Q:  Why is it, no matter how much we invest, it never seems to be enough?
 
A:  It's not how much you invest as much as it is how and where you invest that leads to the highest ROI.

As spring rolls into summer I find it increasingly hard to keep up with the weeds.  They're in my lawn, in my garden, and as they grow they steal the nutrients from the soil;  they're many in number, tough and require all of my limited resources to deal with them…meanwhile, the grass, flowers and veggies in my garden get neglected and as a result will never reach their full potential.
 
I find this a fitting analogy for the programs we build to improve our partner and customer relationships.  If you think of your audience as your garden, and your programs, budget and resources as your soil, does it make you realize you may have some weeding to do?  Can you differentiate between the weeds and the rest?  Could a shift in your attention and resources make a bigger impact to your results if your best were performing at their best?
 
We recently interviewed 20+ top vendors for the HTG Peer Groups to compile a report on their programs.  Throughout the process we uncovered some interesting data - one significantly relevant to this concept of "weeding" is displayed in the graph here:
 
Spending as a % of Annual Budget

This shows, of the overall budget being spent, 60% is going to Recruitment, 30% is going to Engagement, and 10% is going to Retention.  With this distribution, do you think the best are performing at their potential?

There may be multiple arguments as to how to draw conclusions from this, but at the end of the day, if you’re spending the bulk of your budget to engage and retain your best partners, enabling them to perform at their potential -- even IF recruitment is expensive you’ll need to do far less of it.  Your ROI will increase as the bulk of the money you spend is more directly related to money being made.

For many of you, the fiscal year is rolling over and you're getting a fresh and renewed start.  It's spring for you too!  Take a good hard look at your data and determine who in your audience has helped you, who has held you back, and who might not be a big producer today but has what it takes to do something for you later.  If you don't have the historical data or qualifying information to do this, now is the time to include it for tracking in your programs going forward.