How to Turn Your Sales Kick Off into a Revenue & Performance Multiplier with Richard Ellis

Speaker A: The best way to keep your A players engaged is to have them actually lead some of these workshops or lead some of these sessions. As a sales guy, I always used to love hearing what my other sales counterparts were doing that led to their success. Put them up front. Leading sessions is a great way to keep your A players engaged.

Speaker B: Hello everybody and welcome to the Sales Transformation Lab podcast from youhubs. I'm Ash Ali, one of the co founders here today. I have a really wonderful gentleman called Richard Ellis, the CEO of Revenue Innovations. So we're going to talk about an interesting topic today, skos. But before we start, let's get a bit of background of Richard and your background in sales and tell us more.

Speaker A: Well, thank you for being here. It's an honor and a pleasure. Look forward to chatting with you. Time is right to talk about sales kickoffs, but a little bit myself. I, uh, was an engineer by education, but quickly found myself in enterprise software world doing consulting work, building business cases. Back then we didn't call them value engineering efforts, but that's what it became known as in the industries. I like to think that I was, you know, one of the pioneers in that, that process because I am old but um, spent most of my career around sales, whether it's carrying a bag myself, leading sales teams, leading sales operations, et cetera. And so really passionate about the go to market engine and uh, of course sales kickoffs, or revenue kickoffs as my many people are calling it these days, is kind of front and center when you think about kicking off the new year.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for that quick background, Richard. So let's kick off with what is an sko?

Speaker A: Well, when we think about a new year, right, we want to get things kicked off with a strong start. These days we're talking about sales and that's kind of the, uh, you know, the primary motivator is revenue sales. Let's get off to a fast start. Let's understand what's going to be required to make our number in light of everything that we learned the prior year. And so one of the things that we're seeing in the market right now is as companies try to really bridge the gap between sales and marketing, I'm seeing a lot of companies involving marketing more also bringing in customer service into sales kickoffs. Right. So there's a smooth handoff from sales to delivery. And you know, we're also seeing that many customer success organizations are being tasked with quotas for upselling and cross selling. And so they're every bit as important in terms of driving revenue growth. And so that's why I mentioned in the little intro there that many companies are really kind of rethinking SKO and starting to think rko. Right, Revenue kickoff.

Speaker B: I like that. I like that revenue kickoff because it's bringing the whole team together rather than just sales people, because everyone's in sales effectively in a company. But then the commercial team is growing so wide, like you said, the CS team involved with expanding accounts and also account management teams working on building out land and expand accounts as well. So super interesting. Why is SK so important though? What's the point of it? I mean, a lot of sales people, like, we're doing this sko, what's the point of doing this? We're going to go away for two days, have a jolly and come back.

Speaker A: That's a great question. And I think one of the realities is just reconnection is critical these days. Every client we work with has disparate teams spread out across the world. And then even in the local cities, there's a lot of remote working, so they're not even going into the office every day of the week. And so people can get lonely out there. They feel like they're the lone wolf or a man on an island trying to get things done. And so I think it's just, uh, a great point of time to bring everybody together physically and rally around priority or mission.

Speaker B: Yeah, I get you. What are you seeing right now, Richard, when it comes to remote teams and hybrid teams and bringing them together and sometimes not bringing them together, how does that work now?

Speaker A: Well, certainly, uh, you know, there was a period of time a few years ago where we had to pivot and do these types of kickoffs versus virtually. I'm seeing most are prioritizing at least an annual kickoff now to be in person and really taking opportunity to invest in the team.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Bring some of that culture back. Right. And implement that into that process. And so, uh, definitely the strong trend is whether you're disparate, whether you're remote working, all of that stuff. Companies are prioritizing in person kickoffs.

Speaker B: Yeah, that kind of makes sense. A lot of our clients are doing in person kickoffs over two days or a day, full day, bringing everyone over and spending and investing money in people so they can see the face to face. Right. It makes a huge difference, like I said, from a cultural perspective.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: So what are the mistakes, though, which, uh, companies are making right now with these sales kickoffs? What are the big mistakes?

