#612: Sales Kickoff Masterclass: The Ultimate Planning Guide

0:00Most revenue or sales kickoffs are a complete waste of time and money for your sales organization because a sales trainer will show up, spout out your reps for 48 hours, and then you don't remember a damn thing and you've lost an entire week of selling time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, Katie Givens has planned over 16 of the best revenue and sales kickoffs I've seen in my entire life, including the first one that I got to see her run at Carta, which was our first revenue kickoff ever, all the way to a thousand plus rep, massive revenue kickoff in her experience as a top-notch sales enablement leader.

0:32So today, you are going to learn the exact steps that she uses in her secret beast planner to plan a truly great RKO, including number one, the exact goals of what she wants to accomplish in RKO. Number two, how she thinks about selecting themes for an RKO. Number three, an example schedule of events for one of the past revenue kickoffs Katie ran recently. Number four, a breakdown of what to do in each of the most common sessions. And then lastly, number five, all of the key timelines and logistics that you need to plan a great revenue kickoff. And if you do it all right, you will leave with the exact blueprint to one, make sure that your RKO does not blow up in planning phases to get your reps fired up.

1:11And then three, actually retain your top performers. Katie, welcome to the show. Thank you, Arman. I'm so excited to be here. I'm checking off a life bucket list right now, being on 30MPC with you, being a customer, all the amazing things working with you all. Alrighty, Katie. So fun fact for the audience is the first revenue kickoff that I was ever actually a part of was the one that you put together at Carta. And I want to start with just going into a revenue kickoff. What are some of the common goals or things you want to accomplish other than just a pure celebration when you are kicking off the year?

1:44There are five goals to an RKO. yeah i'm going to start with what i think is most important one which is culture building or the one that actually really happens that you feel after a kickoff and that is how do we build a really great sales culture where everyone is working together they're inspired by one another and they're ready to go out and hit the ground running and so that culture building is a huge part of that and we'll talk about how you design the event to really help create culture building inspiration is another we want the reps to go out to the year and be like i am so pumped to be working here right now and to tackle this market and to talk to our prospects and to solve their problems.

2:21The other one is in education. And I think this is a lot of times where enablement leaders will overcorrect and the whole event will be about education. And it's a little of what you said in the intro of just knowledge jumping the whole entire time and no one's going to remember at all for a numerous amount of reasons, including that you just don't remember everything that you hear in a two-day period. And so education is part of it, but it is not it. It's not everything. The next one is celebrate. We worked really hard. We worked so hard the last year. Whether we won, whether we lost, we were all working hard.

2:51And so let's celebrate that moment, remember it, and then move on so that we can go to number five and jumpstart the year, which is how do we actually do work at a kickoff to get us in a place where we are running by the time we hit the next week in January and the rest of the year, we're hitting our numbers a little bit faster and we're accelerating that. As we were in the prep, the two things that you called out to me that stood out the most were, number one, I remember at Carta, we had offices in New York, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. And you know very well that there wasn't always like super kumbaya between all of the offices.

3:25A lot of times there's remote workers and all that stuff. And so RKO is oftentimes the only time in the year where you get to get the entire company together. And so one of the most underrated purposes of an RKO is to just get all of these people who wouldn't normally be in a room together for 72 hours, get them in a room together. That was number one. But then number two is using both education and jumpstarting the year together was a key combination of you oftentimes know what the keys to success are going to be going into the year. And you can effectively use SKO or RKO to kickstart the education and set the tone for the year.

4:05You don't want to literally train all of do all of the training for the year in RKO, but you can use RKO as your kickoff point or your literal momentum starter for the rest of the year of what you want to accomplish. Yes. And I'm excited to walk through detailed parts of an agenda where you can see some of that come to life as you start to build out an RKO to hit on all of these in different ways. One of the things that will dictate the agenda is the theme. So let's talk about jumpstarting the year because that's really where the themes come from. All right, so Katie came up with four common examples of theme buckets that you might have for your sales organization.

4:44So the four are your product might be changing, you might have a change in your sales motion, you might not be winning, or you might be a winning locker room. So let's talk through the first one. Katie, could you give an example of what you were trying to accomplish and an example theme for when the product was changing? So we had launched quite a few products. We'd made an acquisition in this one and we were moving towards a platform sale. The structure of the sales team was changing, who they needed to work with cross-functionally was changing. And as you shift to that platform sale, multi-product sale, they had to learn how to be a different type of seller.

5:17And so we had to really teach them that team selling notion. And so it came across as a team one and it became a sporting event type of a vibe and a feeling to help people understand we are one team. And in order to sell multi-product, you have to be able to work with your CSM, your solutions engineer, et cetera, to drive forward every piece of that event around what it means to actually be a team and team sell when we're moving to a multi-product sale. Great. So what about the sales motion change? So we had mapped our customer journey and we had looked at what it actually means to buy our product.

