Few people in the advertising and marketing ecosystem are better equipped than Sanjay Mehta to lead this online Masterclass on Digital Transformation. In our discussions with him, we were inspired to ask Sanjay Mehta to formulate a three-part series aimed at motivating founders and owners of mid-sized businesses in India to embrace digital transformation.
While Digital Transformation is a much-touted (and often incorrectly used) buzzword in Indian business circles, Sanjay Mehta’s series highlights the real growth potential that comes with the right retooling. This insightful series, ‘Digital Transformation 1-2-3 with Sanjay Mehta’, will culminate in a Zoom-based webinar on Wednesday, August 7, at 3 pm IST. The webinar is exclusive to 40 professionals on a first-come, first-served basis.
Masterclass #1: July 17, 2024 – Boards and Founders need to see “outside the box” for the multiplier effect
Masterclass #2: July 24, 2024 – Exploiting Opportunities, Overcoming Challenges
Masterclass #3: July 31, 2024 – The Specific Nature of the Beast
Masterclass #4: August 7, 2024 – Live webinar (Registration will open on July 31)
By Sanjay Mehta
Over the years, working with many companies, working with their top management or with their teams, what comes out clear is that the top focus of senior management is growth. India coincidentally happens to be poised at a very opportune phase. By and large, one sees increased demand and most businesses of good caliber are seeing good progress in their businesses.
In India, we also have a base of some good-sized businesses that are home-grown and run by the original founder families, after multiple decades. They are absolutely sharp in their own business. Often, we see the next gen also joining the business, often educated and trained abroad, in their respective field, and adding to the strength in the business.
That said, growth continues to remain a key motivator and driver for the owners and while they are doing all that they know to drive the said growth, are they genuinely tapping the business to its full potential?
At any point in time, a business may have multiple potential growth multiplier factors. Some of these are known to the business and efforts may be going on. Some others are known, but these are either not prioritised for the moment, or there is a recognition that they don’t have the right skills or resources, to take those up.
And then there are the third kind of growth multipliers about which the company is not aware of at all. Simply because these may fall outside their areas of competence of experience. Some could be technology-based, some could be through other means.
It is because of the second and third kind of opportunities that exist, and which are not being addressed, that a company or its Board or the Founders, need to keep an open eye and think “outside the box” to tap these.
In this case, the term “outside the box” can be a little literal also! To say that, at times, the understanding of the opportunity to multiply growth levels, may not be available at the existing Board level or with the team in the company. And that the Board must be open to consider outside expertise, either by bringing that into the board, as additional/ external/ independent directors, or as strategic advisors.
Once a strategic approach is defined well, an action plan is laid out, a monitoring and review mechanism is in place, the execution itself, may be something that the company’s internal team, or their existing partners/ vendors could manage. However, since the strategy comes from a level of experience, knowledge and skills that may not be available internally, that is where there is a need to be open to outside help.
As an example, let’s consider a very simple situation on first principals’ basis. Let’s understand this: that, a company’s revenues are a multiple of their number of customers, the number of transactions that the customers do annually, and the average value of each transaction.
So, if the company must grow revenues, they need to focus on:
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- Growing the number of customers
- Increasing the frequency of the customers’ transactions with them
- Increasing the ticket size of each transaction
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Maybe the company has high focus and skills on new customer acquisitions and they are addressing that first point well.
However, has anyone truly focused to figure how to bring the customer back to purchase more frequently?
Has anyone figured as to how we could drive the average ticket size of the transaction higher?
If asked, there is a good chance that team members will affirm that all these efforts are being done. But whether it is so, in reality? Whether the right skills and opportunities have been exploited to do so? Whether for example, data has been used well to enable this?
So yes, there is a role that data and technology could be playing, and maybe that is the limitation within the team. That they do not know the potential of data or technology for that purpose, or they don’t have the skills to comprehend potential benefit and ROI of such efforts.
Be that as it may be, this is just to bring to the fore, the idea that Boards and Senior Teams in companies may be lacking certain areas of skills and knowledge, and in their efforts to do better for the company, they need to be open to change with the times. And where today, there are maybe specialists for audit and legal or around the business itself, on their boards, maybe the next additions to the boards, or at a strategic advisory level, need to be people with subject matter expertise in newer areas that the company current lacks, such as technology and innovation, say, and utilize such persons to provide the further impetus of growth multipliers.
Next week (Wednesday, July 24, 2024):
Masterclass #2: Exploiting Opportunities, Overcoming Challenges
Sanjay Mehta is one of the pioneers in the digital world in India, having founded and spearheaded several companies: HomeIndia, Mirum (earlier SocialWavelength before WPP took it over) to name a few. He is also an author and commentator on all things digital, and beyond. He is an investor, mentor and also helps organisations – large and small – in their process of digital transformation. He tweets @sm63. Linkedin.com/in/spmehta
Over the past few months, I noticed that while buying stuff from e-commerce sites, specially stuff made by small players, mostly new entrepreneurs, I would get an unusual request. It would be in the form of a leaflet or a visiting card which would request the buyer to get in touch with them directly if there were any issues with product quality or delivery etc. One or two of them would even request not to complain to Amazon or give a negative feedback. They would reassure of sorting out the problems. There would be a phone number or a WhatsApp number and also an email id. The products I bought were either accessories or small electrical or electronic devices. This is an example of the same when I bought a phone cover recently.
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