Kickoff your Company/Sales Kickoff with these Two Strategies for 2025

Football season has kicked off, but another kickoff is around the corner. It’s already time to be focusing on your sales kickoff (SK/SKO) or company kickoff in 2025! But is your focus where it should be: on the customer?

It’s Q4 for some of you and Q2 for others…and no matter what industry you are in, or which business unit, we all know that a new year is a new chance for growth across sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams.

One key to that growth, and one that should be baked into your sales kickoff is your customer’s mindset. What does that mean and what does that look like? 

Here are two suggestions (one you can do for this year and one that might be something you kickoff off in 2025):

1. Have a customer panel at your kickoff. Invite a variety of customers who worked with you in 2024 to understand their joys, frustrations, and ideas for how to work with your team better. It’s OK if they aren’t raving fans. Questions to ask this panel might include:

• What did they like about your product/experience? 

• What about your product/team needs improvement? 

• What are they most concerned about in 2025?

• What was their biggest win of 2024? 

This is not a customer advisory board. It is getting in the head of your customer’s needs and desires. Get pre-planned questions from your reps or let them actively engage with the panel live. Real engagement can yield real results.

2. Integrate your last year’s sales data with a win/loss analysis and customer insights. 

• Use your CRM data and any post-sale customer survey data that combines reasons for winning and losing, competitive analysis, and combine that with qualitative quotes (these can be anonymous) from review sites, interviews, and customer calls.

• Present these creatively, delivering key insights with suggestions for 2025 sales strategies, marketing and sales cohesion, and customer success goals. 

I promise that these will be the most powerful sessions at kickoff! 

And you know what? This can be applied to any industry or company type. Customer feedback means more engagement or ultimately more success. 

Need some help on facilitating interviews, surveys, programmatic setup, or analysis? Let’s chat!