#611 - The Sales Leader SKO Survival Guide | JD Miller | 30MPC Hall of Fame

0:00Hey, if you're planning your next sales kickoff, 30MPC is here to help you. All week, we're doing scope planning content to make your next sales kickoff actually fun and useful, and we put together the ultimate guide to planning your next scope in collaboration with Katie Givens, who's the VP of Enablement over at AwardCo. It's free. Grab it in the show notes. And now we've got a fun episode today on surviving your next sales kickoff as a sales leader with JD Miller, Armand, and Mark. Enjoy.

0:29Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk, and I'm here with my co-host, Mark Casaglo. And today we have for another round on the show in one of the most timely podcasts you could possibly imagine. It is the one and only J.D. Miller. He is a multiple-time CRO, most recently CRO over at Cantata, and he is teaching us the do's and don'ts of sales kickoffs in sales kickoff season. Mark, why should people listen? I would wager, Armand, that fewer than 0.01 % of CROs are also movie screenwriters. But J.D. Miller just happens to be the rare animal that can run a huge, profitable, efficient revenue team and write a really endearing Hallmark Christmas movie script.

1:17But you know what he's done? He's put those two things together into creating the best SKO that you can possibly have. And that's what we're going to talk about today. All righty, JD, welcome back to the show. We start every leadership show with your top three actionable takeaways. And we start every year with a sales kickoff. So let's get your three actionable sales kickoff takeaways. JD, take it away. Kick off item number one, choose an SKO theme that you can return to throughout the year. We're going to have a lot of people in a room for a lot of days, and it's very easy for them to lose track of what they were supposed to remember.

1:50But the one thing they will remember is what your theme was. And so I always like to choose a theme that really encapsulates all of the learnings and all of the parts of success that I want to instill in them for the rest of the year. I was at a company called Cantata, which is a musical themed name. And our biggest thing that we wanted our sellers to be able to do was to be braver in going to market and being more forthcoming, confident about the ROI that they could deliver. And so we had a theme called Forte, which is a musical word for being loud. And then that Forte theme was reinforced in everything we did through kickoff.

2:21So it was activities like going to dinner and finding musical instruments on your table, having a drummer come in and lead us through a making some noise kind of activity, team building event. It was about having dancers come in and doing flamenco stomping and making music so that when people left kickoff, hopefully they remember the training. They definitely remember the flamenco dancers and then couldn't have that conversation about why were we making all that noise again? Oh yeah, it was about being bold and brave. JD told me he was going to do the flamenco dance later on this podcast. So you better hang on for the end of the episode.

2:55Bring us on to number two. Number two, make personal connections with all of your sellers. When you're the CRO of a company of size, everybody knows who you are. And at some point, the size of your team gets too large for you to know who they are. But it's really important for your sellers to feel that personal connection and they really respond to it. I have a few tactical things that I do to help me make a personal connection with each of my sellers. The first is before I get to sales kickoff, I ask my managers to give me a quick rundown of their team members and anything important about those folks that they're going to want to hear me talk about.

3:28Maybe they welcomed a new baby. Maybe they achieved something really big. And then I get that put together in a photo flip book. So when I'm on the plane on the way to sales kickoff, I'm looking at photos, I'm memorizing names, and I'm memorizing the stories that I want to talk to them about. At the event itself, a really well-designed name badge. They're color-coded according to the job that they're in. Their first name is in really bold letters so I can read it from across the room. And then other parts of the badge are going to show them things about where in the world they're from or other details so that when I get to break, I know I've got to go find Mark and I know I need to congratulate him on the launch of his new company.

4:04And so I'm looking for the purple bag with a big Mark on it and can go wander the room really quickly and find that person and make that personal connection that he's looking for. What's number three? Number three is manage your time really effectively. When we think about not only the hotel cost and the food cost of SKO, but also the dollar amount that we're spending on people's salaries and the opportunity cost of sellers being out of the field. Every minute of sales kickoff can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars. And we want to make sure that we get the most out of that spend. It starts by having a really great agenda, not putting anyone on stage unless they can tell you what they're going to talk about and what the sellers are supposed to leave that session knowing how to do.

