How Successful Businesses Use Technology In Ways You Might Be Missing

Finding a technology that suits your business, then getting company wide buy in and implementing it - is a constant challenge for every business owner. You’ve probably tried different types of software, spent big money on training, but no one seems to care and nobody buys into the value to the business or themselves.

It’s a common problem that we all might have experienced. A 2015 MIT study looked at the characteristics of digitally mature businesses. The study revealed that a strong digital strategy, a company culture of taking risk and clear communication from the leadership team were the three factors that impacted successful technology adoption.

Technology is not worth the code it’s written with unless it makes life easier and better for the day-to-day user. How we encourage our sales teams to adopt technology and how we integrate it into our business is often the deciding factor in whether the investment has been worth it.

If sales people don’t get any value from your sales technology they won’t use it. They’ll think of it as a policing tool for admin only. CRM is a common example of this. If it is not easy to use and if it doesn’t offer value to the user, businesses will struggle to get people to use it.

I’ve broken down the results from the MIT study and honed in on three core areas.

1. Don’t change your business strategy to suit the technology.

On a recent consulting trip I visited a small business in the UK. Their digital strategy was to be cloud based. This meant laptops, no servers and spending money on services like Dropbox to make sure that everything was accessible anywhere, at anytime.

Digitally mature businesses have similar digital strategies, focusing on integrating digital technologies - such as social, cloud and mobile - in an attempt to improve how their business works. They don’t try and change their business strategy to suit the technology.

In contrast, digitally immature companies try to solve small business problems with individual digital solutions. In other words, they did not consider digital technology to be a central part of their business process.

The survey results showed that 80% of companies that were considered digitally mature had a clear digital strategy that was clearly understood by all employees. In comparison, only 15% of companies that struggled to implement technology had a strategy.

Nicholas Carr wrote an article for HBR and said - “technology should be the means to an outstanding goal - not the goal itself”. Clear strategy from the business meant that companies sourced solutions that suited their company. They didn’t change their business processes to suit the technology.

2. A Company Culture that encourages employees to take risks

A collaborative, risk prone working culture was also a factor in successful technology adoption. Digital technology these days is less about an existing skill set - it is more about an attitude. Users of technology no longer sit down with a manual and learn how to enter data. Software is produced that is intuitive to use and people are encouraged to learn by doing.

Companies who encouraged people to work collaboratively and share ideas, take risks and experiment with the technology itself saw more successful technology adoption amongst users. They encouraged people to explore potential alternate solutions and take innovative approaches to how they used the technology.

The rate of technology development is fast, very fast, and for companies to stay ahead they need to avoid micromanaging their staff and embrace fast paced development to keep in front of the competition.

Phil Simon, author of several books on how technology impacts businesses says: “Today, the cost of inaction almost always exceeds the cost of action”.

Technologically successful companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon encourage and promote taking risks with how technology is used to ensure they maintain business advantage over their competitors.

3. Get staff to believe in the story

It’s all about the story. Again, using the example of CRM, few people get excited about spending hours learning a new system because it’s expected. However, learning how to use CRM because in the next 5 years you’re looking company-wide expansion and subsequent professional growth - is.

These stories help to convey the implications of technology and help to convince sales people that populating CRM contributes to the long-term success of the company. Storytelling creates a movement for employees to buy into that then translates to putting effort into using and then understanding the technology.

Technology is the most likely place that departments intersect and to make sure people communicate and collaboration effectively, digitally mature companies create a story. A story the whole company can buy into.

As with all stories though - it needs a storyteller -leadership from the business owner. 90% of employees at digitally mature companies felt that their boss had both the skills and the knowledge to lead the company’s digital strategy. Only 15% of employees at digitally immature businesses said the same.

If you want your sales team to start using sales technology - you need to look at the culture you’re creating and whether you’re prepared and knowledgeable enough to lead your team to the desired result.  You may need to call in reinforcements or learn more about digital strategy to be able to effectively create this narrative.

If you'd like to find out more about this topic you can register for the webinar: "Adopting Sales Technology: How Sales Managers Can Enable Success".