Is There Meaning In Your Last Year’s Top Tens?

So this week is the first week back for most of us. Many sales clocks are reset to zero. For the majority of companies, it appears their financial year is also the calendar year.

Over the next couple of weeks the much vaunted sales kick-off meetings take place.

I’ve attended scores over the years. Performed slots aplenty. So with this in mind, I thought I’d post a trio of blogs along a theme of an idea for a session. Hopefully you could easily adopt or adapt if you are required to run something yourself.

I’ll start with one that allows you to progress from the previous year.

Pretty much every start-of-year event features a review of what’s just past.

Yet the presentation of it is often fairly flat. Numbers, logos of big clients, company milestones. They can look and sound like pages from the Annual Report. Drab, dull, lifeless.

Why not let your best achievements sparkle a little?

Most of your audience will know about the headlines. So why not drill down?

Everyone loves a year-end chart. Time magazine for instance has a webpage with around sixty of their favourites. From all sorts of weird and wonderful sources.

Rather than blandly listing the largest deals, how about pick the top ten you’d like to see built on this year? Or those that are most aligned to where you need to be throughout 2014? Remind salespeople where ambitions lie for the coming twelve months.

There’s also a way of praising ideal or encouraging performers in public. A list of best sales lines, deal innovations or customer feedback. Favourite competitor displacement, meatiest account growth or shortest deal cycles can also trigger expectations neatly.

One of the CNN news channel year reviews even revelled in the fact that their offices are next to what an English website decreed to be the world’s best roundabout of 2013. I kid you not. New York’s midtown Columbus Circle. If you can’t find inspiration somewhere in there, well…?!

nb – this post on Top Tens is part of a trio of kick-off conference ideas, along with Predictions & Resolutions.