When it comes to adopting, implementing, and investing in technology for your business, it can be difficult to measure ROI, especially when it comes to money. But it’s worth taking a deeper look into the benefits that come with modern, innovative business technologies.
In this blog, we’re going to look into how new technology can lead to more success and growth and why investing in technology for your business is a key part of setting it up for a strong future.
Investing in Innovative Technology is Investing in the Future of Your Business
The most important thing to understand about investing in technology for your business is that it’s not about immediate financial gains. It’s a long-term solution that, over time, increases an organization’s effectiveness and efficiency by streamlining the way you operate.
Related: The Biggest Barriers to Technology Adoption in Business
Technology helps you use collected data to make informed decisions that lead to stronger outcomes, it removes speed bumps keeping your teams from performing to their highest ability, and it opens doors for growth opportunities that simply won’t be there without it.
Oftentimes technology can be seen by c-level leaders as a disruption, something that’s going to stop production, require training and a period of adjustment, and nothing else, but the bottom line is that this is a highly temporary moment that leads to a brighter future. Also, it’s the same thing many of your competitors are thinking and what’s keeping them from adopting the latest technologies, too. Deciding to take that innovative jump leads to future success and a massive advantage over businesses that were too afraid to make it.
56% of CEOs have said that digital improvements in business technology have directly led to increased revenue and digitally mature businesses are 23% more profitable than their less mature competitors. Additionally, the costs of falling behind can mount, too. A study from Cleo reports that businesses can lose nearly $500,000 a year due to mishaps and errors from old technology that loses data, halts production, causes downtime, and is slow to process orders or perform functions.
Related: 30 Technology Adoption in Business Stats
Investing in technology for your business not only provides a boost to your employees and customers, but it can also eliminate errors, waste, and losses associated with legacy systems.
How Business Technology Strengthens Organizations
New business technology strengthens businesses in a variety of ways, including some that impact the bottom line and some that foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. Here are some of the main ways that innovations in technology strengthen businesses:
- Make Informed, Data-Driven Decisions: Data-driven technologies like business intelligence helps businesses collect more data and structure it in ways where it can be effectively used by teams and departments to make informed decisions based on real trends. Without the technology to manage, structure, and build data visualizations and reports, much of this data would either not exist or go to waste.
- Fostering Collaboration and Communication: Technology that aims to connect teams through shared data or communication helps foster a culture of collaboration where experts from different fields (marketing, sales, IT, HR, etc.) can put their minds together to find creative solutions to problems that would normally not cross their desk. This unique ideation leads to major breakthroughs for new services, business plans, marketing strategies, sales materials, and more.
Related: What are Employee Expectations for Business Tech?
ROIs of Technology Investment
New and innovative business technology can provide substantial returns for organizations that are brave enough to commit to implementing them in everyday processes. From boosting the abilities of the sales and marketing teams by more closely tracking prospects to providing a stronger customer experience throughout the buying process, new technologies can help in many different aspects of business.
Measuring the success and ROI of these investments can be difficult though, especially as many technologies provide quality of life fixes to employees, customers, and users that maybe can’t be directly measured in dollars spent or earned. It’s similar to buying an employee a new computer, it won’t actively make money, but the job can’t be done without it (or will be done very slowly.)
With modern technology, it’s important to measure the ROI of technology investment in other ways, like production, satisfaction, wasted time, and other intangible ways that technology can elevate a business.
Related: Emerging Trends in Business Technology for 2022
For example, if a newly automated process saves your team hours and hours of time that was previously wasted by unoptimized operations, a business is not only saving money on labor costs but also on the costs of production as a whole (office operations, resources dedicated, etc.).
In Conclusion
When investing in technology for your business, it’s important to understand that not only is technology a way to accelerate growth by empowering your teams with the tools they need to succeed, but it’s also giving you an advantage over everyone else who’s too stubborn to adapt. It’s an investment in the future of your business that shows in the key areas of business that can’t always be measured in numbers, but in overall success, customer satisfaction, employee retention, production, efficiency, and growth.
Learn more about modern technology and why businesses need new technology by checking out our digital transformation services.
