'Digital transformation' is one of those phrases that gets thrown around so liberally it's almost lost all meaning. A bit like 'innovation' or 'synergy' - everyone nods along in meetings, but if you asked five people in the room what it actually means for their business, you'd get five wildly different answers.
And yet, according to Foundry's research, 89% of companies have either implemented or are planning a 'digital-first' business strategy. That's a big number. But here's what it doesn't tell you: how many of those initiatives have genuinely changed anything? How many resulted in a shiny new platform that nobody uses properly, or a strategy document that sits gathering dust in a shared drive somewhere?
I've worked with enough mid-sized B2B firms to know that the gap between wanting to transform and actually doing it is enormous. Not because the ambition isn't there - it usually is - but because the starting point is almost always wrong.
So rather than giving you a tidy seven-step framework (there are plenty of those already, and most of them read like they were written by a committee), I want to talk about what actually matters when you're trying to get this stuff off the ground.
This sounds obvious, and it is. But 'obvious' and 'easy' aren't the same thing.
Most firms have a rough sense that their digital setup isn't where it needs to be. The website feels dated, the CRM is held together with duct tape and good intentions, and the customer journey has more friction in it than a gravel path. But there's a difference between a vague awareness that things could be better and a clear-eyed understanding of how far behind you actually are.
I'd encourage you to think about this in three parts:
Your technology. Not just what you have, but whether it's doing what it should. A CMS that technically works but requires a developer every time you want to update a page isn't really working. A CRM that your sales team has quietly abandoned in favour of spreadsheets isn't a CRM - it's an expensive address book.
Your processes. Where are the manual workarounds? Where do things get stuck? I once worked with a professional services firm that had a brilliant team producing excellent client reports, but the internal process for getting those reports approved, branded and sent involved seven email chains and a shared Word document. The output was great; everything behind it was held together with string.
Your people's digital confidence. This one often gets overlooked. You can invest in the best platforms in the world, but if your team doesn't understand them - or worse, doesn't trust them - you've just bought very expensive furniture that nobody sits on.
The temptation here is to skip the honest audit and jump straight to solutions. We need a new website. We need to be on HubSpot. We need AI. Maybe you do. But unless you've properly diagnosed the problem, you're likely to end up treating symptoms rather than causes - and that's an expensive habit.
Here's something I see a lot: a leadership team decides it's time for a digital transformation. There's energy, there's budget (or at least the promise of it) and there's a vague sense of what 'good' looks like. But the objectives are woolly. Improve customer experience. Be more efficient. Get better at digital.
These aren't objectives; they're wishes. And wishes, however well-intentioned, don't give you or your team anything concrete to aim for.
A better approach is to connect your digital ambitions directly to your broader business strategy. What are you actually trying to achieve over the next two to three years? Where is your growth coming from? What's holding you back? Digital transformation isn't a thing in its own right - it's a means of getting somewhere specific. And if you don't know where that 'somewhere' is, you'll burn through budget and goodwill remarkably quickly.
I'd go further. If you can't articulate - in plain English, not jargon - how a proposed digital initiative will help you win more of the right clients, serve them better or operate more efficiently, it probably isn't worth doing yet. That might sound brutal, but it's a useful filter when you're staring down a list of twenty potential projects and a finite pot of money.
We've got buy-in from the board. Grand. But what does that actually mean?
In my experience, 'buy-in' often translates to a brief conversation at a leadership meeting where everyone agrees this is important, followed by very little in the way of active sponsorship. The CEO says the right things in the town hall. The COO nods along. And then everyone goes back to their day jobs, because the quarterly targets aren't going to hit themselves.
Real buy-in looks quite different. It means a senior leader (not the most junior person in the room) owns the transformation and is accountable for its progress. It means the leadership team is willing to make uncomfortable trade-offs - because transformation always involves trade-offs, whether that's reallocating budget, retiring a beloved but clapped-out system, or asking people to work differently.
And it means creating a culture where people feel safe to experiment and, occasionally, get things wrong. This is perhaps the hardest part. Most B2B firms, particularly in professional services and financial services, are culturally risk-averse. That's understandable - these are industries built on trust, precision and getting it right first time. But a culture that punishes every mistake is a culture that will never change fast enough.
