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Critical Success Factors Of Digital Leaders
October 8, 2007

As we prepare for our webinar on Digital Leaders Vs Laggards this Wednesday we have to pick and choose between the 6 Urban Myths and the 5 Critical Success Factors of Digital Services. Both are outlined in our report and both are interesting to discuss.

The question of what to discuss has been rattling around my brain this weekend as I watched the games (Go Rockies!) and went to the movies (“The Kingdom”, an eye opening movie). I know its pretty sad that work stuff was rattling around my brain on the weekend – but there is good reason (or at least a good rationalization).

Although Andy Paparozzi (NAPL Vice President and Chief Economist) and I completed the report just before Graph Expo we have not really spoken about it much publicly. Each of us had few slides in a few seminars and we did a short Podcast together (http://media.libsyn.com/media/lubetkin/NAPL-GraphExpo2.mp3). But we have not had the chance to go into much depth about our findings.

The evolution of the 6 Urban Myths of Digital Services came from questions we were asked during seminars. These include:

• If you build it (digital services) will they really come (customers / work)?
• Are early digital adopters more successful then late adopters?
• Are the critical success factors marketing and sales, outsourcing, or an integrated workflow?
• Do companies offering digital services sell more then those offering traditional services?

We first studied whether there was a connection between when a service is first offered and the success of the company offering it, also known as the "early adopter advantage." Companies that were the first to offer certain digital services were able to create a new market and, at the outset, did have the field to themselves, but you can't survive forever on the early adopter philosophy because the advantages are short-lived; typically, within two years others see your success and build their own new and sometimes more advanced solutions.

Being an early adopter can be a success factor if it is supported by other components, such as a solid marketing or sales initiative. This is consistent with our research, in which many respondents have indicated that strong marketing or sales contributed to their success.

Consequently, we next studied whether marketing and sales were of themselves critical success factors, i.e., if activities such as hiring new salespeople proficient in digital sales, retraining existing sales staff, and/or focusing on targeted marketing efforts such as vertical market opportunities would guarantee success.

This was not supported by the research, however, which showed that not all companies we studied that have hired digital salespeople, hired sales trainers, or focused on specific vertical markets have succeeded. When we spoke to salespeople in those companies, they told us that the lack of success was not a sales or marketing problem, but a production problem—that insufficient competency to operate the new equipment hindered the company's ability to deliver on its promises and did not enable salespeople to grow its digital services business.

That led us to look at whether operational or manufacturing excellence might be the critical success factor— that and more will be discussed next Blog. And if your interested in hearing more, then tune in  Wednesday, October 10th, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm EDT for What They Think Webinar. The registration page is
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/webinarregistrationform.cfm

Posted by Howie Fenton on October 8, 2007 | Comments (0)