Small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from digital maturity like large enterprises, but at a different scale. There are key levers available to every organization, and pulling them can unlock hidden value. For example, a family-owned regional oil and lubrication distributor improved their market share by implementing a specialized ERP system as the foundational step in their digital journey. This new technology allowed them to create customer centric journeys and organize their internal operations in a more logical and efficient way.

Based on our experience and extensive market research we’ve identified seven key opportunities for small and medium sized businesses to mature their digital operations.

1. Executive vision – Organizations that are committed to building a digital agenda have a demonstrable advantage in the market. Setting a company up for success starts with the leadership team. The most important question that team need to answer is “where are we going”. After establishing the end game there are a few building block that will make up the core of your executive vision – almost none of this requires significant financial investment. What is the right organization structure to emphasize these digital priorities? Which leaders need to own these priorities? How do we get buy-in from operational leaders and shift our collective mind set? How should my HR team change their candidate profiles?
2. Build systems that support the business – In the example of our regional oil distributor they had built a decades worth of operational business processes around the limitations of their core systems. At the time the system was built it may have been a fine solution but the market changed and the business needed to change with it. If systems aren’t adaptable you need to reimplement the most essential ones. If the bones are good, however, you may be able to build new channels and customer engagement platforms on top of existing systems. Our team can help you evaluate and prioritize which systems can benefit from modernization.
3. Design for customers, not your staff – This phrase has been used extensively. Often times it’s used in a way that doesn’t really mean anything actionable. Customers can tell when their best interest has been considered – they can tell when a company has put thought into making the buyers journey easy. The easiest lever to pull is the actual design of your customer touch points. Is your site intuitive and aesthetically pleasing to your target audience? Is your service team easy to contact or do you inadvertently put up road blocks in the form of unempowered CSRs, unmanaged inboxes, unintelligent chat-bots, or long chains of telephone prompts to reach a human?
4. Measuring what matters – So many companies grew and became successful based on the intuition of a few key leaders. While the executive team should consider many data points the challenges they face are often unclear and they need to rely on a measure of business intuition. Regardless, there are many more modern analytical data points available to both executive leaders and line managers. By modernizing your core systems and customer engagement channels you start tracking the data that will influence internal priorities. Share that data and track performance against that data with dashboards and reporting tools. These data points will influence the teams intuition.
5. Fine tune everything – We live by the pareto principle (80/20) but financial margin, customer life time value, cash conversion cycle, and many other key drives of business success can’t be significantly moved without focusing on the long tail. Route optimization, conversion rate optimization, packaging efficiency, supplier negotiations, waste reduction, IT roadmap execution – any of these may have a small impact on it’s own but in aggregate become a competitive differentiator and enabler for additional digital investments.
6. Digitally mature individual channels – Whether you are a industrial manufacturer or lifestyle apparel brand you have some inefficiency in your channels. These inefficiencies are opportunities. One apparel brand was able to increase the number of abandon cart emails by 30% after implementing a new e-mail service provider. Each of those additional emails is a conversion opportunity. Similarly, an automotive accessory brand saw a $32M opportunity in their call center and decided to build a new service tracking system. In both cases, they had existing digital solutions but that had fallen behind. The call to maturity is relative – push possible within each channel.
7. Leverage partners strategically – Every company needs to be focused on their core competency. Vertical and horizontal integrations provide opportunities for increasing financial and operational leverage but those strategies are only available to the most operationally advanced organizations. Firms looking to use digital initiatives as a growth engine need to find partners that can help them execute on those initiative. The primary reason for being partner centric in these projects is that they aren’t long term. You may engage in some operational support long term but the heavy lifting tends to be relatively short in duration, typically less than two years.

The key to digital transformation lies in finding a balance between taking small steps with strategic purpose and making big bets that come with real risks. It’s important not to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task while also avoiding the trap of incrementalism. Said differently you should despise small beginnings or fear the measured risk that comes from pursuing new growth. Embracing both the cautious and the daring approaches can lead to significant rewards.