4:46And then looking at the cost of that session, whatever your training is, whatever the takeaway that it is that you want the sellers to have, do you really need 30 minutes for it? Can we do it in 20? Can we do it in 13? And can I really put you on stage for just that amount of time so that we're as impactful as possible? And then producing it is a lot like the Oscars. At the foot of the stage, there's a screen that's got a countdown timer letting you know how many minutes you have left to talk. As you get to your final three minutes, it starts flashing at you. When you get down to 30 seconds, It's a big red number that says you've got to stop.

5:18And as soon as it hits zero, just like the Oscars, music is playing. I'm walking out on stage and I'm shuffling you off to the side, even if you're the CEO, even if you're not done talking, because we've got something else equally important that we need to get to and spend our next thousand dollar minute on. A lot of salespeople have creativity, but sometimes they struggle like putting it into certain contexts. And I think SKL is one of them. I know you have this theme about cantata and forte. That one is so perfect. Like you have another one that you did with links in the chain and stuff like that.

5:49Tell me a little bit of like, how does your thought process work to get to a theme like that? I think it actually begins by looking at your agenda and trying to decide what are you trying to accomplish in your SKO? What are the skills you're trying to teach? What are the lessons you want people to learn? And then creating a theme from there. I think a lot of people go wrong when they say, I've got a great hotel in New Orleans. And so my sales kickoff is going to be New Orleans themed. Actually, the theme has got to be about what is the thing that you're teaching at New Orleans, not where did I happen to be.

6:20We'll all remember a lot about New Orleans. But if I'm trying to teach cantata to be loud and bold or sellers to do links in the chain, it's really about what is the lesson that I want to keep reminding you about again and again is really where that needs to begin. Of course, AI these days are great brainstormers. So you can open up ChatGPT or Gemini and say, I'm launching a sales kickoff where I'm trying to tell my sellers, everyone needs to be able to sell something, a deal of any size every month of the year. And that's how we're going to get to success. And ChatGPT will give you five or six great ideas to iterate on.

6:56And that's actually how I wound up with this links in the chain one was we wound up saying we're as strong as our weakest link. And every person who sells a deal every month, they get one more link and a little set of carabiners that we're going to hand them. And that became the theme of the kickoff. So suddenly people are walking around with these on their lanyards and some people have 30 chains long and some people just have one. But it's a really good reinforcement of, oh yeah, I've got to go sell something because that's about how we're going to succeed as a team. And then I also am really good at this because I have a great network of creative folks that I work with.

7:30I have an amazing event producer, but I've surrounded myself with marketers and event managers who do this for a living and are constantly coming to me and saying, I just saw another company's sales kickoff. They did this one thing, it worked really well. And that kind of goes in the bag of ideas that I'm always remembering and thinking about for the future. Like how far out to do something like this, do you need to start planning in order to feel like you can work at a comfortable pace to get it versus, you know, that, oh my God, SKOs in a month. What are we doing y 'all? We just know we're going to New Orleans.

7:59So I know we're talking in December and January right now, and most SKOs are probably January, February. Really, we should have started this work at the end of Q3. At the end of Q3, you're starting to build your annual plan, you're starting to figure out what the new year is going to look like. And as soon as you start building that plan of what's my number and what are the tasks that are going to get us there, we suddenly know, oh, I've got a whole new product launch and here's what that's about. Or I'm going to do a hiring influx. And that's where you can start to come up with what are the themes that are going to reinforce that.

8:27So the theme needs to be related to the key areas of improvement or emphasis that you're going to use for the next 12 months. What are you doing to come up with that list of the top two or three things that really influence the theme? For me, the work of the CRO is annual planning. And it's constantly working with your executive team early on to say, what are we going to do to win the day next year? What's the revenue target we're trying to hit? And building up an annual plan that says these are the building blocks that are going to get us to 20 % growth. Maybe it's a year about new logo. Maybe it's about cross-selling to the install base.

