How to use sales enablement and readiness tools for an effective SKO

When used regularly, sales enablement and readiness platforms increase your sales team’s skill, performance, and revenue. They also make a huge impact on the effectiveness of sales kickoff events, which are basically intensive, multi-day sales training sessions (with a bit of celebration thrown in).

Planning a successful SKO requires a lot of thought, effort, and seller engagement— and that’s where enablement comes in. There are sales enablement tools to enrich and streamline every stage of the SKO process for a highly effective event.

To help you plan your event and figure out which tools would be most useful to you, we’ve detailed six sales enablement and readiness tools with ways they can be applied for each SKO stage: Planning or pre-work, executing the event, and following through or post-work.

#1. Brainshark Presentations and Content Authoring

Brainshark (now part of Bigtincan) content authoring lets you quickly transform PowerPoints, Google Slides, PDFs, screen recordings, webpages and more into compelling, voice-enriched presentations. You can add attachments, embed hyperlinks, and include interactive polls, surveys and exam questions. It’s also easy to edit existing content to ensure your sellers always have access to the most up-to-date information.

Brainshark Presentations for SKO Planning and Pre-Work

With interactive polls, surveys, and tracking built-in to see who has viewed them, Brainshark presentations are the perfect delivery method for SKO-related information and pre-work for attendees, as well as an organized way to collect information from them, such as what they would like to learn and discuss at the event.

For our SKO event this year, we used Brainshark presentations to survey reps about their preferences and to send an expectation document beforehand to get everyone aligned on objectives.

Brainshark Presentations for Day-of SKO Activities and Execution

Brainshark presentations also come in handy the day of the event. They work offline (because everyone has experienced those conference centers with shoddy WiFi) and are a great vehicle for engaging, multimedia presentations that have slides, built-in audio, video clips, and more. If you use Brainshark for your presentation and want to incorporate more than simple slides with text and images, you can eliminate the need to click out of your presentation to show a short product video or customer testimonial.

Brainshark Presentations for SKO Follow Up and Post-Work

You should set objectives for your SKO, but keep in mind that following through on any training or upskilling objectives require post-work. You can follow in our example by using Brainshark presentations to send out post-SKO surveys and training videos on topics that reps had a lot of questions about such as cross-selling product suites or speaking knowledgeably about new products.

#2. Brainshark Coaching

With Brainshark Coaching you can initiate video and text-based coaching activities to measure, score and certify rep preparedness across your entire organization. Regular coaching sessions ensure sellers retain the information they learn during training and can demonstrate mastery of key messages. Coaching also enables you to foster peer learning and improve team-wide performance by capturing your team’s best examples and sharing them throughout the sales organization.

Brainshark Coaching for SKO Planning and Pre-Work

Brainshark Coaching lets you create Coaching challenges for your team. When planning Bigtincan’s SKO, we sent out a Coaching challenge to our attendees asking them to describe what the Bigtincan acquisition of Brainshark means to them. We compiled the team’s excellent responses into a video using Brainshark Content Authoring and used the video as an introduction to the sales kickoff event.

This was a great way to generate energy and build consensus around the objectives for the event, which were combining two sales teams and learning new products.

Brainshark Coaching with Advanced Feedback can also help presenters practice their presentations and get objective feedback from the AI. The AI evaluates the speech and tone of voice of the presenter and offers feedback, suggested next steps, a transcription, a word cloud, filler word count, and topic ratios. After running their presentation through the AI a couple times, presenters will nail their presentations and keep the energy of the room up (because SKO days can be long days).

Brainshark Coaching for SKO Follow Up and Post-Work

SKOs with objectives of teaching new products and upskilling reps in other areas of their performance should be followed up with Coaching challenges such as practice pitches. This kind of post-work is a reinforcement technique that ensures reps retain what they learned at the event.

#3. Conversation Intelligence

Bigtincan Conversation Intelligence, formerly known as VoiceVibes, is an AI-powered practice and coaching platform built by speech ​and linguistic experts that helps people sound more natural and polished when they speak, so they can transform how others perceive them. It can ​ accurately predict how you’re likely to be perceived by others, according to 20 “vibes.”

