Every VP Sales knows the importance of a successful kickoff, but how do you ensure engagement, education, and excitement about new products and the goals? Here are a few tips I’ve compiled from speaking at and attending some truly great and truly forgettable sales kickoffs.

1. Have Direction

• The structured agenda should have a clear Point of View and direction for the meeting.
• What is the ONE key takeaway or big idea you want participants to remember? How should they change they way they think or act about the product or company? You may have 10, 20, things to say, but there should be one main idea or vision that guides the rest.

2. Inspire & Motivate

• Motivation often stems from inspiration. How are you planning to inspire and excite your global sales team?
• Sales is stressful, so incorporate entertainment throughout the meeting with SHARPs – stories, humor, analogies, references & quotes, and pictures & visuals
• A keynote speaker is often crucial; their message needs to resonate, but also, as Chris Brogan just reinforced, the message needs to be simple. So often, companies spend $M+ on venue, stage, etc., but if the speakers aren’t great.. what a waste! Invest time in finding someone of quality.

3. Be Interactive

• Involve the stars of the show, the top sales people – they have a lot to share and will appreciate the recognition. Give them notice to prepare something succinct and sweet.
• While it’s important to involve a variety of players in the event, sometimes we miss the mark by letting every VP and director say their piece. Potential nap time alert!

4. Encourage Relationships

• We know the value of breaks and time to marinate on new information. Give people structured downtime for networking, sharing best practices, and the opportunity to build some rapport with one another.
• Remember that you’re creating an experience with this kickoff. How does the meeting feel to participants? Is it high energy with momentum, or staggered and slow? Attendees are less likely to run off to their rooms at breaks if the experience is high-energy and exciting.

5. Capture the Moment

• Capture information for follow-up and give the group access to key points and presentations to re-read on their own time. Help them stay in the process after the meeting has ended and continue their education.
• Don’t lose momentum after the meeting ends, use continuous feedback and energy to keep going and moving toward those sales quotas.

Your sales team is your most valuable resource. Are you engaging and motivating your sales team, or wasting their time with this meeting? Please share your favorite part of the last all-hands you attended!

Joel Mowbray

I thought that with this crowd, all standing uncomfortably,  Joel would just give a few remarks and tell people to enjoy the party. But he did so much more, and kept everyone’s rapt attention for over 45 minutes!

Here’s how he handled it. (And in the same form we give feedback in our Communicate To Influence program, let me mention 3 Keepers and 3 Improvements.)

Keepers:

• He came out strong. He didn’t apologize for the circumstance, but just began speaking, with a strong voice, humor and confidence.
• Great behavior. He has a great smile, open manner, gave insider asides, his voice carried with no mic, had energy, gestures and movement. He showed care and candor…
• Content. He was interesting. He was authentic as he had lived the experiences he talked about. Lots of stories made his very focused points. Joel did all the behaviors, but it ultimately was his content that carried the day. Impressive, authoritative…

Improvements (only ones are in the Q&A Session):

• Joel’s eye communication was to each questioner, and he held it. It’s always best to start your answer looking at the questioner for the first 10 seconds or so, and then continue the answer looking at other individuals in the entire audience. This frees your mind to broaden your answer, and avoids this next problem…
• He got into dialogues with some long winded questioners. By continuously looking at them they could easily feel they were in a conversation, and break in and give their opinions, or begin dialogues or arguments. And they did – this was a verbal group. We (the audience) came to hear the speaker. We’re interested in Mowbray’s opinions, not some strangers.
• He went too long. The Q&A turned out to be over 25 minutes, and he should have stopped it sooner by saying, “We have time for one more question.”

But the improvements were minor compared to the impact he had, and how skillfully he spoke. He handled the room, and the audience was the better for it.

This came from a client in a recent Platinum Session, referring to the commonly-held belief that engaging emotions is an effort we make only for those presentations intended to motivate and inspire. For this client, he viewed the majority of his presentations as just providing information.

It’s human tendency to compartmentalize. We segment ourselves in all sorts of ways, including ideas about how we should communicate. It seems natural to separate motivational and inspirational focused speeches from data delivery presentations. However, what’s “natural” is not always best. A fragmented mindset can backfire when it comes to communication.

I asked this client a couple of questions:

• Do you ever give a presentation in which you’re not presenting data?
• Do you ever give a presentation in which you have no intention of impacting your audience?

By definition, a presentation intends to make an impact by conveying information. You can’t make an impact if your data doesn’t reach its destination (the receptive minds of your listeners). Though we might categorize presentations into different types, communication – by definition – involves both emotion and information.

The key to successful communicating is realizing that all communication is an opportunity to motivate and inspire, and all communication requires emotional connection to make an impact.

