There are industries where digital arrived on its own. The customer was already buying online, the competition was already there, and the question was how to do it better.
And there are others where none of that happened. Where orders still come in by phone or WhatsApp, the salesperson knows every customer by name, and digitization doesn't appear on anyone's priority list.
We work quite a bit in that second group. It's harder, and it's usually where there's the most to gain, precisely because nobody else is there.
The real objection isn't technological
When resistance shows up, it's almost never "I don't understand the technology." It's something else, and it's worth listening to seriously:
- "My customers don't buy online." Sometimes it's true. Often it means "they don't buy online yet, because there's nowhere to do it."
- "We'll lose the relationship." This is the most legitimate one. In industries where selling is consultative, the salesperson brings real judgment, and a form doesn't replace that.
- "It's going to cannibalize the current channel." The fear that online will take sales away from the usual salesperson, who also earns a commission.
Ignoring these objections and pushing technology through is the fastest way for the project to end up as a site nobody uses, shut down within six months.
What works: adding a channel, not replacing it
The framing that's worked best for us is to not present it as a migration. The digital channel isn't there to replace the phone: it's there to take off its plate the things it shouldn't be doing.
A salesperson who spends the day answering "do you have stock of this?" and "how much is it?" isn't selling: they're acting as a database. That's the job the digital channel absorbs well. What's left — advising, handling an unusual case, maintaining the relationship — is exactly where the person adds value.
Framed that way, the salesperson stops seeing the project as a threat. And that matters a lot more than it seems, because they're the ones who know the customers and can make the tool succeed or get ignored.
Start with the boring part
In an industry with no prior digitization, the temptation is to launch with everything: catalog, cart, payments, tracking. We prefer the opposite.
The first thing is usually the least flashy: having the information online and correct. What products exist, what their features are, what stock is left. No cart, nothing else. Just that.
Two reasons. The first is that it solves 80% of repetitive queries from day one, and that's noticeable right away. The second is that it forces the data to get organized — which in these industries is usually scattered across a spreadsheet, an old system, and someone's memory — and that organization is the foundation for everything that follows. If the catalog isn't clean, the prettiest cart in the world is going to sell things that don't exist.
Only once that works and the team has adopted it does it make sense to add the transaction.
How you measure that it worked
In an industry that's already digital, the metric is conversion. Here, at first, it isn't: if you only measure online sales in month one, the number will look bad and the project will seem like a failure when it isn't.
The early signals are different:
- Repetitive queries that stopped coming in. The salesperson feels it before any dashboard does.
- Customers who arrive already knowing what they want. The conversation starts at a different point.
- Orders outside business hours. It's proof there was demand the phone channel couldn't capture.
That last data point usually settles the "my customers don't buy online" argument.
What doesn't change
Even if the industry is analog, some things aren't negotiable: the site has to load fast, it has to look good on the phone — which is where almost everyone will land — and the information has to be up to date. An outdated online catalog is worse than no catalog at all, because it destroys trust that took a long time to build.
In our software factory case studies we cover projects like this. If you have a business in an industry where digital hasn't arrived yet, write to us: it's often the best possible position to start from.
