The digital transformation has marked a real shift in how companies organise themselves. Today, in an increasingly connected world, it is essential to anticipate and develop a well-defined digital strategy in order to be efficient.
Essential to the commercial development of the company, it is a real growth booster and extends to all levels of organisations. During a company’s digital transformation, the role of managers is therefore to lead their teams through a viable and reliable change process.
The objective is, of course, to significantly improve the end-customer experience in order to smoothly develop their business.
But to succeed in its digital transformation, it must not be rushed. It is therefore essential to prepare it well, while respecting a few key stages in order to complete the project.
Step 1: define your strategy to create a roadmap
This crucial stage will enable you to take stock of the situation and define your new objectives. You need to accurately identify the drivers of change, including the evolution of new customer requirements. Today's buyers feel an increasingly urgent need for immediacy: they want near real-time answers to their problems.
To carry out a concrete business project, and not a vague and generic digital transformation, you must analyse your precise needs. Do you want to test a new sales channel? Improve your customer service or develop an innovative product and/or service?
By redefining your priorities and objectives, you establish a clear strategic vision that will allow you to project yourself into the future. It will be the basis for a well-thought-out digital experimentation to gain efficiency later on (and avoid the pitfalls when digitising your company!).
Step 2: Involve and train your teams
In order to unite all the players in the digitalisation of your organisation, its management must be in agreement with this new strategy. Your employees must be convinced of the validity of your strategy and fully support this new corporate culture.
Digital transformation is a process of change, you must rely on your company's internal resources to implement it. It is therefore important to support the evolution of the skills and missions of each of your employees.
As a first step, identify the departments most affected by this digitalisation. There is no point in trying to transform everything too quickly; it is better to work in small groups and rely on the "early adopters" to lend you a hand.
In view of the obvious changes in daily working methods, do not hesitate to take advantage of training courses to improve your grasp of digital tools. This approach will also make it easier to remove any remaining reluctance or misunderstandings among your employees.
Step 3: Adopt the right digital tools
Of course, digital transformation means integrating new tools. And digital transformation is not a new concept. It has existed since the rise of the Internet!
One of the first challenges of this restructuring will be your ability to make data speak for itself. How can you interpret it to gain better customer knowledge? How can you analyse the data to generate more qualified leads? How can you link tools together to make the data communicate?
First of all, for a successful digital transformation, and to get out of your comfort zone, you need to adopt a tool that is essential to your strategic vision: business management software.
Why? Simply to gain agility and performance by:
Deploying agile and powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software with a pipeline view to take control of your prospects
Centralising your sales information in real time
Tracking all your business opportunities automatically and naturally
Identifying your hottest prospects via, among other things, visit tracking and lead scoring
And so on.
Finally, keep in mind that combining tools is also a real opportunity. It represents a real gateway to create added value and help you achieve the digitalisation of your company.
Many big brands have understood that successful digitalisation can be confusing, but it has become a matter of course to grasp all the benefits of the digital revolution. And it is only by removing the obstacles that you will be able to propel your company to the forefront!
Step 4: spread the word about your digital tools
In the long run, for your digital transformation to be a complete success, you will have to impose and gain acceptance for a new internal operating model.
This means that all the previously compartmentalised departments will be reorganised to set up new interactions between them. This means, for example, that the data of your sales representatives will henceforth be shared with all the teams in your company – for the well-being of your business!
Because, from now on, it is by aligning your sales and marketing teams that you will ensure better performance to improve your company's turnover.
Step 5: Build on your company's human capital
Once again, your people are your best allies in achieving a new strategic vision and reaching your new goals. But only by presenting them with simple and ideal paths, with the right arguments, will you succeed in giving them precise answers to their expectations and needs.
Of course, implementing new processes requires a reorganisation of your company. But this is done with the aim of creating a new entity which will, naturally, become a reference for all your teams!
Digitalising your company is above all about anticipating. Preparing for the future also means improving the customer experience. This is an obvious change that requires time and patience in order to perfect smooth and optimised customer journeys in the long term.
You have everything to gain!
Learn more about the 5 pitfalls to avoid when your company goes through digital transformation