Bert wrote about this in You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard. People buy on emotion and justify with fact. You can’t connect with the mind – the New Brain (Cerebral Cortex) – without first getting past the gatekeeper – the First Brain (Brain Stem and Limbic System). The First Brain is the seat of emotion and emotional response. Data destined for the New Brain travels through the filter of the First Brain. The First Brain is where the human connection (likability, credibility and trust) is measured. Without getting past the First Brain, the information intended to reach the New Brain hits a brick wall. No matter what type of presentation you are giving, if you want to produce results, you need to be human.  You need to incorporate your emotions.  You need to connect with the hearts and minds of your audience.

Hans Rosling is a master at bridging the gap between data delivery and human connection. On his Presentation Zen blog, Garr Reynolds wrote an excellent post detailing how Hans does this. You need only watch a minute or two of Hans in action to understand why he’s so esteemed.

Hans takes data, statistics and trends (information that could easily be a “just presenting data/data dump” presentation) and engages the hearts and minds of his listeners, delivering the data right through the heart and into the mind. Through storytelling, humor and an uncanny ability to perceive and respond to the emotional pulse of his audience, Hans glides right through the First Brain and lands extensive amounts of statistical data into the New Brain, making a memorable impact.

It’s easy to get buried in data and compartmentalize communication into different categories – some requiring emotional connection; others not. But when we do this, we fail to recognize the significance of connecting with our listeners. This is when we need to step back and remind ourselves: Communication without emotion is just data dump. It’s disconnected; it doesn’t effect change; it doesn’t make an impact. The data has no value if it doesn’t reach its destination. Successful communication incorporates the whole self – heart and mind – to connect with others in a basic human way. The human connection is the communications experience – not the data.

Photo credits: Café psicologico

Speaking and Twitter dominance

The experience of South by South West (SXSW) in Austin is like the
Wild West – it's the frontier of Social Media converging with traditional conference,
dominated by Twitter. After experiencing it, I've modified my opinions since my last Twitter post here, and more will be coming on that (for a very good post on this subject today see Mark Ivey's blog.)

First, four important (read 'Rock Star') voices from SXSW on the question "Is Twitter distracting, additive or what?" I recorded our conversations spontaneously on my iPhone – here are highlights:

@Armano - (Listen to iPhone recording here)

• Good thing, not a bad thing
• Speaker can broadcast his/her message
• When I tweet in conference, use it as notes
• Tweeting causes disconnect but you store up info and come back to it

@GuyKawasaki – (iPhone recording here)

• Very good for speakers, can reach thousands through tweets
• I like big numbers!
• Tweeters disconnect – It's like taking notes
• Not too distracting for me as a speaker. But embarrassing when I'm speaking and someones sees a live tweet from one of my surrogates…

@Pistachio – (iPhone recording here)

• Tweeters can take over a conference – last SXSW
• Great as back channel, speakers can see what audience wants
• Opens up ways to broadcast our content world wide in seconds
• Tradeoffs – can distract speaker, be rude, discount audience
• Can connect with individuals in room and conference
• One more things for corporations to assimilate, change "laptops down" policy

@ChrisBrogan – (iPhone recording here)

• Important to be able to free flow and multi-task well
• Many conversations can take place at the same time, all can express themselves
• Note taking useful for in house audience
• Real audience is the thousands outside the conference room
• Twitter is like hamburger helper for the conversation – makes a little go a long way
• We'll learn to speak in 'twitter bites' (as Chris Brogan does!)

There's a unanimity of opinion by those who are in the Twitter elite of course, and I share their enthusiasm for the possibilities. But there's another side to the story in the traditional and more bureaucratic business world – which is perhaps 80% (or more) of the business population. They still think Twitter is the answer to the now irrelevant question, "What are you doing?" (The other day I asked the CEO of a billion dollar investment banking firm how he used Twitter and he said "What's Twitter?")

More to come on this important communication experience, and Twitter tips for the mainstream business population…

@BertDecker

Be Aware, and Beware!

There's been a lot of buzz – and new insight – into what to do about people twittering while you are speaking. Olivia Mitchell did an outstanding guest blog on Laura Fitton's Pistachio site, and the next day on Chris Spagnuolo's Edgehopper, wrapping up a busy week with her own summary post. All great food for thought – but let's not get carried away. The "back channel" will only be useful in a small number of communicating environments – at least for the next year or so. Here's why:

The great majority of Twitterers, and bloggers for that matter, are early adopters, and tech/social media savvy. They probably would be lost without their computers/PDA's/phones (I know I would.) However the majority of the business world uses the tools, but don't lose themselves in the process. And I'm afraid that the thrust of the current Twitter buzz advocating twittering during speeches will cause an expectation of good communication that will not be met – and will lead the majority of people (like most of our clients) down the wrong path.