Conversation Intelligence for SKO Planning and Pre-Work

Conversation Intelligence (CI) picks up on positive vibes like clear, confident, and captivating, and negative vibes such as confusing, boring, and detached— which makes it another great option for a practice and pre-work tool for SKO presenters. They can run through their presentation and get instant, objective feedback on how the audience will perceive them the day of the sales kickoff.

Having internal company presenters practice their speeches and get feedback beforehand ensures they are actively working toward engaging the sellers and other teams in the audience so no one is drifting off or playing on their phones under the table.

Practicing with CI is also a great professional development tool that will have exponential, long-term returns for employees beyond the scope of the SKO (which is a win-win situation).

#4. Sales Scorecards

Sales CRM Scorecards offer cutting-edge visibility into sales team activities and performance by pulling in data from Salesforce and other sources.  Sales managers, leaders, and enablement teams can monitor team-wide learning and coaching trends and drill down to see how individual reps compare to the rest of the pack. You can also track activities across your teams to quickly see who’s learned the most, scored the best, finished the fastest or missed the mark. This gives visibility into which reps have the shortest stage to stage duration rate, fastest quota attainment, and more.

Scorecards for SKO Planning and Pre-Work

SKOs are the perfect time to celebrate and reward your reps. Sales and enablement leaders can use Sales CRM Scorecards to assess rep performance and give out awards based on top performers in certain categories.

Scorecards for Day-of SKO Activities and Execution

Reps respond to a little friendly competition when it’s done the right way. Display highlights from Scorecards day of to praise high performers or use in deal review case studies where there were notable achievements like quickest time to close, highest ACV, or shortest stage to stage duration.

Scorecards for SKO Follow Up and Post-Work

Scorecards make it easy to monitor and measure how the SKO affected reps’ knowledge and effectiveness following the event, which lets event planners know where they succeeded and where they can do better.

#5. Bigtincan Content Portal

Bigtincan lets you store and make all web content available to your revenue teams (or entire organization— up you!) in a central location.

That location can be Bigtincan itself, or an integrated content repository such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, or Sharepoint. The Content portal boosts the efficacy of any customer interaction by providing easy content collaboration tools that support over 150 file types. Marketers can design playbooks, pitch decks, and multimedia sales collateral and save them as templates, allowing users to quickly personalize content ahead of their next meeting.

It gives sellers quick access to content to help them better prepare for any sales situation, while chat and collaboration tools help marketing and sales stay connected on content in real-time.

Bigtincan Content for SKO Planning and Pre-Work

With Bigtincan, you can make videos, product documents, agendas, and other SKO-related assets for attendees to view available to everyone before, during, and following the event. You can see who’s opened and watched or read the materials in order to send out reminders to those who haven’t. Monitoring and responding to attendee engagement with the pre-work materials ensures everyone walks in the door with the same base level of knowledge.

Bigtincan Content for Day-of SKO Activities and Execution

In our case, having Bigtincan as a resource allowed us to react quickly and pivot according to events and conversations at the live SKO. In one case, we were able to upload an asset to the portal immediately following a conversation with a rep who was working to close a deal. During a conversation, an asset she didn’t have was brought to her attention and we were able to deliver it to her right away.

Bigtincan Content for SKO Follow Up and Post-Work

Using an enablement platform like Bigtincan increases the longevity of your SKO content and the benefits stemming from it. You can easily post any recordings or videos from the event to make sure those who couldn’t make it can stay in the loop, and those who did attend can review presentations of particular interest. You can also create FAQ documents and other learning resources to answer questions that came up during the event.

#6. Bigtincan Interactive AR/VR Content

With Bigtincan Interactive Content you can quickly create engaging experiences that combine videos, images, 3D models, slides, PDFs, and many more to showcase your products. Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities allow sellers to transport buyers into a virtual reality to show them what their environment could look like with your products or services. Using the AR (augmented reality) camera, you can add a product or a piece of furniture to a room in its real size, measure available space, arrange paintings on a wall, simulate the placement of machines, and more.

Bigtincan Interactive Experiences for Day-of SKO Activities and Execution

Bigtincan Interactive Experiences have a ton of unique uses, but one fun way we incorporate it into our own SKO each year is to make an augmented reality scavenger hunt. Using the product helps familiarize the sales team with some of the functionality— especially when it is brand new to them.

Ready to take your SKO to the next level? Get in touch.