3 THINGS YOU MUST DO TO STICK THE "DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION" LANDING

Whether you’re a start-up, small to mid-sized business, or a global organization spanning 80 countries, you’re going through some sort of digital transformation effort right now. It’s just the way things are and it’s not going away. To stay relevant, organizations must constantly update their customer’s path to purchase and refresh their business model accordingly. Perpetual change is the mindset we all need to adopt in this environment of “continuous next” and as owners of digital transformation, there are specific tactics we can employ to stick the landing. 

For the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to focus specifically on digital transformation in sales and marketing, but the 3 tactics I share are applicable to any transformative business initiative because they are universal and work every time. The tactics I share are gleaned from on-the-ground experience gained participating and leading adoption strategy of digital transformation initiatives. Success is guaranteed if all the pieces, processes and players are lined up in a holistic effort (think ecosystem vs one-off). In my humble experience, when transformation fails, it’s 9 Xs out of 10 a leader, or leaders, with their own agenda (do not neglect the pre-work of gaining consensus and buy-in of global process owners, it will be the Achilles heel every time).

“TRUE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION HAS PROFOUND IMPLICATION FOR AN ORGANIZATION - AFFECTING STRATEGY, TALENT, BUSINESS MODELS, AND EVEN THE WAY THE COMPANY IS ORGANIZED.” (Deloitte)

DEFINITION - digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new - or modify existing - business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation. 

It transcends traditional roles like sales, marketing, and customer service. Instead, digital transformation begins and ends with how you think about, and engage with customers. As we move from paper to spreadsheets to smart applications for managing our business, we have the chance to reimagine how we do business - how we engage our customers - with digital technology on our side. (Salesforce)

“93% OF ONLINE EXPERIENCES BEGIN WITH A SEARCH ENGINE, AND 47% OF PEOPLE CLICK ON ONE OF THE FIRST THREE LISTINGS.” (Blue Corona)

FACTS - 75% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a company that knows their name and purchase history and recommends products based on their preferences. (Accenture)

More than 50% of customers expect a response from customer service within an hour, even on weekends. (Edelman Digital)

80% of consumers look up product information, reviews and prices on their smartphones while in a physical store. (Outer Box Design)

By 2022, 70% of enterprises will be experimenting with immersive technologies for consumer and enterprise use, and 25% will have deployed them to production. (Gartner)

56% of CEOs state that digital transformation initiatives led to revenue growth. (Gartner)

94% of 361 surveyed executives stated that digital transformation is a top strategic objective for their organizations. (Deloite)

“RETAIL SALES FROM AUGMENTED REALITY (AR) EXPERIENCES ARE EXPECTED TO HIT $5.9 BILLION BY 2020, COMPARED TO $1.6 BILLION IN 2016.” (MCM)

COST OF DELAY - traditional methods of sales and marketing are no longer relevant in today’s marketplace. Consumers jump the shark and exit the carefully-curated buying path that organization’s have invested in and are making their buying decisions from 100s of inflection points the organization didn’t even have an intentional hand in. Why? Most organization’s today aren’t equipped to capture customer inflection points and respond immediately. They’re constrained by their traditional marketing infrastructure which moves like an elephant vs a hummingbird. They have a push vs pull infrastructure even though the linear sales funnel and customer path to purchase has been blown up in this 4th industrial revolution. Customers iterate in the discovery loop of a product or service minutes, months, years and then buy, iterating again in the post-experience instead of being moved along like a tunnel of love.

The promise of digital transformation is that efforts will be driven by collaborative data (no silos in the company) vacuumed in by every inflection point, powered by automation and optimized by analytics. In a nutshell, organizations will be able to get every single drop of juice squeezed from the orange. They will be hummingbirds with wide nets of quick-hit responsive content vs one-time campaigns that are cool but don’t convert.

Digital transformation initiatives are some of the largest IT investments ever made by a company to date. When you consider the significant lift to transform a traditional sales and marketing organization to one that is rewired to meet the customer’s buying objections in real time, there is no room for missing the landing. In today’s hyper-competitive environment of technologically-enabled consumers a misstep in digital transformation is death, bankruptcy, the end your company. If there is one initiative that should be discussed in every meeting, open every keynote, uttered ad nauseum by every member of the C-suite on down, it’s adoption of digital transformation initiatives. If it helps, imagine traditional sales and as a fixed-gear mountain bike on a hilly course and digital transformation is installing the 9 other gears you need to compete and win.