5:49That was changing our sales stages. that was changing our handoff processes, also changing how we spoke to our customer. This could also be a methodology change if you have one of those for your sales kickoff. And it was really shifting how we went to market. And so we went with breaking barriers. It was a Maverick type theme. We actually did a showing of Maverick because it was coming out that week. And it was teaching the team like things are going to feel different, but we're going to break barriers and we're going to show up in the market differently. Breaking barriers, we have this like Maverick type of theme and that's what we're going to talk about in terms of like the night of arrival like when you arrive at revenue kickoff you start to feel like that theme before we get into that let's talk about a not winning locker room situation this is the hardest one any any woman person has to plan a kickoff when you're not winning it's hard because you're like guys let's get pumped we missed quota the last three quarters what are we gonna do and so this one gets hard to do and the one thing that I've seen fit, and I've actually learned this from another annual leader, was true grit.

6:50A country western vibe that's like, yeah, it's getting hard, and it's a little bit harder to be excited when you're not winning, but what can we do to push forward and persevere and really show true grit, and we defined what it meant, and everything was a country western vibe, including the parties that we had, and it really focused on how do I set myself up for success to win as we move into the next quarter? What can we do to move the barriers that have been in our way out of our way. I'll just call out on this one that especially when in 2022 like the economy flipped it always came off as extremely tone deaf if we plan this like massive rah-rah celebration as if nothing was going wrong and it's not like we're a losing locker room we're down the entire time but I think there's something to be said around like all right we need to come in with a chip on our shoulder and we can still celebrate the individual successes but it's a little bit of like a we're going to get this done this year type of tone versus rah rah let's celebrate everything is kumbaya when the reps know they're not getting paid in an environment like this i think that is the biggest one is that reps feel it and i've seen that like fake theme where it's like we're gonna do this and we're winning and reps like i'm feeling it and i'm not winning this is how i get paid so can we have an honest conversation about why and there's different ways you can do that in like a breakout or a general session to help also the reps feel heard about things that are getting in their way of winning.

8:09Agreed. So let's talk about the winning locker room, which is the best case scenario. There's so many things you could do here. This is not an exhaustive list, but with winning, it's so nice. And so launch is just a fun, easy one. There's so many things you can do with a closing night party. There's things you can do in general session. It's your space vibe. We're launching into new frontiers. We're doing something really awesome and it's unique. It's eclectic and it's exciting and you're winning. And it just gives you a really fun theme to go with. We've done airbrushed space tattoos at a closing night party that were glow in the dark.

8:40There's so many things you can do when you're winning, but launch is just one of the really great examples that we're just launching into the new year and we're going to continue to win. All right. So now let's go into an actual example. We are going to use the second one, the sales motion change, just because oftentimes sales kickoffs or revenue kickoffs are where people are introducing a new methodology or a big change to the way that they want to sell going in the next year, whether it's just trying to get to power more, going more outbound, being platform sale, et cetera. So Katie, there are three days that we're going to walk through in detail.

9:08Day number one is the night of arrival where you're just setting the vibe for everyone as they come in. Day number two is the general session day where you actually run things on the main stage. Day three is usually when you're doing a lot of the breakout and working sessions. And then lastly, at the end of that day, that's when you do the big celebration where you're typically announcing president's club and all of that stuff. So as a recap, to remind you all, the situation that we are in is you are completely changing the customer journey and changing the sales motion. And so this is the Maverick theme.

9:41So Katie, let's talk about first, what goes on when it comes to the night of arrival. So the night of arrival should feel like your theme. It's the first moment where people get to come and experience, oh, this is what RKO will look like. This is what it'll feel like. A lot of times what people will do is they'll be like, oh, just arrive, get in your hotel room. It's going to be busy today. days, so like we'll see later. And it takes away the ability to build culture immediately. You get in, you drop your bags, you come in, we've got food, and you can adjust what it looks like based on what you're trying to do.

10:13And so we had gotten a lot of feedback before this kickoff that there wasn't a lot of leadership transparency. And so we had a leadership happy hour. We had every executive in the room answering questions, talking. It was just appetizers. People were walking around. There was music. We've done a carnival before with stilt walkers and tarot card readers. Everything to just keep people excited. There's no agenda. There's no learning. It is just meet people from other offices you want to talk to, get to know them, take pictures, have fun. Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal.

10:43When 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. And bonus, Proposify data shows 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.

11:16One 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. We 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. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C.

11:53Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, PipeDrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. I think some of this is like how when you dress up for a black tie event, you just take it a little bit more seriously because everyone is in uniform. And I'm not suggesting that you have people fly in black tie.

12:22But I think when you just say, hey, check in your hotel room, grab a beer with your friends, that is the level of structure that you are telling your reps you are going to have for the rest of the session versus I remember when you planned an RKO, when I came in, the whole vibe was about the theme. And I was like, oh, like there was actually a lot of thought that was put into this thing. And that means maybe I should take this thing a little bit more seriously, especially because I was a leader. So that is the night of arrival. Let's talk about the general session day. Your first bucket is critical.

