Welcome to 2022! Many of us believe that a great way to get the right start in a new year is to make some New Year’s resolutions. As I made mine this year, I started thinking about how important resolutions are not just in our personal life, but also in our business life. And that’s particularly true if you want to use an ecosystem to help you achieve your growth goals.
We generally make these resolutions to achieve a goal that we procrastinated on or did not achieve for some reason the previous year. We believe the new year offers us a fresh start on that goal. That thought caused me to do a little research about the success of such resolutions. After all, if we are going to make some resolutions for our ecosystem together we want to make sure they work right?
Well, according to a recent report, the news is not all good about resolutions. In fact, 88% of people who made a resolution failed, and that’s not even the worst of it. The scary statistic is that only 42% thought they could achieve the goal when they set it. In other words, they set themselves up to fail at the start.
Why do resolutions fail? Thirty-five percent of participants admitted they had unrealistic goals; 33% did not keep track of their progress; and 23% forgot about them. Also, about one in 10 respondents claimed they made too many resolutions.
Start with an End Goal
So, we have to challenge ourselves this year. If we are to make ecosystem resolutions that work, they will need to be realistic, trackable, important enough to stay on our work list, and limited in number. With those guardrails, let’s get started on setting some resolutions.
All good resolutions start with an end goal: What is your goal for your ecosystem this year? Try not to answer with a simple revenue or cost goal. Instead, think about your business and what will accelerate your overall performance. Then think about how partners could help with that goal, by shortening timelines, improving success ratios, adding competencies, or saving costs. If you are a partner reading this, think about your customers’ businesses and what would help them to accelerate their business this year. Write that goal down.
Now it’s time for the resolution crafting. Let’s say your goal is to improve the time to market for your new mobile edge compute customer service strategy. At a high level, you would utilize an ecosystem to improve your delivery timeline for mobile apps, mobile devices for your field staff, security, data analytics, IOT asset tracking, testing in the field, and customer feedback collection. So, just what would your resolution be? You might be thinking your resolution would be “find a partner who….”
But stop—that’s not the answer! The right answer is to ask yourself a different question: If this strategy of utilizing a partner is to be successful for our business this year, what would have to be true in our business to make partnering work? Some answers might include: internal processes, channel neutrality in your company, better data, or even better talent to help manage partners’ work products.
Remember: Make It Realistic and Trackable
Now you are ready for your resolution. It might sound like “be a better partner by ensuring we have data available for our partners use” or “conduct proof concepts with multiple partners to determine who is a good cultural fit for our organization.” Remember, make it realistic, trackable, important enough to stay on our work list, and limited in number.
Need help getting there? Listen to my upcoming podcast to help you ask the right questions to get to your partnering strategy for 2022! Have questions? Leave them here for me and I will be happy to answer them.
