At Conway & Co, we’ve spent many hours supporting consumer brands and retail businesses to get fit for digital growth. And if there’s one thing we’ve learnt, it’s that no one in the company cares until they see positive results. Small visible results create the buy-in you need to start a company-wide transformation. We’ve done it many times before and always followed seven indispensable steps.

1. Warn the board

The first step in creating internal buy-in is a tough one. It’s telling the board that implementing a digital commerce strategy will hurt. Digital transformation is hard and expensive and has to take into account people, technology and learning. 

There’s no getting around it. It can take up to three years with no short-term results whatsoever. There will be times that you’ll all wonder why you ever invested so much time and money in it.

The organisation’s leaders need to know and understand that it will be painful. A tech plan is not about craning in an isolated block of code or functionality; digital change is about people as much as it is technology.

There are thousands of components to a successful digital strategy, all interconnected. You need the board to play the long game. During tough times, they need to remember your plan's outcomes. Then, they must be willing to suffer and bleed to withstand the resistance. 

Because resistance there will be.

2. Explain your plans (but don’t expect people to care)

Next up is telling the rest of your organisation about your plans. We know, we’ve just told you to come off that soap box, but hear us out. Although explaining your plans to people in the organisation won’t create buy-in, transparency is everything. In fact, it’s one of the things that Silicon Valley tech companies get right compared to more traditional companies. who tell people further down the pyramid only what they ‘need to know’. 

Take on the mantle of promoting your plans in the early days of your implementation, but don’t be shocked and don’t take it personally if nobody cares, and remember, you need skilled people and  a clear mission and mandate for systematic change.

3. Hire middle management and get ready to babysit

The success of your digital commerce strategy depends on your middle management. 

They’re the ones who take your strategy and put it into action. So, we always recommend you bring in a new management level as you roll out your plans. This might seem counterintuitive as it puts another layer between you and the people you want to bring along for the ride, but you’ll find it worthwhile.

Now, the bad news. You’re going to spend a lot of time babysitting your new middle managers, chasing them for answers - and they’re not going to like it. You need to be aware of the level of resistance you’re likely to encounter. 

We always ask two questions that may get on people’s nerves but help crystallise what we’re doing in their minds. Those questions are:

• What is the value of this action? It doesn’t have to be monetary, but there needs to be a purpose that you can measure

• By doing this, what are we not doing?

4. Make one change at a time

We’ve talked about how when you roll out your digital commerce strategy, people won’t care. Whether they’re team leaders, developers, investors or anyone else in your organisation, they will need to see some results before they can believe in your plans. However, it’s a bad idea to take this apathy and turn it into outright hostility. Instead, build credit slowly, with small successes proving your ideas' worth. This can just be small, tangible successes, but it’s good to show results within the first 100 days of implementation. 

This is why we recommend you implement one change at a time. Is there a significant pain that you can solve quite quickly? If so, start with that low-hanging fruit (low-hanging for you anyway; remember, no one else has managed to solve it yet) and build from there. As mentioned before, results create buy-in, not vice versa.

5. Repeat 10-15 times

You have a formula for success now. Few people may notice or care, but the number of people who buy in increases every time. So, carry on. Keep making those small changes around 10-15 times until people start to care and trust you. Then, roll out your initiatives around other departments in your organisation. Most people will soon be on board as your digital commerce strategy begins to take hold and it’s key to make these people ambassadors of your mission and message so they can help with change management.  It’s a signal that it’s sinking in. 

6. Be the salesperson

Once your ideas have taken root across the business, it’s time to step back from the frontline. Instead of an agent of change, become a salesperson. Spend your time walking around the company. Meet everyone, as many people as you can. Tell everyone. Tell them as often as you can. Rinse and repeat. Tell them what you've done and remind them of the goal, the achievements and the road and milestones ahead.

Be the voice of the strategy and the customer. Share insights that you get directly from customers. This helps show both a customer first strategy, and also that you care and connect with the frontline. Keep this one-on-one communication style up forever until everything is in place. It works.

7. Make it about people

Don’t make your digital commerce strategy about technology. Make it about people. 

This is all about helping people understand that software automates a process and a process is a way people do work. IT and software always gets the blame, but it's the people that need to change and adopt the process that the software defines. If not, the technology will be labelled as a 'system that sucks'. But the actual problem is in the process and the people.

As long as you keep talking and listening to your people, promoting your initiatives and gauging how it’s working, you give your plans the best chance of success. Then, when people are on board, you can start implementing that technology stack. You can create a seamless customer experience that aligns online and offline sales channels. And eventually, you’ll make a shift that turns your business into a digital commerce winner that knows how to navigate this digital age.