DIGITAL HEELS

l d D i g i t a l
Th e W i

n s f o r m a t i o n
Tr a e y
Jou r n h oStore
e
of a

k r u p t S
Ban
by Tolu Adelowo
Table Of Content
Preface ..............................................................................................................2
Always Start With Data............................................................................4
Create Digital Content Customers Want......................................7
Be Faster and Always on the e-Commerce................................10
Use Rewards to Drive Change.............................................................15
The Future........................................................................................................16
References............................................................................................17
About Author...............................................................................................18

1
Preface
Are people not buying shoes anymore?

This is a question that keeps playing around in Lara's mind.

Since Lara took over the running of the shoe store from her
mother, customer numbers have fallen drastically. Many of their
regular customers that had great relationships with her mother
have since retired and are no longer active customers.

Lara knows she needs to attract a younger customer base to

keep the business afloat. But she knows a younger customer
base will not visit their small shoe store located in an obscure
mall in Surulere. Worse still, they don't have a big budget for
marketing.

As Lara looks over the recent bills for rent and power, she knows
she needs to do something quickly. Otherwise, her mother's 30-
year-old shoe store will go bankrupt within 6 months.

Lara joined her mother's small shoe store business straight out of
university. This was not her first choice of careers. She wanted to
join a well-funded fintech startup after university. But her mum's
health deteriorated, and she decided to step in to keep her mum's
shoe store open. When Lara first took over, she had a simple one-
year plan.

She had heard a lot about the potential of digitalization for

businesses. She saw this as an opportunity to scale her mother's
business and possibly even expand to other African countries.

Her plan was to ramp up marketing to increase revenues. With the

extra revenues, she planned on launching an ecommerce
website.

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Her expectations were that within 1 year of launching the e-
commerce site, the store would double their revenue and even
expand to Ghana.

How wrong she was?

This is the story of a struggling small business that saved itself

from bankruptcy through the process of digitization. As with
many failed digital transformation initiatives, this small business
initially got it wrong by having a technology first approach.
However, through a series of experiments, mistakes and
doggedness, this small business eventually transformed itself
successfully and grew its business.

For all the promise digital transformation holds for small

businesses, almost 70% of digital transformation efforts fail.
There is a common misconception that digital transformation is
simply about adopting digital technology. Many business owners
rush into digital transformation initiatives believing all they need
to do is adopt the new age technology to get transformative
results. Unfortunately, this is not the case and so much money is
wasted with this kind of thinking.

The purpose of this short book is to provide a step-by-step guide

that small businesses can easily follow for digital transformation
success. Unlike other books on digital transformation, this book
puts less emphasis on the technologies and focuses more on
introducing a simple framework for digitizing business.

As we follow Lara's journey to save her business from bankruptcy

using digitalization, we will learn these key lessons that ensure
digital transformation success.

Let's get started.

3
Always Start With Data
Lara has to do something quick to get the business back on track.
As things stand, if the shoe store does not get a boost in their
revenue soon, they will likely have to close down. Lara cannot
imagine the shame of it. Her mother's 30-year-old business
legacy would be wiped out on her watch. She cannot let that
happen.

She needs to do some creative marketing to get some customers

into the store. But she knows the store does not have a budget for
marketing. As things stand, they are struggling to pay salaries.

As Lara contemplates her next move, an idea starts to form in her

mind. If she can get some of their current customers to do a
referral, she can possibly get some more business without
spending money. Lara immediately picks up the phone and
places phone calls to 10 of their loyal customers. These are
customers that have stayed with them even after her mum
retired. She asks each customer for a referral in exchange for a
limited time discount. And this plan works well.

By the next weekend, the shoe store gained 10 new customers.

And better still, the loyal customers that received the discount
also came into the store to take advantage of their limited
discount. Lara thinks she may be onto something.

If she can find a way to ask for referrals from all their existing
customers. they can potentially double their customer base in
the next few months. She can't wait to start.

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She goes through their books to see if there are any records of
their customers. She cannot find any. So, she calls her mother.
Lara is sure her mother would have a record of all their customers
over the years. To Lara's dismay, her mother never kept records of
customers. She still had the contacts of many of her friends that
patronized the business but beyond that, she had no other
records. That's when Lara realized they had a problem.

The shoe store had not kept any official record of customers in
the last 30 years of operation.

Many small businesses like Lara's shoe store do not have a

formal system for keeping records of customers. They may
know who their regular customers are, but they have no data on
their wider customer base.

