In-person SKO: Avoiding stress and achieving success, with Stephanie White

Speaker A: Welcome to the Sales Enablement Innovation Podcast brought to you by the Sales Enablement Collective. Each episode we sit down with sales enablement and revenue leaders from around the world and invite them to share their expertise and experience with the community. Hey, Stephanie, welcome back to our podcast. So glad to have you back on. Could you briefly introduce yourself for our listeners who aren't familiar with you, with who you are, before we sort of dive into today's episode?

Speaker B: Absolutely. Hey, everybody, it is Steph White. It's a pleasure to meet you all. Always love connecting with more Napoleon folks around the world. Um, I'm in the camp of former marketer turned seller. We're talking physical product. Back in the day, everybody turned software, sales, sales leadership. Then I went on into sales operations and sales enablement, where I have very happily had my home for almost a decade now before joining you today.

Speaker A: I love it. And everyone should be following you on LinkedIn and various places. You're always sharing sort of great insights as well. So if anyone who isn't already, they need to get on that. Um, but we're talking about SKL today, sales kickoff, and more specifically, coming back to in person skl. Can you share a little bit about why you wanted to talk about this? I know we're sort of in planning season now, right in the midst of it. So what excites you about skl? Why was that your. Your topic for today?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think it's interesting a lot of us, particularly those of us that are in SaaS or B2B sales in general from 2020 when things started locking down through recently we've been running virtual SKOs or revenue kickoffs, and that had its own host of challenges. How do you keep people engaged in zoom rooms? How do you orchestrate different breakouts and engagement opportunities? But a, uh, year ago, I had my first curveball in years, which was, hey, guess what, Stephen, we're going back into person. And I went, oh, it's been five years since I've done an in person sko. We're talking international travel, we are talking physical swag. We're talking branded copy banners in lobbies of hotels, airport logistics, content that physically needs to present in a room instead of just on a screen. And suddenly now it's not just hours, it's multiple days. And so I learned a lot the hard way last year when I was right back into a 400 plus person event and going into another planning cycle. Now I thought, let's talk about it. Because more and more companies are shifting back to the in Person annual kickoffs. Uh, so it's a great time to talk about it.

Speaker A: I totally agree. And the fact that you sort of listed off the amount of factors that sort of have to be considered, it is overwhelming. It's a little bit scary. I think we'll break this up into categories so that we can actually make our way through, uh, at a reasonable way through this episode. Um, so starting with sort of the planning and logistics before we get on to the actual content, what would you say have been, let's say top three learnings when it comes to actually making it to the SKO date and getting everyone in the building successfully, on time, on budget before we even worry about the content. How do you actually get to the day successfully?

Speaker B: Yeah, coffee is life. Um, but I mean, joking aside, it really comes down to we often talk about enablement. Project management is a core competency we have to have. It's not just a two week planning cycle. Right when we are talking big skos, we're talking four to eight months in advance. You are kicking off these planning cycles. So no question your project planning needs to be on point. We are talking stakeholder management to the next level. Weekly, bi weekly and monthly updates for your different audience groups and really making sure that you're engaging cross functionally but also your external vendors to support. So project management is huge. The other thing we need to talk about that's different is budget management. Virtual kickoffs did not require a lot of budget management in person. Absolutely does. For some folks it'll be the first time you manage a seven figure event budget and that is big. The third piece there that is absolutely critical is international logistics. Let's talk about that for a second. You are over in Scotland, I am over here in Canada. Imagine a world where you have 400 attendees coming from 20 different countries. You're talking flights, visa, uh, applications, time zone adjustments, different arrival days, different departure considerations. Getting your head around the logistics for what it means to physically move that volume of people into a space is critical and it is huge to get off the ground early.