12:50It's called protein. Explain. The mistake people make a lot of times is that it is very cheap to get a continental breakfast as one of the meals for your team. But nobody wants a dry croissant with cantaloupe for breakfast that's going to take them through the next, I don't know, four to five hours until lunch. Just give them some protein. It's possibly$8 more per person, and it is a great investment, I promise. People have energy, their brains will be working, they'll be engaged and ready to learn. If they have croissant and cantaloupe, they're going to be asleep by 10 a.m. And we don't want that to happen.

13:23That also includes coffee, coffee on tap. A lot of people will remove coffee after breakfast. Like you had coffee for breakfast. You're good. No, people want six cups today. It's general session. It's heavy. Let's just give them six cups of coffee throughout the day so that they're ready to go. I think I must have had at least 30 eggs and 17 cups of coffee when you did an RKO. So thank you for your protein. Let's talk about setting the tone. Explain what it should feel like, what's going on when the first speaker takes the stage. This is your very first moment to set the tone and the experience.

13:56They should come in to a full production on a stage, whether it's a hundred people, whether it's a thousand people, and the cost of that varies, of course. But even for cartas, like we had a huge logo, we had bright lights, there's music when people are getting sat. And then you actually set the tone a lot of times with your executive team. We want to talk about what the numbers were, what we hit, some of the biggest logos we brought in, amazing videos and stories from the team. And then we want to talk about where we need to go in the next year. What is the number we need to hit? What are we going to do to get there?

14:29And have that moment. And it's a really great one to bring up your leaders, your CRO, your CEO, your CFO, etc. etc. Executives are very willing to have fun here and use that to help set the tone and also just talk about where we're going and what we've done. So I remember at Carta what this looked like is our CFO came up and to your point he was doing them in he did his note in jorts and it was all about where we landed last year and I remember at the end of that 30 or 45 minute session I thought Carta was literally like the only company in the world that mattered and it was like holy smokes This is why we're already a best in class company.

15:06And then it transitioned in the next session to here's what it takes for us to grow into those expectations. And so it's very much a look back and then a look forward. And that's what brings us to the next session, which is you then start to introduce the key concepts. In this case, it was a sales motion change. Yes. So we had one concept that we were heavily focused on for this session, and it was that we were changing our sales motion to get the reps to sell towards our customer journey that we had mapped, but also to follow a why change, why company, why now, why pay type of emotion. And so we were teaching them the first part.

15:42Again, going back to education, we're not going to teach all of that at kickoff, they won't remember it. Let's focus on why change. So we introduced the concept. We walked through what it is, how to do it. It was a fairly long session. We had lunch, we came back, and it was heavily focused just on that topic. And so it sounds like your new sales motion was called Govology here. So that's going from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. So the original session was 8.30 to 10, give or take, where we're headed. And then from 10 to 11, now you have introduction to Govology. Who was running the session? Was it your VP or CRO in this case?

16:17So on stage, we had myself, our CRO, and our CMO. I think it's super important to have more than one person on stage during teaching moments, they get to hear different points of view. They don't hear an enablement person droning on forever as well. And I think one fatal flaw that people make in a general session is that it's a moment where you're like just talking at people for hours on end. Even if you have a room of 1 ,100 reps, there's really cool interactive things you can do to get people involved. And so let's take the Govology introduction, for example. We taught them what's called why change messaging.

16:51And they had to take the hero, which is our prospect or our customer. And they literally drew a stick figure of said hero in their notebook. And they had to talk about what problems they're facing day to day, especially with, in our case, it was governments and the shift that COVID had done for governments and how they had to adjust how they're actually supporting their citizens. We had to talk about the things that are getting in the way of solving those problems. We had them go through a whole motion and each part of that motion, we'd stop. We'd have them do it in their notebook. We would teach them.

17:21They'd do it in their notebook. They'd turn to the person next to them and they'd actually present what they had. Then they turn to their table and they talk about what they had done. And then we'd end up just randomly calling people up. We'd be like, oh, Armand, hey, pop up here. What was your hero doing? What does their world look like? What do they need? Why would they even need to change? Tell us. And we'd pick apart those like pieces live. So it's getting people involved. It's getting them excited. But it is still a general session where we're all learning together. So this goes on, Katie, from it looks It's like from 10 to 11, you have a session, then you had a break, then you have another small session, then there's a why change messaging, then there's lunch, and then there's one more activity.

17:58So this is all, all around the new concept. So you're spending like a solid four hours on this new concept. And then from there, you're transitioning to changing the voice where this is stories and guests. For this situation, it was all about our customers and our prospects and their world and how we're actually selling to that world. And so the first thing we want to do is we wanted to actually hear from them afterwards. words. And so we had wrapped up with that like hero drawing story of what they're facing. And then we brought them on stage. Pro tip, put customers and prospects on stage together.

