By 2026 65% of B2B sales organizations will have transitioned to data-driven decision-making.
What does this mean? Businesses will rely more heavily on digital methods to create, plan, and implement sales strategies.
“Investing in virtual selling tech right now requires a classic case of slowing down to speed up. A carefully designed, purpose-built virtual selling technology stack will help sales teams more predictably hit the number.” – Craig Rosenberg, Gartner
Digitalization helps companies streamline operations, increase workflow efficiency, automate processes, and improve customer engagement. It can help you tap into new markets and gain a competitive advantage.
We’ll explore the five primary elements of a successful digital transformation – and how each member of your executive team has a key role to play in digital transformation.
5 elements of a successful digital transformation
Digital transformation is essential if you want to be more efficient and competitive. It is essential to enable companies to:
- Provide better customer experiences
- Gain insights from data
- Automate processes
- Increase accuracy
- Save time, energy, and money
- Coach and train better your workforce
In Gartner’s report, Top Strategic Predictions for 2023 and Beyond – Seizing Uncertainty, their research team said:
“A lack of awareness and skills among business executives and management, still dismissing digital tech as just another enabler of capabilities rather than the center of new business models, will result in perilously underestimating its profound impact.”
That said, digital transformation isn’t a monolithic effort. It encompasses various initiatives and tasks, depending on your industry and company’s maturity.
Let’s look deeper at the five pillars of a successful digital transformation team:
1. Data and technology officers
Data will play a more significant role in your business’s success than ever before.
CTOs will need to re-examine what tools and technology are needed to ensure they can gather the necessary data.
Many companies start their digital transformation by upgrading their existing IT and mobile infrastructure, data lakes, and cloud services. Your organization can use a “digital initiative” budget to modernize IT and communications platforms. This will help you increase efficiency, lower ongoing maintenance costs, and boost employee satisfaction.
But collecting and optimizing the use of sales data is a revenue-driving effort involving multiple stakeholders. Recognizing the needs of your company should be a primary focus for your sales and marketing department.
To accomplish this, determine what your customers really want by analyzing their behavior using interaction channels.
Start by assessing your current tech infrastructure to understand how each tool drives business value. Then plan upgrades to more up-to-date platforms and more effective tools.
2. Sales operations and enablement
You can use digital strategies and tools to improve the efficiency and productivity of your sales team, and sync efforts with other revenue-generating departments.
Teams will need to determine the tools needed to stay current and ensure sales teams have every advantage – online and in the field.
Digital transformation of operations includes using tools like process automation, artificial intelligence and enablement. These tools streamline processes or swap out analog sales activities for digital ones. It may also mean rearchitecting your organization from top to bottom to provide a customer-centric experience.
Increasing the use of digital sales rooms is an excellent example of how you can use digital tools to improve sales operations.
By 2026, Gartner predicts that 30% of B2B sales cycles will be managed using digital sales rooms.
Sales enablement platforms like Pitcher offer digital sales rooms that include tools like:
- Embedded video conferencing
- Emotional and engagement analysis
- Microsites for internal or external collaboration
Digitizing operations can also include using enablement tools for revenue-generating teams outside the sales department, like:
- Presales (technical sellers)
- Marketing
- Customer success
3. (Digital) marketing
By utilizing and optimizing online channels, digital transformation in marketing transitions from complacency to proactive digital excellence. CMOs will have to slow down and analyze the effectiveness of current strategies.
Here’s what a transformation to digital business could look like for your marketing department.
Refine digital channels: Assess the value of your current marketing channels and tools, including your:
- Website
- Social media platforms
- Analytics
- Automation platforms
- Customer database
Identify ways to leverage these tools better or replace them with options that fit your current needs.
Connect silos: If your tools, team and data are operating in silos, you’ll miss out on the bigger picture. You won’t be able to track the entire customer journey and be customer-centric.
Within your tech stack, join your platforms to get a holistic view of your entire customer base and track and measure customer behavior.
Optimize the customer journey: Once you’ve improved your channel integrations, you’ll have a more holistic view of your marketing funnels. You’ll be able to identify weak spots and opportunities for improvement. Then you can deliver personalized, relevant experiences during the entire customer journey.
4. New business development
Transformation to digital business can open up many opportunities, including:
- New business models
- Products or services
- Collaboration with the larger ecosystem in your industry
CEOs need to be forward-thinkers when it comes to spearheading AI and platform initiatives.
Adaptive AI is another potential business opportunity. These AI systems continuously learn based on new data and adapt quickly to real-world changes. An adaptive AI engineering framework can help you build and optimize applications that transform as needed and provide resiliency against disruptions.
Gartner predicts that “by 2026, enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the number and time it takes to operationalize artificial intelligence models by at least 25%.”
5. Human resources and your workforce
Digital transformation of HR is typically led by the chief people officer (CPO), HR leaders, or learning and development (L&D) professionals. These leaders have an opportunity to retool and retrain the workforce through onboarding, training and coaching to improve employee performance and upskill entire teams.
HR digital transformation is the process of using technology to automate and streamline HR processes like:
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Development
- Employee engagement
- Performance management
This technology can help reduce costs, improve the efficiency of human resource teams, and allow HR professionals to focus on more strategic activities.
Transformation efforts are happening just in time, with labor volatility reaching all-time high levels. Gartner’s Top Strategic Predictions for 2023 and Beyond report predicts that by 2025, labor volatility will cause 40% of organizations to report a business loss. This will force companies to shift their talent strategy from acquisition to resilience.
Digital transformation solutions to consider in your HR strategy are:
- Automation
- Onboarding software
- People analytics
- On-demand training
For your sales team, enablement solutions can make it easier to improve employee engagement by freeing up time spent on manual tasks. You can also use enablement solutions to deliver targeted sales coaching and training that enhance performance.
The next step in your digital transformation journey
Your company’s digital transformation journey – adopting digital processes and tools to streamline operations, improve customer engagement, and gain a competitive edge – starts with these five pillars.
Sales enablement is an integral part of any digital transformation strategy. It ensures that the sales process is optimized and reps are equipped with the right tools to succeed in the digital age.
Find out how Pitcher’s sales enablement solution can help you unlock new revenue streams and boost sales performance by automating tasks and improving your team’s productivity.
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