Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It requires hard work, careful planning, and ongoing measurement, optimization, and collaboration from everyone involved. As we've discussed before, it requires a lot of reflection and willingness to change.
Deciding and mapping a strategy for digital transformation can’t happen in a silo, either. Without buy-in from leaders across departments, digital transformation can be a slow process—or worse, your efforts won’t be successful.
When you and your team have decided to work toward digital transformation, you need to start with a strategy that clearly outlines your organization’s path toward that vision.
Our digital strategy workshops help set the stage for all the steps required to reach both quick wins and long-term digital transformation goals specific to your organization and your industry. This type of workshop isn’t just table talk, either.
With a guided, structured conversation aimed at creating a specific set of deliverables, you’ll see unexpected benefits that will help fuel your organization’s digital transformation and improve your team’s culture.
1. Understand Needs and Set Goals
A digital strategy doesn’t impact just one department or a small group of people. During a digital strategy workshop, your team will gain an understanding of what everyone expects and requires from your strategy. This includes marketing, IT, sales, operations, leadership and—most importantly—your customers.
A detailed look at your targeted audiences will be at the core of the conversation. After all, changing your processes or operations should ultimately serve the goal of improving the customer experience, acquiring new customers, and retaining existing ones—all of which have a direct impact on your organization’s profitability and long-term success.
Each team at the table will have unique insight into the customer, as well: marketing might have specific insights about demographics and customer needs, while sales has insight into common objections and pain points, while the service and operations teams will understand the day-to-day customer experience. Coming together in a digital strategy workshop will bring these insights to one place and help determine what each team needs to improve the holistic experience.
Once you have a clear sense of the needs and expectations of everyone involved, you’ll want to understand clearly what your digital strategy is trying to achieve. Those goals should be “S.M.A.R.T.” in order to serve your strategy effectively: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. For example, it’s not enough to say that your goal is to qualify more leads through your digital strategy. You can, however, set a goal to increase lead generation from digital marketing campaigns by 20 percent in the next year.
2. Improve Processes and Platforms
As part of your existing digital tactics, you’ve likely invested time and energy into creating some processes and purchasing some tools. However, it’s unlikely that those processes are as efficient as possible, and that the tools you’re using might not meet all your identified needs.
As part of your digital strategy workshop, you and your team will review your existing processes and platforms to identify efficiencies and opportunities for optimization. This includes conducting an ROI analysis of your existing tools and identifying opportunities to implement machine learning, AI and other automation technologies that might help your organization reach both short- and long-term goals.
3. Create Alignment and Accountability on Your Team
With everyone working toward the same goals, it’s easier to create alignment across teams and work toward those goals. This type of alignment allows for improved collaboration and accountability—with specific milestones and responsibilities outlined on your digital transformation roadmap, there is never any question of what work needs to be done or who is responsible for that work.
Everyone involved in the digital strategy workshop will express their preferences, their vision and their pain points. This will help set the stage for a productive conversation and ensure that the workshop meets the expectations of all departments.
This alignment is critical when implementing any type of major change in your organization. If your team’s leaders have a seat at the table when decisions are made and goals are set, you’ll have an easier time getting support across your organization.
Leaders—both managers with formal titles and informal leaders that hold clout among their peers—have a unique understanding of what it takes to communicate changes to the rest of the team. If they have insight and input, they’re more likely to understand the reasons for change and paint it in a positive light to their peers.
4. Determine Metrics for Success
It’s not enough to just set goals and assume everyone is working toward them. There are several measurements and key performance indicators, or KPIs, that can help measure performance and determine success along the way. Different organizations have different needs, and we understand how to work with clients in a wide range of industries.
As part of your digital transformation roadmap, you’ll not only determine goals that need to be achieved to work toward digital transformation, but also what those KPIs are and how frequently they should be measured. Based on the SMART goals you set, you'll select the KPIs that need to be regularly measured to meet your goals.
Most goals will have quarterly check-ins, and reporting at the end of the quarter will help determine if progress is being made toward those goals. With digital tools and tactics, you’ll also be able to identify opportunities to optimize the performance of those tools, and ways to further increase ROI and process efficiency.
5. Set Your Team on a Path for Transformation
As you prepare to embark on a journey for digital transformation, it's essential to be prepared in as many ways as possible. A digital strategy roadmap will ensure not only that your organization is mentally prepared, but financially prepared before making decisions about digital transformation.
With complete alignment on desired outcomes, you'll understand the investment you need to make to reach those outcomes. The roadmap you'll produce in your digital strategy workshop will help guide your organization through costly implementation decisions and determine the best investment of both time and cash resources along the path.
These are just a few of the benefits of a digital strategy workshop. In addition to these benefits, you’ll leave the workshop with a set of documented recommendations, goals, and checklists to help your organization improve profitability, efficiency, and technology. Our expert team will help guide the conversation based on proven methods and detailed research specific to your organization, industry, and target audience.
Interested in learning more about how a complimentary digital strategy roadmap workshop can help your organization meet revenue goals, improve profitability, and exceed the expectations of both your customers and your team? Let’s start a conversation.
