Blogs
Brent Kasper, Head of Sales
If it sounds simple, that’s because it is.
All of us can be guilty of desiring different outcomes and failing to put in the work or changing our lifestyle to achieve those outcomes. We do it with our fitness goals, relationship goals, work-life balance goals.
Businesses are just as guilty of falling into this same trap.
Does this sound familiar to you: Your organization sets a goal at the beginning of the fiscal year “We are going to deliver a new set of playbooks to drive net retention revenue up 20%” and we spin up meetings and get everyone excited about this new target and everyone goes to work and starts hustling to achieve that target – yet at the end of the quarter our growth rate has remained the same.
Why does this happen?
Unfortunately, we don’t get in better shape simply by setting a goal and saying we’ll be 15 pounds lighter at the end of the year. Goal setting is the first part and following through on that plan is the second part. However, we all know that life is busy. Family, animals, and surprises (both good and some less good)!
Technology helps us with our fitness goals. For example, “today I am going to take 10k steps,” followed by “tomorrow I am going to exercise for 30 minutes.” Leveraging technology like wearables, allows us to achieve our goals and change our habits – and at the end of the year, boom, we lost that 15 pounds!
Why then do businesses not adopt this same strategy? Because setting those daily goals and more importantly, enabling teams to have insight into their attain them, has been hard. In fact, it has been downright impossible. That goal of 10k steps for a business is fragmented across dozens of tools, teams, and regions – especially in a work from anywhere world. Different applications give you pieces of your "steps:" Salesforce informs you of what customer you are working on, Gong informs you of what was said, Zendesk informs of their issues. However, it has been next to impossible to combine all these pieces of what you are doing and have the instrumentation to measure, coach, and transform. Companies in the past have usually relied on individuals to report what they do - which has been proven to be less than inaccurate. The data lake/integration strategy also fails 80% of the time (especially when you realize that people work across 100s of tools). Therefore, nowhere has been a complete view into what are the best habits and actions that truly enable you to hit your goals - nowhere can you understand how many steps were taken across your customer lifecycle
This is why Retain exists. We built a product that sits across all of those fragmented data sources, teams, and workflows that are part of the customer lifecycle (your steps). The product provides never-before-available workflow intelligence that gives true visibility into how your team spends their time so you can identify moments of genius, coach them into best habits and implement real change. Because a change in behavior is the only way we ever see a change in results. Retain is the wearable for your workday, coaching you every day, giving you actionable steps to take in changing your habits, and helping your business ensure success against critical annual goals.
So if you are about to kick off your fiscal year (for a lot of companies that just happened or is about to happen) and you have no plan on how to fundamentally understand your teams' habits, how they tie to outcomes, or how to grow to form better ones..., then you risk failure for all of those goals that you and your team are so excited about today. You must have mechanisms to measure those behaviors and provide coaching against them because talking about them simply isn’t sufficient to attain them. In the coming days as you go through your fiscal year planning and you are asked to put your name and brand on the line to achieve your annual goals ask yourself this question: Do you have the instrumentation to actually understand your teams’ habits to achieve your goals, or are you just going to hope it works out?