Call Your Shot is a sixty minute sales kickoff session in which the whole room bets on masked deals drawn from the company’s own recent history. Everyone plays from their phone, tables compete, and a winning table takes a trophy. Leadership leaves with a written read on how the room reads deals.
Everyone commits a position privately, from their phone, before anyone argues. Then the room finds out what actually happened.
Tables are real teams, sellers and engineers together. Everybody plays. No volunteers on stage, no spectators, no game show.
Drawn from your own recent history, with real losses mixed in. Nobody knows which until the reveal. The deal on the screen is built from your product, your buyers and the ways your deals actually die, so the room is playing its own pipeline without knowing it.
They learn by being wrong, in public, with something at stake, and then being shown exactly where the evidence was. A game does in an hour what a forecast call never does. It makes optimism visible, gives it a price, and rewards the people who saw the truth early.
Because everyone is betting rather than listening, nobody is defending a position. You cannot argue with your own lost bet. Tables end up collaborating to win, sellers and engineers on the same side, arguing about evidence.
Round tables, a phone per person, and a seating list. Nothing to print and nothing to pre read. Forty people or five hundred, same session, same energy. A winner in the room.
Best placed on day two, or straight after the main keynote. The slot where the agenda normally sags.
The deals are assembled before the event with someone on your side who knows the history. Wins and losses both, with enough of each that the room cannot guess by pattern. Names, logos and anything identifying come out. What stays is the shape of the deal: the buyer, the evaluation, the signals as they appeared at the time.
That preparation is what separates this from a generic exercise. A room will politely play along with somebody else’s case study. A room sits forward when it recognises the situation, argues about it, and then discovers it was arguing about a deal three of them worked.
The room is playing its own pipeline without knowing which deal is which, so nobody can defend a position they already hold.
By the second afternoon a kickoff audience has absorbed roadmaps, comp plan changes, a keynote and a run of breakouts. Attention is gone and politeness has taken over. That is not a content failure, and a better deck does not reach it.
What changes the room at that point is having something to do, with a result, in front of their peers. Tables compete. A position costs something once it is committed. People who have not spoken all day start arguing about evidence with the engineer sitting next to them, which is the behaviour the whole agenda was trying to produce in the first place.
Yes, and it works with forty. Everyone plays from their own phone, so the session does not depend on volunteers or on anyone being willing to speak in front of a large room. The energy comes from tables, and tables scale.
No. There is a winning table and a trophy, which is what makes people take their positions seriously. Nobody is brought on stage, nobody is put in a sketch, and nothing is played for laughs at an individual’s expense.
Deals are masked and anonymised before the session, and losses are mixed with wins so no single case stands out. The room is judging evidence, never a colleague, and the person who worked the deal is usually the one most interested in how the room reads it.
One working session beforehand to select and mask the cases, round tables, a phone per person and a seating list. Nothing to print and nothing for attendees to read in advance.
Between forty and sixty percent of qualified B2B deals are lost to no decision rather than to a competitor. Source: The JOLT Effect, 2022, based on an analysis of 2.5 million recorded sales calls.
If that is where the pipeline goes, then the skill worth an hour of a kickoff is reading which deals are real while there is still time to act. That is a judgment, and judgment does not improve by being described from a stage. It improves by being tested and scored, which is the whole of what happens in this session.
Call Your Shot is a sixty minute sales kickoff session in which the whole room bets on masked deals drawn from the company’s own recent history. Everyone commits a position privately from their phone, tables compete, and leadership leaves with a written read on how the room reads deals.
Forty to five hundred, with the same session and the same format. Everyone plays from their own phone rather than from the stage, so it does not depend on volunteers or on people being willing to speak in a large room.
Yes. Cases are built in advance from your own recent history, wins and losses both, then masked and anonymised so nobody can tell which is which until the reveal. The room ends up playing its own pipeline without knowing it.
Day two, or straight after the main keynote. That is the slot where attention normally drops and politeness takes over, and it is the point in a kickoff where a session the room has to play beats a session it can watch.
Presenters are chosen eight to twelve weeks out. For a January event that is now through mid November.