Episode 110: Jamin Fochtman on How to Host an Engaging Sales Kickoff in 2020 Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs.

Today, I’m excited to have Jamin from Addepar join us. Jamin, I would love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Jamin Fochtman: Sure. Thanks for having me on today Shawnna. I’m happy to be here. As you mentioned, I’m Jamin Fochtman with Addepar. I am the head of our sales enablement team and we specialize in performance of reporting and analytics for folks who manage money. So, happy to join and share some insights as to what we’ve been doing this year.

SS: Absolutely. I’m very excited because you and I were just chatting, and you recently executed your sales kickoff. And I think right now that is top of mind for sales enablement professionals across the board. So, I’d love to hear from you, how was your event structured and delivered this year in particular?

JF: Yeah and this year, obviously it was a little bit different, but for us, as we really thought about getting the team together, it was critical not just to sort of tackle the standard things that we do at a kickoff in a normal year. For us, I also put a really high level of emphasis in terms of team engagement and making sure that people really embraced the days together rather than just dialing into another zoom. So that was really important for us.

Ours was structured over two days where we dove into key wins, key losses, took some time on new product development, as well as marketing initiatives. But I will say this year, we put a little bit more emphasis on taking time to celebrate the wins across all of the different teams. And that came out of kind of soul searching, where we were looking back and noticing folks didn’t necessarily know what other teams were doing when it came to our AEs BDRs, AM’s all working really hard but not necessarily knowing what each team was doing and the big wins that they were having. So, we did, we spent nearly 50% of our time really digging in and celebrating key wins and how those wins were achieved.

SS: I love that. And I think you’re absolutely right in this more remote environment it’s very hard to stay connected in that manner. So, I think that’s absolutely critical to accomplish during SKO this year. So, tell us a little bit about what this new planning process looks like.

JF: It was fast. So, we kind of took a step back and I actually did, it was really helpful for me to do a dry run with just a 45-minute team meeting. So, I wanted to kind of feel out. So, very important to highlight we used zoom for our sales kickoff, and I just wanted to test out a few different workflows. Whether it was going into breakout rooms, did people stay engaged? Did they not? Doing shorter sessions, did people feel more comfortable, really focusing? So that was critical for my planning phase was doing just a dry run in terms of using the functionality and see how the team responded to that functionality. The other piece, I guess it felt very new normal when it came to planning our sales kickoff in that I was still meeting with key stakeholders. We were going through presentations, making sure that all the material was on point. So, I’ll be really honest Shawnna, my planning felt very similar to any other year.

SS: Well, that’s good to hear. And I think for those in the audience, maybe if this is, you know, per se, their first sales kickoff that they’ve ever had to do, I’d love for you to give them some insight into who all is typically involved in the planning and execution of a sales kickoff. What other departments, and you mentioned stakeholders, are you partnering with to ensure that it’s successful?

JF: For us, our sales organization is made up of sales executives, sales engin