No small business Digital transformation journey can really

begin without data. This has to be the first step for any small
business. Get your data right.

From Lara's case study, we can see how not good quality
customer data having can affect marketing efforts. But more
importantly, not having good data limits a business ability to
garner interesting insights that can exponentially grow the
company.

For example, a mother that buys a pair size 4 school shoes for
her child this year, is likely to buy a pair of size 6 shoes next year.
With such insights, Lara's shoe store can possibly send a
personalized email to the mother promoting their list of size 6
school shoes before school starts next year.

Such personalization efforts are what makes companies like

Netflix and Amazon really successful.

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Lara unfortunately has to put her grand plans for boosting
revenues through referrals on hold. They will need to build their
customer database first. Lara directs all their employees to
collect data on customers after each purchase. The staff have
even been given some leeway to offer discounts to encourage
customers to leave their personal information.

For now, all customer data and purchase data will be stored on a
google spreadsheet and the data transferred to Zoho CRM at the
end of each day. It's not a perfect solution but it works and most
importantly, it's free. But Lara still has to find a way to solve their
revenue issues if the business is to survive.

She cannot count on many new customers to find the store on

their own. The store is located deep inside one of the less popular
malls in Lagos, Nigeria. Moving to a more prominent and visible
location would be ideal but that is a cost they cannot bear now.
She must find a cost-effective way to attract customers to the
shoe store.

Lara wonders if Social Media may hold the key.

6
Create Digital Content
Customers want
Lara remembers reading a blog post on how content marketing is
a cost-effective way to attract customers. Lara thinks content
marketing may just be the best marketing option for the store. If
she is honest with herself, it is probably the only marketing option
available to them. So, Lara brings out her phone and starts
posting pictures of shoes.

After a few weeks of posting shoes, the store's Instagram

account gained some followers and a handful of customers
trickled into the store. However, it's not enough to get them out of
the woods. Soon after, Lara runs out of shoes to post.

Lara needs new content ideas that can increase engagement on

their Instagram handles. No matter how hard she thinks, she
keeps coming up short of ideas. She could hire an expert to help
them with their marketing efforts, but they just don't have the
budget for such an expense.

Out of desperation, Lara decides to repost their entire shoe stock

in the hopes of getting better results. After a few weeks of
reposting their entire shoe stock, the results were clear.

Their content marketing strategy was not working.

7
Many small businesses use social media solely as a tool to
showcase their products and services. They expect customers
to come across their products on social media and immediately
bring out their wallet to buy. Unfortunately, customers do not
behave in this manner.

When customers use social media, they are not necessarily

looking for new products to buy. Rather, customers use social
media as a tool to mostly alleviate boredom. To that end, they are
looking to engage with digital content that is sensory, interactive
and relevant to their needs (Rogers 29).

The second step in any small business digital transformation is to

perform a review of the digital engagement strategy on social
media. The digital content must be transformed to ensure that it
draws customers in and also encourages customers to engage
with the business.

The real advantage of a compelling digital engagement strategy

for any small business is staying top of the customer's mind. And
this is also true for B2B businesses.

A compelling digital engagement strategy is how small

businesses win in the digital space.

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During the course of her research, Lara notices that Instagram
posts that showcase people dancing or performing crazy stunts
get higher engagement rates. Lara half jokes with her staff that
maybe they should be dancing also. To her surprise, the staff
think it's a great idea. They brainstorm and come up with a plan
to do a video of a dance off between members of staff wearing
different designer shoes. Lara thinks this is a crazy idea, but she
is desperate.

Their first dance off video was recorded using Lara's phone. The
first dancer wore a pair of Zara shoes while the other dancer wore
a pair of Gucci shoes. The video was titled Zara v Gucci. And that
video was a massive hit.

The engagement on that single post outperformed all their

previous posts combined. The number of followers increased
and more importantly, they received a number of orders through
Instagram. Lara could hardly contain her excitement.

Over the next few weeks, more dance off videos were posted on
Instagram. Engagement rates on their posts kept going up. The
videos worked so well that the shoes showcased on the videos
always went out of stock a few days after. It seemed their new
digital engagement strategy was working. For the first time in 6
months, Lara breathed a sigh of relief.

But her relief was to be short-lived.

9
Be faster and always on
with ecommerce
The increased engagement on their social media channels
brought its own set of challenges.

Lara and her team were spending far too much time managing
customer requests on social media. They were inundated with
requests, questions and taking orders. And that's when the
cracks started to appear.