9:05Maybe it's a year about doing a really important merger and acquisition. All of those are things that are going in your annual plan that's telling you how you're going to win the year. And then when you know what that is, you can start theming on, oh, it's a merger. Our theme is about better together or holding hands or something like that. Oh, our year is about we're going to be hiring 50 more salespeople because we're moving into new regions. So I should have themes about welcome and friendship and mentorship and on and on. But it really begins, honestly, from the financial spreadsheet of what is the business trying to do next year?

9:39And then what are the tactics I'm deploying as a sales leader to help my team get there? Do you think like inspirational stuff or like data driven analysis? Like, for example, we're losing to this one competitor. It's such a rate that it's like really hurting our results. Or is it more like, hey, we really want to grow 20 percent next year. And it's more aspirational and maybe not quite as data driven. So I think the business plan is very data-driven. I'm going to grow 20 % next year if I can beat that competitor two times more often. Sellers aren't necessarily going to respond to that spreadsheet.

10:14And they may get that more inspirational, let's go be bold, let's go be brave, let's have some swagger in the market that we're still number one. It starts with a really tactical thing that we're trying to do. And then a sales kickoff theme and all of the props and activities and excitement around it is where we put the inspiration around to inspire our sellers to get excited about doing whatever the thing is that we want them to do. We had had our first breakout year, we went from zero to 6 million in ARR, and we found really, really good product market fit in the middle market. The name of the game, quote unquote, going into 2022 at the time was dominate the mid market, figure out the enterprise.

10:53And so we spent part of our sales kickoff, just codifying the playbook and jamming it into our heads of everything that we had learned the last year. But then we spent the back half talking about multi-threading, joint execution plans, lots of the process stuff that would be required to start winning a logo like an NVIDIA or a Stripe or someone like that. And that was stuff that we were able to carry back to every single step of the year. And then what we had our product team come and present on was, how are you going to support us with enterprise functionality? Marketing team was coming in, talking about how are we going to invest in ABM to make sure that you can break into these enterprise accounts.

11:28When you have a theme that carries with your revenue goal, you can train your team on it, but then you also have a guiding compass where every external speaker that comes in knows what they should and shouldn't be talking about. If someone comes in and starts talking about 2K deals when it's figure out the enterprise year, they are going against the theme. And you know what? I would even abstract that theme a bit further and make this the year of Goldilocks. Not too big and not too small. and you could be reinforcing the theme with books and children's television personalities and all the rest of it.

11:59But when people go, why did we have Goldilocks in the theme? Oh, it's because we're dominating the middle market. You're looking at a two to three day sales kickoff. Some teams use that to hire a sales trainer and have them run half of it. Other teams do tons of rah-rah sessions and it's basically a glorified celebration. Other teams do something in between. What is the right balance and how do you actually run a two to three day sales kickoff? So first of all, it starts with understanding what your objective is. Sales kickoff often covers a lot of objectives. There is some of it that's training and getting people the skills they need for the new year.

12:32There are some of it that's inspirational and motivational and rah-rah. There are some of it that's celebrating and rewarding your best talent. Some of it is about retention of your top performers. Sales kickoff in January is a time when the top sellers are getting calls from recruiters asking them to leave your company and go somewhere else. So some of sales kickoff is just flashy inspiration. Aren't we a great company? Please stay here. So you have to really think through what are all of the objectives you're trying to get to and then build a tactical program that gets you there. Now, what have I learned from tons of sales kickoffs?

13:04People have really short attention spans, whether it's online or in person. You can't sit on an eight-hour Zoom if it's online, and you can't sit in a conference room in the same seat. You've got to start by structuring your day into chunks. In the beginning, when people's attention spans are longest, you can have 90-minute sessions. But as the day and the week goes on, your sessions need to get down to 60 minutes and 45 minutes before they're going to get up and change. Move the room around as much as you can. Have some big, giant main stage sessions interspersed then with, we're going to go to small team breakout rooms.