2 COMMON SALES AND TRANSFORMATIONS -

#1 YOU'VE RETHOUGHT YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY and have taken the funds from expensive one-time push efforts (poor ROI and conversion) and spread those funds out to create a net of low-cost online conversion (social, video, CTA interactives) points. These conversion points collectively result in an authentic customer experience w/loyalty reinforcement that is aligned to the new, non-linear, digital (see, think, care, do). One mindset example - why invest in a few highly produced and stylized 4K video efforts when you could take those funds and create 100s of short burst testimonial videos and target them to distinct customer personas and rake in conversions. 

#2 YOU'VE BEGUN REWIRING your commercial organization by connecting all efforts via unbreakable (workarounds = defects), roles-based workflows that are augmented with cloud based insights-driven tools and AI that automate a responsive customer path to purchase environment. This rewiring unleashes local insights to out-personalize the competition and the new tools bust the administrative burden that sap your creatives’ energies. One mindset example - doubling down on glocalized marketing infrastructure with spend in a trade promotion management system that automates and personalizes B2C/B2B efforts to elevate CX and drive customer loyalty.

“4XS AS MANY CUSTOMERS WOULD RATHER WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT A PRODUCT THAN READ ABOUT IT” (Blue Corona)

3 WAYS TO STICK THE LANDING -

1) ACCOUNTABILITY WITH TEETH is the most under-utilized and overlooked method to drive adoption of the new processes and tools launched as organization’s transform digitally. Despite the C-suite and global process owners agreeing that these initiatives are critical for survival and continued profitability, there is surprising little accountability cascaded down to ensure the landing is stuck. Performance milestones are housed on the project plan spreadsheet but not lived and measured against daily. In a sink or swim initiative, a mindset shift must happen and that is one of real accountability with teeth. If a marketing VP or Director owns a piece of the transformation pie, their whole team needs one-time goals that are heavily weighted with weekly progress checks to that piece. Digital transformation initiatives require a rewiring of the whole sales and marketing organization and the only way to accomplish this is to have everyone set measurable performance goals. This forces those “why” conversations that lead to unity and buy-in.

In my humble opinion, you cannot move an organization unless a leader has stake in that move. It is not too much to ask to have compensation tied directly to the success or failure of the transformative piece they are responsible for. The C-suite should in fact demand performance goals with teeth and HR should create lagging indicators that report the health of the transformation on a weekly basis.

On-the-ground - I recently did some strategic adoption work for a major consumer packaged goods company in the middle of transforming their commercial business unit. I was brought in midstream because the adoption efforts were failing and chaos had been created. What does chaos look like during digital transformation? Churn and workarounds. Initial gained ground and small victories were lost as talented marketers became fed up and left the org. or reverted to a hybrid of old mixed with new processes aka escalating operating costs and defeating automation benefits. 

I observed the many, many training sessions (another symptom of poor adoption) and did not see the VPs or Directors in attendance. Why not? They were too busy executing their daily tasks and not aligned to the most critical rewiring in this company’s history, the big picture was sacrificed for daily tasks. I see this all too often. A root cause is that “change management lite” is employed to drive digital transformation initiatives and not “true adoption strategy”. In my opinion, this is why most initiatives fail in general.

TIPS

• Align on priority level of initiative with C-suite and involve all Global Process Owners to agree on accountability measures for their leaders (everyone needs to be at the table)
• Involve HR from the beginning to guide and help incorporate one-time performance goals with teeth

2) ADOPTION STRATEGY REINFORCED WITH TECH should be part of the sales & marketing digital transformation initiative. This is not the time to moneyball transformation but invest in technologies that reduce the friction for employees (huge barrier, especially if they are change-weary due to past initiatives that didn't stick the landing) learning these critical new processes and tools. Think pull not push in real-time.

There are no silver bullets to stick the landing but a digital adoption platform (DAP) is as close as a company can get today. Platforms such as WalkMe, uPerform, EnableNow are role-based web overlays that sit on top of any GUI that is online without seeing your organization’s data and provide just-in-time curated learning paths with data validation (sorry, no bypassing a critical form field). DAPs render your new tools and environment plug n play, users can jump in at any point and be productive while learning. I like to think of this as Amazonifying the employee experience (if you've spent a day at Amazon, they work hard to create plug n play employee experiences by rendering the learning curve unnecessary).

