How companies can increase their Digital revenues?

Share of Digital revenues

Many enterprise companies still struggle to increase their digital revenues due to their subpar digital initiatives. Hence companies are taking cues from their B2C counterparts by increasing their investments in digital businesses.Inspite of this, they have not been able to achieve high margins.The reason for this is because companies have trouble achieving benefits at scale with many promising initiatives losing momentum after the pilot stage.
Enterprise companies are still not able to overcome stiff competition from digital masters like Amazon, Google and Facebook as these companies are expanding their presence in the enterprise technology sphere.Digital leaders are further optimizing their prices across channels and customers by projected demand, likelihood of sales and other factors.This makes it challenging for enterprise companies to enter new channels or deploy new GTM models that reduce pricing flexibility.
Enterprise companies that persist in improving their digital sales execution often achieve incredible value.Companies with strong digital capabilities not only improved shareholder value but was also able to reduce their costs to serve their customers.

How enterprise companies improve their Digital revenues?

Enterprise companies need to emulate Digital leaders to tap the full value of digital sales growth.

Digital revenues  step 1 -Comprehensive and focused Digital Sales Strategy

• Digital strategy and their related sales initiatives should be aligned to the overall business strategy.Many companies make a fatal mistake of launching numerous small scale initiatives in numerous business units.These efforts are scattered and fail to deliver any big returns in terms of improving costs and revenues.
• Many firms still struggle to set a comprehensive strategic framework for their Digital business because they still have not been able to figure out how Digital is disrupting the industry and changing the overall landscape. They are not able to articulate exactly what value digital will deliver making it difficult for these companies to prioritize initiatives.
• Enterprise companies need to address Digital as a strategic priority and Digital should drive the agenda of senior level C-Executives.The executives need to close their existing gaps in digital by addressing the capability they need to acquire.They must set long term goals and then try to achieve their goals by prioritizing the initiatives.
• Multiple business units should work in coordination and every projects that is launched must be aligned with the larger digital vision.Companies need to refine their existing processes by adopting best business practices and then creating capability building programs for their employees.Businesses should share their learnings and insights across the organization.They should create solutions that other business groups can use.

Digital revenues step 2 – Concentrating on Customer needs

• When companies focus too much on technology, it can lead them to build over complicated solutions which makes it difficult to sell to their customers.Many companies are still struggling to automate and simplify their customer decision journey.They are focusing more on automating their internal processes.This is the reason why many companies still have a subpar customer experience.
• Enterprise companies have far less knowledge about their customers when compared to their B2C counterparts. This is the reason why B2B companies are not successful in their customer focused strategy.Hence many enterprise companies often lose customers and businesses to digital natives as Digital natives are able to provide simple customer friendly solutions at a lower price.
• In order to address these issues, companies must identify factors that influence key decision makers at each stage of the customer journey.After the purchase is completed, companies must gather information on purchase experience, product usage and service, repeat purchase rates and customer loyalty.Most important real time customer insights can be obtained by using advanced analytics to detect patterns in customer behavior.
• Companies need to provide digital options along the customer journey because customers expect it.Many customers use online research while making purchase decisions and often repeat their purchases through the digital channels.
• As companies create their digital strategy, they should focus on omnichannel interactions thus ensuring that customers can navigate seamlessly between digital channels.Companies should focus on creating best customer journey and experiences rather than focusing on making a sale.

Digital revenues step 3 – Shifting to Agile Methodology

• Companies building Digital solutions should adopt an agile methodology in order to adapt quickly when working across multiple business units.By moving rapidly, companies can adapt to market changes, respond to competitors moves, economic shifts, evolving customer preferences and build innovative products.
• Companies need to significantly alter their work processes to apply agile principles at scale within the organization.Their approach should include Growth hacks – short ring fenced initiatives that favors the iterative process of testing and learning with high involvement of sales front line.These hacks streamline progress and create value by helping companies reduce time spent planning initiatives on spreadsheets.
• For large scale initiatives, companies must build cross functional teams that are empowered to make decisions and have access to state of art digital tools.Companies can implement new technology solutions in a restricted testing environment where they can experiment with code changes.After creating a minimum viable product, companies can expand usage to other business units.
• Companies also need to make organizational level changes to gain the full benefits of agile.They need to be flexible in moving certain groups so that they can collaborate onsite with other functions.Companies must be flexible to change their structure to group employees by solutions or customer journey.

Digital revenues step 4 – Talent Acquisition and Management

• Companies need to have sufficient talent inhouse with skills to create digital content, apply advanced analytics or implement social media campaigns.
• Apart from the executive level leadership, companies require midlevel talent as they are ultimately responsible for bringing products, services and offers to market.Midlevel talent like scrum masters are required to lead cross functional agile teams.Companies also need to invest in continuous coaching and capability building of their existing employees as there is a limit to the talent that they can hire from outside.

Digital revenues step 5 – Tracking results with right metrics

• Companies cannot use the traditional key performance indicators to measure progress as they are not appropriate for digital initiatives. Companies need to create digital KPIs and hold staff accountable to act on them.
• Digital KPIs like tracking release speed is important to validate if agile methods are institutionalized.Other metrics like digital adoption rates, content views and increase in online customer interactions are equally relevant. Companies must diligently track progress of every metrics and share the results with larger group.

Conclusion

• In order to drive higher digital revenues, companies need a successful combination of top down direction and bottom up enthusiasm.
• Companies need to create the systems, processes and structures to support digital revenues efforts and adapt their products, pricing model when needed.This will help to transform the customer experience.