Another week and another successful Passle CMO Series event with some brilliant speakers and content.  I had the pleasure of attending our second New York event along with 40 brilliant CMOs and senior BD folk at some excellent professional services firms.  The panel consisted of Koree Khongphand-Buckman (CMO at Foley & Lardner) Haley Pollard (Digital marketing manager senior VP at Alix Partners) and Crossley Sanford (Managing Director at Ankura).

My colleague Eugene McCormick did a great job of orchestrating the conversation and broke the session down into key questions.  The first one was:

Why and how did you identify the need for a website project?

Koree suggested that when on the previous version of the Foley website you didn't know where you were or what the firm did.  The Bio's were old and often didn't reflect what lawyers did and it looked like a dated hotel lobby.

Haley pointed to the fact that at Alix partners, again everything was very dated and that various developers over time had left their mark but it ultimately meant nothing worked.

Crossley felt like the user journey was broken on the Ankura website and it hadn't evolved with the brand.  The foundations were broken and the whole website needed to be stripped back and rebuilt.           

How should a professional services firm approach the project?

Crossley and her team made a huge play to interview every stakeholder in the business to make them feel like part of the process.  They also looked at their consultants as the clients which in turn got them thinking about theirs.  In hindsight, it was the best approach but it certainly was political, taxing and a difficult thing to do.

Koree the website was over 7 years old and Koree inherited the project but also a team that was still wedded to it in some ways.  There was quite a bit of behavioural change management that had to take place as a result and convincing that the project would be a success.  Similarly, when convincing the wider business, Koree used stats and numbers to back up the business case.  Page views and site visits were low as were visits to lawyers' bios.  Koree also had to really labour the point that the website is for clients not for lawyers.

Haley stressed the need for long and detailed discovery sessions about what the website should do and be.  As a result, they built the platform back to front with best-in-class technology that talks to each other.  They made a decision not to be wedded and bogged down with templates and there was a huge need for agility.  Haley admitted that they actually got to the end goal a little bit by accident!

What types of technology and vendors work?

Koree we needed to do an audit of existing technologies- did they talk to each other and do we even need all of them?  Koree brought in a tech expert which was revolutionary for the firm.  She noted that they require an agile team themselves to deal with agile vendors

Crossley It is important to get stakeholders to understand the infrastructure to a certain extent and why they need to adopt certain technologies to get an end result.  At the end of the day the website is the shop window and thought leadership, for instance, has led to revenue generation across multiple practice groups.

Haley we did a lot of trial and error with the technology and actually tried to break it.  This meant we ended up with a stack that is agile, incorporates AI, talks to each other and ultimately that we are very happy with.  Haley also recommended the use of project management tools to showcase efficiencies that can be brought in with new systems.

It was a great session, a great turnout, and really stimulated conversations further into the night.  Thanks to all that came and were involved.