Effects of Data-Driven Digital Transformation on Revenue
Data Driven Digital Transformation of Your Revenue Operations
We live in a rapidly changing business landscape. If your organization is still relying on intuition and gut feelings to make decisions, your competition will pass you. You need a data-driven digital transformation initiative, and this must operate within a strategic, structured, systems-oriented approach to your revenue-generating operations. Here’s how to do just that:
14 Things Every Successful Data Driven Digital Transformation Initiative Does
1. Considers RevOps Interdisciplinary
Revenue-generating strategies should not be a siloed discipline within an organization. To be maximally successful, they should be viewed as wholly collaborative.
Sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and other relevant departments should not only be communicating but should be working toward overt, explicit, shared objectives and goals.
While there is a long-standing division between marketing and sales, the companies having the most success today are those that are blurring and even doing away with this departmental distinction.
After all, if you got sick and medical professionals couldn’t figure out what was wrong, they would put a team of doctors on your case. Financial growth within your organization should be viewed from the same perspective.
Growth is often treated like a specialization when it’s actually a multifunctional problem, and data can help solve it. Strides in your financials often only happen when you combine and implement organizational process and tech together in a meaningful way.
2. Looks to the Future
Digitizing the data environment is all about looking to the future. This applies both to your individual organization and the means by which you achieve successful digital transformation.
In terms of your organization, your goals should all be growth oriented and future facing. The data you collect should help you reach those future objectives.
As far as the technologies you choose, don’t use the past as your benchmark. To gather, to analyze, and to utilize the right kinds of data, you need the right kinds of tools, and that likely means branching out from what you’ve always done or always used. A planned evolution of data collection isn’t always comfortable, but it’s often necessary for real results.
3. Views Digital Technology as a Force Multiplier
With the advent of the Internet, it became increasingly clear to many businesses that technology could be a powerful and profound means of transforming a company’s potential.
This digital transformation trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. By 2026, it’s estimated 65 percent of B2B organizations will move from decision-making that’s driven by intuition to data.
While every organization will have different specific tools to help them reach their individual goals and objectives, there is a constant among successful entities: embracing technology as a vital part of their evolution of data strategy.
Remember, digital transformation can mean whatever you want to your organization. As long as you are effectively harnessing technology, strategically utilizing the data to reach your goals, and your specific objectives are driving transformation, these efforts can have a positive impact on your bottom line
4. Takes a Systems-Based Approach
What does a functioning digital transformation strategy look like? One key component is viewing your organization as a series of interconnected systems. What exactly does that mean, though?
It means not thinking of your revenue generation as a bunch of disparate people, teams, or departments. It’s thinking about it as a cohesive system. It’s acknowledging that changing one aspect in a department here will have a ripple effect that changes many things for many departments.
In a company, nothing happens in a vacuum. Like an ecosystem, everything impacts everything else.
When thinking about financial opportunities and the integration, optimization, and implementation of the strategies and tactics to maximize those opportunities, it’s important to remember that your organization is not just a bunch of separate people working together. It’s a system. When your technology, data, people, and processes all work together toward a common purpose, you see better, more impactful results.
5. Incorporates a Buyer-centric Strategy
In successful organizations, data helps them create a more seamless customer experience. They use carefully curated data from their technology to facilitate this buyer-centric approach. A data environment, for example, can help transform the customer experience for the better.
This accomplishes several key things:
Creates loyal customers.
Serves as an important differentiator between you and your competitors.
Generates positive word of mouth about you and your brand.
Increases the overall account value of each customer through continuous opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
Customer experience should never be a buzzword in your organization. It should be concretely defined for your specific company and then improved through careful, thoughtful, thorough data collection and analysis.
Use improved customer experience and increased revenue as your starting points, and technologies you implement should support that.
6. Accomplishes Change from the Top Down
Transformation with data across your organization often can’t happen until you have the buy-in and support of leadership.
People within operations can usually see the organizational problems. Take silos, for example. If you realize you have divides between departments that should be more collaborative, communicative, and open, you know you need to deal with fragmentation and manage siloed environments.
People in operations, though, don’t usually control the capital. They don’t create the common purpose. They can’t logistically or financially do what needs to be done to drive the systemic growth that furthers the organization.
That kind of overarching data-driven digital transformation has to come from the top.
In this context, a good leader is one who understands both sales and data. It’s also someone who recognizes that it’s unreasonable for a single person to effectively manage every facet that contributes to organizational growth.
This is why the most successful companies are often those that embrace shared goals and a mindset that every department, team, and individual contributes to the company’s efforts toward success.
7. Knows Data Is an Organization's Biggest Asset
The most successful organizations view their data as an asset. Because it’s an asset, it has concrete dollars-and-cents value. It should be thought of and treated in this way. Without the data, digital transformation could simply be a way to marginally improve the productivity of your teams. With data-driven digital transformation, it can give you the insight you need to revolutionize processes and your financial opportunities.
You must find a way to monetize your data and to get a significant and positive return on this asset. When this happens, you’re able to initiate significant and scalable growth within the organization. While every transformation plan looks different, there is consensus on this point: data is the driver of this growth potential.
8. Operates with a Common Purpose
The most successful organizations view their data as an asset. Because it’s an asset, it has concrete dollars-and-cents value. It should be thought of and treated in this way. Without the data, digital transformation could simply be a way to marginally improve the productivity of your teams. With data-driven digital transformation, it can give you the insight you need to revolutionize processes and your financial opportunities.