13:35So the context that people are seeing shifts and is inspirational. Every time you come back into that main stage room, what can we change about the lighting? Can we move from a podium to, I call them Oprah chairs, four people sitting around a coffee table having a chat on stage? How can you keep stimulating people with something new to keep grabbing their attention? And increasingly, people are used to screens now. How do we get a production team that's going to intersperse my classroom lectures with video? really good inspirational stories from customers that have been edited and produced really nicely so that every moment of that experience has been planned, has been put in place for a reason.

14:12It's been really thoughtful, maximizes their attention and maximizes the use of their time. How do you fit in the work time? We want you paying attention, put phones down, laptops closed. Like this is an important, we're going to talk about it. But every rep, their phone is buzzing with text or emails. And ultimately there becomes like this backload in their brain of, oh my gosh, I just got 17 emails and now I'm going to be cooked tonight. How do you break up the day so that people can do work so they can have clear minds? Part of it is actually putting two hours into the day for work. If you can tell your sellers ahead of time, we're going to be in training, but on Tuesday between one and three and on Wednesday between 10 and noon, that's going to be work time.

14:52It helps a whole lot to then have people focused when it's time to come in and pay attention to whatever we're working on. Give me an example day one. You're on the main stage, what do the breakouts look like, et cetera. So day one, the first hour and a half is the CEO and the CRO talking about the big inspirational theme. Then we're rolling into what does that tactically look like? For the rest of this week, your agenda is going to be about picking the right ICP, understanding what the pains are of mid-market, understanding the new skills, or maybe you're doing a team reorg or something like that.

15:21So you've had your first hour and a half where you're really laying the big picture, people are understanding. We're going to a 20-minute coffee break, and then we're coming back into the room and we're having now a targeted training where maybe marketing is talking about the ICP or maybe product is talking about that brand new product launch for the mid-market. We go off to lunch, come back in the afternoon, but now they're in small breakout rooms where they're going to get the tactical training on exactly what the message is or what the features and functions of that product are. We're going to have an afternoon cookie break for 20 minutes, stretch our legs.

15:53We'll go back into breakout rooms where we've mixed up. So if I started as sellers, SEs, and customer success. Now I'm coming back into a breakout room. That's the North America sales team or the East team or the West team. And then we've got a little bit of time to go off to refresh ourselves, unwind from the day. And then in the evening, we're going to do something social. So I like to have some sort of a team building activity. Maybe we found a local charity. Maybe if we're doing this Goldilocks theme, we've got a school coming in with book bags that we've got to stuff with children's books, or maybe we're scanning books for the local library, something like that.

16:28We've got some wine and beer and some appetizers around that. And then we show up for dinner. And dinner, we'll have a bunch of different kinds of dinners. The last night is always when I have the big awards dinner that you're recognizing all the top performers. You're announcing people who are going to club this year. You're also announcing the club destination for the next year. Some of the other nights, we might do smaller group dinearounds. So instead of the whole sales team all together, we might again have regional breakout dinners or cross-functional breakouts. So people are starting to get to know each other across also organizational lines.

16:58Does your club destination have to tie into your themes? I think club is super important. And I think, you know, a lot of companies can't do it. But if you can stand up at your kickoff and announce not just where this year's winners are going, but where is your club going to be a year from now? Then at every quarterly meeting and every training session, I can remind you, when you found that Goldilocks deal, and you've hit your quota, you just qualified yourself for Hawaii and I can send you little gifts in the mail, little packets of sand or seashells or surfing toys or something that keep reminding you you're working hard this year because you're trying to qualify for that Hawaii trip.

17:35Breakout sessions. You've got seven different groups, AEs, SDRs, mid-market, SMB, yada, yada, yada. And now, frankly, you need to rely on your team to run really, really good trainings. And I've seen some of these fall super, super flat. And this is also when the audience is most exhausted. So talk to me about the right way to structure these breakout rooms, everything from who is running the training, what kind of support are you giving them, and how are those sessions typically structured? This is why we want to start early, because in Q4, we should really be writing the curriculum, knowing what the activities are, knowing what the slides that are going to be presented are, and then recruiting our speakers.

