Let’s start with a question. What’s the 20% that delivered 80% of your sales results last year?

That’s the essence of this Kick-Off series — I’m going to take you through a structured and detailed approach to identify where you have the greatest potential to both create value and importantly capture your fair share of that value so that both you and your customers get a win out of the coming year of sales.

I’m really excited to be providing you with a completely revised approach to make sure that you execute a fantastic kick-off to get your sales year going. Whether you’re a manager or an individual salesperson, the content and strategies I’m going to take you through in this series of Vlogs will be valuable in planning for sales growth and making sure you’re not wasting energy, time and effort doing the wrong things with the wrong prospective customers.

Even if you’re in the middle of your sales year — coming back to the Sales Growth Blueprint and the 8 conversations I’m going to take you through will be incredibly valuable. (If you don’t know about the Sales Growth Blueprint, make sure you download the free 32-page eBook here)

Back to planning for your Kick-Off — It all starts with the Sales Growth Blueprint and identifying how you’ll use the 7 drivers of sales growth to make the coming year your best. Let’s go through what those drivers are and let me explain how they relate to building a sales growth plan as part of your Kick-Off event.

 

1. Compelling Story

At the centre of the Sales Growth Blueprint is the COMPELLING STORY. There’s the compelling story you want to be sharing with your target market but for kick-off, you need to be thinking about the compelling story you want you and your people telling themselves about the growth strategy. A big tip here is that the more you and your people link your personal goals to the sales growth targets, the more likely it is that everyone will follow through on the plan.

This conversation is critical because it makes sure that you and everyone around you have established their own personal WHY for growth.

Then the conversation at Kick-Off needs to move to opportunities for great efficiencies. I always like to remind people that I’m not just about more sales. If you can achieve the same amount of sales with significantly less effort, energy and time this year, I would rate that as a success. If you can do that — enjoying your customer and colleague relationships significantly more, I would also rate that as a success. So, let’s consider the four key areas for driving greater efficiency that leads to sales growth.

 

2. Smarter Targeting

The first efficiency you want to consider is SMARTER TARGETING. Your planning and reflection at the kick off event should enable your people to go into the new sales year making smarter choices about where they focus their time, energy and effort. It’s incredibly painful to be doing all the right things at the wrong time with the wrong people.

 

3. Persuasive Engagement

Knowing who your ideal customers are is just the beginning. You need to make sure you’re effectively and efficiently persuading those people to want to engage with you. Very few salespeople have a marketing and lead generation team that fill their diaries so if you need to generate leads, developing ideas and choosing you PERSUASIVE ENGAGEMENT strategies needs to be a part of the sales growth plan you develop as part of your Kick-Off.

 

4. Persuasive Proposing

Kick-Off is also a great time to review the way you’re proposing solutions to your prospective customers. For most businesses, a 10% improvement in conversion creates around a 40% improvement in profitability. PERSUASIVE PROPOSING is the third opportunity for improving growth and efficiencies. This is something that rarely gets discussed at Kick-Off’s and yet it’s one of the best opportunities most businesses have for making a major leap forward with very little extra resourcing and effort.

 

5. Retention & Advocacy

We all know that stats around an existing customer being 5 times easier to sell to and a referral being 4 times more likely to convert but RETENTION & ADVOCACY are rarely discussed in much detail at Kick-Offs. For most businesses and salespeople retention and advocacy should be the two most important drivers of achieving annual sales targets and planning in these areas is critical. Success is not about doing more with less. It’s about doing the most with what you’ve got.

Reflecting, developing ideas and reflecting on how to be more efficient should be a core part of the Kick-Off conversation and improvements in any of these 4 areas we’ve just covered will have a dramatic impact not only on sales revenue but also on how much you enjoy selling throughout the year.

 

6. Deliberate Confidence & Motivation

The last two drivers in the Sales Growth Blueprint relate to personal productivity. As humans, we need to recognise two things. It is very hard to change the habits that are driving our current results. If we want to change our results, we need to make conscious choices to change and that requires DELIBERATE CONFIDENCE & MOTIVATION. The Kick Off event should inspire and motivate you and your people but it should also include reflection, ideas and planning on how to stay motivated throughout the year. Remember, consistently good beats occasionally great and staying consistently motivated is not something that will happen on its own.

 

7. Activity Accountability

And finally, there’s the discipline of ACTIVITY ACCOUNTABILITY. Our results flow from what we do and in the absence of measurement, monitoring of measures and coaching very few people achieve anywhere near their potential. The Kick-Off is a great forum for reflecting on which activities are genuinely delivering results and how to create an environment that drives a more disciplined approach to get more of the right things done with the right people at the right times.

 

Remember where we started this blog — we all know about the 80/20 rule but what’s important is figuring out which 20% of our activity is driving 80% of our results and using that knowledge to be better.

As you can see the Sales Growth Blueprint provides us with a fantastic structure to build our sales Kick-Off and in the next Vlog, I’ll share the 8 must have conversations that will enable you to reflect on, develop ideas and plan for sales growth at your Kick-Off event.

If you’re doing a major kick-off, please speak to my team about having me along as a conference presenter and if you’re an individual salesperson or have a small sales team come along to our Sales Kick-Off event on February 12th. All the details are on the website and there’s even a competition to win over $12,000 worth of sales training.

Here’s to a better sales life and a better kick off for you and your people.