Here's a prediction. You're going to pick a platform in the next six to twelve months. You're going to run what feels like a thorough process. Demos, feature grids, analyst reports, maybe a Gartner quadrant someone printed out and left on your desk. You'll have strong opinions from your CTO, your marketing lead, your favourite vendor rep, and at least one board member who read something on LinkedIn.
And about three months after go-live, you're going to have a platform that does exactly what the spec said it would do - and somehow still doesn't work.
Not broken. Not failing. Just... wrong. The content team can't publish without raising a ticket. The integration with your CRM is held together with duct tape and a consultant's mobile number. The licence renewal conversation reveals costs nobody mentioned during the sales process. And someone - probably you - is sitting in a meeting thinking: how did we get here? We did the due diligence.
You did. That's the problem. You did the wrong due diligence.
I've sat through dozens of platform selection processes over the years, and the same pattern repeats itself with eerie consistency. A firm decides it needs a new CMS or digital experience platform. Someone sensible suggests a structured evaluation. A spreadsheet appears - usually with about forty rows of features down the left side and three or four vendor names across the top. Ticks, crosses, partial scores. It looks rigorous. It feels like progress.
What that spreadsheet actually tells you is what each platform can do in a perfect environment, with unlimited configuration time, operated by someone who knows exactly what they're doing. It tells you nothing about what the platform will do in your environment, with your team, inside your budget, on your timeline.
I remember reviewing a selection grid for a 200-person consulting firm a couple of years ago. They'd scored one platform highest because it had the most sophisticated personalisation engine. Eighteen months later, they'd never turned it on. Not once. The marketing team was three people who were still trying to figure out how to update the homepage without breaking the navigation. The killer feature that won the evaluation was completely irrelevant to the firm's actual reality.
Meanwhile, the thing that was quietly destroying their productivity every single day - the content approval workflow - hadn't even appeared on the original comparison grid. Nobody had thought to ask about it, because vendors don't tend to lead with "here's how approvals work when your managing partner insists on reviewing every page before it goes live."
I'll be honest: I've made a version of this mistake myself. Early in our work with a financial services client, we helped them shortlist platforms based on a requirements document that was thorough on technical architecture and almost silent on editorial experience. The platform we recommended was genuinely well-suited to their infrastructure. Their content team hated it. Eighteen months of workarounds followed before we fixed it properly. That one stung.
Every platform looks brilliant in a demo. That's literally what demos are designed to do. The vendor controls the environment, the data, the use case, and the narrative. Judging a platform by its demo is like judging a restaurant by its Instagram. The lighting's great. The portion sizes are generous. None of it tells you what Tuesday lunch actually looks like.
So if feature lists and analyst quadrants aren't the right inputs, what is? Over the past twenty-five years, we've been involved in platform decisions across professional services, financial services, SaaS, legal, and consulting firms. Some went well. Some went badly. The pattern of what separates the two is remarkably consistent.
None of the factors are exciting. All of them are predictive.
Total cost of ownership over three to five years. Not the first-year licence. Not the number on the vendor's proposal. The actual total: implementation, annual licence, hosting, maintenance, training, the internal time your team will spend learning and operating it, and - this one always gets missed - the eventual cost of migrating away from it when the time comes. I've seen mid-market firms budget £80k for a platform and end up spending £300k over three years once you factor in everything the proposal didn't mention. In the last eight platform evaluations we've run, five came in at more than double the original budget once you account for integration work, ongoing maintenance, and the customisation that seemed optional until it wasn't.
Team capability match. Can the people you actually have - not the people you plan to hire, not the agency you might engage - operate this platform productively? If your content team is two marketing managers who are good at writing but aren't developers, a platform that requires code changes for routine publishing is the wrong platform. Full stop. I don't care how powerful it is.
Integration complexity. What will it actually take to connect this thing to your CRM, your marketing automation, your analytics, your finance system? Not "does it have an API?" - everything has an API. What does the real-world integration look like? Who builds it? Who maintains it? What happens when your CRM gets upgraded and the integration breaks at 4pm on a Friday? One professional services firm I worked with chose a platform partly because of its "native Salesforce integration." Turned out that integration covered about 30% of what they needed. The other 70% required custom middleware that cost more than the platform licence itself.
Editorial usability. This is the one that bites hardest and gets evaluated least. Can the people who'll use this platform every day - your marketing team, your content editors, your comms people - actually do their jobs without filing a support ticket or waiting for a developer? A brilliantly architected platform that your team can't use independently is a brilliantly architected failure. And yet I've watched firms spend months evaluating API performance and security architecture without once sitting a content editor in front of the thing and asking them to publish something.
Vendor stability. Is the company behind this platform going to be around in five years? Are they investing in the product or milking an existing customer base? Are they genuinely committed to your market segment, or are you an afterthought while they chase enterprise deals? I've seen firms select platforms from vendors who were acquired within eighteen months, leaving the product on a slow death march that nobody acknowledged until the upgrade path disappeared. It's not a fun conversation to have with a board.
Migration ease. When - not if - you eventually need to move away from this platform, how painful will that be? Is your content locked into proprietary formats? Are your integrations built on vendor-specific APIs that don't translate? The best platform decisions are the ones that make the next decision easier, not just this one. Most people don't think about this until they're mid-migration and it's too late.
If you want a structured scorecard for running the evaluation using these criteria - covering weighting methodology, scoring guidance, and a comparison output format - download the template here. It's designed to be vendor-neutral and applicable to any platform shortlist.
Right. So you've got the criteria. Now how do you actually do this without the process taking six months and consuming every hour of your CTO's week?
