What is digital business acceleration?

Digital acceleration is all about leveraging technological advancements to gradually (or in some areas, quickly) replace “old-school” methodologies that involved time-consuming physical or manual activities like traveling, mailing/messengering formal and informal business documents, local hardware-based demos, print-out record-keeping, and much, much more.

Everything Online

In the realm of sales and training, in particular, the primary driver for digital acceleration is simply the emergence of the cloud. Suddenly, our data and the software managing it are available anywhere we can log in. This business acceleration from the cloud and the entire mindset of maintaining hardware, backups, installations, updates, and having to be “in the office” have all fallen away.

Rethinking Every Step

Some roles, like sales and customer training, have seen each stage or activity completely replaced by a digital version. Consider the process of a salesperson or trainer just a decade ago:

• Inviting prospects or clients to a location – ideally, but rarely nearby for everyone
• Paying for travel, lodging, and food
• Hauling hardware to be set up and configured
• Performing a passive demo or training session, or spending time (often with the help of a sales engineer) setting up someone else’s computer.

…and this all assumes that schedules and travel arrangements remain as planned, with no last-minute conflicts, cancellations, someone falling ill, etc.
Today, this entire process can all be accomplished — with risks much more easily managed — using a cloud-based virtual environment. A demo or training session can be activated in minutes, with only a browser – from literally anywhere on the globe, for whoever you need to engage with. Minimal long-term planning, minimal risk.

Not just different…. Enhanced.

And the experience is actually better when it’s all digital: Your demo, POC, or training can be completely interactive, with the prospect/customer running an authentic, clean, bullet-proof version of the software, with no hardware or software configuration headaches for anyone. You can control the demo or hand off the controls, and you can track the process with reporting so you know who had done what, and when.

It’s all about improving KPIs

This digital business acceleration is the result of trimming both key profitability drivers – time and expenses – at each of these steps, across your entire team. As a result, you can sell more, train more, support more, all with the exact same number of employees being paid the same salaries. This comprehensive boost in productivity gives you the edge over those competitors too slow to follow, and translates, quite obviously, into measurable net gain in profits.