18:29No matter what happens, that prospect always gets old. I've never had a situation where you put a prospect on stage and they're like, sounds like people hate this thing. I'm not in. They're like, oh my gosh, this is, yeah, I should buy today. And so work with some of your reps or prospects that are later stage, put them with customers that are facing similar things and ask them hard questions. Prep them beforehand. Have a really great moderator. CS leaders are good at this. Even really good CSMs are really strong at this with a rep. I like to put a CSM and a rep on there and it kind of can look at the different world and go to market, ask specific questions, and always open it up for Q &A.

19:05You'd be so surprised how excited customers and prospects get. A lot of times, they're like, can I like hang around? I'm having a lot of fun. We've had customers and prospects at the closing night party because they're like, this is just like such a good vibe. People can talk to them. They can pull them aside. They are so crucial to making a kickoff because that is exactly what we do as reps. We are selling to them. We have to understand their world and they're having a lot of fun with us as we do it. And what are you having them talk about on a panel? It varies. For this situation, we wanted them to talk about like what their day to day looks like and what exactly do they want to accomplish.

19:38But we also have them talk about their experience with us. And we tell them like, be upfront, don't sugarcoat it. If you're like, man, I wanted to buy yesterday and you still took me through this gigantic sales motion with all these questions, tell us that. Or if you're like, you didn't even talk to me about procurement. I felt like I was trying to figure things out myself. We asked them very hard pointed questions about like, how could this experience have been better for you? The team learns from that. So it is a mixture of like, what was your experience with us and what is it with us? And is it good?

20:09what's going well, what's not, but also what does your world look like? What are you thinking about? What do you have to conquer day to day that no one really understands? It's so easy to get caught up in your team's messaging. And then you hear a customer describe your product entirely differently. And you're like, oh, like I'm a little bit removed from reality. And the customer is now the one who can ground me back in the reality of the problem that we actually solve. So next up is the investor and board panel. And sometimes if you are like, if we go back to those different themes, if you have a huge product change, this could be your product team coming up and doing a panel.

20:44For this situation, it was the investor and board panel. We wanted them to talk about their vision, what they're feeling, what they care about, and what we should care about as shareholders of the company as well. And it's a really nice moment for people to get an interaction with someone that they don't often see, but who is heavily, heavily involved in the organization. This one does take a little bit of tricky planning depending on your board or depending on your investor and their willingness to. Always partner with your CEO and CRO. They're usually the ones that can help you get them there.

21:11And then they have really great EAs that you can partner with to prepare them. There's multiple steps that they can help you take to be like, hey, they digest information best this way. Give them this and they'll be ready. They tend to like just give people a higher up view of like, oh, the company is great. I love how you had said with the Carta one, we're like, we are the best company in the world. That's a lot of times when people are feeling they're like, wow, I made such a good decision. I want to keep working here for years to come. That typically is the speech that does that as well. The last thing I'll say is that I remember being at an agenda that was very similar to this that you ran, which is at this point of the day, I'm pretty tired.

21:48But when Henry, our CEO, gets on stage, even I can perk up a little bit after like eight hours of speaking. So I love how you have the CEO as the anchor at the end of the day too. It's usually something the CEO, the board, even a tired rep will usually be like, okay, I want to hear these people speak. So let's talk about the ending evening dinner. So this sounds like both a dinner out for the broader company, but this is also when you'll do a little bit of celebration where you plan like an evening top performer event. And this one probably varies the most depending on the kickoff and the vibe we're going for.

22:24for our dinner out for this one, we actually went to like an illusion museum. We rented out the whole museum for everyone. There was a giant Olympic swimming pool-sized ball pit. Nothing makes people a child, like a giant Olympic-sized ball pit. And I'm not tall. I was drowning. And I was like, this is actually dangerous. I got to get out of here. It is so much fun. But then there's also situations where it's like, we've got a lot of amazing things people did. Let's recognize them and have like a nice black tie awards event. I've gone back and forth and I don't have a true recipe for like which one's which.

22:55It is what you want the event to feel like. And so sometimes it is like we're going to have an awards night. We had a comedian that we hired that came up that was hilarious. We did awards. It was a fancy like three course meal dinner that we had at the hotel. But then we've also done a dinner out and it is kind of a moment to just connect people back, build that culture. I have also found that the more you can keep people together, even if it is just in the hotel in different restaurants, the less likely when people are to be fired. Let's be honest, people get fired at Arceos. A little bit of it's our job to make sure that that doesn't happen by creating spaces where they can still interact together without making bad decisions.

23:32Two, it builds culture. It helps people have fun. We've done a speakeasy event, which we did this two years ago and it became our most popular event. So we've kept it at my last company where every night from 8 to 11 a.m., we would rent out part of the hotel. we had poker tables we had music we had just snacks like popcorn macarons you name it and we had games all over the place with couches and people would hang out there and we'd be like guys you have to leave we have we have sessions tomorrow the executives they were there they were sitting around they were hanging out we had pictures we had videos people like that is the best thing you could have ever done and so we've kept it because every night people would just do it in between sessions before a closing night party to build culture to grow together and to also just make friends and have a little fun.

