Leadership Support:

If you’re reading this, you already understand the importance of digital to your business. For many brands like yours, digital is the difference between sustainable, scaleable growth and the vast plains of the revenue bar chart’s plateau.

Digital change can be something as simple as a few e-forms and some automatic process flows.

But who plans to stop there?

Digital Transformation on the other hand, can represent a significant shift in a business - so it is careful to keep a handle on where you are, where you’re going and being sensitive to the legacy that’s worth keeping and maintaining your audience which may have been whole careers in the making.

It is key that you show your leadership team that you understand these issues and demonstrate how your digital change project will carry the brand forward, rather than erasing it and replacing it with the next, shiny, new thing.

If you can strike the balance between continuity and digital evolution, you will massively improve your chances to get your project underway.

Be clear about the ROI

It’s no secret that financials are top of mind for any executive listening to your presentation that involves making an investment into your project. Often, no matter what you present or how you present it, the leadership team will turn straight to the financials page and work backwards to determine how the plan will fit into the organisation and its overall budget- that’s if there even is a budget for your type of project.

The stark beauty of your digital project is that the results are inherently measurable. The outcomes and actions are recorded, you can demonstrate conversions, usage, engagement, views or whatever other metric you label them as.

Real live data gives digital champions like you the best opportunity to provide fact based case for digital.

So how can you do that?

It can be easy and cheap using batch testing and case studies. Use a handful of free services to execute a shadow of your proposal to measure the benefit.

Eg: If it is a range of e-forms and automatic process flows, you can use a sample of your staff or client base to engage with these for a couple of weeks and write your case study from the data you collected.

Make the project, fun, engaging, familiar and inclusive

You probably don’t have a leadership team of technical people - and that’s fine - but you need to tailor your approach - be careful to avoid the technical features and focus on the benefits and outcomes.

They don’t want to know about how flexible the SQL database is, they care about having live status reports available on demand via their custom dashboard.

Remembering that from their end, the particulars and strategies of running of their business will be largely the same, what needs to be done is to make all those processes easier, more seamless and interact with each other better to provide efficiency and effectiveness to their processes.

Managing to make the pitch of your project engaging and fun can be a tall order - so don’t be too ‘wordy’ in your presentation - consider use infographics, video and interactive graphics to make the prezzo more exciting and engaging. Show them what you’re proposing and you will have to talk about it less.

Make sure that everyone is up to speed

Your leadership team is likely flat out dealing with 4386 other things, so don’t make the mistake of assuming that they are up to speed with what you are doing and the progress that has been made.

If you are using a tool like Jira to manage the project process - assume they’re not looking at it and at your progress meetings recap what was signed off last time and what you’re about to cover off now.

Progress meetings are the best time to share your project timeline or burndown chart against the project budget and show everyone that things are on track.

Don’t put your leadership team in a position where they’re going to be chasing you for information and remember - they agreed on a financial budget to realise a series of benefits and outcomes - give the project information back to them in this context too.

Make them look good

Just like you report to them, they report elsewhere. Keep in mind that they are part of the leadership team because they have the organisation's best interests at heart and they’re good at delivering on them, but there is also a measure of self interest too.

Everyone likes and expects to be rewarded when their actions benefit the business. In a corporate leaders case, this means getting credit for making some smart decisions around the approval of a particular successful digital transition project.

Engaging someone in the leadership team as the project ‘sponsor’ gives the wider group optics over their role in your project and makes them the bridge between your team and the executive team which brings with it the opportunity to accept credit for playing their part in the project.

Be strategic

Managing to put together a good project pitch is not easy. It will take time and effort and most people will have one opportunity to put it out there to get a result.

If you are part of a larger organisation then you will likely have a number of people in your leadership team. Consider avoiding the group pitch and explore the option to take it to selected individuals first.

Map your leadership team, work out who could be your champion and pitch them. Make it clear you would like them to ‘sponsor’ the project and if you can get them excited about it, they will take it to the wider group on your behalf and help get it across the line.

If at first you don’t succeed- pitch someone else - you may have a number of opportunities to get it across the line in this way.

Always keep in mind that the business is there to make money and provide returns for investors. While there will also be cultural and qualitative benefits in a project like this, you project should be pitched as a path to being able to do business better, with less work and provide opportunities that don’t already exist.

So, go pitch it!