Sometimes, they would take orders for a pair of shoes on

Instagram that had already been sold to a walk-in customer.
Other times, they lost track of customer orders on Instagram and
lost some sales. Lara's shoe store needed a better way to take
and track orders or they risked reversing all the gains they had
made.

Many small businesses are too dependent on one-on-one

interactions for providing customer service. But customers want
customer service on-demand anytime. They don't want to have
to wait to speak to someone to get their questions answered.

Beyond that, customers have so much going on in their personal

lives that they would rather not have to speak to someone to
place an order. If anything, customers are looking for easy and
simple solutions that solve their problems. This is where e-
commerce comes into play.

10
Ecommerce is simply the buying and selling of products and
services over the internet. Every small business digital
transformation journey must include an e-commerce strategy.
Even for businesses that provide services. Beyond being able to
sell online, the real advantage of an ecommerce strategy is in
providing an always on and on-demand customer service.

With the right ecommerce strategy, a small business can simplify

their customer service operations without increasing staff or
costs. And more importantly, an ecommerce platform, lets a
small business receive orders at any time of the day or night.

With the extra sales they have made, the shoe store now has
some leeway to invest in an e-commerce site. Lara had wanted
to launch an ecommerce site 2 years ago, but things had not gone
according to plan. Back then she wanted the ecommerce site as
a way of just selling shoes online. But she knows better now.

It is clear to Lara that their ecommerce site must do much more

than just sell shoes online. The ecommerce site must be able to
address customer needs like recommendations, asking
questions and speaking to somebody. These are the things their
customers need when they come into the store. And she wants
90% of these needs to also be addressed online.

Lara hired a recommended web design agency to help design and

develop the ecommerce site. The agency designed a homepage
that showcased many of their recommended shoes. They
developed features to make it easier to place orders online and
provided more payment options.

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A Live chat feature was included on the site that connected
directly to an App on all the staff's phones. That way, customer
requests could be addressed on the go.

An FAQ section was added to the site also. Lara spent time
curating all commonly asked questions by customers to include
in the FAQ section. A support section was also included that had
numbers for customers to reach the shoe store by phone. Lara
felt it was important for online customers to have a variety of
options to reach them.

A blog section was added to the site also. Lara used this section
to showcase all their customer focused content.

With a bit of tweaking, the agency was able to modify the

ecommerce site to let the store input and track orders from walk-
in customers. This meant they could track all online and in-store
orders in one place and could see when they were out of stock of
any items.

Finally, the ecommerce site was connected to their Zoho CRM.

This meant they could track all online and in-store customer
details in one place.

Lara was really excited about their new e-commerce site. This
new ecommerce site was going to help automate a lot of their
sales processes. A lot of work and money had been put into the
site.

She was looking forward to sitting back and watching the orders
coming in. They spent money on a big launch of the ecommerce
site. They ran ads on social media to publicize the new
ecommerce site. They promoted the ecommerce site to all their
in-store customers. But after all that marketing, customers were
not rushing to use the site.

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Use rewards to drive change
Customers were finding the site useful for browsing their shoe
collection and getting shoe ideas. However, many customers still
preferred to complete transactions over WhatsApp. Lara was
puzzled.

She knew that her customers were comfortable ordering from

the likes of Jumia and Amazon. However, they seemed to behave
differently with their ecommerce site. Furthermore, their long-
time customers were finding it difficult to change their preferred
way of transacting with them. They were used to sending
WhatsApp messages to place their orders. However, Lara needs
this practice to stop because too many mistakes are being made.
She wonders if she should force her customers to use the
ecommerce site by shutting down their WhatsApp number. Her
thoughts are interrupted by a knock on the door.

One of her employees pops her head into her office. Lara's
attention is needed on the shop floor. A customer is making a
fuss about not being able to buy shoes on credit.

This is a recurring issue Lara has had to deal with since taking
over the shoe store. Her mother regularly gave out shoes on
credit to her good friends and loyal customers in the past.
However, as the economy took a downturn, these customers
started to default on their credit obligations. Worse still, some
tried to return the shoes after obviously wearing them out.

Lara had to mandate a No Credit Policy when she took over. But
this did not go down well with their loyal customers.

13
Many vowed never to buy shoes from the store again. Lara stuck
to her guns but the impact to the business was unprecedented.
40% of their longtime customers discontinued their relationship
with the shoe store. Revenues took a big hit and they almost had
to close down.

It was not until Lara took a softer approach and offered

significant discounts t before their customers agreed to get
behind the policy.