Define your requirements before any vendor contact. I mean it. Before. Not during. Not after the first demo when you've already been anchored by whatever the vendor showed you. Sit down with the people who'll own each of those criteria and get clear on what "good" looks like for your firm specifically. What's a must-have? What's a dealbreaker? Write it down. It sounds basic, and it is. Barely anyone does it.
Shortlist no more than three. I've seen firms try to evaluate five or six platforms in depth and the process collapses under its own weight. Three gives you meaningful comparison. More than three gives you decision fatigue and a spreadsheet so large it requires a second monitor.
Run a proof of concept in your environment. Not the vendor's sandbox. Not a demo instance with sample data. Your environment. Your data. Your team. If a vendor won't support this, that tells you something useful. One financial services firm we worked with - a mid-sized asset manager, maybe 400 people - ran proof-of-concept evaluations for all three shortlisted platforms over a two-week window. Two of the three performed notably worse with real data and real users than they had in the demo. The third performed about the same. They chose the third. Funny how that works.
Do your own reference checks. Not the references the vendor provides - those are curated for a reason. Find firms of comparable size and complexity in your network who've implemented the platform within the last two years. Ask them what surprised them. Ask them what they'd do differently. Ask them about the second year, not just the launch. The first year is the honeymoon. The second year is the marriage.
Negotiate with all three simultaneously. This is just good procurement practice, but it's astonishing how many firms enter exclusive negotiations with their preferred vendor before the evaluation is complete. Keep all three live until you've made your decision. The commercial leverage alone is worth the administrative effort.
I've written a companion piece on the architecture decision - headless versus traditional CMS - that's worth reading before you get into specific platform selection. Getting the architecture right first narrows the field considerably.
We've done due diligence. We've had demos. We've read the analyst reports. We've compared the feature sets. We know what we're doing.
Maybe. But let me ask you this: who's "we"?
In most firms I've worked with, the platform decision has a political dimension that nobody wants to acknowledge. The CTO has a preference based on technical architecture. The CMO has a preference based on a demo they saw at a conference. A board member's nephew works at one of the vendors. Someone in IT has already been talking to a sales rep for three months.
I'm not being cynical. This is just how organisations work. The question isn't whether politics exists - it's whether your process is designed to surface better information than any individual's preference.
What works is parallel evaluation with defined owners. Marketing evaluates editorial experience - how does it actually feel to create, edit, approve, and publish content? IT evaluates architecture fit - how does it connect, what's the security model, what's the upgrade path? Finance evaluates total cost of ownership - the full three-to-five-year model including everything vendors conveniently leave out of their proposals. And leadership evaluates risk - what happens if the vendor gets acquired? What does it cost to leave if this turns out to be wrong?
Running these evaluations through a single person sequentially is slower and produces worse outcomes than running them in parallel with clear ownership. It also makes the decision more defensible, which matters when you're spending six figures of someone else's money.
For readers who've already made their platform decision and are ready to move forward, there's a piece on how to write a brief for a digital partner that covers what happens next.
Firms almost always choose the platform first and the implementation partner second. Platform selection gets months of rigorous evaluation. Partner selection gets three weeks, two pitches, and a decision based on price or chemistry.
This is backwards.
A good implementation partner on a well-matched platform will outperform a mediocre partner on a theoretically superior platform every single time. I've watched it happen repeatedly. The platform is the instrument. The partner is the musician. You wouldn't buy a Steinway and then hire the cheapest piano teacher you could find.
Across the platform projects we've been involved in over the past twenty-five years, the single strongest predictor of whether a project delivers what it promised isn't the platform chosen - it's the quality of the people implementing it. Not the agency's credentials deck. The actual people doing the work.
When you're evaluating partners, four things matter: specific experience implementing this platform for firms that look like yours (not generic "we work with lots of platforms" experience), reference clients who can speak to delivery quality as well as technical competence, a clear answer to the question "who will actually work on my project?" - not the senior people in the pitch who disappear on day one - and a commercial model that aligns their incentives with your outcomes rather than their utilisation rates.
At Distinction, this is something we feel strongly about - not because we're saints, but because we've spent twenty-five years cleaning up the mess when it goes wrong. Senior people doing the actual work, not juniors learning on your project. Done with you rather than done to you. That's not a sales pitch - it's a lesson we learned the hard way by watching what happens when firms don't insist on it.
If you'd prefer to run the platform evaluation with an experienced facilitator rather than doing it solo, we offer a platform evaluation workshop that covers the same ground as this article in a structured day with your key stakeholders in the room. Sometimes having someone in the conversation who doesn't have a horse in the race makes the whole thing move faster.
I can hear some of you thinking: that's lovely, James, but our current platform contract expires in four months and the website is falling apart. We don't have time for a three-month evaluation.
Fair. And I'm not going to pretend the full process works on a compressed timeline. But here's what I'd prioritise if you're under pressure.
Get the criteria defined and weighted - even roughly - before you talk to anyone. It takes half a day. Do the proof of concept with real data, even if it's only a week instead of two. And whatever you do, don't skip the implementation partner evaluation. If anything, when time is tight, the partner matters more, because you need someone who can move quickly without cutting corners.
The worst platform decisions I've seen weren't made by people who didn't care. They were made by people who cared a lot but evaluated the wrong things. Feature lists instead of fit. Demos instead of reality. Vendor promises instead of reference checks.
The right platform for your firm might not be the one with the most impressive feature grid. It's the one your team can actually use, your systems can actually connect to, and your budget can actually sustain - not just this year, but for the next five.
That's a less exciting conclusion than "choose Platform X." But three months after go-live, it's the only one that matters.