Speaker A: I hadn't even thought of visas in my head somehow and I can only imagine the amount of headaches that that would bring up as well. It's crazy. Always something else new that I haven't thought about when we started talking about. It's unbelievable. Um, so something we spoke about before recording was sort of the challenges around organizing content tracks for two, three, even four day long events. It's not like you said, a few hours on Zoom where you're sort of getting everything in. How do you sort of approach that and try to tackle it in a way that actually keeps everyone engaged and learning over, you know, 24, 48 hours, however much it might be. Because that's a different sort of elephant to grapple with.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I think let's break it down by the biggest buckets. Let's say you have a two day RKO or sko that's pretty common. Right. You're going to have a lot of product marketing updates, plus the actual sales content. One of the ways that you can consider breaking out, uh, your tracks is actually leveraging a day on the front end to bring your leadership team together a day before their team arrives. Why, Stephanie, that's unnecessary. That just adds complexity in my planning. No, hear me out. It is an amazing opportunity to actually go through all the key content with the leaders of the business the day before. Two things are going to happen. Number one, by doing that effective dry run with your leadership team on the physical site of the venue, you're going to realize some things about your content or your delivery. Ooh, that font is way too small when you're sitting 50ft away at the back of the room. Let's quickly change those slides. Or oh, there's a pillar in the room that we weren't expecting. We need to quickly reformat the tables of this room. Those things are quite tactical. Right. So there's a lot of tactical stuff that you benefit from doing a dry run with actual people in the room. The other thing is buy in. It is one thing to get 50 revenue leaders to sit on a zoom call and listen to you go through what is planned on your agenda. It is a whole other thing to have them be the audience and start the day by encouraging them to interject with their questions. The reason is we want to get ahead of the questions. We may end up adjusting our talk track if our sales leaders go, oh, this is going to raise a question for my team. Oh, have you considered how this impacts Australia? So it allows you to really get deep and ahead of some of those things where doing it over zoom format doesn't allow it. The last piece of that second bucket is it's really about your sales leaders now feeling confident that they know what their sellers are about to hear and they already know the next answers. Because inevitably we've all been to these meetings where we show up, we're there on the day, and we hear the messaging at the exact same time as our manager and our manager tries to play it cool. But when we have questions coming out of that big conference room, we turn to our manager. We're like, what does this mean for A, B and C? Our manager goes, um, I don't know. I was blindsided by this today too. We don't want that. A successful kickoff means all of our frontline and middle managers are ready to hit the ground running before their team even hears it. So I would recommend that you carve off time at the front end of your RKO if you can. The second thing is we think about content tracks. So that's our manager content track, right? We make sure they're prepared up front is to think about our audiences. If you have a revenue kickoff, you may have customer success and AKA account management, AKA client success, whatever your business calls it. You may also have a technical audience of, uh, solutions architects or engineers that need to be trained on the new product functionality differently than your core sales team as well as your actual frontline sellers. So you need to think about your audiences in terms of what they need to take away from the content. You may in fact find that you are rolling out new product. Imagine you're rolling out AI functionality in your platform, right? Because nobody's dealing with that right now. What you need to train your sales team on when they're physically in the room for the training component is going to be different than what the solutions engineers need to be trained on, which is going to be different than the customer success team needs to be trained on. So thinking about your audiences and how they may need to be split into different physical rooms, the last thing I would say about content, and I touched on this earlier, we have all been operating in a world where we can get away with 12 point font on a slide. We make our slides really heavy. We speak from the slide. We have our speaker's notes right on our screen when we speak. Guess what folks, Your speakers are used to having speaker notes and you are probably not going to have a teleprompter. For an in person sko, this means razzle, dazzle, jazz hands, charisma, all of it. You need to be thinking about who your speakers are based on who can actually host a room. The best people that perhaps present on a zoom call may not be the best people to speak to it. For a physical in person event, you want people with high energy, high charisma that can move on the fly and understand the content deeply so that they don't need things like speaker notes. Because a great speaker will wander around the room a little bit, right? Even if they're on the stage, they're going to go to the right of the stage, they're going to go over the left of the stage. You want them to emit that confidence to the audience and really engage that audience to ask their questions back. So think about your overall structure, breaking out your leadership. Think about how you break out your audiences and what the content needs to communicate to each of them. And then think about who should be delivering that content in a way that's better or different than a virtual environment. Those would be my big three to think about as we think about how we structure the actual content that we're delivering.

Speaker A: I love that a lot to take away there, especially on the manager front of out taking them and preparing them so that they're not being blindsided. I think that's really important. And I'm sure there's people who will. Managers who will appreciate being able to nitpick at slides and stuff and being able to do that the day before as well. They'll appreciate that thing as well.

Speaker B: Um, be careful what you wish for on that one.

