Insights
A practitioner’s view on digital transformation
Transformations are hard and digital transformations are even harder!
According to a recent McKinsey study, only 16% of B2B companies claim performance improvement. There are numerous post-mortem analyses, recommendations, and approaches to transformations. However, in my experience, of over 25 years, four key critical success factors repeatedly determine success from failure for any digital transformation and, as such, deserve particular focus. To be clear, there is no silver bullet as every individual organization faces a distinct set of challenges, but the following factors are fundamental to all successful transformations.
Upgrade marketing to optimize sales & match customer expectations
To unleash the true potential of marketing and make a meaningful and measurable contribution to increasing and evaluating a business, marketing actions/initiatives must be quantified in terms of “how many leads and orders” it generates.
Purchasing behavior is increasingly shifting online so businesses can no longer avoid changing too. This provides an ideal opportunity and a sound business case to refocus internal structures to match new customer expectations and market realities. Sizable rewards can be found in upgrading the marketing function to make a meaningful and measurable contribution to increasing business.
What matters now is Execution
It is a leader’s vision that largely defines a company’s future
It takes courage, commitment, and collaboration to turn vision into reality, fully achieving set aspirations and making a business fit for the future. The ability to achieve sustainable results quickly and consistently is what really defines high performers. Profitable growth is harder to realize in the current climate of economic volatility and any program/project investment needs to be fully leveraged
AI - Move to real business value
GenAI and LLMs are the zenith of AI-driven marketing
Success in the competitive world of B2B marketing hinges on technology and innovation and as CMOs and Heads of Digital Commerce, you understand the significance of staying ahead. Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM) are ground breaking innovations and are tools with which to reshape your marketing strategies, enrich customer interactions, and drive personalization to new heights and at the same time facilitate and improve productivity, time management and effectiveness.
Customer Behaviour is Changing: The Rise of Digital Commerce
Revenue is at risk unless manufacturing companies transform
The purchasing behavior of B2B customers is moving online and, as such, manufacturing companies need to respond to current changes in the market. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, with more than 70%1) of the global industrial B2B market now being derived from online interaction, in one form or another. Excellence in managing the digital commerce purchasing funnel (see figure below) end-to-end, along the entire customer journey, from the first contact with a supplier to the purchase of a product or solution, will reward the companies who are proactive.
Tom Webber, WBR Conference Director and Bernd Hirschle, Strat-Exx
Reflections on the #B2BOnline Europe conference 7/8 December 2022, Berlin
Digitization does not replace the human factor. People, brand, emotion continue to be integral
The winning combination for digital commerce is a hybrid system of human & digital. A purely digital system can only support processes, drive automation, sell commodity products, however the human touch is additionally required in complex sales situations or for complex products
All companies recognise the need for digital commerce, many “talk the talk” but still only a few "walk the walk"
There are numerous strategies to drive the digitization from “crawl-walk-run” to “full steam ahead”; each company must design their own approach, respecting stakeholder buy-in vs. speed of implementation
Basics are quite often missing, e.g. PIM/DAM, MDM, Analytics, Content
MarTech and DigTech are not roadblocks anymore, now it is rather how to embed digital commerce into the business