SKO Day 2: Almost Done
Feb. 16th, 2023 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerIt's just before dinnertime on Day 2 of my company's sales kickoff (SKO) in Las Vegas. We're almost done. Almost in this case means that we still have the awards dinner. That starts in another few hours.
Am I expecting an award? Not this year. There was a big project I took a lead on this past summer that didn't work out as well as everybody hoped. Had it succeeded, big, I'd expect great recognition. Alas it only succeeded small. We won more business from the customer than we had previously. But the gain was a 50% gain rather than a 200% gain. In sales there's no A for effort. Update: what happened next surprised me!
On the whole this has been a reasonable SKO. I wrote a few blogs ago about how events like this are a marathon, not a sprint. This one actually hasn't been a marathon, more of... a 5k walk/run, if I can extend that metaphor. We've had 2 days of seminars. Often SKOs stretch to 3 or even 3.5. And each of our 2 days has had a reasonable amount of content. Too often leaders try to cram in session on everything, fudging the schedule to make it all fit, then run hours overtime each day. None of that here.
Arguably one of the event's strengths was its weakness.... Due to executive attrition, planning for this SKO wasn't even started until 10 weeks ago. For an organization this size that's desperately short. That forced leadership to be more conservative about how much content to jam in. They couldn't overfill the schedule because there wasn't time to organize the creation of that much content.
Am I expecting an award? Not this year. There was a big project I took a lead on this past summer that didn't work out as well as everybody hoped. Had it succeeded, big, I'd expect great recognition. Alas it only succeeded small. We won more business from the customer than we had previously. But the gain was a 50% gain rather than a 200% gain. In sales there's no A for effort. Update: what happened next surprised me!
On the whole this has been a reasonable SKO. I wrote a few blogs ago about how events like this are a marathon, not a sprint. This one actually hasn't been a marathon, more of... a 5k walk/run, if I can extend that metaphor. We've had 2 days of seminars. Often SKOs stretch to 3 or even 3.5. And each of our 2 days has had a reasonable amount of content. Too often leaders try to cram in session on everything, fudging the schedule to make it all fit, then run hours overtime each day. None of that here.
Arguably one of the event's strengths was its weakness.... Due to executive attrition, planning for this SKO wasn't even started until 10 weeks ago. For an organization this size that's desperately short. That forced leadership to be more conservative about how much content to jam in. They couldn't overfill the schedule because there wasn't time to organize the creation of that much content.
