3 things I took away from LinkedIn’s Global Sales Kickoff

I used to organise sales kick-off events. Prior to joining LinkedIn’s sales team I worked on the client side in France, as a marketing co-ordinator – and one of the roles that this involved was firing up our sales teams for the year ahead. I organised events in Paris, Rome and London – but I can safely say that none of them had anything quite like the impact of the LinkedIn event in Las Vegas last week.

It wasn’t just the scale (4,300 people compared to the 60 or 70 that I organised my events for), and it wasn’t the showmanship (although the Late Night show spoof on the final night with our SVP Global Solutions Mike Gamson was very entertaining). What really stood out for me at LinkedIn’s Global Sales Kick-off was the importance this company places on linking what our sales teams do every day, to the mission and values of the company.

We walked out of Vegas feeling empowered to go out there and make a difference for people.

Mike and our CEO Jeff Weiner challenged us to “act like an owner”: putting ourselves in the shoes of our clients, taking ownership of their challenges, and doing so in all of our day-to-day dealings with them. They broke this down to three watchwords to keep testing ourselves with:

Owners are passionate, and we have to show the same passion an owner would have for their business. We need to show passion too for the difference we believe we can make to those businesses and those people.

Owners are accountable, and we need to take personal ownership for each client’s success. The accountability has to come from a fundamental belief in what we’re doing. From Marketing Solutions to Sales Solutions to new business lines like Elevate and LYNDA (LinkedIn’s online learning portal), one of the things that really stands out about LinkedIn people is their belief in the difference our products can make. The great benefit of an event like last week’s is that you get to see how strong that belief is across your fellow sales people. Another aspect to Accountability is the sense that your own performance matters. On a personal note, I was hugely honoured to receive an award for collaborative working at one of the breakout sessions for Marketing Solutions. It’s amazing how something like that makes you feel.

Owners are strategic, and we need to make sure that we see the bigger picture for our clients, beyond the particular sale we’re making. It’s another way of taking ownership for the client’s success and the part that LinkedIn should play in it. And it calls for each of us to invest in genuinely understanding what that business is trying to achieve. We’re able to do that all the more effectively, of course, when we are plugged in to all aspects of what LinkedIn has to offer. This is one of the great things about having a CEO, in Jeff Weiner, who’s also our head of product. The session where he talked us through what’s coming down the pipeline for LinkedIn was one of the most exciting and inspiring of the whole event.

For me, the culture behind those three takeaways is best summed up by another of the keynote speakers at the event: Gerald Chertavian, the CEO of Year Up, a company that helps young people from difficult backgrounds into the workforce. He was the first ever external guest speaker at a LinkedIn Sales Kick-off, and he said something that really resonated with me and my colleagues: “Talent is distributed evenly across the world but opportunity is not, and that’s what we aim to change.” It’s a great summary of what LinkedIn is on this earth to help achieve. All of us at Vegas last week will have left fired up to be a part of it.