You must find a way to monetize your data and to get a significant and positive return on this asset. When this happens, you’re able to initiate significant and scalable growth within the organization. While every transformation plan looks different, there is consensus on this point: data is the driver of this growth potential.
9. Puts Belief (and Budget) behind Your Revenue Efforts
It’s one thing to say you support your revenue-generating efforts. It’s another to throw your support behind it financially.
While there’s still a lot of disagreement between brands and vendors alike about what rev ops even means, more and more companies are dedicating their budgets to it. Chief revenue officers are routinely seeing their budgets expand.
If you want significant improvements in your revenue-generating opportunities, you’ll need to implement this budgetary and mental shift in your organization as well.
10. Digital Transformation and Data Management Must Be More and More Strategic
The point of gathering, analyzing, and making decisions around data is that you want to move away from gut feelings and toward a more strategic, objective way of solving organizational problems. Strategy and good data must be at the forefront of these efforts.
This encompasses every step from setting your goals to improving the customer experience to knowing when and how to scale your efforts.
One part of this overarching strategy should entail how to address data fragmentation and manage the resulting information. Lots of companies know they need to be using data to make decisions; fewer companies can successfully do it.
Why is there this disconnect? Data is often proliferated across multiple channels and management systems. Add in organizational silos, and this increases the chance of data being available without all departments even being aware of its existence.
If your organization is large enough (or intends to scale), you need a repository of truth where your data can reside. Everyone needs to have access, and everyone needs to know where this data lives.
Bad data leads to bad choices. Clean, reliable data allows you to make more strategic, more effective, more impactful decisions.
11. Adapts with a Changing Business Landscape
Nothing stays the same forever. This is as true in business as it is in life.
The goal should be to build a strategic framework that can grow and adapt as you and the business landscape evolve over time. The specific measures and processes that plug into your framework should be adaptable. This way, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time there’s a shift within your organization or the greater business landscape.
The global shift to remote work and its impact on revenue-generating efforts is a prime example. Nobody could have anticipated this widespread and significant disruption to how we work. The companies who came out on top were those who had a nimble, agile mindset and an overarching strategy that allowed them to pivot quickly.
12. Changes How the Money Works
You can tell where a business has its values based on where and how the money is distributed. In business, you can always follow the money.
That’s why so many organizations have chosen to switch up their compensation models. This can manifest in several different ways:
Eliminating departmental distinctions at all levels by applying one compensation model to all workers.
Implementing compensation around a common purpose, meaning everyone is compensated for the same goal, outcome, or objective.
Making the importance of data clear by compensating employees based on the cleanness of that data. (Remember, bad data leads to bad decisions!)
While the specifics of these programs differ, they have one thing in common. They alert employees to what the business prioritizes and values because it’s where they are choosing to invest their money.
13. Embraces Accountability
When digital marketing broke onto the scene, people liked it because it was accountable. You could look at the data and see if an initiative was working, not working, or had the potential to be optimized.
These principles have since been applied to business areas outside marketing alone. The most successful companies are those applying this data-driven viewpoint to all their systems and processes.
With accountability, however, comes the need to accept that you might not like the results your data is telling you. While implementing your data efforts, you must simultaneously ensure there’s a willingness throughout the organization (at all levels) to follow where that data leads.
14. Acknowledges the Importance of Adoption
Without technology, there is no data, and without adoption, there is no reason to have the technology at all. If your people aren’t effectively, correctly, and enthusiastically using the technology you choose, you will not see a favorable return on that investment. You will also not gain the data insight that has the potential to be so transformative for your organization.
Adoption is a piece of this puzzle that is often overlooked, and it can have incredibly detrimental effects on your revenue-earning opportunities.
It’s equally important to prioritize adoption initially and on an ongoing basis. In this way, a strategic adoption program will include both onboarding and everboarding efforts for current employees and new hires. It will also include a host of other strategies to ensure your adoption is (and remains) strong.
Why Does Digital Transformation with Data Matter to an Organization?
Companies that rely on intuition alone to make decisions will be left behind. If that’s the case, then how do you get ahead? Data-driven decision-making and a structured, systems-oriented approach to the totality of your revenue tactics.
You can’t use twentieth-century ideals, strategies, or processes to manage a twenty-first-century business landscape. Your data strategy and organization must be updated and relevant to today’s best practices in order to stay ahead.
Technology has the ability to drive value and insight within an organization. It shapes all aspects of buying and selling in today’s business world. If your organization isn’t embracing data to make decisions, you are not only shortchanging your ability to make revenue now, but you’re falling further and further behind competitors who are.
Key Considerations; Common Objectives
When it comes to revenue opportunities and how you collect, analyze, and use data, here are some important takeaways:
In terms of results, gut decisions and intuition will never compete with reasoned, objective data.
In a constantly evolving business landscape, data-driven decision-making is essential to having (and sustaining) results.
You want to manage selling as a system as opposed to managing the individual sellers within that group.
Data is, arguably, any organization’s biggest asset and should be treated as such. It should be prioritized, monetized, and analyzed for return on investment.
Failing to harness data within a strategic digital transformation framework leaves you open to diminished financial results now and in the future.
Change is difficult, but if you want scalable success, it can’t be business as usual.
Learn More about Data-Driven Digital Transformation
Want to increase the revenue opportunities in your organization? Interested in hearing from a panel of experts how to go about that in a sustainable, successful way? Transform Your Revenue Operations for Growth is an on-demand webinar event. Watch today, or reach out with any questions.