How To Digitize Your SME Quickly And Effectively

We will start by specifying that digitizing your SME is not just about launching a web page. Although at this moment, opening a new digital sales channel is one of the priorities of almost all businesses, this action must be accompanied by others that seek to improve company processes. The aim is that digitization is not an added burden that consumes more time and resources, but that it achieves greater productivity. Some of the advantages of digitization are:

• Open new sales channels, something essential in the current situation.
• It allows expanding the company’s radius of influence, which can go from having a local to a national audience.
• Increase in equipment efficiency.
• Avoid mistakes (for example, in stock management, orders, or invoicing) that cause the company to lose money.
• Improve internal communication.

How To Digitize Your SME In An Agile Way

The new context that society is facing makes it more necessary than ever to restart, readapt, and reactivate the economy, with technology as a weapon. Thus arises the concept of digitization. Digitization is based on digitization and digital environments to make economic reactivation faster and more agile while being more humane, more flexible, and more sustainable. This requires a digital plan that impacts all areas of the socioeconomic system: the workforce, industry, innovation, the Administration, and, of course, SMEs, which make up the vast majority of the business fabric. Thus, digitization uses digitization as a tool to help the economy (and, as a fundamental part of it, SMEs) to get back on track in an agile way and to improve their prospects.

Five Steps To Digitize Your SME

To articulate all the change (at a technological and organizational level) that digitization implies, it is necessary to propose a roadmap that establishes the steps to follow.

1. Evaluate The Situation Of The Company

Start by analyzing your company to establish where you are starting from and how far you have to go. By learning about the digitization process before starting it, you can avoid making mistakes that waste time and money.

2. Define Priorities

Decide which aspects you want to focus on first and which can wait a little longer.

3. Set Goals

Typically, they revolve around four core goals: improved sales, improved productivity, greater savings, and greater control. However, it is necessary to establish more specific objectives. 

4. Look For Solutions For Digitization

The priority for many companies that seek to digitize is the creation of a website or an eCommerce. However, if this is not accompanied by systems that facilitate work and help automate certain tasks, the company can be overwhelmed by the process. Therefore, some of the technological solutions that can help you in the digitization of your SME are:

• Online presence tools. Like a website or profiles on social networks, which help to reach new customers.
• Accounting and billing software. That allows automating tasks such as the generation of budgets, invoices, delivery notes.
• Order management and inventory control. Opening a new sales channel will boost sales, but it also increases the chances that the company will have supply problems and stock-outs if it does not have adequate control. A system that brings together supplier and customer relationships will help you successfully digitize.
• CRM. The English Customer Relationship Manager or customer relationship manager helps to collect all interactions of customers or potential customers with the company. It is an important tool for SMEs that have sales teams.
• Cybersecurity tools. As backups, recover the information if necessary, and applications that protect the data from third parties.
• Cloud work systems. That facilitates work from any location and teamwork.
• ERP.  An ERP system (an acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning or Business Resource Planning, in Spanish) is an advanced tool that allows you to centralize various aspects of a company: accounting, human resources, customer service. It can help a lot to medium-sized companies when they have already started to take off. Choose the tools that you are going to use based on the needs of your company.

5. Learn Your New Obligations

Digitization entails new obligations, such as the processing of your customer data. For this reason, you must update yourself on the data protection regulations. 

Involve Your Employees In The Change

The human team is essential for the success of digitization. Make him a participant in the growth, communicate the advantages that digitization brings in his day-to-day life and train the team in the new digital tools so that they get the most out of it

Listen continuously to your customers

Digitizing your SME gives you tools that allow you to understand your customers better (for example, reviews on the web or satisfaction surveys on networks). Use them to your advantage to constantly improve your customers’ digital experience.