Now there ARE great new possibilities, particularly with high tech audiences like at SXSW, and others. So there’s the good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s start with the ugly:

• Until there was Twitter, there was only ‘Blackberry Abuse,’ which we blogged on awhile back. Here it was rude for people to go to their Blackberrys (or PDA's/iPhones) during a meeting or speech to IM or check email – but they did it anyway. Because they were bored!
• The solution to Blackberry Abuse was to be INTERESTING as a speaker. Engage and excite your audience and they will be compelled to listen, and watch!
• That’s still the solution to the almost 90% of speaking situations where Twittering would not be appropriate (see below). But we're beginning to see an expectation that people SHOULD Twitter, it’s OK, it will be constructive, and it’s not really because they’re bored. But the majority of Twitterers WILL be twittering because they are bored, because the majority of speakers are unfortunately boring. And so now we have a valid excuse to put our heads down, get our minds on the tweet and not the message, and be rude to the unsuspecting speaker.
• Confusion will reign.

Now for the bad:

• In probably 80-90% of most business and conference settings speakers have a message to give – at keynote speeches and large company events – the large audience venues. It is not a groupthink or collaboration (see below for “the good.”)
• You can't read and listen effectively at the same time. This has been well documented by Edward Tufte and others, and I'll personally confirm that with my past 30 years experience in the communication and speaking business. It is cognitive dissonance in action.
• Think of the problem with PowerPoint presentations filled with text, (also well documented in this blog and Presentation Zen and others.) We’ve all had the sad but common experience of reading ahead, as the speaker says, “Now stay with me.” And of course we don’t, and since we can’t read and listen at the same time we have cognitive dissonance.
• And it’s even worse with Tweeting. If you think you can’t read and listen at the same time, it’s even worse to try to text and listen (and read) at the same time. If you have a group listening to a speaker (supposedly) and tweeting about the speaker’s 140 character sound bites (supposedly) and looking at the text and PowerPoints, and reading other Tweeter’s tweets, and looking up urls – chaos reigns in the mind. The speaker has lost control, and there is not only NOT better communication – it is far worse and more fragmented.
• In this large conference/event/speech setting where the speaker has a point-of-view and a message to deliver, the speaker is responsible for the experience. You can’t command “No Blackberrys. No Twitter!” – because people will do what they want to do. But there are other ways – the speaker cannot abdicate his or her responsibility. He or she should be should be interesting, engaging and powerful, using arresting stories, visuals and Black Slides!

A new perspective – the good that will come out of this:

• The growing dialogue and power of Twitter is opening up new ways to communicate, and we are just on the forefront. This is what this recent buzz is leading to, and take the time to read all of the ideas and comments in those blog links below – you’ll get some idea of where it is going.
• Workshops, social media sessions, Jelly!, BarCamps, et al are far different than the traditional more formal speeches mentioned above. Although they won’t replace them anytime soon, they are offering new collaborative possibilities, and it is these where Twitter and the ‘back channel’ will flourish. Likely ALL the sessions at SXSW 2009 Austin in two weeks will be Twitter enhanced, providing a high level laboratory – much should come out of that.
• On webinars and teleconferences there is much more potential for using Twitter, and this back channel becomes very useful where you don't have the speaker present, and need more visual engagement.
• The thousands of smaller meetings and business conferences going on everyday should be living laboratories for experimenting and trying out some of these new ideas of Twitter that have already shown promise.

See Olivia, Pistachio and Edgehopper for dozens of examples of the benefits of Twitter in today's growingly diverse communications experiences. But don’t lose sight of the fact that in most speeches today, Twittering during a speech won’t be of use – but abuse.

"If you’re going through hell, keep going."

He was an all star basketball player and athlete in high school, and got polio three weeks before the Salk vaccine became available. Dan told his story at the Million Dollar Round Table last week, driving on stage in a motorized cart. He told how for the first year he was depressed and helpless, but then he chose to like himself, and chose laughter over heartache. And slowly he came back from no mobility to the use of one arm and a bit of leg power

And the real inspiration came as he described his goals, and what he did to achieve them. He majored in PE, when they said it was impossible. Learned to fly a plane. Became a one armed golfer with a 13 handicap! (Now that is hard to comprehend – when I can’t get below a 16.) And when they said he couldn’t play the guitar because he couldn’t use one of his hands, he proved them wrong – and sang to 8,000 people at MDRT - to a standing ovation.

Dan and Judy Miller have raised three kids and have eight grandkids (here’s a glimpse), and have led a pretty normal life because they chose to. An award winning Principal in Washington State for two decades, he now speaks around the country, inspiring others. In the phrase of his mentor which he repeated many, many times: "Let’s see what you can do."

If you see and hear him, you’ll be motivated to do more. For that’s what a great motivational speaker does.

His message was clear, funny and worthwhile – and it will last:

"Pain is inevitable.

Suffering is optional.

Joy is a choice."