Give yourself the gift of business success
Tags: Sales Strategy, Insights, Business Strategy, Business Intelligence

Many of us use this time to look over the past year and plan forward. At ThunderAct, we did a similar process from a business standpoint, and here are a few gifts we decided to give ourselves. We hope some, if not all of these areas of focus are already part of your planning. But if they’re not, it’s not too late to add them.

So, as you finish holiday shopping and wrapping up the end of the year, don’t forget about the gifts you should give to yourself and your team for a prosperous 2021.

Better collaboration

Collaboration is a critical component of a fruitful business. Without collaboration, there’s a higher chance of misaligned objections, frustrations, and false assumptions. When organizations work in silos, they’re at a disadvantage. Silos foster mistrust, miscommunication, or limits communication. Silos only give us part of the picture, leaving leaders to make decisions with insufficient data.

An increase in team collaboration will decrease silos. Once you start collaborating with others, you could discover an entire world of new information and insights that otherwise would be missed. Working as one big team, instead of several different departments focusing only on their own goals, will strengthen relationships and bring new insights from the diversity of knowledge and opinions. Team members can learn from each others’ experiences and failures, and work more effectively.

Visibility into your data

As you increase team collaboration, you should move towards increasing data collaboration. This will give greater visibility to customers, product features, and other factors that impact organization growth. Find ‘gold in hidden data’ with a read from our last blog here.

Better customer awareness

One of our team members once heard of a company that hand wrote, “paid by your customers” onto each of their employees’ paycheck. The effect of this on the organization was massive. Every employee, from the receptionist, developers, support engineers, and executives were reminded: it is the customers that make it possible for everyone to bring home a paycheck.

When it comes to day to day operations, it’s common to just review the data and information available to you. But what if critical data about customers are hiding in other department databases? The ability to renew a contract with a customer relies heavily on their continuous satisfaction from support. And of course, the ability to execute faster business relies heavily on the billing and operations team to execute contracting and orders. Customer data live in multiple places and by centralizing it, it will increase everyone’s customer awareness. Knowing what customers need, not just from one team, but from multiple teams is powerful.

Identify the important things to focus on

We are exposed to an abundance of information from various channels on a continuous basis. It’s now become harder to distinguish between what’s important and what isn’t. When it comes to the business arena it is even more critical to optimize your time.

Block out potential distractions and give yourself the gift of focusing on what can have a big impact on delivering business success. You can create a list of parameters that will help guide your focus or use a platform such as ThunderAct, which provides you with insights on what’s needed to receive the highest ROI or the highest impact from your actions.

A new way to measure your success

In the business world, we measure so many tactical things: servers availability, customer satisfaction, number of hosted event attendees and the list goes on. But what about the more strategic ones? Do you measure the wide impact a feature development has made, how it impacted the competition, or how customers’ perception has changed? Most importantly, how have this impacted Sales?

For the new year, give yourself the gift of new ways to measure your business success. A fun exercise (which you can work with your team on) is to explore the areas most intuitively would think aren’t impacted by current strategic decisions. Then brainstorm how these things might have an indirect effect on the organization, for better or worse.

Celebrate success

We often get caught up in moving forward and achieving the next milestone we forget to celebrate the smaller achievements. Your inbox has zero unread emails, woohoo! Your team closed a big deal, hurrah! A new partnership signed, way to go! We had a successful meeting with an internal department and now we can start a new chapter of collaboration. Take out the champagne to celebrate, (only after office hours, of course)!

Taking the time to celebrate any success is good for the mind and body. Small wins build momentum, so each accomplishment builds on another. And don’t forget to include those who have supported and assisted in your success.

When heading out for New Year’s celebrations and taking the much needed break (after this crazy year), think of the gifts you should give yourself to be able to start 2021 in the best way imaginable!

From all of us at team ThunderAct we wish you happy holidays and keep safe and healthy. See you next year!