I'm not against planning. But I am against the kind of planning that becomes a substitute for doing.
I've seen firms spend six months producing a comprehensive digital transformation roadmap - complete with Gantt charts, RACI matrices and a glossy executive summary - only to discover that by the time they're ready to start, the assumptions underpinning half of it have changed. The market has shifted, a key stakeholder has left, or the technology they were banking on has been superseded by something else entirely.
A better approach, I think, is to have a clear direction of travel and a rough sequence of priorities, and then get moving. Start with the initiatives that will make the most tangible difference in the shortest time - not because quick wins are the goal in themselves, but because they build momentum and, just as importantly, they build confidence. When people can see that change is possible (and that the sky doesn't fall in), they become far more willing to tackle the bigger, harder stuff.
This doesn't mean flying blind. You still need to allocate budget, assign ownership and set milestones. But the roadmap should be a living thing, not a monument. If it's still sitting in its original form twelve months later, something has gone wrong.
If there's one area where I see firms consistently trip up, it's here.
The temptation is to start with the technology: which CMS should we use? Should we go headless? What about Salesforce vs HubSpot? These are valid questions, but they're second-order questions. The first-order question is: what do we need our technology to do, and how does it need to work with everything else?
Too many firms choose a platform because it demos well, or because a competitor uses it, or because the sales rep was particularly persuasive (and they usually are - that's their job). Then they spend the next eighteen months trying to bend the platform into a shape that fits their actual needs, which is a bit like buying a house because you liked the kitchen and then discovering the plumbing doesn't work.
A few things to consider here:
Scalability matters more than features. Your business will look different in three years' time, and your technology needs to grow with you, not hold you back. That shiny bespoke build might feel perfect now but ask yourself whether it'll still feel that way when you've doubled your headcount or expanded into new markets.
Integration is where things get ugly. Most mid-sized B2B firms don't have a single platform problem; they have an ecosystem problem. Your CRM needs to talk to your marketing automation, which needs to talk to your website, which needs to talk to your finance system. If your new technology doesn't play nicely with the rest of your stack, you're just creating a different kind of mess.
Don't underestimate the cost of change management. The licence fee is the easy bit. The real cost is in migration, configuration, training, and the inevitable dip in productivity while people get used to new ways of working. If your budget only accounts for the technology itself, you're about 40% of the way there.
You know the drill. We need to be more data-driven. It's become one of those phrases that gets a round of approving nods in every strategy meeting, right up until someone asks what it actually means in practice.
For most firms, the data challenge isn't about having too little data - it's about having data scattered across fifteen systems, none of which agree with each other. Your marketing team has one view of a client, your sales team has another, and your delivery team has a third. Nobody is quite sure which version of the truth to believe, so decisions get made on gut feeling anyway, which rather defeats the purpose.
Before you invest in fancy analytics dashboards or (heaven help us) an AI strategy, sort out the basics. Where does your data live? Is it clean? Is it consistent? Can you get a single, reliable view of a client across your business? If the answer to any of these is 'no' or 'not really', that's where you start. It isn't glamorous work, I'll admit, but it's the foundation everything else sits on.
I've talked about audits, objectives, buy-in, roadmaps, technology and data. These all matter. But if you pressed me on the single biggest reason digital transformation efforts stall in mid-sized B2B firms, I'd say this: they treat it as a project, not a change in how the business operates.
A project has a start date and an end date. You deliver the thing, tick the box and move on. But digital transformation - if it's going to mean anything at all - is an ongoing shift in how you think about your clients, your operations and your competitive position. It doesn't 'finish'. It evolves.
The firms that get this right are the ones that build the capability to keep changing, not just the ones that execute a single programme of work. They invest in their people's skills, they create feedback loops so they can learn from what's working (and what isn't), and they accept that some things will need to be revisited, refined or even scrapped entirely.
That's uncomfortable for organisations that like certainty. But certainty, in a digital context, is a bit of a fantasy.
Rather than wrapping up with a neat bow, I'll leave you with a few questions worth sitting with:
There's no shortage of advice out there about how to 'do' digital transformation. Most of it is well-meaning. Some of it is useful. But the firms that actually make progress tend to share one thing in common: they start by being brutally honest about where they are and what's really getting in the way.
That's not a framework. It's just good sense.
And it costs nothing.
