Your sales summit is a disaster waiting to happen (but there’s still time to fix it)

There are many moving parts leading up to a sales summit and, let’s face it, most of them are other people doing their best to ruin it. There’s the senior sales leader who’s obsessed with a new book and wants to spend the entire budget on getting the author to speak. There’s the marketing team that is methodically laying out the world’s most trance-inducing slides for their product presentations that will be about as exciting as a melatonin. There’s the sales training team valiantly battling for any real-estate they can get their hands on, while knowing everything they plan will be cut by fifteen minutes when the awkward customer fireside panel goes over. Meanwhile, your painstakingly planned experiential group activity (the highly anticipated whisky tasting/fish scaling/build-a-bike for single dads event) is shaping up to be a drunken boondoggle no matter how you spin it. (Adding ‘whiskey’ was the only way you could ensure people would show up.)