The venue is reserved. The product team has its 40 slides. There are probably a few more about AI, the pipeline and the need to win more. And the inevitable MEDDPICC booster session.
What will your salespeople do differently when they return to customers?
If you own the SKO agenda and it is not final yet, start there.
Buyers still want sellers. They want fewer, better conversations.
Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers. 70% prefer a fully digital, self-service buying experience. Yet 69% prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep.
Buyers increasingly engage sellers on their own terms. Many arrive with an AI summary of your market, your competitors and your product, and ask whether it is right.
Picture that call. What does your rep say next? Has anyone practised it?
Salespeople do not need more process. They need situational fluency: the competence to help a buyer build confidence in their next decision.
Practice and coaching build that competence. A product presentation does not.
Maria Ionescu, Finance Director at mindit put it plainly:
"We had a nice-looking deck, but it didn't change anything. Sales didn't use it. It wasn't something they could actually take into a conversation."
Three questions to ask before you finalise your SKO agenda
1. What will sellers do differently?
Look at your agenda. How much time is allocated to what the company wants sellers to know? How much time is spent practising what they need to do?
The product roadmap matters. Give product their hour. Ask them what they want reps to do differently in 2027.
2. Which customer conversations will sellers practise?
What difficult situations will your salespeople meet in 2027?
How do you know?
If practice revolves around product features, battlecards and objection scripts, you may be preparing sellers for conversations your customers no longer want.
Build practice around real situations.
The buyer's CFO has asked for a cheaper option. The champion has left mid-deal.
Run that call until it sounds natural.
3. How will you know whether anything changed?
Thirty days after SKO, what evidence will show that customer conversations improved?
Event feedback and message recall will not tell you much.
Pull ten call recordings from February. Does the rep ask about the buyer's situation before showing the product? Does the buyer's own language appear in the proposal?
The week in the room is the easy part. The weeks before it decide whether it works.
In my experience, SKO preparation takes six to eight weeks. Customer interviews reveal what matters to buyers. Those insights shape realistic role-play scenarios, and customer availability determines how quickly we can prepare them.
At mindit, every customer-facing team spent a day and a half in a consultative selling and Whiteboard Storytelling workshop.
Maria described the difference:
"When our sales and delivery team started using the dialogue they learned in the whiteboard storytelling workshop, confidence grew, and the conversations moved forward faster."
During the following year, mindit's client base doubled.
For a kickoff in the last week of January, eight weeks back lands in early December. Christmas makes interviews and scheduling harder. An early-January event may leave too little time for a complete programme.
The venue is booked, and the budget is committed.
Use the room to change what happens in customer conversations.
If your 2027 SKO agenda is still taking shape, send me your draft.
In 30 minutes, we can identify which sessions give sellers something useful to practise and which are unlikely to change customer conversations.
Book a 30-minute agenda review
A successful kickoff fills a room. A worthwhile kickoff changes what happens when your people leave it.
Mark Gibson
Source: Gartner, Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights, 20 May 2026.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-20-gartner-survey-finds-sixty-nine-percent-of-b-two-b-buyers-turn-to-sales-reps-to-validate-ai-generated-insights