The Joys of SKO…Part 1

It’s that time of year again. Sales Kickoff, a.k.a. SKO. For those that don’t live in a sales/technical sales world, at the beginning of every fiscal year, every company has a sales kickoff where the entire sales and sales engineering teams get together for multiple days and live in conference rooms. The purpose is to get updates on product roadmaps, get the teams together to build comradery (thank goodness for spell check) . More on that in a later post…

If your company follows a calendar year fiscal year, then your SKO is likely in January or February. Which means fun times at the airport hoping your flights don’t get delayed/cancelled due to weather.

Once you get there your time is spent:

• Sitting in sessions with hundreds of others while giving dirty looks to anyone who coughs repeatedly and thinking, “WHY THE HECK ARE YOU HERE???”
• Shaking hands with folks… a lot of times right after they cough
• Rubbing hand sanitizer on your hands after every handshake.
• Eating mass-produced conference food that sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. I remember one year, the conference venue served Mexican food for dinner one night and then the I swear the leftover beans were used for the next morning’s breakfast. Let’s just say a lot of SE’s weren’t feeling so good after breakfast that day😊
• Praying/hoping that someone you avoid getting sick

Don’t get me wrong, there are good aspects of SKO, mainly seeing my good friends, many of which I haven’t seen since last year’s SKO… I just feel like there’s an economic opportunity for the likes of Purell, Emergen-C and Imodium to sponsor SKO, putting their products out there to help support the health of the global SE community.