Today almost every company is a tech company. And as we predicted in our 2013 book B4B, tech companies have been in a race to maximize recurring revenue and get better connected to their products. Those efforts, combined with classic IT activities like moving workloads to the cloud and automating daily activities via new apps, constituted the first wave of digital transformation (DT). But even after a decade, most companies are still not done. They have spent millions, still have lots of work to do and many feel unfulfilled by the results.
And now a second wave of DT is emerging. This new wave promises to force successful companies into some uncomfortable places as customers change which suppliers they prefer and why. As a result, TSIA believes two new pursuits will dominate the management focus of B2B companies for the next decade:
Complexity to Simplicity
Mastering Value Realization
The journey from complexity to simplicity is often talked about but rarely achieved in traditional B2B. With the exception of startups with a narrow product focus, B2B companies were always thought to be inherently complex with no realistic path to a simple, digital customer experience. That’s not only going to prove to be untrue, becoming super-easy to work with and offering instant time to value are going to become major market share determinants in almost every sector of the economy. They will cause a complete re-engineering/simplification of how companies operate across the customer lifecycle – from sales to service to finance.
As we move closer to the customer via our connected products we are also amassing more and better data about the business benefits of our solutions. Armed with better analytics capabilities and broader data sets we are not only going to be able to track customer value, we are going to use ML and AI to advance it. If companies cannot perform either of those functions they will fall onto the pile of highly commoditized “tools”. The same pile of “tools” that are exhausting internal IT organizations, frustrating CFOs, and overwhelming users. Tomorrow’s successful companies will stand out from the pile by not only tracking value but setting market segment or individual customer pricing based on it.
In this session, we will review where most B4B companies are today and where we are going next with our technology-driven business models. We will reveal the main areas that companies are under-achieving their potential and how they must think differently in order to master the Second Wave of Digital Transformation. Don’t miss this chance to get ahead of your peers and help lead your company through this exciting time!
Sponsored by FinancialForce.