18:15Just because you were the engineer who invented the next best product doesn't mean you're the best person to speak about it. And so I spend my Q4 really recruiting through my team, who are my trusted folks that I know can present really well, can master it really well. And we've got to have prep sessions with them where they literally look through the book together and know, this is slide number one, this is what you speak to. This is what the activity is going to look like. Yes, after lunch, people are asleep, but you can't just have PowerPoint to death. So you do need to have some activities.

18:46Maybe it's quiz show or interactive or small group breakout sorts of things. But every room should be getting run in exactly the same way because you fed them the materials, you trained them on the materials, and you tested them on the materials before you let them step foot in that room. This is also a place where outside vendors can be good. I love CRM tools and revenue intelligence tools. Those are common things to roll out at sales kickoff. But you can't just trust the vendor to show up and do training either. You need to inspect them just as well and say, before I'm going to let you talk to my sellers for$1 ,000 a minute, I need to see exactly what your class looks like and make sure that I've approved it and find it engaging.

19:25I know one thing that we did at Outreach is we'd always do something super unexpected after lunch. And there's this phenomenon among penguins called turtling, where in Antarctica and really cold climates where penguins are, when the weather gets really cold, they all huddle up in a group. And then they actually have this kind of rhythmic way that the penguins in the middle cycle themselves to the outside edge. And they're constantly cycling through. It's called turtling. I remember after lunch one time, it was my turn to do a session. I knew the glazed eyes were going to be happening and the cell phones were going to be out because people started stuff during lunch.

20:01And so I did this turtling exercise and I explained what turtling was and I made us all do it as a group. And after four or five minutes, all of a sudden, like we all got the rhythm of how to move as a group so that we could cycle things around. But it was super corny. It was a little bit uncomfortable because people were in close proximity with each other, but it was so memorable and powerful because it talked about togetherness, teamwork, what we got to do. What I love about what you're turtling was, is it was kinetic. You really want to engage all of the senses as much as you can. It's like going to Disney World or a great amusement park.

20:38What are you smelling? What are you tasting? What are you feeling? What are you doing? What are you touching? It's not just sit in a chair and listen. The here is just one sense. You've got to keep mixing it up. How can you break up the day into little chunks? We might be training for an hour, but how do I have three minutes of listening and then two minutes of writing and then three minutes of getting up and sharing my idea with someone else so that you're constantly introducing a new prompt to get something new happening. There's some people that do two days and on the third day you travel home.

21:11There's other companies that'll do two and a half days and on the half day you travel home. Like how do you think about scheduling for travel and stuff like that so you're maximizing time together? This is such a complex hotel topic that your CFO really cares about too. So the best rates on hotels want a booking pattern that begins on Sunday and ends on Thursday. So you'll get your best hotel negotiation if you have a Sunday arrival and a Thursday. Culturally, your company decides like maybe I have a rule that we don't travel on Sunday and Monday has to be the travel day. Depends on your locality and all the rest of it.

21:48If Sunday is a travel day, I see a full day Monday, a full day Tuesday. I would love to have a full day Wednesday and travel home on Thursday. The hotel would love that too. A lot of times people don't have that budget. So meet all day Monday, meet all day Tuesday, Wednesday morning. Maybe that's a free time unstructured, but you've still got the rooms for teams to do their own little breakout stuff and travel home Wednesday night. And then if you're not traveling on Sunday, then you've got to shift all of that. Monday morning is a travel day and your first meeting starts at one in the afternoon.

22:17I want to ask about some of the other things that should and should not go inside of sales kickoffs. I want to roll out MedPic message to my team. Does sales kickoff the right place to roll out a training methodology, or should it be more about feeling than learning? I think sales kickoff is probably a place that if MedPick is part of our strategy, I should at least say the word and tell you that it's going to come. I shouldn't expect that you're going to learn all of the questions and be an expert at it. I would probably put MedPick in the thematic topic. This is going to be part of our winning strategy.

