2023 just started and I’m feeling… calm. Last year we achieved our stretch financial goals even after scaling back our workloads and donating 4% of our profits to charity. We seriously leveled up the team, and built a deeper bench in demand gen and revenue ops. And I’m so proud of the company we’re building. But now it’s all about 2023.
>> Related: The Pandemic Was Actually Good for Our Work Culture <<
Dreaming is a form of planning
Allison and I are big fans of mixing the personal and professional when we do annual planning. Every year, our team tackles Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year exercise. Yes, this is the kind of forced soul-searching you can expect at a company run by millennial women. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honest introspection is how I pinpoint what felt off, what I was proud of, and what energized me. It grounds how I rebuild the new year around what I want to start, stop, and continue. And, especially because we all work from home (or live at work? ????), how we tend ourselves physically, mentally, and emotionally is entwined with the business.
This exercise is also a fantastic way to stoke camaraderie. I can genuinely say I intimately understand and trust each person on the team. I know their strengths and hopes, and we orient biz dev to both grow the business and their career goals.
A north star you can navigate by
It’s not all woo woo, though. The news has been dominated by tech layoffs and warnings of a longer recession. The sense of stress and perhaps panic is building. But my takeaway from 2020 was that in uncertain times, companies need strategic conviction. That means more focused plans, less chaotic activity. More data-driven visibility, less relying on ego.
I’m confident that growing revenue is recession-proof. The trains need to keep running, and if you’re in MOPs, you’re valuable and mission-critical to companies trying to grow and thrive. Our work is serious and valuable and grounding. Focus on the revenue-growing basics, and we can ride the wave.
2022 Roundup
I also can’t resist a round-up. Here’s our best work from last year:
- The coolest thing Sponge built in 2022: A Lead-to-Revenue playbook that synthesized multiple newly-formed/acquired business units with multiple different Salesforce orgs, multiple different marketing automation platforms, and *very* different lead management processes. Now hundreds of people rely on the same playbook. It’s been truly transformative.
- Most popular client project in 2022: Fulfilling Bizible’s potential. Whether cleaning up an untrustworthy instance or implementing Bizible for the first time, we’ve helped many clients actually get value from that investment.
- Most popular blog post in 2022: How to Automatically Match Salesforce Leads to Accounts – three years running!
- Most popular post on social in 2022: Our new headshots!? What can I say, we’re cute ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Image via My Modern Met