Speaker A: The biggest one that comes to mind and I'll say it in a couple of ways. One is kind of the fire hose approach, right. Going to the kickoffs feels like a lot of times drinking water through a fire hose. Right. It's just a lot of what to know, a lot of presentations kind of thrown at you and you can only digest so much in that amount of time. Right. Many people will call it, you know, death by PowerPoint. And so I would say a, uh, big mistake is just trying to cram 12 months of training into two days or a three day kickoff. Right. You really need to be intentional about what you're going to focus on and balance that out. Another big mistake is really ignoring kind of the pulse of energy across the two or three days. You know, many times there's just keynote after keynote after keynote in the morning and then that break for lunch and then in the afternoon you have 45 minutes after 45 minutes of all of these tracks that you go through. And again, it's all kind of one way dialogue, not a monologue, not engaging or interactive. And you need to kind of balance energy and interactivity, et cetera. And so rather than thinking about, oh, here's our opportunity of two days to throw everything we have at the team, really pause and think what is going to be required to execute upon our one or two key growth strategies or priorities for the year and be intentional about how you do that.

Speaker B: Yeah, that kind of makes sense to me because the overload, A, uh, lot of people say that, but how do you, how do you plan an SKO when you have like seasoned sellers and new people in the business? How do you do you do different talk tracks or how do you do that?

Speaker A: That's another great question. I would say there's a couple of angles you can take. One is, I love peer led learning. The best way to keep your A players engaged is to have them actually lead some of these workshop or lead some of these sessions. As a sales guy, I always used to love hearing what my other sales counterparts were doing that led to their success. Put them up. Uh, front leading sessions is a great way to keep your A players engaged. Secondarily you can think about separate tracks. And so let's recognize that not everybody needs the same level of knowledge transfer, skill development, et cetera. And so have some tracks for your seasoned players and then have some tracks for your younger new hires and et cetera and give them the opportunity to go where they going to be served best.

Speaker B: Got you, got you. That makes, that makes total sense to me because I mean salespeople are very hard to get them engaged in any content. Right. And they don't want to be overloaded. And then if they're new versus, uh, tenured, there's a slight different variance of understanding of the business and the needs as well.

Speaker A: And I'm sure you've seen as well that you kind of observe across the room and you see those rock stars kind of leaning back, arms crossed, going, okay, you know, I've seen it all. I'm not going to learn anything new here. Yeah. So you need to just anticipate that and plan your scale around that. Plan their involvement, lift them up a little bit. Right. Hey, you're a leader. You're an unconscious competent. Right. You, you do things just naturally and intuitively. Well, we're going to help you transfer some of that skill and discipline to your peers. Right. And so there's a lot of ways you can kind of get them involved, if you think about it.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love that approach. Uh, we're very big on peer to peer learning here at uhubs, where we do a lot of peer matching with the, uh, capabilities. And we have a whole feature on our platform that does peer matching for people based on their skills and then allowing managers to connect with each other. So I'm very big on them getting your top players to actually teach the things and they also learn it twice. And they can simplify. And salespeople are more willing to listen to someone who's a top salesperson.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: Just another sales enablement person who's not in sales. I hear that quite often.

Speaker A: Right. Or a product person that, you know, they come across, hey, I just want you to pitch my product, sell my product. It's like, well, you haven't even sold product before. Right. And so, yeah, they love to hear from other sellers, for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So I'm hearing a lot right now, uh, Richard, that a lot of the companies that we work with have got new products. Um, the new products are very much AI led. We live in an AI era now. So there's new AI products coming out in a company and they use the kickoff opportunity to talk about these new products. How do you see that now being incorporated? Sales kickoffs, because it wasn't something that was used to before, where sales kickoff is another year, uh, another forecast. Let's go for it again. There's a whole bunch of new products coming out now and learning these new skills and learning these new products. How would you incorporate that with the SKL going forward?

Speaker A: Well, I would say that, you know, because of the dramatic shift that you're likely to see with AI and other technology embedded into your services or products, it takes a different level of knowledge transfer and enablement to equip the team on how to position and how to sell that. And so, uh, yes, the knowledge transfer piece is good, where, you know, you can have a big keynote, product manager comes out, or product marketer says, hey, this is the new roadmap and here's, you know, the why and the market we're going after. But I would say where a lot of companies fall short is they don't follow that up with. And then given that, we're going to put you in some smaller workshops where you can learn the key value drivers and how to position those and how to connect those to your customer's priorities. And we're actually going to do some role play. So you're taking advantage of that event to start building some muscle memory around how to position the product. Not just say, here's the product, now go sell it. Right? Here's the new features that you get to, you know, talk about. Now go sell it, right? Follow up the, uh, what to know with how to do it.

