Digital Transformation: Why it’s Critical to Your Business’ Success

In this digital age we live and work in, how does your business use digital technologies? They’re the backbone of every marketing and sales strategy and processes. From setting up digital marketing and sales channels to marketing automation and CRM implementation, the future of business is clearly digital.

All of these are part of a digital transformation strategy. But what does it really mean — and how does it go beyond technology implementation? While digital transformation largely depends on adopting digital technologies in sales processes and customer experience, you’ll find that it’s more of a culture or outlook, aimed at efficient and sustainable ways of doing business.

Is your company still using legacy technology, or you’ve yet to adopt digital technologies? Learn about digital transformation, and why you need a strategy for doing better business in the digital age.

What is digital transformation?

At its core, digital transformation is the process of integrating digital technology into all areas of business. Its most visible application is in upgrades to marketing, sales processes, and customer service. As a result, digital transformation makes businesses future-proof and ready for growth in a now largely digital marketplace.

But as mentioned earlier, digital transformation goes well beyond implementing digital tools and platforms. It’s not simply a technology solution; rather, it allows you to reimagine core business processes with technology as a vital resource. This means a digital transformation strategy is a culture that businesses need to adopt in order to enable and optimize customer engagement and sales, powered by digital technologies.

Why is digital transformation important?

Simply, digital transformation is the future of business. It has everything to do with survival in the digital age, essentially determining how businesses are able to evolve their processes, strategies, and core values. Digital transformation is all about getting ahead of the curve by investing in technologies and processes in response to evolving consumer behaviours.

A digital transformation strategy is driven by:

• New technology: Retire the use of legacy technology in order to support innovation in a nimble and highly adaptable manner and avoid liabilities such as technology debt, through the use of cloud architectures and approaches.
• Enhanced customer experience: As millennials and digital natives accumulate consumer power, their skepticism of traditional sales methods require investments in content marketing and providing resources to make informed shopping decisions.
• Focus on digital sales: Similarly, a digital approach to sales requires adopting automation, AI, big data analytics, and opening digital channels to market in order to enable scalability.

5 Elements of a Digital Transformation Strategy

A digital transformation strategy is your business’ playbook for doing business future-proof. This means embracing new technologies and approaches to customer experience and sales through agile digital channels. Learn about the core elements of successful digital transformation.

1. People-first, not technology-first

A common misconception among adopters of digital transformation is the focus on the technologies that need to be retired, replaced, and upgraded. But this isn’t accurate — and it risks a limiting approach to sales and customer experience.

Instead, your digital transformation strategy should put people at the heart. This means adopting a bottom-up approach, starting with the evolving needs of customers and how these can be effectively addressed through investments in digital technologies. Find out what customers really want—such as value-added information shared through content marketing — before ordering a CRM implementation and marketing automation.

Similarly, for e-commerce retailers, think about the user interface and user experience. Before adopting a platform, conduct extensive user analysis and testing to determine the most effective approach to building the sales channel.

2. Enroll staff in the transformational process

On the other side of a people-first approach to digital transformation are the people behind every customer experience. Think of staff as change champions and top brand ambassadors. They represent your business to customers and facilitate their purchases and overall experience.

This means staff need to be able to provide actual insights into the customer journey based on their experience. Empower staff as major stakeholders who are central to your digital transformation strategy, and make sure their insights and opinions help inform the implementation of digital tools that enable them to connect with customers.

3. Use business intelligence to inform digital transformation

There isn’t — and shouldn’t be — any digital transformation process without sufficient and actionable business intelligence. Analytics is a powerful tool that provides actionable insights to both marketing and IT. 

The key is to use data to determine what types of digital interventions and innovations customers best respond to and would be most effective in improving the shopping experience. In digital sales, this means supporting customers from browsing to check-out, with seamless invoicing, payment, and order management integrations.

4. Measure outcomes and track milestones

No digital transformation strategy is static — if it is, that would defeat the purpose of adopting evolving best practices in enabling digital sales. Just as you require strong business intelligence at the onset, it becomes more important later on.

A successful digital transformation strategy has built-in performance indicators. Make sure to continuously monitor sales and revenue to capture the full picture of what should be an improved customer experience. Find out if and how digital transformation has contributed to increased revenue and positive customer interactions, and gain actionable insights for constant optimization.

5. Watch the market

Finally, it pays to look beyond your business. Your digital transformation strategy should include industry benchmarking and competitor analysis to determine your market share. As well, it would be useful to examine recent technology implementations and see what your competitors are doing to ensure that you are at par with the latest trends in the industry.

Design Your Digital Transformation Strategy with Consultus Digital

Are you ready to launch the new phase of business? Consultus Digital is here to help. Our team of sales enablement, CRM implementation, marketing automation, and digital marketing experts work with you to craft your digital transformation strategy, and map out key milestones for every technology and process implementation.

At Consultus, we’re always looking toward the future of business. That’s why we’re dedicated to helping you adapt, starting with the necessary technology investments you need to make in order to compete in this digital landscape and win digital sales. More importantly, we’re not just technology experts: we’re also people experts who bring years of real-world, on-the-ground experience in building sales teams while enabling digital transformation. Always, the result is a better-connected, better-resourced, and agile brand, fully responsive to evolving consumer needs.

Are you still operating legacy tech and functioning on traditional sales methods? It’s time for a total digital transformation. Let’s create your digital transformation strategy, and start doing better business with Consultus Digital.