something up their sleeves to help the Sales Team?

Coffee Break

To keep everyone fresh, allocate a 10-15 min coffee break before moving into any strategy sessions, role-playing, or workshops.

Workshop/ New sales strategy sessions

Planned activities: brainstorming sessions, workshops, or training sessions to teach your sales reps new strategies or improve existing ones.

Product Training

Invite product managers to present key product features and their benefits.

Wrap-up

Unlike any other meetings, this one doesn't end with action items. An excellent way to tell if the event is successful is to ask a question. For example, if the event’s primary goal is to learn a valuable sales strategy, you could ask, "What is your main takeaway from today's event?" And if another goal is to make sure the team feels motivated and energized, you could ask, "How do you feel after the session?" These are only some of the sales meeting kick off ideas for how to wrap up your meeting.

Ready to rock all of your other meetings? Check out more of our free templates. 👇