06 Jan

New Year’s Resolutions for 2011

Happy New Year to all of you!  Hope everyone enjoyed a wonderful holiday season.

It’s always hard coming back after the short but action-packed few days of festivity and joyous celebration. Maybe that’s the reason why many of us try to find our focus by making New Year resolutions. Of course, we know that these are the most commonly broken set of promises we make to ourselves!

I was reading a comic strip in a local newspaper recently where a teenager asks his Dad if he had made a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2011. The man replies “Yes” and points to a dusty diary. The son picks it up and observes it is from 2004. “Yeah, I know; it’s a work in progress”, says his father sheepishly.

So anyway, while I had a good laugh, I would not completely criticize a “work in progress” list of resolutions. We don’t always need new ones, simply because we don’t usually achieve everything we had planned for in a year!

In this blog post, I thought it may be an interesting idea to come up with a Demand Generation parallel of personal resolutions. I’ve picked what seem to be the most common ones people make every year, including in 2011.

Top 5 Personal New Year’s Resolutions in 2011	Top 5 Demand Generation Resolutions in 2011
Lose weight and keep it simple.	Trim organizational fat and simplify process. This requires being more efficient with available resources. Just like simple living and a healthy diet is the best way to lose weight and keep it off, simplifying work processes versus adding complexity can yield better results in your lead generation and demand generation efforts. The New Year is a good time to review technology and analyze whether it is helping or impeding growth. Learn from mistakes of the past and ensure that it is your process that is driving your go-to-market strategy, not technology.
Stop smoking	Stop spike marketing. Just like smoking, spike marketing is injurious to the health of your organization and can potentially prove fatal. Rather than indulge in bad habits like this, you should try to replace one-off demand generation programs with consistent strategies that deliver measurable results.
Be more successful	Build on successes. It makes perfect sense to replicate what has worked before (if circumstances and influences have not changed drastically). Start creating organizational history in your lead generation processes. Build on past success. Have clearly defined objectives. Get to know your sales team better and enlist their efforts in quality lead nurturing.
De-clutter my life	Get more organized with your leads database. 2011 is as good a time as any to get a handle on your internal leads database or prospect list. Start cleaning up to sift the grain from the chaff. Run a good hygiene and maintenance program to continuously and regularly update your database. Most importantly, make sure you have the ability to access and analyze data easily when you need it. Have good reporting structures in place.
Spend more quality time with family and friends	Know who your friends are. Recognize your allies, know their plans, be close to them and be there for them when they need you. In a nutshell, or to put this in demand generation perspective, undertake an Account Mapping and Account Intelligence exercise in 2011.

Wishing you great success and fulfillment in 2011 and beyond!