How to Incorporate CI into your Sales Kickoff

Sales assets, landscape charts, and battlecards. These are all elements of sales enablement. What better place to bring them all together than your sales kickoff (SKO)? 

An SKO is a great time to get everyone on the same page. Here are some of the competitor topics to cover and questions to answer as part of your sales kickoff agenda:

Review the Competitive Landscape

Focus on “less is more”. Bringing the team together for an SKO means lots of conversation. That’s why the competitive content you bring should be simple: you want the material to be easily digestible and credible.

  • How has the landscape changed since the last SKO? 
  • Have any competitors meaningfully progressed, changed their messaging, raised capital, or launched new offerings? 
  • How has this impacted our position in the market?

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Are there any new players on the scene? Your team may be hearing of someone in their deal pipeline who hasn’t been previously discussed. If you have new intel to share about them, then do so. 

If not, then this is a great time to dive in and have a discussion about the competitor and what people are hearing. Look to gather intel at this event and come back with sales assets to help your team position against them.  

Launch New Battlecards and Sales Assets

Inform your team of new battlecards, how they’ve changed, and when and/or where to use them.

A good thing to do is expose what’s been removed from a battlecard. What assumptions about a competitor were correct? How did we use them in the field?

Updated Sales Battlecard

It’s tempting to want to review battlecards at the SKO, but that may not be the best venue to do so. The information on a battlecard can be dense and reading through it in a room or on a call full of people will be difficult. Instead, send this content ahead of time. Let people review the competitor intelligence before the event and come prepared with questions. 

Moreover, you want to focus on specific situations where your teammates won a competitive deal, and how they did this. This brings us to the next and most important element…

Share Competitive Wins and Losses

Use this opportunity to show how you’re winning deals in a particular space. 

Visuals go a long way at the SKO. A battlecard that’s all text is not going to help anyone. There’s too much to read!

Instead, create wincasts and share them with the team. These are a great way to quickly summarize a competitive win and why it matters. Focus on key elements that the sales team can reproduce in other deals.

  • What lines were effective?
  • What assets did they use?
  • Did the customer respond favorably to any particular features?

For lost deals, explore what your team thinks went wrong. Was there a particular sales asset, demo, or element that wasn’t received well enough? Importantly, what might we have done differently if we could try again? 

A lost deal is not a blame game. It’s a discussion about how to make the next one a win.

Questions you can expect at a Sales Kickoff

Answer them in your own way and be ready for these to come up.

  • What competitors have fallen off the map?
  • How has our competitive landscape changed?
  • Why would a particular competitor win?
  • How do we handle pricing objections?
  • What is our strategy when X comes up?
  • How can partners help us in competitive cycles?