Selling changed. Did your kickoff?
Something has been breaking in sales for years. Alexander Group's 2024 sales compensation study found that only 49% of core sellers hit or exceeded quota in 2023, across nine industries. In software sales specifically, where the erosion tends to be sharpest, several long-running benchmarks, compiled across Salesforce, Bridge Group, RepVue, and Pavilion Revenue Collective, put median account executive quota attainment at roughly 52%, essentially a coin flip.
But here's the kicker: in that same Alexander Group study, the average seller still reached 89% of target.
Those two numbers only square one way. If a meaningful share of sellers were falling far short of target, the average would sit well below 89%. It doesn't, which means the misses across that other 51% are mostly narrow, not collapses.
49% of core sellers hit or exceeded quota in 2023, across nine industries
89% average percent of target still reached by the average seller in that same study
52% median attainment in software sales specifically, an even sharper version of the same trend
Across industries and benchmarks, attainment has been drifting down, but this isn't a story about a handful of great sellers carrying the number while everyone else is falling dramatically behind. The typical seller is getting close to quota.
Sellers aren't suddenly incapable of selling. The context around selling has changed.
Buyers still need sellers, they just need them differently
1. Sellers aren't guiding a single buyer anymore
Complex sales now involve 6 to 10 stakeholders, and the biggest enterprise purchases can involve well into the double digits. About 77% of buyers describe their last purchase as complex or difficult, a dynamic that shows up anywhere a purchase has real consideration behind it, not only in enterprise software. The seller's job is increasingly to help a group reach a decision, not simply help one person make one.
2. The seller's information advantage is shrinking
Buyers now use about 10 interaction channels during a purchase, roughly twice as many as in 2016. AI is accelerating that shift, giving buyers more ways to research, compare, and pressure-test options before they ever engage a seller. The value of simply knowing more than the buyer is disappearing.
3. Buyers can avoid seller friction for longer
A recent B2B buyer behavior study found that about two-thirds of buyers would rather not engage a salesperson until later in their process. Separately, Gartner found a smaller but still meaningful share, about a third of buyers overall and 44% of millennial buyers, who want no sales contact at all. The same pattern shows up anywhere a purchase has real consideration behind it, from enterprise software to a major purchase a family researches for weeks before ever talking to a salesperson. It's easier than ever to research a category, build a shortlist, and develop a point of view without talking to sales. That means sellers have to earn their way into the conversation by adding value, not just showing up.
4. Sellers are becoming sense-makers
Buyers aren't necessarily struggling to find information.They're struggling to determine what to trust, what matters, and what to do with it. In fact, 69% say they turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights.
How this changes the kickoff
All of this has big implications for the one moment each year when we bring the entire commercial organization together to prepare for the year ahead: the kickoff.
Put those four shifts together and the implication is direct. If sellers now have to facilitate a group decision instead of a single conversation, earn their way in with value instead of information, and help buyers make sense of what they've already found on their own, then two days of strategy decks, product updates, and a motivational keynote will not build any of those muscles. Most kickoffs are still designed for a seller with an information advantage. Very few are designed for a seller who must do all four of the things above.
The good news? You don't need to scrap the kickoff, you just need to redesign it.
That's work we do with clients all the time, across sales kickoffs and other high-stakes moments where strategy needs to become action.
And, in the spirit of not gatekeeping the good stuff, here's what a kickoff designed to change behavior needs to get right at each stage: before it happens, during the event itself, and in the months after everyone goes home.
Before
Start with the change, not the agenda
This is where many sales kickoffs go wrong. They start with the event: strategy update, product roadmap, messaging, breakouts, keynote. The agenda becomes the organizing principle.
Flip it. Start with the behavior you need to change, then design the kickoff around it.
That means thinking beyond the room itself: what needs to happen before people arrive, what they need to experience and practice during the event, and what needs to happen after they get back to work.
THE TEST
Can you name one behavior this kickoff needs to change, in a single sentence, before a single agenda item gets picked?
Find the real constraint
Most revenue leaders have a hypothesis about what's holding their teams back. Few have enough data to know.
We ran a readiness diagnostic, what we call a Commercial Velocity Diagnostic, for a financial services client preparing for an AI leadership event. The leadership team came in expecting the biggest barrier to be skepticism: would sellers believe AI could help them sell differently?
They were wrong.
Sellers and leaders already believed in the value of AI. The real gap was much more practical: confidence and ability. People understood the promise but weren't yet sure how to use it in their day-to-day work or bring it into a client conversation.
