Are you doomed, caught in the past, and lost with your digital strategy? At seminars and exhibitions, the hyped gentleman, wearing a blazer and a flashy pocket square, calling himself an expert is ranting about digitalization, Omnichannel, IoT and Big Data year after year. But you STILL communicate with your customers by phone or face to face. Do you feel like the global world is slipping through your fingers because the digital hype has passed you by?
Are you doomed, caught in the past, and lost with your digital strategy? At seminars and exhibitions, the hyped gentleman, wearing a blazer and a flashy pocket square, calling himself an expert is ranting about digitalization, Omnichannel, IoT and Big Data year after year. But you STILL communicate with your customers by phone or face to face. Do you feel like the global world is slipping through your fingers because the digital hype has passed you by?
Have you ever hoped you could take one of these experts with you to show you how it is actually done instead of just talk?
A Team Finland eCommerce Growth study report shows that there are currently around 6000 – 8000 ecommerce businesses in Finland. The vast majority of these are small businesses are run by only 1 or 2 people. Remarkable sales are also being achieved by only a handful of Finnish ecommerce companies. In the B-to-B sector, there are a few success stories. But on the B-to-C side, there aren’t any truly international big-time achievers.
Is it so, that the experts aren’t being listened to? What else could be the reason for the lack of international success stories? According to the study report, companies tend to be overly focused on technology and lack a great deal in commercial competence. I fully agree with this statement. Finnish companies have been doing international B-to-B trade for tens of years and digitalization makes global business transactions even easier and more fluent. But digitalization as such, isn’t always a highway to happiness. Besides the right technology, you still need a strong business idea and commercialization. This lets you take it to the global market with the right marketing and sales operations. The fact that we Finns are very competent in the digital technology field doesn’t, unfortunately, make us experts in B-to-C trade. Knowing how to run a successful B-to-C business requires much more than just knowing about tech. Our western neighbor, Sweden, has already had a lot of success stories in digital business, even before the digital revolution, which shows that their expertise was in commercialism, above all.
Digitalization isn’t rocket science. In Finland you can find terrific know-how in exploiting digital technology with good business ideas. In that sense, we are in a good position.
But commercialism is everything in business. A good story is still easy to sell and today it is even easier to spread to the world than ever before. Dare to question the ways companies are doing digital business today and try something different. And do not fear failure. It is something that happens to a lot of us on the way to success.