How We ‘Virtualize’​ Our Sales Kick Off 2021

In mid January 2021, we at Marketing & Business Intelligence team in Telin, conducted our first virtual Sales Kick Off, SKO 2021. Our sales kick off event is usually held in January and designed to bring the Commercial team together, celebrate our last year’s success, share a new strategy for this year, and also educate in product, marketing or sales subjects.

As we held annually, this event has an ambience of professional, inspirational but also fun and entertaining. The event is traditionally an in-person one, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, we held the SKO 2021 in virtual online format.

The goal is to engage all participants from the Commercial team worldwide while generating energy and enthusiasm for the sales year ahead. This year SKO has theme : Together We Grow, and we implement ‘start-up’ ambience to emphasize our focus program this year in developing new digital products.

As this is our first virtual SKO, we anticipated some constraints, such as:

• No strong connection with the event itself
• Networking and interaction seem limited
• Lack of real physical events see-feel-touch ambience
• Attendees will have a short attention span for online event
• Technical problems

So what we do? Lucky for us, we are in the digital era that provides technological solutions to continue our activities in this situation. We considered technology elements down to the smallest of details and ensure they can integrate between platforms.

Then we develop the virtual SKO 2021 concept by these steps:

• Build excitement towards the virtual SKO 2021 through sending goodie bags to each home address and ask all Commercial team worldwide to prepare the creative video performance that will be contested during SKO.

• Optimize the use of technology to make this event interactive by using a virtual platform at sko.telin.net. This platform is designed to have an event lobby, that can simulate an event floor’s look and feel, with interactive product booths, virtual room and various parts of the event.

• Arrange motivation and education session with shorter presentation, from product and market update, external speakers, and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) fire briefing. This session is include interactive games, and interactive visual especially for keynote presentation. The shorter time and all interactive parts are our efforts to keep all participants still engage during this event while keep delivering all important messages to all team.

• Bring celebration as the momentum of appreciation, motivation, encouragement, and entertainment to light up the energy to strike 2021 target and goals, through creative video contest, awarding, virtual team bonding, and live band (also virtual!). A boring event can never bring engagement.

Hope with all these approaches and experiences, this year’s sales kick off brings our Commercial team feeling educated, inspired, and ready to conquer the new year.

Together, We Grow!