Speaker B: Yeah, got you. That makes total sense. How do you manage this then? Richard, if you've got an organization with say 40 or 50 people in your commercial org versus someone who's got 500, how does an SKO change?

Speaker A: Well, certainly the larger the organization, the larger the team, the more logistical challenge it is. I mean, I've had a situation where one of my clients, we had 900 people in this giant Marriott ballroom and we did role playing. We had flip charts all around the perimeter outside of the ballroom. We had those, you know, kind of table tent, tabletop whiteboards on every table. And so you can't tell me that, oh, uh, you know, 200 people, 300 people in the room is just too much to do something engaging and interactive. We had 900 people role playing all at once in teams of three. And it changed the game. Right. For them, the energy was at the highest level. People were really learning and getting excited about, you know, learning from each other how to position and oh, this is what hard to talk about. How would you talk about that? Oh, I anticipate this pushback. And so I would say there's no group that can't be solved with just a little bit of pre planning and logistical work.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, I mean, that sounds like Tony Robbins conference live there with all the, uh, with lots of energy and jumping up and down, let's go for it.

Speaker A: And I'm not saying that we didn't have a little bit of anxiety leading into it on is this going to work? Are we going to be able to pull this off? But it was fantastic. And you know, it just proved to us, uh, if you put your mind to it, you can figure out how to do, you know, some of these larger sessions. Now naturally, if you have 3, 4, 500 people, the more ideal scenario is to have different sessions where you can do 50 at a time, 75 at a time, and keep it a little bit more manageable. And you might have a couple in the morning, a couple in the afternoon and you just split up the team and go through it in pieces. But that wouldn't stay away from it. If you have an organization that's large, I would say, you know, that interactivity, that engaging role play type scenario where they're putting in some practice, it can be done and it does move the needle.

Speaker B: Yeah, it makes total sense to me, Richard. And I love that RKO. So I'm going to call them RKO's going forward now. I like. Yeah, so RKO's loads of energy, 20 robins high energy, two days and then boom, dead after that. What do you do to make sure that the sustainability of the RKO is ongoing throughout the year? And do you do, I mean, It's a double two questions here. Do you do RKOs every quarter or do you just do once a year? Or how do you think about timing as well?

Speaker A: Well, I think there's a cadence of follow up that you need to plan for. I don't necessarily recommend or see, you know, many companies doing a full RKO every quarter, but everybody does have this, you know, idea of some level of quarterly business review. And so what I will say is that, you know, most teams do an RKO or SKO once a year. Some percentage, a good percentage will do kind of a booster mid year. And so that's two. And then in between those to hit kind of that quarterly rhythm. You know, you might think about more regional efforts where it's not the whole team together, but it's the west team and the central team, the east team kind of doing their own thing. But what often gets missed is how are you going to reinforce, you know, the sales initiatives or the priorities or the sales plays that you launched at that original SKO or RKO in January or February. And so you need to really think about, okay, we're going to launch this new initiative. It's going to require Some knowledge transfer. It's going to require some skill development, it's going to require some new disciplines. So how am I going to work through my management team, especially the first line coaches, right, those first line managers to drive reinforcement, application and follow up, to really embed it in, in the way we go to market. And that just doesn't happen if you just tell everybody to do it Once at sko, you have to have that follow up. And so when you have those QBRs or those even weekly or monthly team meetings, those are good inflection points or interactive opportunities to really get that manager led reinforcement, you know, built into the culture.

Speaker B: Got you. Yeah, yeah. And we talked a lot about culture there as well. The opportunity to bring people together, together, uh, to drive culture. But how can leaders use the RKO SKO moment to really reignite that culture in an organization?

