Digital insights? These technical aspects aside, hopefully it is clear that many of the factors involved with CRM adoption – possibly a surprising number of factors to you? – are in the hands of executive leadership and not your CIO, system implementer or training team. Of course, the technical complaints are FAR more acceptable as excuses than some of the human nature dynamics summarized above, so polls of sales teams often yield results which seem like everything would be perfect and that big investment the company made in the CRM would really deliver, if only a few things in the system were tweaked…. Don’t be misled that polls of this kind yield the real rationale behind your team’s reluctance.
A key part successful digital transformation is assessing the needs and opportunities of organizations to ensure that the chosen strategy is the optimal path. Executives are justified in concerns about change, but with the pace of innovation being what it is in today’s economy, doing nothing is often actually more risky in many industries. Concerns about information security are legitimate, of course, but those countermeasures are table stakes in their own right, and many approaches to Digitalization do not raise security risks.
The real power comes when you know how a customer will best interact with YOU. Beyond understanding a customer or client generally, the real benefits come to companies who know how customer needs overlap with the company’s offerings, and to companies who can predict the timing of those needs more fully. This can be challenging when you’re not doing business with a customer yet, but to fill this gap myriad data brokers and aggregators offer data which can be harvested and combined for useful insights. One critical prerequisite for combining multiple outside sources (and later integrating internal data) is to identify a unique key for each record, which ideally can be obtained automatically from data generally complete and accurate in each source. Don’t be dissuaded if this step does require working through exceptions using outsource data cleansing services or temp/intern help. If you’re going to leverage multiple sources of data, it’s a critical step to develop and nurture this unique key; many companies who skip this step end up in a nightmare of duplicate records.
Any business should want to have an IT consultant! The main advantage of hiring an IT consultant is that a business gets professional services and advice. Business technology is dynamic and IT experts can help a business integrate the latest technologies into its operations. In addition, experts can predict future trends in business technologies and help businesses adjust their operations in line with those trends. Certified IT consultants can analyse the current and future technology needs and help a business to meet those needs. Find additional info at innovative consulting.
A thing every CEO should know about cybersecurity: Cyber-attacks and security breaches will occur and will negatively impact your business. Today, the average cost of the impact of a cyber breach is $4.9 million. Historically, cybersecurity has been an area that is housed solely in the technology department of a company, whether that consists of one or twenty employees. But more and more executives are understanding the importance of being not only knowledgeable but also involved in the conversations and decision-making process when it comes to protecting their data.
Trust is a universal Human Need Turbo-charger! Although we apply this approach to IT-driven transformation, it is truly in effect in every aspect of our lives. Myriad leadership studies have proven the connection between success/efficiency/effectiveness and trust. And each of us can confirm in our own lives the “difference” between situations where trust was absent vs. present; it is not difficult to recall in which situations we were at our best. As with many things, the impact of trust may be seen more clearly by examining what happens when it’s absent. There is something deep in human nature which causes us to hold back, maybe in subconscious self-preservation, in these situations.