24:17So let's talk about section two, Katie, which is, or day two rather, which is the breakouts. So this is when it goes from, we've introduced all of the concepts that we've wanted. We've done the customer panels, and now it's a lot less of talking at you, even though those are interactive sessions and a lot more function specific breakouts with a lot of interactivity. So could you talk about what did your breakouts look like for this revenue kickoff? Yeah, for this revenue kickoff, we wanted to take the why change concepts they had practiced and they had built a full why change story. And we put them into brackets where they were with different people from different segments, delivering that why change story.

24:56And so they were going through, they were talking about it, and then they were delivering it and we bracketed out so that by the time we got to that like celebration party at the dinner, the top three people presented. And it was just heavily focused on take what you've learned in general session and fight it out. It was the best one. So that's super, super impactful, which is day one, you've introduced the new sales motion and that's on the main stage. So it's this high level concept that you can't get in the nitty gritty for both an SDR and a CSM and a sales engineer and an AE all at the same time, but it's the high level concept.

25:30And this is when it becomes specific where the SDRs are probably weaving this into their cold calling scripts. The AEs are weaving this into their discovery talk tracks. The SEs and the product people and the CSMs, they're probably weaving it into their demo talk tracks. And so that's where it gets really specific, where you go from ingesting information to applying information specific to your job. And I think something that's interesting with that is that you get to a point like you had myself, our CRO, and our CMO teaching the general concepts. You have to prepare the people leading these breakout rooms to run it perfectly.

26:05So there are three ways. One, every breakout room has an enablement partner if I have the capacity to do that. That includes things like our HR team had an enablement partner that was helping them craft their sessions for them in a way that helped adults learn and created behavior change. Then you also have a leader that has partnered with them. So for these sessions, like you said, an SDR is going to do it differently and take it differently than a CSM versus an AE, SDRs had an enablement partner with a leader that was running the session tailored to them and running the bracket tailored to them.

26:39And they were heavily prepared for that session prior to getting in there. It wasn't like, here's your role the morning of, it was like two weeks prior to this, you knew your session cold and you had someone in there who was helping you do it. And then you were also leading it based on the people that you were working with. So from there, this is actually something that I don't think you did at the CARTA kickoff. This is QBRs at kickoff. One, could you just explain how a QBR is typically structured for anyone who's not familiar with it? And then two, is there anything that's different about QBRs at this kickoff versus any other QBR?

27:17A QBR is ran by a rep to their peers and to their managers. And it is saying, here is what happened the last quarter. And here's where I missed or did well. And here's what I learned from it. and here's what I need to do this quarter to hit the ground running. Here is my number, here is my gap, here are my three to five very specific goals, here is what it looks like to actually tackle that with in-depth deal reviews, customer accounts, etc. It is a retrospective on how I've done, what my numbers were, where I missed, where I won, and then a look at like where what are like the three biggest lessons learned.

27:54You could even either do like a start, stop, continue, or you could do lessons learned depending on the situation. Then they go into, okay, what's my number for this quarter? What's my gap to get there? And what am I going to do to get there? Here are three goals that I have, and they have to be very, very, very specific. I think about some of the work that I'd seen you do early with the Carta SDR team on setting their goals very much like that. It is like, you will make X calls by X date to X customer, not like, I'm just going to make some more calls. And then you go into some in-depth account planning.

28:27So taking your top three to five deals and you're delivering it to your peers. You're learning from each other. They're giving you suggestions. Your manager's calling you out on things that probably won't work. And then you're following up with it. But they're leaving kickoff with their plan for the quarter, their territory plan, their account plans, and understanding here's my number and here's what I need to do to hit it. 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.

28:58You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And 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.

29:30For 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. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use the closed deals faster, grab it in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C, which is it for you?

30:01Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30 MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. Kickoff is not just stuff that is outside of the day-to-day job. You're actually bringing the most important planning exercise of the year, the QBR, the first QBR for the rep into kickoff, because the theme is fresh in their mind.

30:35How you want them to act differently, how you want them to sell differently is in their mind. They're also probably pretty fired up. They're also probably not distracted by all the other stuff because they're at kickoff and they are in one place. And I love that you pulled QBRs into this so that when they get back, they don't have RK or SKO hangover. They can literally just start the year immediately versus oftentimes after an RKO, there's usually a delay because people are just like getting themselves oriented again and they haven't even put together their proper account plans. Yes. 100 it gets them going and it launches them into the year as fast as they possibly could and folks katie literally has a qbr deck template that we're also giving you for free down in the show notes below let's talk about what gets celebrated and the do's and don'ts of making celebration happen because i know celebration is an awesome thing to recognize your top performers but it's also sometimes a time where if someone didn't make club they become aware of it there or they're like oh like I'm not on that list.