Speaker A: You uh, know, everybody likes to talk about the why and you know, I think that's still important. Right? What's in it for the stakeholders? What's in it for the people? Uh, people want to feel like these days that they matter M. Right. And they, they can make a difference. And especially in light of the AI, you know, world that we're living in, there's a lot of increased anxiety on is this going to take my job? How's going to be different tomorrow or next year? And so it's just a good point to remind us, hey, you know, we're a team. What, uh, does that team look like? What do we care about? What do we value? And so, you know, while we get people together, I think that's important. I've always been a big believer in kind of the culture of coaching. Right. Whether it's, you know, you're a literal manager that is required to coach your people or you're just uh, an individual contributor coaching peers and coaching others around you to do better. I think this is an opportunity for us to kind of go get back to that and you know, when we drive that culture of coaching, good things tend to happen.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that on the coaching side and uh, driving that culture from peer to peer, from sales, frontline managers and getting everyone involved. But the question here is what do you share RKA or, or an SKO which has data and kind of is coaching orientated. You mentioned role plays that you do. You mentioned you do some live interactive things. What else could you do to start to ignite that? Because there's a lot of new managers coming into their role and they're struggling with Understanding how to coach. There's a lot of managers who complain, which we know a lot about because they have lack of time, they have no time to coach. So how do you incorporate that thinking into RKAOs and drive that culture? What would you share with, what should CROs share with their managers and their team? To say this is actually a good thing. It's going to help you hit your target. There's data around this.

Speaker A: That's a really good question. And I think it's a missed opportunity for many teams. Right. The process that I tend to see is, you know, when we start planning around an sko, there's a call for content. Right. And so, hey marketing, what do you want to share with the team? Hey product, what do you want to share with the team? Hey, sales, what does your team need? Right. Executives, what do we need to share with the team? Right. And it's kind of a top down push, just stuff. Right. Whereas what I would prefer is that you have kind of a bottoms up diagnosis before you prescribe what the team needs. And that's where the data and analytics and insights can come in. Right. You don't want to train the whole team on negotiation best practices if your data shows that your real problem is pipeline generation. Right. Or if you know your win loss reporting is showing that you're losing because your solution and your conversations is coming across as a nice to have versus a strategic enabler of your client's growth.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Well, that's, that's a messaging problem and a positioning problem and maybe a relationship engagement problem. We're not getting high enough in the organization. And so I think a lot of teams could be better served at, uh, really analyzing, you know, where there are opportunities for improvement in sales execution and having that be, you know, an input into the process of planning. Okay, what are we going to cover with the sales team during our RKOS or SKOs?

Speaker B: Yeah, it makes total sense to me, Richard. Just getting a baseline and understanding where that baseline is and then uh, using that to personalize the approach that you take with your team because then it's much more engaging and it's more uh, data driven. Makes total sense to me as well. But surprising how many people are not using diagnosis and capability trends for RKOs and skills, Richard.

Speaker A: Not many at all. Which is surprising because you forecast every week. Right. We look at pipeline data all the time. But then it's like, okay, let's have somebody in marketing put together our, you know, SKO plan and not look at any of the sales data. I just See it happening all the time. And you mentioned earlier, you know, well, how do you handle like seasoned reps versus newer reps, et cetera. Same thing applies here, right, where you can use kind of competency data, performance data to really understand your team. You don't want your enterprise reps sitting through sales 1, 101 stuff that's really meant for new hire. Right. And so really tailoring your approach to what the team needs, their acumen, their performance level, et cetera. And that comes from data and insight. And I think a lot of times, I was just, uh, on a client call this morning. They're doing their SKO the second week in January and here it is, you know, mid December, and they don't have their plan fully baked out yet. So they basically got four weeks with Christmas in the middle to figure it out. And they're certainly not doing intensive data analysis to support that. And so that's where we're trying to help, to say, hey, let's uh, slow down a little bit so we can go faster and plan something that's a little bit more intentional and purposeful rather than just, hey, let's throw a bunch of stuff at the team and, you know, hope they get excited about it.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense, Richard. It's always that, isn't it? Some people are closing out their year, end quarter, some people are closing out their first quarters. So it depends on the timing of the company as well. So it's a busy time and then the holiday period comes in as well, and then everyone.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: So totally understandable. What are you seeing in terms of trends and when RKRS are happening? What are the kind of. Is it the first quarter? Is it like January? When are most people doing this tends

Speaker A: to be the first 45 days in the first quarter. Right. Is what most companies are doing. They really do want to kind of wrap up and celebrate success from the last year and then kick off as soon as possible in the new year with a new priority, which oftentimes requires some pivots and some due difference based on what happened the prior year. And so they don't want too much time lag to go before they set off in that new direction. I've got two clients specifically that are doing it the first week of the first quarter, which is really early. But, but most of them do it, you know, kind of the first, you know, four to six weeks of the quarter.