That changed the intervention completely. Instead of spending the event convincing people that AI mattered, we could spend the time helping them use it.
SO WHAT?
That's what a good diagnostic buys you: permission to change the plan.
A useful diagnostic doesn't need to be complicated. The version we typically run takes 15 to 20 minutes per person and, when deployed across the full population, gives leaders a ranked view of the constraints by region, function, or level, assessing everything from strategy clarity to manager effectiveness to whether the right tools are actually being used in the field.
It also gives you a baseline for the behavior you're trying to change. Without a clear starting point, there's no way to know whether the kickoff moved the needle.
Get leaders ready before the room
Leader preparation shouldn't be a briefing the night before.If leaders aren't aligned on the change, the room won't be either.
Before the wider team arrives, leaders need to understand the data, the capability gap, and, most importantly, what they need to do differently to close it.
The strongest version we've run gives leaders a dedicated session ahead of the main event. They arrive aligned on what needs to change, why it matters, and how they'll reinforce it with their teams.
THE TEST
Can every leader explain what their team needs to change, how the kickoff will help, and what they'll do differently afterward? If not, you're asking the organization to change before its leaders are ready to lead the change.
During
Get people working, not watching
Most events fail for an unglamorous reason: people sit and watch.
If you want behavior change, the room needs to feel more like the work and less like a conference.
A simple experiential architecture works:
Start with the real work. Put people into a live or simulated situation before explaining the framework.
- Let them see the gap. Pause and reflect before introducing the solution. Let the insight come from the room.
- Give them something to try. Introduce the model, tool, or methodology when people have a reason to use it.
- Practice before they leave. Don't assume understanding will translate into behavior. Let people try the new behavior while they're still in the room.
Skip the practice and you have awareness. Practice it and you have a shot at behavior change.
This isn't a small-scale idea. One global technology company runs its entire annual kickoff this way: every year, tens of thousands of sellers work through a live simulation of the coming fiscal year's go-to-market strategy before it becomes real, built with BTS. Reps are inside the situation before anyone explains the framework, they see where their own instincts fail, and they practice the year's strategy before the year starts for real. The client's own enablement leadership has pointed to an unexpected side effect: running kickoff as a shared simulation built genuine community across a large, remote, global workforce, not just skill.
Put your leaders to work too
Leaders should facilitate, participate, join teams at the tables, and model the behaviors they're asking others to adopt.
If executives are on stage for 20 minutes and gone by lunch, you've designed a broadcast.
People notice the gap between what leaders say matters and what they spend their time doing.
THE TEST
Did leaders do the same work they're asking their teams to do?
After
Build reinforcement into the work
This is where a lot of the investment quietly disappears.
Managers today are carrying more people and more work than ever before. Gallup reports that the average number of direct reports per manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Yet managers remain one of the biggest variables in whether new behaviors stick: Gallup estimates they account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement.
So don't give managers another program to administer.
Make the first 90 days part of the design:
- Weeks 1–2: Translate the kickoff into 90-day commitments with clear owners and dates. Give leaders an executive synthesis they can use with their teams.
- Days 30–60: Bring managers together in peer groups of 6 to 8 to compare what's working. Give them simple guides they can use in one-on-ones and pipeline reviews.
- Day 90 and beyond: Connect the new behaviors to business-led check-ins and actual performance.
This isn't a theoretical sequence. In one engagement, we ran a 12-week, AI-embedded capability journey alongside a live product launch, reaching more than 100 commercial team members across 6 languages.
The results?
45% improvement in year-one launch revenue attainment vs. the prior launch cohort
63% increase in assessed manager coaching capability
SO WHAT?
That second number is worth pausing on. It measures exactly what this section argues for: managers coaching the new behavior, not just attending a workshop about it.
Make leaders accountable for what happens next
Leaders set the expectation, managers coach it, executives model it, and the organization measures it.
No platform substitutes for a manager asking about the behavior in a one-on-one.
THE TEST
90 days out, can a participant remember the last time their manager asked about the behavior? If they can't, the kickoff probably didn't stick.
The opportunity is bigger
The best kickoffs don't just get everyone aligned on the year ahead. They create a shared understanding of what selling requires now, give people a chance to practice it, and make it easier to carry that behavior back into the work.
If you remember nothing else from this piece, take this question into the planning process for your next event:
When your sellers walk back into the field on Monday, what will they be able to do that they couldn't do before?
If you have a good answer, you're probably on the right track.
Ready to redesign your next kickoff?
Let's talk about what your sellers need to walk back into the field able to do differently.
Get in touch with BTS
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