Are you a Sales leader, Sales enablement manager, Sales ops guru, or HR honcho wondering how to deploy MEDDPICC at your Sales Kick-Off? Look no further; this one’s for you! If not, do your colleagues a favor – share this dynamo with those who call the shots. They’ll be singing your praises!
Prepare for the ultimate sales training extravaganza: your annual Sales Kick Off (SKO). It’s that time of the year again when your sales squad unites for a grand showcase of learning, teaching, and pumping up the motivation. Sure, you want the SKO to be a blast, filled with evening soirees that foster camaraderie and fire up the team. But don’t forget, incorporating the proper training is the secret sauce – because knowledge is one of the most potent motivators you can gift your team.
Now, here’s the catch: both motivation and learning tend to lose their shine over time.
MOTIVATION
Motivation thrives when every salesperson feels like a crucial piece of the puzzle. It springs from mingling with peers, sharing insights, and imbibing wisdom from sales leaders. To keep that motivational flame burning bright, here’s a playbook of tactics to keep things fired up:
- Engage in frequent one-on-ones with each team member.
- Dive headfirst into customer calls, be it on the phone, via video conference, or in person.
- Tackle challenges as a team.
- Provide guidance on conquering these hurdles.
- Set clear, actionable goals to overcome specific challenges.
- Shift the focus from end results to daily and weekly activity goals.
- Monitor their progress towards these activity goals on a weekly basis.
- On a global scale, mimic the SKO with regional sales gatherings – always punctuated with an evening of socializing every quarter.
- In tandem with global and national sales meetings, arrange smaller district sales meetings every month.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Motivation is a vast universe, deserving volumes to explore. We’ll deep-dive into this in a separate blog post.
EDUCATION
The perennial question that crops up in the lead-up to every SKO is: “What are we going to teach this year?” Will we introduce a fresh methodology? But wait, we rolled out the Challenger Sale last year, and Customer Centric the year before – is it practical to introduce MEDDIC this time? Questions galore.
Here’s the scoop: Contrary to popular belief, most successful methodologies complement each other. Solution Selling, Customer-Centric Selling, SPIN Selling, The Challenger Sale, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC,… – they’re all pieces of the puzzle. Each zeroes in on a specific aspect of your sales strategy. Solution Selling and Customer-Centric focus on messaging. TCS hones in on industry knowledge and salespeople’s consulting prowess. MEDDPICC takes the lead in the qualification game. A Fortune 5 company signed up for MEDDIC training with us just two weeks after a Challenger Sale boot camp. Each of these methodologies equips your sales team with fresh tools and perspectives.
However, the more significant hurdle is ensuring that knowledge doesn’t slip through the cracks.
Numerous studies reveal that a staggering 85% of the information fades into oblivion (or is simply left unutilized) within a mere 30 days after a live, in-person SKO training session. Despite the initial euphoria and chatter about newfound insights during coffee breaks, the odds of retaining and applying that knowledge are slim. Even with the most electrifying SKO speaker, a one-time lecture on even the most groundbreaking content starts to lose its luster within weeks.
Keywords To deploy MEDDPICC at your Sales Kick-off: Learn, Practice, Blend, Get Coached, Repeat = Habit
So if the event is going to fade no matter how great the content and the speaker’s skills are, then how do we implement a killing methodology that will increase performance?
The best way to deploy MEDDPICC at your sales kick-off is by repeating the concepts in different formats. Blended learning, lecture, workshop or practice, online, in-person, coaching, repeating…
At MEDDIC Academy, here’s how we operate deploy MEDDIC at your SKO, and it works:
1) Pre-event online courses
Begin by delivering concepts via online courses. There’s no need to eat up valuable SKO time with lectures, as this can easily be accomplished online, at each salesperson’s own pace, via eLearning. This should be completed a week or two before the event, allowing your salesforce to dive into the MEDDIC universe. By taking the sales force into our MEDDIC Academy online platform of courses, they’ll be exposed to the concepts and will understand the MEDDIC message. Keep an eye on progress reports to ensure everyone’s up to speed (our reports are available for sales ops and leadership).
2) Event Training
We delve into the eLearning materials’ key takeaways during live virtual or in-person sessions, enriching the experience with real-life examples. While there’s some overlap with the eLearning content, the different format makes the learning more effective. Remember, repetition in various forms is the golden rule for a successful learning journey.
3) Event workshop
We arrange workshops in a collaborative format, putting into practice what was learned during the training sessions. This practice happens both before and during the event. Sellers roll up their sleeves, reflecting and crafting their specific strategies for sales campaigns, mastering the art of asking questions and applying MEDDIC to their accounts. These workshops guide them through tailored exercises. Mistakes are bound to happen, but they serve as valuable lessons, teaching what not to do and honing what to say or, more precisely, how to question and apply MEDDIC effectively.
This is how they hit the ground running that Monday morning post-event, thanks to rigorous practice and the pragmatic approach of the MEDDPICC methodology.
4) Sales Management Training
Front-line sales managers are instrumental in method implementation. We offer specialized coaching training within the MEDDPICC framework. This coaching can also be rolled out blended, commencing online and receiving a refresher during the SKO, through a management-focused breakout session.
5) Live Opportunity Reviews & Collective Deal Inspection
Nothing is more helpful than applying rules and concepts to our own problems; our own deals and opportunities. This is what we do right after the workshops. Account Executives use our tools, provided free of charge to the attendees, to analyze their opportunities. Some of them present their analysis live during the sessions. Sellers learn how to remove those pinky glasses and realistically self-assess their deals. Managers learn how to coach their teams.
6) Post-event Coaching
Equipped with coaching techniques, sales managers are primed to guide their teams during one-on-one deal reviews and team meetings. After a few of these meetings, MEDDIC practices become second nature. Sellers must be prepared with MEDDIC-related questions about each account in their forecast, or else the account doesn’t cut.
Deploy MEDDPICC at your Sales Kick-Off With MEDDIC Academy’s full-scope program.
Although you want to deploy MEDDPICC at your sales kick-off, training professionals have found more significant success in supporting ongoing learning than relying solely on a single training event. The SKO remains an integral part of the learning process, but an extended, blended approach ensures better retention and application of acquired skills.
With an online platform like MEDDIC Academy, you have all the tools to deploy MEDDIC at your SKO and support your sales team year-round. In preparation for the next SKO, enroll your sales team in the complete MEDDIC course bundle available at MEDDIC Academy. These self-paced courses enhance pre-SKO training and allow SKO event training to focus on practical application, collaboration, and learning from experts through workshops. To top it off, consider extra courses to provide bite-sized, feedback-driven micro-learning, addressing new product releases and crucial business matters. These mini-courses include Objection Handling, Social Selling with LinkedIn, and the ROI course.
Remember, the Sales Kick Off isn’t just another classroom-style training event. It’s a golden opportunity to anchor long-term learning and deploy MEDDIC at your SKO. Bolster it with pre-event training content and elevate it with post-event management coaching. This approach incorporates spaced repetition as a potent learning strategy instead of overwhelming your sales reps with a massive dump of content in one go.
You can’t learn or perform for your reps, but you can set them up for success with an all-encompassing program they’ll eagerly adopt. It’s all about delivering training content in the proper format, at the right time, and in the right way.
Does this resonate with your game plan? Are you ready to roll out MEDDIC at your SKO? Request a quote, and let’s make it happen.
Photo Credit: SPORTX SOCCER BALL TRAINER
Comments are closed.