Speaker B: So anything beyond six weeks is too late in your mind.

Speaker A: Not necessarily. I mean, you know, where people are located and the travel Requirements. Requirements and things like that. Last year we had a client, uh, their first quarter is January through March, and they did it mid March. So you could still do that. I'm just saying the trend that I see is most companies want to do it sooner rather than later to get off to that fast start.

Speaker B: Yeah, got you, got you. That makes sense. That makes it. So, Richard, if you were to redesign an SKO from scratch, what would be your process?

Speaker A: Well, we actually have a 5P process that we like to think about. Right. And the P's stands for purpose, place, practicality, Pulse and Post. And, uh, if you want, I can just kind of go through, you know, quick, you know, description of each of those. So purpose obviously starts with kind of defining your North Star, you know, what is going to result in you killing your quotas this next year. Right. And it can't be everything. If everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. Right. So what are the one or two sales plays or priorities or initiatives that, that are really going to drive the results and then, and then define your overall theme around that and align everything to that. And so now you've got a strong purpose and everybody can rally around that one purpose. The next is place. And, uh, the reason we mentioned this is because, you know, it is important to, I think, get people out of the office in a new environment. It signals that this is a little bit different. It's not our status quo. Right. This is a big deal. Doesn't necessarily have to be expensive, expensive, but just kind of different location. It's a rallying point. And then make sure that, you know, the place is conducive to learning. And that's why, you know, when we talk about interactive sessions, breakouts, things like that, you don't want everybody in a big ballroom for two days straight, right? You want to have a place that's conducive to have some of these smaller breakouts, smaller venues. A lot of times clients on the. The second or third day will have some really regional team meetings. And so you'll want a place that's conducive for that. The third P is around practicality. And so you'll hear me use the word intention a lot and practical a lot. Because at the end of the day, the way I measure success of an SKO or an RKO is not applause. It's not positive surveys, it's behavior change. Right. At the end of the day, you want to drive behavior change to move the needle to get better results this year than you did last year. And to do that you need practical guidance, practical content tools and training throughout your sessions, something that they can use immediately. And so I like to just think about the litmus test of you got an SKO this week. What is your sales rep going to do differently Monday than they were before coming in this sko and have you given them a tool or a framework or a training or something to help them do that, that whatever it is, differently. And so that's kind of the practicality piece. I've done three out of the five. Let me just pause. I don't want to make this a monologue. Any, any questions or comments so far.

Speaker B: That's super interesting. I love your kind of purpose based aspect, which is the North Star creating a North Star and then the place being conducive to allowing people to converse and do workshops, uh, and have the, the safety, but also the opportunity to have the energy and the release and connection together. I think the connection point is very good. The human connection, the humanizing it all. Yeah. Being super important. You mentioned something about the practicality and the driving behavior change. The question I have there is how do you track that behavior change going forward? Like what do you do? And maybe you can talk about it after you finished your two P's that are still.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Speaker B: But super interesting. So what are the other two P's that. Oh, go ahead.

Speaker A: I was going to say, just to tease the answer there, I, I like to look at leading indicators versus trailing performance metrics. And so when you come back to that, you want to think about what metrics that you can monitor and measure. But the fourth P is pulse. And what I mean by that is kind of the pulse of the energy throughout your sko. But you can also think about it as the uh, the literal pulse and the heartbeat of your people. Right. I've seen situations where we come back to lunch and this is after, you know, four keynotes. In the morning you have a lunch break and then you're bringing everybody back to the ballroom and you know, people are just nodding off. You want to really kind of just, just design with uh, intentionality, the flow and the energy of the two or three days. And so that can include high energy mornings. In the Interact. After lunch, people are kind of tired, it's been a long day already. You drive some level of interactivity in those afternoon sessions so that they're doing something, they're up around, you know, meeting with people, they're out of their chairs. Plenty of breaks throughout. Right. Um, you don't want to have death by PowerPoint. You don't want to kill their brain with boredom. Right? Yeah. And so just kind of thinking about the pulse and the energy throughout the session. Is that fourth P got.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the flow of that piece. Yeah, it makes sense.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Hey, one thing, I love music. And so I kind of think about DJs. Right. If you go to a nightclub or a bar or whatever.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, the DJ doesn't play high energy music 100 of the time and he doesn't play slow music 100 of the time. Right. He gets people out on the dance floor, explore for a few songs, but then takes a break, brings things down. It gives people a break. Okay. Now they're back at their table getting their refreshments. Right. And so you can kind of think about your role as a DJ as you're orchestrating this SKO event.

