Carry Out a Digital Transformation Plan in Your B2B Business

The term ‘digital transformation’ does not tell business managers much. It’s merely a necessary action that mid-size and big companies should undertake to stay competitive. However, there are ways you can better understand the term ‘digital transformation’ and apply this in real life ways to your business. To do this, we will explain what successful digital transformation looks like, which companies have already achieved this, and how can you self-diagnose whether you are doing it right.  

Putting Customers at the Center of Change 

These days, B2C businesses are pushing their revenues to new heights because they are putting their customers at the core of their business. What B2B businesses may not realize is that they can apply the same customer-centric principles. At Pricefx, we innovate together with our customers and, thus, prove that in B2B companies, the customer can also be at the center of change. 

Examples of Customer Focused Change 

The importance of B2C customer focus within a B2B setting cannot be understated. For example: 

McKinsey & Company introduced the Digital Quotient® (DQ™) which measured B2B and B2C companies on the base of how well they harnessed a digital strategy. On figure 1, you can see that the B2C companies are doing better than B2B. It is not a surprise since, in the B2B world, the processes are more complex, the sales cycles are longer and the decisions involve many stakeholders. However, these are the areas where B2C businesses doing well can help B2B businesses to improve significantly*. 

Trends in Digital Transformation 

If you look at the last decade, you can identify a trend for successful transformation and what companies are doing in that area: 

• CUSTOMER: Harness customer networks and reinvent the path to purchase in line with their real behavior. 
• COMPETITION: Rethink the competition and build platforms that deliver a competitive advantage. 
• DATA: Turn data into assets that prove results in real–time. 
• INNOVATION: Innovate by rapid experimentation. 
• VALUE: Judge change by how digital transformation helps create the next business2. 

We would also argue that there is one more point to be made – the team. You are successful in digital transformation when your team is self-managed, self-efficient, and self-organized without endless documentation, auditing, and hierarchy. 

Real World Examples of Digital Transformation

Let’s have a look at two different examples of the application successful transformation and technology. 

DBS Bank

The fast-growing fintech sector in Asia put a lot of pressure on DBS Bank. They faced a problem: All of the young companies entering the market were fast, agile, and knew how to make money online.  

At one point, the new COO of DBS took a taxi. To his surprise, the driver told him that DBS stands for “damn bloody slow”. This was a wake-up call. Following this, the bank undertook many steps to transform their daily business. One of the changes worked from the premise that banks should be invisible yet provide the best service possible. By using technology, “cutting the waste” and optimizing the processes, DBS became one of the most innovative banks in the world3. They launched Digibank in India – a bank with no physical branches and wholly centered on the mobile experience. Also, in the future, the bank will leverage artificial intelligence-driven automation to reduce the back-office to the absolute minimum. Finally, there was no more linear hierarchy applied to the approval process for certain services. Instead, people had weekly face-to-face meetings to solve all cases in a fast and efficient manner. 

Hasbro 

The company that brought us games such as Monopoly and Play-Doh realized that they were focusing on the wrong target group. By leveraging segments of available data, Hasbro transformed and tailored its advertising efforts to meet the needs of its target consumers, using social media to run targeted ads while focusing on multiple marketing channels to expand its reach. Using an ad tech platform, Hasbro now drives sales by advertising products – impulse buys in particular – at the end of the customer journey on retailer sites. This targets parents with relevant products when they are buying for their child, a strategy that is proving very fruitful for the company4. 

Digital transformation has a company’s data at its core. As Hasbro pursued the data usage by utilizing a software platform in the right way, it opened up all opportunities to reach a new high and push the company to the next level. 

Digital Transformation with PriceFX 

At Pricefx, we aim to address all key six elements of digital transformation and help our customers achieve their strategic change goals.  

Our customers have always been in our DNA and are what drive our innovation process. Our customers are reinventing their sales processes, automating their pricing activities, giving better prices to their customer, while offering full transparency in pricing for all stakeholders. It is refreshing to see how many of our B2B and B2C customers have transformed their processes over the years and started to be the first choice of their own customers in the market. 

As a first 100% cloud company, we are one step ahead of our competitors and can cater to our customers in a way others cannot. The lineup of almost 100 customers speaks volumes about how we have generated value for all of them. PriceFX recently launched PlatformManager, which you can use to integrate your systems in just three clicks. In addition, we have launched the Plasma project which will help our customers to get an idea of how the industry in general is doing in comparison to a single company. We believe that data should be at the core of pricing decisions and that’s why we focus on this area to provide the best quality advice. 

In the last three years, the most common question asked by our customer has been, “How can I scale my pricing after I have passed the initial stage of growth in this area?” The answer lays within machine learning and price optimization. We are working on many tech innovations to assure that companies aligned with us can always come up with a reliable solution. 

Finally, the value of change through software cannot be understated. If you have a team that is ready to work with you on a daily basis, bring knowledge and experience accumulated over the years in the industry, and is flexible and open to the changes in the project, then you have the best possible framework to begin digital transformation. 

The way towards digital change is not easy. Nevertheless, think how much you can achieve if you utilize all the capabilities of the digital world and push for innovation.  

To learn more about how we can help you, click here.