Digital Sales leads are usually referred by your Digital Marketing campaigns. The digital sales experience should look and feel like it's part of your website and compel a buyer to purchase online. Its purpose is to convert leads on its own, but failing that, drive them towards your sales team or remarketing function. This facility is also known as an Online shop, E-commerce or Sales funnel.
Sales teams usually have limited capacity, forcing them to "cherry-pick" the leads most likely to convert. Digital sales facilities typically automate the sales process and engage and compel "hot leads" to buy your product or service online. This releases more capacity for your sales team to focus on developing the leads that need a "human-touch" to convert. In turn, this helps you achieve your target "Cost Per Acquisition [CPA]", (the average cost to acquire one paying customer) that your business needs to grow.
Not all digital sales models are the same. Douglas Digital is offering to help you navigate the myriad of options available to you, develop an effective strategy and manage its implementation for you.
...that allows for almost limitless customisation by your developers or by paying the experts in their respective development communities. For example, you may wish to modify the look-and-feel and layout to fulfil your user experience requirements or to comply with your brand guidelines, tailor it to your Digital Business Model and Value Chain or integrate it with another system like a CRM, ERP or other company databases. If so, this may need development.
Critically, any custom work will need to be protected from being overwritten by regular software updates. Software updates are essential to ensure the integrity and security of your digital solution. So, preserving any custom work may need IT development and testing to implement and manage the process appropriately. For this reason, we recommend engaging the development community to help deliver any bespoke business requirements.
As these free systems are often unsupported, you are taking a significant business risk and we always recommend paying for technical support. This support is usually available from the development community for a negotiable fee.
Finally, as you will be collecting personal data, there may be GDPR requirements to be considered e.g.:
- Capturing the consent of subjects for data processing.
- Anonymising or encrypting collected data to protect privacy.
- Providing data breach notifications.
Generally, these systems are favoured by small to medium enterprises (SMEs), with larger organisations often viewing them as too much of a risk to use "as-is".
However, rather than re-invent the wheel and build a system from scratch, some large enterprises use open-source platforms as a starting point for a bespoke system of their own. This can reduce the total cost of ownership.
To do this, sometimes they create a "fork" that allows them to avail of the base technology. Then they commission new processes to manage it going forward in terms of security, maintenance and feature updates. In turn, some of their non-commercially sensitive developments can be shared back with the open-source development community and enrich the platform for others.
Typical "Free" requirements
* Optional, but recommended
** If not already available e.g. for your website
*** If it's not a cloud based solution
**** You may need to seek legal advice
...most reliable ways to get your business online. Fully supported via a contract, these systems usually have to be up and running 24/7 99.9% of the time. They provide you with the support you'll need to implement it and deliver fixes to problems within an agreed timeframe. This way, it should only have a small and manageable impact on your strategic objectives.
Depending on your Digital Business model, these proprietary systems can usually support most of your Digital Strategy requirements, especially those which are an extension of an existing CRM or ERP system.
However, if your business has a requirement that is not supported, getting it developed for you may be difficult (if not impossible) or too costly. If you do manage to get bespoke development support, it may take a longer time, than a typical strategy requires, to get to market.
"Rent or Buy" requirements
...security and feature updates, testing and sometimes compliance updates too. This isn't free like it usually is with the other models, so the decision to build a solution should not be taken lightly.
However, if it's to be a source of competitive advantage it can be worthwhile or even necessary to grow your digital business.
This process is more time consuming than the other options, usually requiring more budget, processes, people and skillsets. It also requires a significantly longer lead-time to market i.e. months, not days or weeks like the previous options.
It's best practice to avoid "re-inventing the wheel", selecting a development platform that provides state-of-the-art common features, like account registration and login, for example.
Focussing on developing the unique features of your digital services, features so exclusive and innovative that they cannot be bought "off-the-shelf", will deliver the greatest value for your business.
Typical "Build" requirements
Whichever option you decide to use we suggest our "Framework for Success" may help guide your project towards success.