Speaker B: Got you now talking about that. I, uh, know you're going to come to your last peep. Sounds expensive. What's the average budget that companies are putting behind this? And how do you track ROI of this type of stuff?

Speaker A: I don't know if I could come up with an average budget. That's a really hard question. I have seen companies do really well at managing the dollars and cents. So it doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. There's some, um, you don't have to go to the biggest JW Marriott and spend a fortune on ballrooms. There are cheaper hotels. There are cheaper locations, certainly. And so I would say that given your budget, you can still design the right flow that get the right place that's conducive to learning, et cetera. Doesn't have to be millions and millions of dollars.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. So let's take an example then, Richard. I'm a CRO and I've got, let's say 100 people in my commercial org and I want to do an SKO rko. Uh, the way you're saying I should do it, you know, with the flow and all the entertainment and making sure it makes sense. How much should I be thinking about investing in this?

Speaker A: You know, we're not a benchmarking company. And so, uh, a lot of times those budgets are on, um, our clients. And so we don't often ask them, you know, oh, how much are you spending in total? But it could be several hundred thousand dollars for a team of 100. Have had some really successful events that have been hosted at the company's headquarters location. Right. And so it doesn't necessarily mean, okay, we've got to have someplace different, we have to rent a big ballroom and a big hotel or anything like that. And they had, I think it was about 140 or 150 people total on the growth team. They had a very nice sizable training room and outside of the training room they had a nice kind of meeting area that was kind of a lunch, you know, break area. And then they had some small breakouts that were on that floor. And so it was very conducive to what we needed to get done at that SKO. It fit 150 people. So I'm not, you know, when I say earlier, uh, that uh, you know, it'd be great to get out of the office and signal this is different, this is a big deal. Doesn't necessarily mean you have to.

Speaker B: Yeah, but what it does show me though there Richard, is that, you know, it's the one event that a lot of investments happening in a sales team and you want to make the most of it. You want to get the ROI on it. So you want to plan it properly, you want to create the right RKO event and it's going to, you want it to have impact, ongoing impact, not just a one off event of 100,000 down. And then that's it. Let's hope for the best. So it's so important to plan the RKO and SKO as well because you're investing so much money in time and logistics and everything around it. So it just makes more sense that what we're going through now in terms of planning your rko. And now's uh, a perfect time to start thinking about it for ready for the quarter.

Speaker A: As, as important as all of that planning is also the fifth P which is final P post sko. So don't look at this as, you know, a one off event. And I think most of us seasoned leaders, you know, can appreciate that one and done events don't tend to move the needle.

Speaker B: Well.

Speaker A: Right. But really view your SKO or RKO as a launch, right? Uh, you can't tell them everything you want to tell them. You can't enable them and equip them with everything you necessarily want. You're going to have to make some decisions. Right. But think of it as the foundational launch pad to kick off the year. But then plan a six to eight week follow up of reinforcement and that's where the managers should be and you should. Even before the SKO event you say, hey, this is our launch pad. This is what we're kicking off. This is your role following sko to drive application in the field, to drive execution of these new priorities, to drive usage of these new tools, frameworks, positioning decks, whatever it is. We're rolling out and we're going to have kind of an eight week sprint after SKO to make sure that we embed it in the DNA of our organization. We're moving the needle, we're learning, we're sharing. Right. Uh, and that can include, you know, team webinars, manager led coaching sessions, micro learning to support that. I think too often we just, you know, we use all our energy to make sure this event goes off without a hitch and we don't think about what are the two months of activities to following up with that, which is really where you're going to get most of your return on that investment.

Speaker B: Yeah, I got you. That makes total sense. Right? The follow up, I Love this. The 5P. So you got purpose, place, practicality, pulse and post SKO.

Speaker A: Yes. You got it perfect.

Speaker B: I love it. I love that model. I mean. So uh, Richard's team has been working with SKOs and RKOs for many years now. You got a lot of, lot of experience around this. It's great to hear from someone who's got a, uh, lot of experience planning these and helping CROs make the most of them. But in your experience having done so many of these, what's been one of the most memorable experiences of doing an RKO SKO or the one most, one of the most impactful things that you've seen?

