4 min read

Your sales summit is a disaster waiting to happen (but there’s still time to fix it)

Andrew Eninger : Nov 16, 2023 12:31:52 PM

There are many moving parts leading up to a sales summit and, let’s face it, most of them are other people doing their best to ruin it. There’s the senior sales leader who’s obsessed with a new book and wants to spend the entire budget on getting the author to speak. There’s the marketing team that is methodically laying out the world’s most trance-inducing slides for their product presentations that will be about as exciting as a melatonin. There’s the sales training team valiantly battling for any real-estate they can get their hands on, while knowing everything they plan will be cut by fifteen minutes when the awkward customer fireside panel goes over. Meanwhile, your painstakingly planned experiential group activity (the highly anticipated whisky tasting/fish scaling/build-a-bike for single dads event) is shaping up to be a drunken boondoggle no matter how you spin it. (Adding ‘whiskey’ was the only way you could ensure people would show up.)

Even though it’s not until February, it’s already a train wreck and you can smell it from here.

Fortunately, it’s not too late! There are actions you can take right now to slow that train down and bring it into the station. That is to say, you have the power to save the Sales Summit 2024.

The problem: Your regional sales leads are planning breakout sessions that will suck the air out of the room like a rocket ship with the door wide open. They are trying out their stories on their spouses, looking for just the right animated GIF memes, and spending way too much time finding the scientifically worst walk-on music that’s guaranteed to roll back DEI efforts by five years. After getting pumped up in plenary, everybody’s going to go into their regional room and get a 90 minute monologue (packed into a 75 minute time slot.) Unfortunately, the room will be too small to hide boredom, so everyone will do their best to perform their excitement. They’ll nod along. Clap. Wonder if they’re the only one who wants to turn into a cricket and sneak out under the door. Meanwhile, these sales leads will be modeling this behavior as ‘just what leaders do,’ perpetuating the same behavior for the next several years, through the next several regional leaders, forever and ever.

What you can do: Here’s what you do: Get in a time machine. Go back in time. Create a culture of trust where people can speak up, where these sales leaders ask for and listen to feedback. Shift the expectation of leaders from ‘telling’ to ‘listening.’ Stop centering the show-offs who center themselves. Prioritize leaders who value and welcome dialogue more than a monologue. Then, get back in that time machine, come back to now and enjoy the great event that’s unfolding! Problem solved!

The problem: Your overpriced sports-hero keynote speaker is going to be terrible. Just because he made a touchdown with his ACL tendon hanging out of his shoe doesn’t mean he’s a compelling speaker. He may have an amazing pain threshold, but your audience of skeptical reps won’t. They’ll sneak out to the cocktail hour while he paces onstage and patches together stories trying to eke out the 55 minutes his booking agency promised. He’ll compare his ACL injury to a tough sales year. He’ll ask a lot of ‘Raise your hand if you…” questions because that’s what he saw when he peeped a Brené Brown TedTalk. He’ll sweat through his suit coat (and so will you). He’ll high-five a lot.

What you can do: The solution is simple! Get in a time machine. Go forward in time about ten years. Get the future version of the sports hero, the one who finally learned to pull together a great talk after he got heckled at Dreamforce. Drag him into the time machine. Bring him back. Have him kindly tap-out his past self and finish the talk. Problem solved! (Except for the time anomaly you may have created, but that’s for HR to clean up, amiright?)

The Problem: The planning team has scrapped ten perfectly wonderful summit themes for some group-think Frankenstein theme like “(Re)Emerge 2geth(er)!” Nobody likes it, but everybody is willing to get behind it because that’s what’s expected, even though it doesn’t really fit on the water bottle for the goody bags. It’s being printed on signage in a color palette called ‘Musk,’ picked after 30 seconds of non-thought by the graphic designer who was too busy working on her Etsy portal to worry about it. Especially after her great PowerPoint template was thrown out because one leader thought it was too colorful and evoked gay pride so now it’s a 1996 forest green horror. But the sales leaders are too busy to care as they’re being coached on connective talking points, trying to weave in “(Re)Emerge 2geth(er)” and looking for the perfect Saturday Night Live clip to make them stand out in their twelve-minute presentation (which will go twenty.)

What you can do: The path forward is simple. First, you’ll need that time machine. You’ll get in it. You’ll go back a few years. You’ll instill a culture of psychological safety where people can disagree. You’ll teach people how to collaboratively generate and narrow ideas, getting to the best one, not the ‘least offensive.’ You’ll create a speak-up climate where people can interrogate the status quo when it’s no longer working. You’ll help leaders build teams that encourage bold thinking and risk-taking where people can have tough conversations that result in big ideas, not weak agreement. Then you’ll get back in that time machine and set the dial for now, get out and get inspired by the powerful new event theme shining out on the gleaming rainbow signage, making people attending other events wish they were at yours.

If your live sales summit is shaping up to be a hot mess, it could be the culture. If you don’t have a time machine (because it’s still in the convoluted requisition process 8 months later), then you’ll just need to build a great culture now, where people can speak up, try big ideas, call out terrible ideas and where everybody values dialogue more than the open bar. Only then will you be able to (Re)Emerge 2geth(er).

If you’re looking for live learning programs that build real collaboration skills while engaging your next sales summit audience, Fairplay has you covered. Our interactive keynotes and accelerated breakout content breaks down barriers and gets everybody talking, building culture while you build critical relational skills.

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