Where and How to Start your Digital Transformation

One of the advantages of having been in the business of solving complex customer problems for more than a decade or two is that you build up a significant degree of experience in spotting good and bad approaches to things like digital transformation.

There are two essential questions that you need to answer when you consider digital transformation for a business, especially in times of disruption and uncertainty.

The first question is simply: Where to start your digital transformation?

Understanding what parts of your business to transform is critical to delivering value quickly enough. And when markets are disrupted, the competitive landscape may be shifting, and customer needs are evolving, delivering value quickly is a matter of life and death.

The place to start your transformation, then, is where you meet your customer – in the sales process.  If you can transform that and build a better buying experience, then you can disrupt the disruptors and lay a foundation not just for survival, but market dominance.

When we look at businesses that are successfully transforming how they sell, businesses like Manitou, for example, we see a clear focus on delivering the best buying experience possible, even through non-traditional digital channels. And buying experience is everything. 

According to a recent Hanover Research study, 70% of B2B buyers have changed vendor preferences during the pandemic, and customer buying experience is a huge driver (in fact, Gartner reports that 89% of business now expect to compete mainly on customer experience).

So, focusing on your sales process – delivering a better buyer experience – is the “where to put your bets” anytime, but especially when the stakes are so high.

The even bigger question is: How to start your digital transformation?

This is what PROS has been focused on for three decades and it’s an area where we have developed a clear vision and goal, founded on proven technology and the path to get you there.

The fact is that there are a lot of sales and pricing technology vendors out there. The problem for most businesses is that transforming the sales process – really embracing the power of digital selling across every channel (digital and in-person), for every customer, and every transaction – requires more than just a collection of point solutions.

It requires an approach that integrates every step at both the operational and strategic levels.

It requires a vision for how to deliver on the full vision for digital selling excellence, and the incremental steps to get your business there, fast.

It requires, in short, the PROS Platform.

Our approach is simple. Rather than build a toolbox of disjointed solutions, or worse, force our customers to do the integration work themselves, we started out with a simple, clear vision for a platform that brings together analytic-based pricing management and optimization, sales quote-to-cash acceleration, and the real-time, self-service buyer enablement technology to power eCommerce platforms.

The PROS Platform brings all these together in a single, AI-powered cloud service that doesn’t just work together, but actively delivers value between solutions to accelerate your path to digital selling.

But just having a vision and a platform isn’t enough.

What businesses need today is more than just an idea of where to go, they need help in the steps getting there.

That’s why, in conjunction with industry analysts, sales, and pricing experts, and our global customer base, we’ve developed a digital selling maturity model that takes business from today, through the incremental steps to build value and deliver a better buyer experience, all the way to full, omni-channel excellence.

I’ll be talking more about both the platform itself and the maturity model and path to realize the full potential for digital selling in future blogs. But let me leave you with this – there is so much at stake, and so much opportunity, the only wrong decision today is to do nothing.

Want to learn more about the PROS Platform and the path to digital selling? Join us at Outperform, PROS free virtual conference experience.