By now, digitalization has accelerated for almost all industries, in one way or another, and many companies have found their operations improved as a result: new and more efficient ways of working, old processes upgraded, time and cost savings. But how can companies get the greatest benefit from digitalization?

People Matters asked Yuji Funawatari, Managing Director of the DAIICHI JITSUGYO ASIA Group (DJK), about how his company has been digitalizing and how this has played out in the last six months or so. DJK is a trading company specializing in industrial machinery and equipment for a variety of fields, and COVID-19 poses major sales challenges to its business because the fall in consumer demand, along with the problems faced by industries such as automobile manufacturing, means that many of its customers have postponed their investments in production lines. On top of this, the inability to network and meet new customers has affected their ability to build a new sales pipeline.

The challenge of taking customer relationships online

"Keeping in touch with our existing customers has not been a problem, but gaining new accounts has been more difficult," Funawatari explained. While online communication, he said, has worked to maintain customer relationships and has even led to large time and cost savings on the associated business travel, it has been significantly more challenging to gain the trust of new prospects virtually.

To handle this challenge, DJK adopted digital tools specifically designed for managing contact information and customer relationships. The objective was to make customer acquisition more efficient and collaborative by allowing team members to share customer information, and also to make the virtual connections more comfortable for both the sales team and the customers. Face to face contact is highly important for DJK's customer base, many of whom are manufacturers: business culture in the industry tends toward the more traditional, with importance placed on being physically present and interacting in person.

One way of meeting that preference was to bring in virtual tools that can duplicate aspects of physical networking. The exchange of business cards, for example, is a mainstay of customer acquisition for more traditional companies. So DJK adopted a virtual business card system that allowed staff and customers to exchange their contact information during virtual webinars and other events, much as they would have exchanged physical cards at actual events before the pandemic.

At the outset, however, these tools presented fresh challenges, especially for the sales team. A peculiarity of more traditional companies, DJK among them, is that the sales team sometimes follows a highly siloed model where team members keep account information to themselves, to the extent that even customer contact information might not be shared within the department. So when the digital system was introduced, some sales staff were hesitant about adding their customer information to the shared cloud database, which slowed down adoption.

Digitalization drives a more modernized business approach

The whole point of adopting new tools, as Funawatari told People Matters, is to use those tools to generate more profit. And in the process, the way the company operates can be improved. He said:

"I feel it is my mission to change our business style, to shift our mindset to be more global in our approach, and to encourage open information and cooperation."

He pointed out that DJK has four business divisions and seven regions in Asia, which work closely together, and digitalization presented an opportunity to create a common platform where all the business and regional divisions can communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Ensuring that new tools are adopted organization-wide is not easy, though. Besides the sales staff's reluctance to share their customer information, some staff also found a virtual working style awkward and had difficulty adjusting to the new tools, requiring continuous support. Others simply had no time to learn how to use the tools. Funawatari described a series of steps that finally worked well for DJK:

1. Assign responsibility for penetration of the new tools to a single person, who will learn how to use the tools and develop internal training materials

2. Assign adoption leaders for each region, who will push for staff to acquire and use the tools

3. Conduct company-wide training and demonstration sessions for all staff—this can be done quite easily online

4. Make the training video accessible online for staff to refer to on their own time

And, of course, leaders at all levels play a major role in adopting not just the tools, but the new approach.

"I think the role of top management is especially important for such an adoption of new tools," Funawatari told People Matters. "I have repeatedly addressed staff with my message that we need to move forward on digitalization. Together with the message, I have assigned training for regional leaders. I regularly follow up with them and keep updated on their progress."

A digital future with the human touch

Greater adoption of cloud and other IT tools is a business imperative to solve the challenges of today, said Funawatari, and even businesses in traditional industries will have to advance their digital strategy in order to survive. Between social distancing and remote work, the ways of working that people have been used to are upended, right down to face-to-face interaction and the accompanying business etiquette. Previously a huge sticking point for sales and service-oriented companies in Asia that wanted to go virtual, even the norms of traditional business interactions are now evolving under pressure from the pandemic.

Edward Senju,
Regional CEO, Sansan

"COVID-19 has induced a shift in the business communication and behaviors and pushed people to meet over online platforms and video conferencing," observed Edward Senju, Regional CEO of cloud-based contact management service Sansan, who helped facilitate the conversation between DJK and People Matters. "In light of this, the rule book of business etiquette is being rewritten."

The human touch remains important, however. Virtual interactions, even if made more appealing and convenient by new tools, is not a substitute for real, face-to-face meetings—people around the world have already realized this over the last six months of remote work, and those whose work revolves around building trust and maintaining relationships will have felt it even more acutely.

"Not everything will be digitized," Funawatari predicted. "DJK is a solutions company. We provide our customers with consultation, we offer them suggestions for improving their quality and efficiency. This requires human sensitivity."

Nevertheless, he believes that the changes brought about by digitalization will persist for his company: whether in the form of a globalized business approach, a different working style, or simply the new knowledge that people have acquired. "The world before COVID-19 and after COVID-19 is completely different," he said.

"Digital initiatives will continue as a part of the new world, and other circumstances will also change. In accordance with the change of the world, we ourselves need to change our working style and business scheme to survive."