What is a DAP exactly? Think tutorials in video games because that is what DAPs do at their core. They tutorialize anything web and possess the ability to connect anything web, and some, like WalkMe, can stitch together disparate online tools into workflows which you can automate if they are routine tasks. They are powerful and significantly less expensive than the typical adoption methods of death by powerpoint and static SOPs housed on a sharepoint site that is not being managed correctly. Save yourself the headache and go the DAP route. With a DAP you can easily achieve 100% adoption within 30 days because you are effectively putting up guardrails your employees cannot circumnavigate. Plus, DAPs follow best practice methods of true recall, learning within context.

On-the-ground - selling leadership on another digital tool like a DAP can be a challenge (keep in mind, a DAP is not a one time use, you can apply to any initiative). Once upon a time I helped a large global retailer realize their need to make a significant investment in a DAP despite strong initial pushback. What changed everyone’s mind? I pulled historical data from a recent digital transformation initiative that had left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. $100Ks had been spent directly to create static training step-by-steps housed on a sharepoint site (analytics showed barely any usage), dozens of microlearnings, custom presentations and they only achieved 80% adoption after 6 months. The initial resistance to the cost of DAP licenses for over 3000 employees quickly evaporated when the true cost of poor adoption became apparent. During the last digital transformation initiative, those 3000 employees had sat through countless trainings, meetings, navigated hard-to-find online content and generated rework as they struggled to learn processes and tools out of context (not at point of need) and the indirect cost was in the $millions and counting.  

TIPS

• Partner early on with L&D/Change function to navigate the adoption waters and demand learning within context, not pushed training but pulled
• Budget for a DAP in the beginning because implementing outside of the project scope will be an Everest to climb

3) FLIPPED OMNICHANNEL MARKETING TURNED INWARDS is absolutely essential to stick the landing of your organization's digital transformation. This is where sales and marketing has to take their own medicine and an organization’s L&D/Change function becomes indispensable.

Multiple town halls with your CEO, President of Sales and CMO delivering keynotes are great to kick off an initiative but then what? You will need a carefully constructed and orchestrated adoption campaign to carry the torch to the teams impacted with equal measures of will, skill and discipline to execute. Think internal omnichannel. This involves more than a corporate communication, blurb in a newsletter or a well-circulated video with all the compelling bells and whistles. Begin by sitting down with Global Process Owners and HR(OD, L&D (Change Management)) to work backwards from the ideal state of digital transformation to identify all the friction points. Collaborate to craft an ecosystem of mini-campaigns to strategically attack these friction points (often cultural) and timed with the implementation plan while tapping your early adopters to post to wikis. Also, leverage NPS and one-question surveys at or near these identified friction points so you can have a pulse on whether your targeted content/experiences are being consumed/digested aka adopted. Audit, audit, and audit some more. Deviation of new tools and processes is failure and you must build in these internal customer inflection points so you can capture what’s working and what’s not working, then adjust accordingly (sound familiar?).

On-the-ground - an organization where I have seen this type of disciplined, strategic internal marketing performed again and again flawlessly is Amazon.com. While working at Amazon I had the benefit of seeing every internal channel possible, utilized to launch and reinforce a new process or tool. It was like watching a symphony play - a press release, a wiki posted, leaders advocating via video channels, gemba walks w/awareness chats, targeted messaging in emails/coms, team meetings, posters, table toppers, desk drops - all strategically timed to smooth the friction points of adoption with plenty of lagging indicators built-in to alert stakeholders when adoption is in the red.

TIPS

• Work backwards from ideal state of digital transformation and identify all friction points and plan to mitigate through communications, trainings and provide take-it-back playbooks to leaders with stake
• Avoid all overproduced content (good enough is the gold standard) because digital transformation is iterative and you will be living in this environment (think wiki and curation)

“MORE THAN 60% OF CONSUMERS PREFER TO SOLVE CUSTOMER-SERVICE ISSUES VIA A SELF-SERVICE WEBSITE OR APP” (American Express)

IN SUMMARY - sales and marketing leaders must evaluate the best way to rewire their business to identify opportunities, counter threats and create competitive advantage. For organizations that are transforming from a traditional sales and marketing architecture, digital transformation must not become a one-time home run. Following, they need to live the iterative cycle of innovation and continuous improvement akin to daily bunts of incremental improvement so they are always evolving with their customers. If organizations going through transformation initiatives have accountability with teeth, adoption technology like a DAP, and a well-orchestrated internal campaign utilizing all channels of communication, they will stick the digital transformation landing.