The Social Strategist - What does your 2023 Digital commercial strategy look like?

At many points in my career, I’ve been involved in the management of risk.

From task-based to business risk.

I’ve found the process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating risk, fascinating through the years.

The mere fact that good risk assessment and management saves lives, reduces waste, lowers cost and saves time is impressive enough but, the mindset and process also encourage us think about opportunity.

Opportunities for improvement, for progress and growth.

As time moved on my focus turned to business risk, often centred around cashflow, profit & clients.

I’ve seen some fantastic, active corporate risk registers in my time and some dreadful examples of stale, inactive box ticking exercises. I even remember a time with a board in the 2010s where the Chairman spent 30 minutes arguing that we should remove “Global Pandemic” from our risk register as it was “a ridiculous waste of time focussing any energy on this nonsense”…

Nowadays my focus is on managing modern commercial risk.

Every organisation we talk to is experiencing challenges . Many have problems recruiting good people and retaining the people that they have…but for most the challenge centres round three areas - pipeline - visibility - credibility

Pipeline = External sales

Marketing = Credibility & visibility

Even those organisations that have been fortunate to have had a couple of good years of sales have invariably realised that those days are gone or drying up and, they not only have no pipeline today…but they have no reliable mechanism for regenerating it.

For visibility and credibility, the stark truth is that old techniques don’t work anymore. That’s not a huge surprise as marketers only one tools, words. You can tell people that your product is amazing/class leading/world beating, and you can say you are ‘customer focused and market leading’…but so can all of your competitors.

The truth is that your prospects (the individuals within your target organisations) are going to make potentially a career-limiting mistake by choosing the wrong supplier and simply giving them data/arguments/reviews “pricing” that you’re better than the competition doesn’t cut it because the competition are doing exactly the same.

Your commercial world has turned to Digital and knowing how to operate and be successful in your Digital sectors is now crucial.

“As leaders, we are at a crossroads – Analogue or Digital..?”

Do we hold fast and keep doing what we are doing or convert to Digital commercial practices and take what’s rightfully ours...?

The Digital Twin of your sector is already in build. Companies that have rewired their commercial processes to Digital are prospecting, networking, growing communities, building new relationships, and converting all of this to commercial interaction.

The access point to your commercial future is through Strategic Social Media.

We meet leaderships team from across sectors who tell us they have no pipeline. They tell us they have no leads and are existing on historic relationships with those 1 or 2 clients that “always come to us”.

We show them what modern Digital commerce looks like, how it works and what they should see in return….it answers their problems on revenue, ebitda, recruiting, ,market share….and more.

Then someone usually asks the question

“How will we find the time to do this in our already busy days...?”

We hear this a lot.

The subtext in the introduction was “nothing we are doing is working and we are struggling to make ends meet”.

They now see a way ahead but are worried that it’s going to get in the way of all the things that they are doing that aren’t working.

This is why we talk about resetting the commercial brain of the company and the team to Digital.

Becoming the leading technical and commercial Digital influencers in your sector isn’t a ‘bolt on’, it’s the way we need to be working now.

Many of our clients realise this as we go through our programme and begin offloading things that don’t work and redefining their commercial processes for the modern age.

So, as we move into 2023., how does your Digital commercial strategy look?

Are you moving with the times or holding onto old ideas and method…more adverts, more emails, more phone calls?

Are you building Digital communities and ecosystems around your people or are you hoping everything goes back to the way it was…?

Eric is a Co-Founder of Crux Consultancy Limited who train and coach cross sector B2B teams in the art and science of Strategic Social Media through Social Selling & Influence. www.consultcrux.com