Lara learned a very important business lesson from that episode.

You cannot force your customers to behave in a certain way.

There are times in business when some activities must be

stopped in order to move forward. However, forcing that change
on customers or employees never bodes well for anyone. It is up
to business leaders to find creative ways to get your customers
and employees to change.

Digital transformations often fail because of resistance to

change. Employees can easily revert back to old ways of
working. Customers would rather not learn a new way of doing
business with you. And this is what makes Digital Transformation
so hard.

Organizations that have succeeded in their digital transformation

efforts have found ways to use a combination of accountability
and incentives to drive change. Let's take the example of
Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in the United States.

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In 2011, Walmart faced a similar challenge as it struggled to
integrate its online and offline channels. Customers still
preferred to go into the stores rather than use the Walmart.com
ecommerce site and mobile apps. So, Walmart decided to reward
its store managers and employees to promote their online and
mobile channels. Following the implementation of this reward
structure, Walmart's employees sprung to action and started
promoting the Walmart.com, the iPad app and the Facebook app
to the 140 million weekly in-store shoppers. (Westerman et al.
241)

Small businesses cannot force change on customers as Lara

found out the hard way. Rather, small businesses need to find
ways to incentivize their employees and customers to drive
behavior.

Lara really needs her customers to use the ecommerce site

more, but she has learned that she cannot force her customers to
stop placing orders via WhatsApp. She knows that she needs to
incentivize her customers to behave the way she wants.

She offers customers a 15% discount for buying and completing

orders through their ecommerce site. She also provides a little
incentive to her employees for encouraging customers to switch
from WhatsApp and instore purchases to online purchases. The
incentives work very well.

Lara's customers jump at the opportunity to get a deal. The

online discount works so well that even their regular in-store
customers convert to using the ecommerce site. Over the next
12 months, online sales grow significantly to contribute to over
55% of the store's revenues. Lara believes that if things continue
like this, they may soon be able to save costs on rent and go fully
digital.

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For the first time in a long time, Lara sees a bright future
ahead.tivize their employees and customers to drive behavior.

The Future
Lara expected her digital transformation journey to last for just 1
year. It took over three years of experimentation, mistakes and
determination to see her digital transformation project through.
And her journey is certainly far from over.

The digitalization journey never really ends. There will always be

opportunities to use digital technologies to gain an advantage or
make improvements. Digitalization is a continuous process of
understanding customer needs and then finding ways to adopt
technology to serve customers better.

The big takeaway from Lara's story is that success in small

business digital transformation is dependent on the mindset of
the business owner. A mindset that understands that there are
no silver bullets in digital transformation. What works for one
may not necessarily work for the other. But most importantly, a
mindset that believes that digital technologies can completely
transform your small business given the right commitment.

Whatever stage you are on your digital transformation journey, I

hope the lessons shared in this book will provide a north star to
guide you to success. in this book will provide a north star to
guide you to success.

16
References
Rogers, David L. The Digital Transformation Playbook.
Columbia Business School, 2016.
Westerman, George, et al. Leading Digital. Harvard
Business Review Press, 2014.

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About the Author
Tolu is the Founder and Managing Partner of Cousant - a technology
consulting company that is focused on delivering digital transformation
solutions for clients. As Managing Partner of Cousant, Tolu has managed
over 50 digital transformation and software implementation projects for
both local and international Clients.

Tolu is also the founder and Chief Digital Officer of PlentyTechJobs - digital
careers marketplace that serves the needs of employers looking to hire
Tech Talent for short to long term needs and Technology talent looking to
find their next IT job.

Tolu is a regular contributor on LinkedIn and has written a number of articles

on Digital transformation and Innovation. He is the author of three e-books
which are the 'The Business Leaders Guide to Managing AI Chatbot
programmes', 'The Case for decentralized workplaces in developing
economies' and 'The Rise of the Emerligent Economies'. Tolu is also a
regular guest on BusinessDay TV in South Africa where he discusses the
promises of Digital Transformation for Africa.

Tolu's professional career spans over 20 years with previous experience

working for multinational companies like Accenture UK, Royal Dutch Shell
Company and Lansdowne Partners. He graduated with a Master of
Engineering (MEng) in Computer Science from Imperial College London and
further holds a Masters degree in Strategy and Innovation degree from the
University of Oxford's Said Business School.

He has advised a number of early-stage startups and sits on several boards

including Fechrad Limited and Arthrimed Specialist Hospital.

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