31:39Can you talk about just the right way to celebrate and announce the winners? I'll break this into two sections because I think one is the closing night party is such a special moment to be like we've worked hard all year and we also just worked hard the last day and a half two days depending three days name your size of kickoff. Let's have fun and it's nice because you can relate it to your theme. This one that you see the picture of it was a Las Vegas night. Everyone is black tie. We had a lot of fun. There were poker tables. There was dancing. It was great. There's other ones. We've done one in Utah where we stayed at the hotel where a lot of the athletes from the Winter Olympics stayed when they had the first Winter Olympics at Salt Lake.

32:14And so we did like an alpine ski from the 70s vibe and everyone was in these vintage ski suits. It was hot with different like skiing, arcade games and frozen hot chocolate. And it is just time to have fun. The executives come dressed up. Everyone is there to have a great time. Next is the celebration. I think Armand, you call it a good thing. It's like, yes, it's a time to recognize our top performers, but it's also a time to just have this amazing celebration for other people too. A few ways that I do like to make it special that I found are really helpful are for especially like what gets celebrated for club qualifiers, depending on who's in the room.

32:50If you're doing club qualifiers and you're announcing them and you're shouting them out and making it fun, I've had a situation, and this was like a go lesson learned for me, where we did them at a closing night party and they ended up spending about 30 minutes per club qualifier talking about their year, what they did, et cetera. And people who are not going to club were like, no, I am so done. And even club qualifiers are like, this is like actually embarrassing at this point and we all want to go party. And so keep it short, keep it sweet. If we're going to go through everyone one by one, have like a slide, have their stats and just rapid fire through and train people to do that.

33:25Train your executives to get through that quickly. Never let it go for two hours. I will, I have learned that lesson for you. It was a terrible experience for all of us. Yeah. At Carta, literally, it was the two most senior revenue leaders and they just alternated naming one person at a time. And so they were like, name this person. They'd run up, cheer, get off. Name this person, run, cheer, get off. And it would have their numbers on a slide. And it was not like a handshake, thank you, da-da-da-da. Because also Carta was pretty big. So I think there were like 40 people or something like that who made club.

33:55If you draw this thing out, one, people usually know. And then two, It just like kind of like puts a little bit of a damper on the vibe and it makes it a little bit weird when you draw it out as long, even though you do want to celebrate people. I am curious, though, Katie, what's your take on not just club qualifiers, but things like rep of the year, for example, where those are only one person gets those awards, for instance. I've done it two ways and I'm not opposed to either way. I will never do them at a closing night party. and if we're a company that really likes to do special awards then we will do them like add an awards night and we'll take that first night and it'll be an awards night and you have rep of the year by segment things like that to try to make it like more exclusive but also a special moment for them i've also done it where you're going into breakouts and it goes into like team specific breakouts so sdrs have a breakout and there's a lot of stuff happening but they started out with a celebration so it's like let's celebrate our sdr of the year the rookie of the year etc to have that moment with their team and to build excitement, but to not do it in front of everybody.

34:56And it lasts forever because it can also just be a really big time suck. And if you look at the ways to make it special, there are other ways that we can make it special that they feel like they got a really cool experience and people care about them without doing it publicly in front of people that takes a very valuable time when you've flown people in to have a session together. Let's now talk about all of the less fun stuff, but honestly, probably some of the most important stuff for the people that are watching this session, which is the planning timelines. New information for me, this stuff begins way further out.

35:29So Katie, could you walk through, we have six phases of planning in RKO here. Could you walk through each of the six phases at a high level? Yes. The first one is your venue and your vendors. Vendors are like production companies. If you have the party who's coming, tarot card readers, even to that level. The number one tip for the venue, walk the venue. I have sight unseen signed a contract for a venue twice in my career. Both situations were atrocious. One of them. It was called the missing second floor. All of our breakout rooms are on the second floor, but the second floor doesn't actually exist until you find one specific elevator on the opposite side of the building to get there and we were all lost.

36:14And had I walked the venue beforehand, I would have learned, oh, this won't work. Never do it. Walk the venue. And also you don't always have to do it a year in advance. I have found that a lot of times you get a better price the closer you get to an event, but like nine to 12 months is typically a sweet spot. So you're getting a venue as far out as possible. You're walking the venue. And then what happens six to nine months out? So this is where you start to work with your leadership team to define the goals, the theme, the scope, you're literally sitting down with them and saying, hey, what do we need to accomplish this next year?

36:47Where are we at today? I like to come with options. Never come with just an open brainstorm. It never works. Come with three to four options based on what you know. And then, of course, budget. It's been budgeted with finance, but sit down with finance and be like, money's going to start coming out now. Let's talk about it. Here's what it looks like. And you'll see in the beast, like a nice budget template to help you have that conversation as well. All right. So now we've selected a venue and let's talk about then four to six months out, which is really when you start talking about the theme, the goals, the scope.

