3 Tips to Make Your SKO Presentation Memorable

David Washer

You only have 15 minutes. How do you get your salespeople excited about the programs you are introducing at SKO? Here are 3 tips to help make your SKO presentation memorable. And make the most of your short — but important —  time at your sales kick-off. And make your SKO presentation memorable. 

Be clear and concise

Over the days of sales kickoff, your salespeople are bombarded with new tools, training, positioning, and much more. They probably remember less than half of it. Making it extra important for your presentation to be memorable. I don’t mean pyrotechnics or even a flashy slide deck. The way to stand out is simple: be clear. 

Tip: Ensure your takeaways are clear and concise. You only have a short amount of time, so get to the point and stay on track.

And repeat what your key message is. 

Tell them what you are going to talk about, talk about it, then tell them what you told them.

In my SKO or new hire onboarding competitive sessions, I start out saying that, “I’ll tell you how we differentiate from the competition, but I don’t expect you to remember anything I said on Monday. All you have to remember is that you can find it all on Klue.”

It may feel repetitious to you, but when you walk off the stage, you can be sure they will remember what you were talking about.

Make your SKO presentation memorable by being engaging

You’ve been there. The person on stage is speaking, but the audience is checking their phones. You couldn’t even pretend to be interested. It doesn’t matter how good the content is if the presentation is boring.

Engage your audience and get them involved. Be it through polls, a game, or better still, get the audience to stand up and stretch or ask them to shout out an answer to a question! The result is a jolt of energy in the room at the time. And, a much higher chance that they will your presentation will stay top of mind when they leave. 

Tip: Include “challenges” during your presentation. The goal of her presentation was to increase long term adoption by introducing the mobile access option for Klue. So they started their presentation by challenging the room to download the Klue mobile app and the first five to do so won gift cards. 

Note: Challenges don’t have to be limited to presentations. We’ve had clients reporting that their engagement levels were off the charts for getting their sales team to use Klue when they included challenges. Some ideas you could borrow and tweak are:

• Ongoing Weekly Challenge: sales team members get rewarded weekly for finding intellibytes through Klue. 
• One-time Project challenge: Sales to provide intel on a competitor you are doing a deep dive on. The first people to share usable content win a gift card. 

Metrics that demonstrate impact

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that picture is a graph with metrics backing up your message, it’s worth a million. 

Tip: Salespeople are all about numbers. So give them what they want. Don’t just have them take your word for how good the new tool or messaging is, prove it.  

Be specific about the impact that whatever it is you are presenting will have on your audience. Make them see — with data — how important your program is to them. Make it clear what’s in it for them and they will be running up to you afterward to find out how to get started. 

Great presentation. Now what? 

Like a good cliffhanger, you want to end your time on stage by leaving your audience wanting more. The point of your presentation is not to do a full program roll-out; it’s to hook in your audience in. Let them know about timing, expectations, and what else is going to happen with your program after SKO. Then follow through.

Have your communications strategy planned out before SKO. If it’s a new tool or technology you are introducing, do you need to start with a small subset of sales to pilot it? If so, have those people selected already so that you can roll out right away. For product marketing teams, what you do at SKO can impact your whole year. Follow these 3 tips to make your SKO presentation memorable and you will be off on the right foot. 

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