22:47Maybe I'm going to give you a taste of it. I'm probably going to do the deep dive training as a follow-up after we get back. Can we talk about the do's and don'ts when you get to the celebration part? I want to talk specifically about recognition because this is the time of year where I think sometimes leaders forget that a rep is waiting the entire year for their name to be called up on stage. And I've seen some people in truly like some of the most amazing moments of their career at sales kickoffs. And I've also seen some people who really feel like they almost got slapped in the face when their sales kickoff.

23:20Could you talk about do's and don'ts for celebrations and recognition? I love trophies and I hate trophies because they're so emotional. I had a seller a long time ago tell me I would rather get a trophy than a$5 ,000 bonus. And it's sort of been true. So I like to celebrate a lot and I like to celebrate as many things as our legitimate celebrations. Absolutely. We're going to have top performer of the year and rookie of the year and some of those standard things. But I also think that once you've sort of figured out what those repetitive awards are, You're also got to take a look at your people and say, who is in the organization that is not a winner here that is going to be upset if they haven't gotten an award?

23:58And what award can we give this year specifically for them? And it might be, this is the only year we have a teamwork award or a rookie of the year for the SE team award or something like that. I also like the awards to be not just a crystal trophy, but sort of mapping to our theme. So to make some noise here, they were like engraved cowbells and stuff like that. The celebration should be about making the team better and inspiring and motivating them. So you've got to be really thoughtful about what are you recognizing? Who are you recognizing? Are the right people getting recognized for the right things?

24:29And then you've also got to really circulate that list ahead of time amongst your managers and make sure are the names spelled correctly? Is the title right? Have we triple checked the math of what did you really sell? What was the metric? And who is really top performer there? I spend a lot of time in December and January with my managers looking at the list, rechecking the list, asking, how is your team going to respond? And is there anyone not on this list that we've got to give an award to for something else? Or if not an award, can I recognize you in some other way during the keynote that I'm shouting you out from the stage for doing the thing you did really well and giving you that public recognition that you crave?

25:06Who is responsible for giving out the awards? And what does a good award giving out speech sound like? So I always think I'm the host of SKO and I think I'm the MC of SKO. So if I'm the CRO, I think I'm giving the awards. I like to do it at a dinner. It's usually the main ballroom of the hotel that we're at. So we're at dinner tables. Sometime through dinner, I'm coming up on stage. There's a table with all the awards standing there. The lights dim and I say, we're here to recognize top performances. You begin with smaller awards and you build yourself up to top seller of the year. It's a very quick, here's what the award is.

25:44Here's what it recognizes. Our winner is Mark or Armand or whatever. The reason Armand won is he did this amazing thing. I tell a quick 30 second story, or maybe their manager tells a quick 30 second story about them. They come up, they stand on stage, they receive the trophy. I like to keep them all there because probably they're all going to sales club. I hope they're all going to sales club. And if they are, and that's how that's working, then we announce these are also our qualifiers for sales club. We go down the line and give them a Hawaiian lay because it's Hawaii or give them a beret because it's Paris or whatever it is.

26:18We bring up the rest of the club performers. And then we dim the lights and we show a movie of the next year club destination so that the last thing I say of the night is we're really proud of these folks. Congratulations on what you did. But everyone else in this room, I hope you're going to join me in 2026 at this even more exciting cool cruise we're going to go on. You'll qualify when you sell your number. And don't forget, Goldilocks for the year is what's going to get you there. Have a great night. And that's sort of the last moment of the event. What do you specifically plan in the next two to six weeks to really keep that momentum going versus just, oh, we did our SKO.

