At this time when there is great competition in all business areas, having your business online is no longer an option, it is an obligation. This takes more than integrating some new hit thing like Bitcoin. That is why now, we will show you how you can digitally transform your company.
Analyze your clients
The first step is to observe, listen to, measure, and evaluate how current and future clients act in both the offline and online worlds.
You must pay attention if we are a traditional company, how your customers behave in the online world. It is interesting to know what their tastes are, their preferences, how they move, and, ultimately, to study how they behave. For this, it is recommended that you create a community.
For example, you can do it on Facebook and let them express it freely. There is no need to be afraid, normally not all complaints about a product or service will reach you, so you will not have a vision when a user changes what the reason is, but if you let them communicate, and also publicly, you will have a golden opportunity to fix that problem and prevent it from happening to other users.
The platform is the least important, it can be Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, or any other. You must be where your customers are.
If you don’t even have a website, start with simple things like a Facebook group, or create your business on Google my business, both will give you visibility and useful information. And don’t forget that you have to start interacting with users, and yes, sometimes it’s lazy, especially if we leave it for the end of the day or if we don’t have a person dedicated to customer service.
If you have personnel assigned to customer service, you should consider social networks as another channel of communication, as if it were the telephone or email.
If you know your clients, what they like or don’t like, what their preferences are, how they are evolving, you will have the opportunity to adapt to them, which is why it is essential to detect it as soon as possible.
Study your competition
It should go without saying that you should conduct research on your competition. Your usual workload, as well as the responsibilities and interruptions that come with it, can easily divert your attention away from crucial tasks like investigating the future of your industry.
Examine how your competitors conduct themselves on the internet. Do they sell stuff or give advice? What communication channels do they employ, how do they communicate, how often do they communicate? Check to see whether they have a community, a website, or if you can give them emails, coupons, or anything else.
Also, how does your competition treat their customers? It is always advisable to study and analyze how they carry out their sales processes, remember that copying is not bad as long as it is to improve.
If you discover that they are copying you, instead of getting angry, be happy, because the fact that they are copying you means that you are doing things too well.
Examine your processes
To put it another way, processes are made up of tasks, and our daily lives are filled with processes that are segmented into tasks. Personal as well as professional. Don’t worry, it’s simple to comprehend.
Breakfast, for example, is something that practically everyone does. We must ensure that we have all of the essential components for the breakfast procedure, in addition to being able to carry it out.
With this simple example, you can understand that you in your business, regardless of your sector, need a series of resources, which must be available, to produce your product or service. And as basic as it may seem, we have to review the machines we use.
Well, in your company you must do the same, no matter how simple it may seem to you, and no matter how much you have it under control and it seems trivial to you, if you don’t already have it, you must carry out a script of all the processes that are necessary for your business to work. If you haven’t done it, now is the time to do it!
If you haven’t done it, start simply by pointing out the processes, such as the one that makes a list of your day to day, as the example of having breakfast, write down everything you and your employees do, as an agenda for the day, and then focus on how you do it, the time you dedicate to it and what you need to do it.
“What are you here for?” you could be thinking right now. Or “What is the purpose of this?”, though, that it is necessary.
Automate those repetitive tasks that can be automated
What does this mean? Well, a task that you do once a year, maybe it doesn’t make sense to automate it.
You better than anyone, know the time it takes to complete the tasks and how much they cost, now is the time to stop and think, if it is possible to automate any of the tasks, how much is it going to cost you and how much can you earn.
To give an example, if you love roast chicken, and you cook it at home, you will know that this takes a lot of time. It is not so much the time to prepare, but the time it takes in the oven to cook. Automating is something as simple as programming the oven to start at one hour so that before you get home it is practically finished.
Did you find automation difficult? You really already had the tools, in this case, the oven that allows you to set the start time and conditions that you wanted.
What you have changed is that, instead of being in person, you schedule the time to get home. Some will say that it is not automation, this is a very simple example, but what advantages does it offer you? Before, you could only cook roast chicken on some Sundays and whenever it did not come out.