Speaker A: But it is back.

Speaker B: It is great.

Speaker A: Uh, I love it. Um, so obviously organizing an event like this is such a mammoth task. You've gone through so much already. My next question is sort of twofold. Starting with how do you sort of project manage it from a tech standpoint? Are you sort of using planning tools? What sort of recommendations you have? Like where does that sort of play in? And we go into sort of after sort of project management from a cross functional perspective after. But I think the tech standpoint is important first in terms of how do you actually sort of keep track of everything? And yeah, are you using any sort of planning tools in particular? What can you sort of recommend to people?

Speaker B: Yeah. So for sure, I like to think about how to project manage these events in terms of three pools of stakeholders. Number one, I have my actual project team. This could be folks that are director ish roles in product marketing. Marketing. It could be some key sales folks. It's likely your internal events team. Right. These folks are in it. They own tasks and deliverables. You should absolutely be in a project management tool. I've been working in Asana. Shout out to those folks. I love the tool. It's a great way to make sure that you can see what's connected to what, who's delivering what, when and how are you tracking at a granular level. You should all be meeting at least once a week. But you should be working through that shared project timeline within the tool so that everybody has up to date information all the time. Your second pool of folks is what I'd call key stakeholders. This may be that VP level in your organization. What they need to know is, Daniel, are you on track? Don't tell me how the sausage is made. Tell me that you are on Track to make 10 of them by the end of the week. Right. For those folks, you're going to want to do bi weekly updates. Okay. As you get closer, you may make those weekly but bi weekly updates from the time you start planning and that is very, very simple. You may find that Google sheets or Excel spreadsheets for those that are still in the Microsoft world work really, really well. A very simple big bucket timeline. Daniel, how are we doing with the posters and marketing printed copy that we need? Great. We're tracking at 50%. We'll be done by the end of next week. That super high level format, right. Your third audience is your exact overview. Do not put these folks in your project management tool like Asana. Do not send them a spreadsheet. They do not need it. Primary concerns, are you on time, are you on budget? Are there any flags you need to get ahead of? From a resourcing money, et cetera perspective that should be monthly. Initially going to biweekly, that is likely one Google Slide or PowerPoint slide or an email with bullet points. That is it. What they need to know if you own sko, are you on track to deliver what you said you were going to deliver? And if you need resources, you need to have flagged it. This M is not the time to get granular. Do that with your first two groups as needed and escalate through. Nothing should show on your exec overview that hasn't already been addressed by your core project team, then escalated to your key stakeholders of VPs. Right? It needs to flow up. The last thing I'll call out on that exec stakeholder group is I've heard people say, well, they'll ask when they want information. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Proactively serve that up. Don't uh, spam, um them. Let them know up front, here's what you're going to get from me and when. We are currently six months out, so for the next two months you're going to get a monthly update from me. But for those that are curious, here's access to the more detailed spreadsheet that that key stakeholder team is using. They're probably not going to look at it. That's okay. You've offered it as a resource, then you Reset the expectations, folks. Now that we are three months out, we are on it. We've escalated priority within the project team. We are tracking well and you are now going to get bi weekly updates from me. Right. Making sure that we proactively communicate gives the peace of mind that ultimately the executive team is going to look good in front of the business because you are delivering quality content that is well, collaborated, well thought out, and you're not going to be going over budget, which is key when we're speaking about seven figure budgets.

Speaker A: I love that. And I think that's such an important takeaway in terms of keeping them updated proactively because the last thing you want is to not have heard from them in months and months and they haven't heard from you. And of a sudden, two weeks out, they're saying, where's this, where's that? And that's the last time that you need actually anyone sort of hassling you for those little parts. Like, I think that's a really important takeaway actually.

Speaker B: And I would just say on that one too, leverage their EAs. A lot of executives have EAs that are capable of so much more than they are often utilized for. Tap into them as part of your key stakeholder group. So that second group we talked about, get their insights. Hey, how do you think, you know, Tony is going to respond to this overall message? Use them as a resource, collaborate together. They'll also tell you, oh, oh, that's a key topic for Tony. Let's actually take him in earlier than the rest of the executive team. Amazing.

