In today’s changing business landscape, organizations are looking to future-proof their business and stay ahead of competitors. Making that happen requires agility.
To pave the way for your own business agility transformation, we’re sharing five actionable takeaways to help your organization quickly adapt as you face changing market trends. Hint: These action steps have a lot to do with the positive impact that digital channels can have on your business.
What is business agility? Why is agility important in business?
Business agility is the ability to assess external forces, internal challenges, and emerging opportunities and then use a future-focused perspective to make fast-paced but intentional changes.
In the face of changing market trends, slow-moving business decisions will not cut it. Leaders cannot fail to evolve and embrace digital innovation that places their customers at the center of their business strategy.
Agility is crucial for staying competitive and setting your business up for success, no matter what external or internal factors come into play. This requires being proactive rather than reactive.
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is data-driven marketing. Rapidly evolving technology has elevated expectations for B2B and B2C digital customer experiences. Delivering on seamless experiences is non-negotiable: 88% of buyers stated they’d turn to a competitor if a supplier’s digital channel couldn’t keep up with their needs.
This means businesses have to deliver personalized, effective experiences or they risk losing market share to competitors. The good news? Increased digital interaction broadens your access to immense amounts of customer data.
Harnessing the power of your customer data allows you to remain agile because it can provide real-time consumer insights that drive responsive decisions. With data-driven marketing, you’ll be able to efficiently optimize the customer experience. This ability to gain insights, run tests, evaluate results, and make quick changes will in turn improve marketing ROI.
Assess the Impact of External Forces on Your Business
Change is a constant, and external undercurrents will always affect businesses. That landscape involves a number of complex factors that impact individual companies in different ways: economics, society, technology, environment, politics, and legal factors.
Consider all the interactions that occur within and between each of these areas. Each area involves different actors — customers, employees, competition, skills, expectations, ideas, resources, and more — that push or pull on your business through an exchange of value.
Managing these external factors in a way that supports business growth is a challenge. The important part is how business leaders handle these ever-changing challenges.
Maintain a Broad Strategic View
Today’s leaders need to have a broad strategic view — looking at the full spectrum of opportunities and threats happening right now. It’s not just about focusing on one predicted future, but multiple dynamic possibilities. This perspective promotes agile business intelligence and allows you to create strategies that stand up against uncertainty and evolve for the long-term.
To find success, consider scenarios over forecasts and create playbooks instead of plans. Strive to keep a broad view of time that encompasses both the future and present, anticipate changes that could have an impact on your business, and be poised to adapt by mapping out alternative options and embracing innovation.
Implement Digital Capabilities to Meet Customer Expectations
To stay competitive, organizations need to focus on digital initiatives that support long-term strategy. Now is not the time for makeshift solutions and short-term workarounds. It’s about taking a fresh look at the customer experience — from start to finish — and developing digital capabilities that meet customers’ heightened expectations and build ongoing relationships.
Outdated IT infrastructure, software, and systems will hold your business back. Small iterations to a legacy system may seem like it saves time or money, but over time, this option can generate more sunken costs and slow the process to scale — and eventually require a full refresh anyway.
It can feel like a leap to move to a new product or vendor, but often that transition is more strategic, especially for the ability to integrate and scale.
Learn more about how we helped our client Merz deliver industry-leading digital experiences using agile and adaptive ecommerce.
Strengthen Your Internal Team Alignment
Internal alignment is essential for successful digital evolution. This alignment requires a clear vision and common goals that are communicated across the organization.
To create and carry out an agile business strategy, be sure to involve the right people in decisions, and then do the work to get internal stakeholders on board. This may involve breaking down resistance, communicating the benefits, encouraging an openness to change, and instilling confidence in the ability to evolve.
Everyone in the company has to have an understanding of the importance of digital transformation and what that uniquely looks like for your business. With a high level of collaboration and creativity, cross-functional teams are key to increasing agility and meeting business goals.
Embrace Digital Transformation
Agility has to run across all aspects of your business — from strategy and technology to people and processes.
Today, enterprise business agility requires a digital-first approach. It requires strategies that truly support digital transformation, not just change for the sake of change.
Digital transformation involves making space for experimentation and innovation, adding a healthy dose of speed with agile business processes, and — when the time is right — accelerating to scale. Digital transformation makes business agility possible.
To boost your business agility during changing market trends, contact an Avionos digital transformation team member or download our “Continuous Evolution: The New Normal” white paper.