37:17For reference, if you're in a June revenue kickoff or February revenue kickoff, this probably means like around August timeframe, you're starting planning, give or take. So like what happens in this timeframe? Yeah. So this is where you're starting to work with your executives to say, what do we need to happen next year? And what do we need the team to accomplish next year? Sometimes you already know in advance. For me, the sweet spot is usually August. By then I'm like, okay, I know right now I know what we need to do at kickoff. And so we're starting to talk about what is the theme that we're going for?

37:49What is, we have our budget that we've built with finance the year before, but like letting finance know like, hey, here's the budget and here's where we're going to start seeing things come out because it's going to start hitting. Also understanding like who's doing what and how they're going to do it because you're going to to start heavily involving them August, September, October, November until you get to your January kickoff. How long does this take? I like to create a compelling event by scheduling a meeting with our leadership team with a few options in place. And it is usually by the second week of August where I'm like, hey, based on what we know needs to happen, this is what we're thinking.

38:24Let's have a discussion about it. And sometimes we're like, why are we doing this so early? One of your biggest reasons is that it's going to save you a lot of money if you aren't rushing stuff come October because you often have lead times of up to 12 weeks for things to ship. This can be swag. This can be notebooks. This can even be if you're printing out things that the team has to do. You actually need that lead time. And if you have your theme and everything decided, you're going to be saving the company money is probably one of your biggest arguments there. So you've heckled your CRO. You've nailed down a theme in August, September, give or take.

38:58and now we start to get into two to four months out, which is really that fourth quarter of the year, the formal agenda and the run of the show. It is the most busy time for everybody. And so you have to be so buttoned up through this whole session because you have a very special window where it's like, I have to get people prepped, but I still have to acknowledge the fact that the most important thing that we do is close business and we've got to be closing business this quarter. And so this includes, I have agenda options for general session. I have one, two, or three that I'm coming to you with, and we have a meeting with a discussion on what we want to pull from either of those and what looks best.

39:34I have a general idea of breakout sessions. At this point, every single breakout or team that could have a breakout is assigned their enablement partner. And enablement partners have a very specific motion that they are running with timelines, with templates, that they are just going and helping make sure these breakout sessions happen. Comms are generated. Emails are generated. six months out people are going to start asking you when is kickoff I'm trying to plan a family trip when is kickoff at least give them the date here's the date here's the location we're so excited more info to come there's other things around like travel lodging you want to try and have people booking travel if it's a situation where they're coming in three to four months in advance is typically the sweet spot where you're still getting good prices on flights because travel and lodging in general is typically a solid 40 % of your kickoff budget.

40:23So be smart about it. If you're booking travel two months, even a month and a half, it's going to get closer to a 60 % of your travel, like of your full kickoff budget, which eliminates your ability to do a lot more fun, cool things. And then could you talk about the communication cadence? You have six months out, two months out, six weeks, four weeks, and then weekly until one week out. And then every other is get excited. Here's the dates. Mark your calendar. Don't plan a trip. Here's where we're going. That's it. We're like more to come. Here's the theme if we have it. Sometimes we don't. Two months out.

41:00We're so excited you're coming. High level. You're going to arrive this day. There'll be something exciting happening. You're going to have a general session. You'll have breakout sessions. You get to leave this day. It'll be really exciting. So it's just that high level program outline. Six weeks out is similar but a little bit more in depth. So we typically like to reveal a few things. I like to use the six weeks out of like we're going to have a closing night party and it's space themed and here's some of the cool things that we'll be doing. Four weeks out is like buckle up. Here is your QBR deck.

41:34Get prepped. We want them delivered at kickoff. Here is a more in-depth agenda. Let's go. And then as soon as you hit four weeks and you go into those weekly, I do a drip of the questions everyone's going to ask. What should I wear? Business casual, business professional, it's going to be cold, it's going to be hot. Here is a little bit more about the agenda. Here's what transportation from the airport looks like. We encourage ride sharing. Here's the Slack channel to start sharing, like asking questions, getting excited. We'll drip pictures in the Slack channel. It's a slow drip until like literally the week before and the day before, which is like, here's your checklist of things you need to do.

42:12Here's where registration is. Here's the different times you have to be doing different things. Here's what to wear. If there's specific pre-work that they haven't done yet, we remind them again, et cetera. So that's all the stuff that we're communicating to the reps and the major attendees. For the general session speakers and the breakout leaders, if we're talking about a January kickoff, when are you typically doing rehearsal sessions? It's like herding cats because everyone is closing quarter, executives are wrapping up the year. I like to do a first session in November, which is just high level.

42:45Here's the timeline. Here's our expectation of you. There's going to be some fun things we want to do on stage. Let's throw out some ideas. That's November. First week of December, I require them to have their decks done in a draft form. It never happens. I actually don't know the magic recipe to get executives to finish their decks by December 1st. If anyone does, I will pay you so much money. Please tell me. But we tell them that. The expectation you're setting. The tone you're setting. I come in really hard with that date. No one follows it. I try, though. By mid-December, we're doing another check-in to say, like, hey, it looks like your deck's not quite done.

