The annual sales kick-off meeting is one of the most significant conferences held at companies. They allow the team to celebrate wins, communicate future goals, and boost morale, among several things. Unfortunately, this year, these conferences are much different due to the COVID pandemic. Hosting them has been a considerable challenge for conference organisers since such events are best enjoyed in person.
So how can you make these sales kick-off conferences interesting, engaging, and overall successful?
Well, managers will likely need to think outside the box and host it on an online conference platform. Planning and creativity are the major driving forces to success when it comes to such events. In this article, we will walk you through the best tips you can leverage to drive better sales outcomes and host a successful sales kick-off meeting.
Give Awards to High Performers
One technique that you can use to make your sales kick-off meeting fun and exciting is to host a segment in the meeting where you give out awards to the high performers who made the most amounts of sales. Publicly recognizing them will increase morale in the employees. This award segment should be about celebrating success and providing recognition while at the same time fostering some friendly competition.
Hence your virtual conference should be about setting the tone right and grabbing the attention of all employees from the get-go. Some of these ways include having an enticing speech, a musical performance, or any sort of attention-grabbing opening act.
Include Breakout Sessions to Remove Monotony
The biggest drawback of hosting virtual reality corporate events is the fact that they can get monotonous really quickly. With such events, people’s attention spans are much shorter. This is often not the case with in-person events. For this reason, hosts and managers should work together to ensure there are enough breaks during speeches to ensure the attention of all attendees.
One of the ways you can remove monotony is to include breakout sessions. This will also give the employees opportunities to network, which is one of the main reasons why people enjoy sales kick-off meetings. Depending on the tools available in your online conference platform, you can allow attendees to break out into separate rooms or chat live as the speaker is presenting.
Include Polls
If your online hosting platform gives you the option to include polls during your virtual meeting, this would be a great way to keep the attendees engaged. This will allow you to mix things up and keep engaging activities throughout the conference. Consider including a poll every now and then to get people buzzing. In fact, you should include polls right before a Q/A session for better engagement.
Review the Speech Given by Managers
This is an important best practice before going live with your virtual conference because you want to ensure that as conference organisers you are not simply recreating what an in-person sales kick-off conference would be like. It is pretty common to emulate things from the physical world online, which is why you must be careful not to do that with the speeches given by managers.
This is because you would very easily lose the attention of your virtual employees and create monotony. The speech should be broken into several parts so that you can ask for feedback in between to strike a conversation and engage the employees.
Including an Attention-Grabbing PowerPoint
The PowerPoint presentation is perhaps one of the most important aspects of a virtual reality corporate event. This is especially important when you consider the fact that most individuals are visual, rather than auditory learners. This is why the presentation for the employees should include several images, videos, gifs, graphics, and so much more.
Simply presenting figures and annual targets can make your employees lose interest very quickly. Hence, you should instead weave them in organically alongside engaging content.
Send Out a Sales Kick-off Meeting Agenda
An important tip to follow when hosting sales kick-off conferences is to send out the meeting agenda to managers and employees prior to the virtual event. This should simply be a concise timetable of the activities and speaking sessions that will be part of the conference. If possible, you should also highlight how each of the sessions or activities will be applicable to the employee who is planning to attend.
The aim of sharing agendas should be to remind your employees and managers that these conferences will give them the opportunity to engage.
Include Virtual Giveaways
Another engaging and exciting team-building and morale-boosting activity for a virtual conference is to send out giveaways to your employees. This is typically a normal practice for those who meet sales targets, but when you host these meetings online, you should still make an effort to recognize high achievers and provide them with tangible rewards.
Diversify Your Speakers
If you plan to host a long sales kick-off conference, then it’s best not to simply stick to one speaker. Instead, you should diversify and incorporate several people from the company to take a chance and share a few words. In fact, if you have the time, you can also have each member of the sales team introduce themselves and what they look forward to from this upcoming year.
Moreover, you should also allocate some time for employees who want to ask any questions at the end of the meeting. The key to a successful sales kick-off meeting is to keep all employees who are attending engaged.
Bringing it All Together
Though employees may have attended several virtual conferences and meetings throughout this year, a sales kick-off meeting should be completely different. It takes a look back at the employees’ achievements and sets the tone for the upcoming year by allocating targets. For such an important conference, engagement is necessary. Therefore, whichever tips you follow, make sure you are being creative and providing fun and informative content.