As social media eats the world, we are seeing a number of departments transforming.
Transformation With Social Started With Sales
5 years ago, it started with sales, while the business driver is always more leads and meetings, social is a great efficiency driver. Or put another way, it allows you to do more for less.
We have been able to take sales teams and increase their output. What do I mean?
Each salesperson can sell one more meeting a week, so can get an additional proposal per month and so can make one additional sale per quarter. If your average deal size is $100,000, that is an additional $400,000 per sales person, per year, forever. For a sales team of 10, that is an additional $4 million per year.
Before the pandemic, companies took this additional sales and kept the sales team the same size. Where as we are currently seeing that people are able to reduce the size of sales (and marketing) and the cost (and cash) related to it, but enabled them to turn in the same numbers.
Business leaders are therefore heroes as they are able to maintain revenues and increase profits. During a pandemic.
Then We Transformed Human Resources
We have a client that has been able to cut their recruitment spend on advertising and recruitment consultants. While recruiting the top talent for the industry. While the pandemic has meant that there are more people to apply for the job, getting the top talent is still key to a business.
So What About Supply Chain?
In our discussions with CPOs we have seen a number of benefits of implementing social with the Procurement and Supply Chain function.
1. Speed
- social is enabling speed of communication internally across the business as well as externally with suppliers.
2. Reduction in Process Costs
- CPOs like every business they are under pressure to reduce cost of process. The first thing companies do is cut people, CPOs are looking at how social can reduce the cost of business as usual. The same way Sales and Human Resources (HR) have.
3. More With Less Personpower
- In line with 2. above, CPOs are able to do more with a reduced team. If they are going to been seen as a "profit centre" rather than a "cost centre" to show they can reduce cost while maintaining quality is a "hero quality" during the Pandemic.
4. Reach More Suppliers Faster - Building Resilience - With the new socially empowered salesperson who is providing insight and education. The CPO today can use this as a way to review their existing suppliers and maybe there is a suppliers out there that is a higher quality and less price. Social will enable you to see this and engage with those business, quicker.
Covid will cause disruption to your supply chain and social will give you inbuilt resilience and risk mitigation.
5. Link with Sales More Efficient
- Social needs to be looked at "in the round" Sales being empowered with social will impact other departments like HR. The same with Procurement being empowered with social, this will enable the company to sell more, to find and employ the best talent. To keep the talent you have.
6. Faster Innovation - Quicker Time to Market
- Social will enable you as a business to undertake market research, faster, as well as source material faster. During the Pandemic, supply chains need to be reviewed depending on local lockdowns and this will enable you to source faster.
For example, if you usually get your materials from Korea, if that company goes into lock down, you will quickly be able to switch to sourcing from Taiwan.
7. Social is Covid19 Compliant
- Business can use social as a way to work remotely and be Covid 19 complaint. If your team need to work remotely and the dealings needs to take place remotely, social is a massive enabling of this.
8. Sustainability
- Social will enable a company to comply with up and coming sustainability legislation. It will support, supply chain reliability, risk mitigation and transparency. Social is, after all, transparent. The CPO team could also write content about the work they are doing in this area and that is likely to attract sales and people who want to work at your business.
9. In line With the Points Above
, this will enable, CPOs to show they are adding value to the business. All teams need to be looking at ways to strip out cost, while working smarter and quicker. Social will enable your business do this too.
Anything that reduces the cost of a department within a business increase the liquidity and places the business in a better cash position.
Let's not forget, it's the business that invest in people and process during a recession that come out fitter. We all know that businesses went into this pandemic analogue and must come out digital. Here is an Harvard Business Review article from 2010, the explains which companies "won" following the 2007 / 2008 recession.
If you would like to know more, I recently wrote this article as well.
For manufacturing leaders, the 21st century has brought with it an operating landscape that mixes longstanding patterns with new factors that are disrupting the industry. Many manufacturing companies that have not evolved are out of business, while digital-native companies are making a range of products from cars to phones to running digital marketplaces. At the start of the 2020s, it seems the only constant is an intensified pace of disruption and a call for manufacturers to recalibrate strategies and operations to prevail.
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/manufacturing/future-trends-in-manufacturing.html
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