43:29And the production company needs it because we're going to lock everything down. None of this is true. I'm just revealing all my secrets to a bunch of executives listening to this. Compelling events. All these negotiation theatrics. Yes. This is 100 % negotiation theatrics. We do a mid-December check-in. We typically leave people alone through the Christmas holiday. December 27th. I am calling you. I am texting you. We're getting this deal across the line. Typically, by then, we've had most people ready. I'm reminding you of their rehearsal times. We typically set up rehearsal times with the production team and with executive assistants.

44:06Executive assistants are your best friend. Give them massages at the end of kickoff. I do that every time because none of this would be possible without them. They are ensuring they get there, that their flight gets there for rehearsals. You then have rehearsals. They will change their deck up until rehearsals, no matter what you've told them. That is okay. They'll also wake up in the morning and change their deck. So you leave a 7am to 8am window when everyone's at breakfast for execs to come in, finish their deck, because it'll never be finished beforehand, and give them another moment where it is a locked door to the stage that they can get up and practice one more time.

44:38So Katie, let's round it out with if you could walk through these final two or three buckets quickly, what happens zero to two months out, production setup, and then on site when you're actually clicking go? Yeah, zero to two months makes it look like zero to two months is easy. You're doing a ton of agenda work still. You're refining that. You're refining breakouts, but you're also heavily aligned with either the AV company at the hotel or the production team. You're giving them the run of show. You're preparing them for like what you want the stage to look like, what it feels like. You're also helping with literally like marketing goes here in the hotel and we're going to put this sign here and we're making sure that people could check in at the right time and we have a registration desk here, all that.

45:18On-site press go is you're typically arriving, depending on the size of the event, two days to a day before everyone else, sometimes three days. Your registration desk is set up. You've walked general session. You've practiced with AV. Everything is ready. So when executives and everyone else come, you're cruising. Emergency preparedness has all been set up. You have the contacts. All of your enablement team, EAs, whoever's working the event has a little part that says, here's everyone you contact if something goes wrong with food, with an emergency, etc. And then we have a comm center, which is a hidden place usually behind a registration desk that's an office that gets really stinky, has a lot of snacks, and people are crying in there.

45:56But we're having a great time. It's a lot of fun. And then finally, your post-event retro. This is where a lot of people fail. They're like, we did it and I need a two-week vacation. I do. I typically would like a two-week vacation after I kick off. But we have to do a financial wrap-up. We're getting contracts from the hotel. If you have ever seen a post-kickoff hotel contract and you have because you're an enablement leader, I commend you and I send you a bottle of wine and a box of tissues. They're 198 pages long and you have to go through them, line, buy, line, to ensure you didn't get charged for something that you're not supposed to be charged for.

46:30Prepare for that. Always have survey and feedbacks. We have ours at the end of each session. It's just a quick QR code people assign. At some point you're going to have to go through them. You're not emotionally stable enough to go through them the week after kickoff. Give it a week and a half and then do a retro determine what needs to happen in the next kickoff. You're debriefing with everyone. You're doing any type of reporting that needs to happen to the organization. You're communicating and you're following up on a lot of the learning that you did. And so a lot of times there's large reinforcement plans that take you quarter after quarter, but the event doesn't end when the event ends.

47:01It goes on forever. It's a forever marathon, which is why we're really great corporate athletes. Holy smokes. Katie, we have gone through everything from what you want to get accomplished, the themes, to the schedule of events, how you run all of those, the celebration, the literal timelines. Thank you so much. This was like a literal masterclass in planning and RKO. I can tell you I personally never want to do it. And so I recommend everyone go connect with Katie on LinkedIn. She is one of the greatest enablement leaders in the game, the best that I've ever worked with. That's number one. And number two, if you want her beast planner and her QBR deck, both of those are in the show notes down below.

47:39And then lastly, number three, you may or may not know that Katie is one of our customers. And we may or may not be speaking at her RKO this year. And so if you've thought about having your team trained by 30 minutes to President's Club, we do everything from teaching your reps how to cold call, do discovery, negotiate, multithread, building out all of your playbooks and reinforcing it in partnership with you and your leadership team. and a lot of teams are kicking off with us at their RKOs now. And so if you want to learn more about that, go check it out at 30mpc.com backslash training. Katie, thank you for this.

48:11This was freaking awesome. Both as a friend, past coworker, but I personally learned a ton out of the sesh. Thank you, Arman. This is a blast. I love it.

48:27Today'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. And 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.

48:54Get 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. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster.

49:26Grab it in the show notes. today show is brought to you by pipe drives easy to use and customizable crm with built-in meeting intelligence my favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question which sounds like typically when i'm talking with folks like you they're focused on a b or c which is it for you now a b and c have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them now pipe drives built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question not on scrambling to take live notes and we built a full Discovery Toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub.

49:59There's a link in the show notes.