Why Your Reps Leave SKOs No Better Equipped to Sell with John McMahon and John Kaplan

If you're putting together an SKO and you do not have a point of view on how AI is going to help the sellers do something better, be more productive, make more money, help understand customers better, you're not demonstrating it, you're not practicing it, you're in trouble.

Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.

Johnny Mac. How are you? I'm good, Cap. What about you? I'm doing pretty good, man. I'm doing pretty good. Can you believe we're going to have this conversation again, which means at least half the year is over. Have you been having a good year, bro? Good year, buddy. Good year. It went fast, dude.

It's not over yet.

No, no, but it really does seem to be going fast. So look, we decided we want to talk about just for planning purposes around August, September, every year, we talk about the concept of, you know, getting your organization together in some type of sales kickoff mode. Right. Let's talk about some of the basics, Johnny, like what you would expect to, you know, What are some of the best things when you think about an SKL? What are some of the best things that you should be thinking about? And where are some potential pitfalls, some areas? For me, like

most SKOs that I've attended when I'm not running it myself, it's like too much... inspiration and not enough execution. The agenda is loaded with the CEO talk and how we did last year. And they'll throw a motivational speaker in there that has nothing to do with selling. They have new product announcements and then they have all the awards. So the reps can leave energized because there's a lot of inspiration. but they're no better equipped to go out and win another deal, right? So I think like a strong SKO, you should be answering the question of, what do I as a rep need to do different on Monday? And if you're not answering that question, based upon everything that you see in your sales force, where reps are getting stalled in deals, like where are the two to three areas, you know your reps get stalled in deals, Your SKO should mainly be about that, right? I don't care. about having every C-level person get up on the stage and tell me about themselves and tell me about their org chart. Quite frankly, I don't give a shit about your org chart if I'm a rep. All I care about is what are you going to do to help me sell more? How are you going to train me so I can more effectively do my job? And if you're just talking about you and how great your organization is, but you're not telling me about how to compete more effectively, I don't give a shit. I don't care.

Yeah, I think you're bringing up, I think the basic premise of your message is, if you don't think about this SKO in terms of the audience, and what do you want the audience to experience? What do you want them to take away? If you don't start there, which