Speaker A: I like that, that, that's a really good takeaway. And what would you say to sort of enable professionals who, like you sort of mentioned at the top, were maybe staring down the barrel of their first in person sko are any sort of mistakes that you've tasks that they can learn from or so words of wisdom, sort of more overall that they can sort of take to put themselves at ease and help prepare themselves for, you know, a pretty daunting sort of experience that they're going into.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, so I would say a couple of things. It is really easy to try to spread yourself over everything, especially when somebody says, and literally this happens to us, right. Stephanie, you own sales kickoff next year. Its success is entirely on you. Go get them, tiger. Right. And you're like, amazing. I can't control for all these factors. This is fantastic. I love this. For me, what I would say is identify those key project collaborators early and carve out your swim lanes. Know what only you can do and make sure that you have that swim lane. And if there's something that maybe you like to do, but guess what? Other people can do it. Carve off that swim lane to take yourself out of it. An example of that is previously I had a partner on a project team for a kao. She was absolutely incredible at logistics and vendor management. While the Virgo in me and fun fact, if I can share. We actually share a birthday, everybody. Daniel and I. Um, the Virgo in me is like, I cannot let go of that. I need to know who's arriving, when, what they're eating, what the room looks like, when is the vendor going to deliver the activity sheets that we're having people do. I need to know all the things. She was incredibly good at that. So being able to parse that off and say, okay, here's my swim lane, here's yours, meant that she gave me the information I needed. Steph, let's confirm agenda timing because I'm finalizing food. We need to make sure we know when our breaks are relative to heavy topics in the agenda for the content tracks, for example. Right. Being able to partner and work in parallel is critical. So as much as it may be difficult for your first in person kickoff, make sure you identify those key trusted collaborators, break out those swim lanes, and establish what your communication preferences are going to be between each other. Focus on what only you can truly do as your priority.

Speaker A: I love that. I think the focus on what only you can do, it's a very sort of powerful statement. M. It's empowering in a way as well, because you got to trust yourself. And then the things that you can put away for your own sanity, divide them up, uh, and move the sway blades. I really like that. And I guess before we sort of wrap up a more big picture question, rather than the sort of tactical and strategic stuff, how do you feel about in person kickoff? Is it worth all the work? Does a part of you still, like, sort of virtual or maybe even hybrid where you can sort of divvy up some stuff, uh, virtually? Where do you sort of sit at it now that you've kind of had the experience of doing the impersonal ones? You've had plenty of experience doing virtual ones. Where do you sit on it? I'm very curious.

Speaker B: Yeah, I am so for it. I am so for it. Listen, let's be real. The last six weeks leading up to my first in person kickoff with hundreds of people from almost two dozen countries, like, I was not sleeping. I was living on protein bars and Coffee. But there is nothing like people coming together cross functionally and within teams who have physically never met before. And being in a room together for two to three days, the relationship building, the collaboration, the insights, the number of times I heard somebody go, hey, Steve, I'm, um, about to respond to an email. Do you learn a little bit about this? Literally sitting on the lunch breakout session that never would happen in a virtual space to that degree. I think the other piece that I love, besides the fact that I'm an extrovert and I just love being with all the people, is you see it in the feedback. You see it. So I had some employee feedback that came in which verbatim was, I've been here for X number of years. This is hands down the best event I've ever been to. I feel more connected, more knowledgeable, more confident to go have conversations with my customers than I felt in the X number of years that I've worked here. That's huge. And yes, you can get there virtually, but it takes so much longer. It is amazing. The power of what you can do with in person time.

Speaker A: I love that. And then anyone listening, you've heard it here first. It is worth it. All the sort of stress and difficulties you're going through right now, it is worth it. Uh, we got the confirmation. I think we can put that to bed. I love it. Um, but I think that that was all we sort of had time for. Thank you so much for, for coming on and sharing that. That was such a great sort of conversation to be able to sort of get those insights and just hear your thoughts and just lean on that experience. I think it's going to be such a valuable resource for the community to be able to put this out here and hopefully just reassure people it is worth it. And they've sort of got that experience to sort of lean on and, and help them sort of when they're building out their own skill. So thank you for, for coming on and sharing that with the community. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. If anyone wants to talk about it or wants to talk about how you can maybe customize some sneakers in company colors to get away with wearing running shoes during your Ko Connect with Me on LinkedIn. Let's talk it out.

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