In this way, you can schedule it for any day of the week. This already represents a change for you, since you can consume it any day, in addition to not having to be careful that it burns, since, by programming it in the necessary time, you know that it will not burn, or you can go out on Sundays to walk and know that, on the way back, a crispy chicken will be waiting for you. You have gained time, flexibility, and peace of mind.
So now, you have to ask yourself, if with the tools you have you can do this type of thing, and a very simple example is to write the emails from a template and instead of sending it in that time, leave them scheduled to be sent at a certain time.
In the area of office automation, there are countless examples and applications that can make our tasks easier, it is estimated that up to 60% of office tasks can be automated.
Maybe you already automate, but you don’t know it. For example, when you go on vacation and indicate what will be attended by another colleague, in this case, you are already using filters and automation, since the user receives an immediate response to his email, you also automatically send a copy of your email to your mates.
Analyze what you need and what can help you
If you already know where they can improve, and the tools you already have do not work for you, you are going to have to look for some solutions that adapt to your needs.
I encourage you to opt for scalable solutions, those that you pay based on their use, or the functionalities they offer you. Professionals and businessmen in general do not need super complete applications, very difficult to learn to use, they are looking for something that will solve their problems.
In this step, it is highly advisable to study the cost of the tools and what the benefits will be, the accounts are simple, the benefits have to be greater than the costs, remember that not everything is always an economic issue, it may be that the benefit is the time to solve or solve a problem since time is the only thing we cannot buy. We all have 24 hours a day.
Write your change plan
As in any project, you must establish measurable objectives, and deadlines in which the objectives set must be met. You must establish some KPIs or key indicators, to know how your project is evolving.
Set some milestones, set some resources, identify the risks, and especially identify the stakeholders (everyone that your project will affect, not only your employees but also customers, suppliers, competition… etc) and a communication plan.
Lean on your team, the more opinions you hear the better it will be. And if you finally get ideas, do not attribute them to yourself, indicate whose idea it is, in this way you will get allies to carry out the changes.
Prepare to manage resistance to change
It is very normal to hear that:
Why are we going to change if we’ve always done it this way? I don’t understand this, I’ll do what they tell me, they don’t pay me to think, that’s how we’re going to lose customers, the bosses have no idea.
Do any of the above phrases ring a bell? Don’t worry, it’s normal, it’s just part of change management.
Start by explaining the benefits of the change, and make sure they understand it.
In a communication, messages are transmitted between the sender and the receiver. Only the sender knows what he is really thinking, and is responsible for making sure the receiver understands it.
If you are responsible, remember to empathize that changes are hard for everybody, possibly for you too. Let your team know that these times are hard for you too, that will not make you weaker, it will make you more human.
Resistance to change is intrinsic to human beings, so don’t be fooled, the greatest difficulty in a digital transformation is not going to be with technology, but rather how you are going to change the ways of doing things, the resistance that you are going to find yourself on the part of the people involved in the project, remember that not only your workers are involved, they can also be your supplier clients.
And remember that the biggest problems you will find are with your own staff. But we must be realistic and not forget about the competition.
Digital transformation is not about technology, digital transformation is about people.
Measure, Analyze and recalculate
In every project it is necessary to measure, compare, control and recalculate, since no project, no matter how well planned it is, will not have unforeseen events, analyzed risks and deviations from the outlined plan.
Don’t wait until you have a perfect plan to begin with. The perfect plan does not exist.
Delegate
It is possible that in all this way you need some help, do not hesitate to ask for it or look for it. Either because you do not control the technology, because you are not used to project planning or you are simply having conflicts and do not know how to manage them.
Surround yourself with professionals you trust. You will go fast alone, but accompanied you will go further.
Trust your team, you may discover talents that you did not know before. If any of these talents is valid for your project, do not hesitate to use it.
BONUS
Turn your workers, your suppliers, and your customers into ambassadors of your brand. Reward them in some way when you get sales through them since they are somehow doing commercial work.
Today, sales can come from anyone, recognition is fine, but so are financial details at the end of the month. Make them feel a bit commercial too.