Speaker A: Well, a couple of things come to mind and you can kind of think of these as uh, you know, not big game changers but just, you know, value drivers. One is across a couple of SKOs, they did a really nice job of assigning table captains to every session that had interactivity, etc. A lot of times you'll have some big sessions and you'll have round tables with eight people at a table, you know, know and that that's a great setup to foster some table discussions and table activities. So it's not just death by PowerPoint, but you're teaching a concept, you're rolling out some, you know, AI enabled part of our product. But then you're driving conversation at the tables on what does this mean, right. How is this going to translate into your pipeline or your opportunity generation, etc. And so that, that's one key is just kind of driving it there, but then making sure that each table has an assigned table captain. Not necessarily the leader, but somebody who's going to be kind of in charge of Facilitating those micro conversations, those application discussions, so that when it gets to that point, uh, they're actually working and they're applying it to their real territory, their real accounts, their real deals. They're not just, okay, now I'm talking about, you know, my weekend and the football game coming up and waiting until the main stage gets going again. And so, uh, I've seen that done really well a couple of times and I always come going, this needs to be a requirement to drive that table discussion in a very meaningful and application based way.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree with you. I mean we at you hubs recently we did a YouHub CRO dinner. We just had CROs together over a nice evening dinner. And the conversation that we shared with everybody, not just learning about people personally, but the human conversations around the challenges that CROs are facing in the new year and people challenges and so on, it just opens up and so many great insights that we got from there. And a lot of the people would say, wow, we learned so many new things and similar problems, but framed differently. So it makes a huge difference having that conversation, that human connection. I agree.

Speaker A: For sure, for sure. Another, another example that comes to mind is this was a smaller team, couple hundred people on the growth team, maybe stretching up to about 2 to 20 or so. Everything kind of led to a final finale of role playing, right? And so, so it was a two and a half day event. They learned a bit about, you know, the market opportunity that they were chasing after that aligned to their growth priority. They learned about the updates in the product roadmap that's gonna allow them to, in a differentiated way, capture that market. They learned about the new buyer conversations that they needed to have because based on the change in their product, now they have something to offer new buyers, right? And so they learned all these different pieces the first couple of days and then they kind of brought it all together with, okay, now you know everything. To have an amazing 15 minute executive conversation. And so at the last day, and they gave them a warning, right? They said, you know, feel free to prepare in your hotel room in the evenings if you need to, because in the last day we're going to ask for volunteers and we're going to make some nominations and we're going to get people up on the stage and you're going to role play this 10 minute, 15 minute executive conversation. And so it gave the whole thing purpose, right? It really got. You could tell everybody was listening with intention through all the sessions because they're like, I've got to Master this because I might be called up on stage. Right? And so they were really in it. And then they did a phenomenal job. In fact, one of the, uh, marketing folks, they weren't even in sales. They volunteered, say, I want to do this. They got up on stage and she nailed it. And everybody, you know, big round of applause. Just a. See, you're used to the sales people being the bold ones and, you know, the ones that want to show their stuff. And so this marketing lady got up there and she just did a great job. And so the fact that it was kind of all choreographed and all the different pieces fit together to. We're going to cast a, uh, vision for our executive sponsors in our prospective accounts and you're going to role play it on that final day. That just kind of comes to mind as something that was really fun and I think worked. Worked really well.

Speaker B: Amazing. Well, it sounds like you've got so much experience in this area when it comes to SKOs or RKLs, let's call them RKLs. But, uh, it's, it's really good. Um, it's been really good chatting to you, uh, Richard. I learned a lot of things around, uh, the RKOS and SKOs. Thank you so much for your time and sharing all the wonderful information around doing RKOs in the best way possible. I know it's very timely right now. Hopefully people will be listening to this over Christmas and the new year, uh, planning them. So, yeah. Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Well, I appreciate your podcast. It was excited to be a guest on your show, so thank you for the opportunity. We've got a very experienced team and always help. Always willing to share ideas. So, uh, if anybody wants to just reach out and just ask questions, always happy to help. Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you today. It's been fun.

Speaker B: Thank you, Richard. Fantastic. Thank you very much.