26:57Thank God that's over. So now they're going back in the field. What is going to happen on Monday on the first team meeting, each of those managers is now with their selling team. That manager has to have something that they're going back to their selling team and saying, remember the Goldilocks team or remember make out some noise. And here's the task of the week. And you're going to have the follow on trainings because maybe we mentioned the word MedPick. But now in those next two to six weeks, we're actually getting the detailed MedPicks training and we're putting it into play. At least quarterly, I'm bringing people together at least virtually for an hour for a quarterly kickoff.

27:31We're going to be reminded of the theme. We're going to have some light celebrations of people who embodied the Goldilocks message for the year. I'm sending them books for that. We're reminding them again about how mid-market and being not too big and not too small is the winning theme for us this year. And we're giving them tasks and takeaways and encouraging them to do that. Then we're reminding them of what next year's club trip is going to look like. and we're sending out vials of sand or bringing the flamenco dancers back in for a 30 second snippet to get you excited about Spain or noise or stomping or whatever it happened to have been.

28:05So, Diddy, we have this big event. We have some follow-up, but we're one quarter in now. We're reading the numbers and all of a sudden the strategy needs to change. How do you deal with the reality of what happens two or three months later when you've built this theme that you want to use all year long? Well, I think a couple of things. If I can at all help it, I've chosen a theme that's vague enough that it might morph. Forte can mean a lot of things. It can be bold. It can be loud. It can be work with force. And we might talk about Q2's refinement of Forte to get us there. If it's fundamentally off, I think we need to own that.

28:40And that's a leadership communication that we should be coming to our sales team and say, guess what? We started the year and we thought mid-market was it. And we told you, go find all those Goldilocks deals. And actually what we've learned is it's exactly wrong. We're only an enterprise company right now. So let's go shift. And now we're three little pigs or the big bear or whatever the new thing is. That's all about being big. I think that's just great communication. Your sellers like it when you respect them enough to say, hey, the thing we tried and told you to do, it's not working. It's not good.

29:09And we're not performing. So we're going to try this new thing. And let me bring you along for the ride. And let's get excited about where we're going to go together next. JD, amazing show. We have to move to the final question. And the final question is this. We talked about a lot of good habits that sales leaders can exhibit, but what is one bad habit that every sales leader should break so that all teams and sales kickoffs get a little bit better? It's not about you. As much as I just told you, I'm the MC and I'm the star of the show and I'm the host sales kickoff and everyone wants to know me.

29:37It's really not about me. So the habit we need to break is really making it all about the individual attendees and constantly thinking about what's their perspective. How do we translate into their viewpoint? How do we feed what they need? And how do we make them succeed? Because ultimately, I'll shine as a result. And before you jump, what is the name of your book? A CRO's Guide to Winning in Private Equity. And it launches on January 14th. Fantastic. Folks, go check it out. JD has been one of my favorite leadership guests of all time. Two-time guests now. And everyone hang on for a 60-second recap coming up soon.

30:10All right, folks, it's time for a two-by-two recap from this episode with JD Miller. Mark, what do you have for your two? Number one, this name badge idea is so dope. If you construct the name badge correctly so you can actually read somebody's name and then you color code it to their role, like you've done half the battle. I'll add one other thing that I thought about along the way is if you can add like a fun fact on there that gives me a reason to look down at your name tag so it doesn't look like I don't know your name, double points on that. And then number two, your SKO is a singular event.

30:39The momentum immediately starts to wane the minute people board airplanes on their way home. There needs to be a follow-up plan that gets that momentum back within a couple days and then maintains it for a little bit so that we are not just having this one huge energy creating stuff. We're using that energy and pushing it through into the sales year. Number three, big sessions to small sessions. When people have energy, you can retain attention a little bit longer. After lunch, you got to do more interactive things or more fun sessions like what Mark talked about. And then lastly, number four, do not let your marketing leader or that random sales rep show up and throw up in the presentation.

31:22You need to plan your sessions at least a month in advance and make people present to you before they present to the sellers. This is literally costing you$1 ,000 per minute in some sales organizations. So use your minutes wisely. Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest, and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation.

31:55And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist. Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal, security, and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially.

32:31We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes.