A 268% improvement in conversion rate. A 48% increase in new business enquiries. An 8% lift in net new visitors. A 16% jump in engagement across the site.
Those are the numbers. I'll get to the story behind them. But I want to start with why I'm writing this at all, because it's not just to show off a case study.
If you're a marketing leader or managing partner at a B2B service firm, you've almost certainly had the internal debate about whether investing in your digital experience will actually produce a commercial return. Not a vague "it'll be better" return - a measurable, attributable, defensible-to-the-board return. And the honest answer is that most firms never find out, because the investment either doesn't happen or it happens without any measurement framework to prove what changed.
We don't know if a digital experience investment would actually produce commercial results for us.
That's the line I hear most often. And I get it. You've probably seen enough website projects that produced a nice-looking homepage and not much else. The scepticism is earned. So rather than argue the theory, let me walk you through a specific engagement - what the situation looked like, what we changed, and what happened commercially. You can decide whether your situation is comparable.
The client was Capita - the UK's leading enterprise IT services provider. A serious business with serious credentials. But the website wasn't reflecting any of that. No CRM integration, no structured conversion paths, and the site architecture was organised around internal departments rather than what a prospective buyer was actually trying to find.
If you've been in B2B services for any length of time, you'll recognise this setup. The website gets built by someone - usually a few years ago - and it sort of works, in the sense that it exists and has pages on it. But nobody's ever sat down and asked: what is this website actually supposed to do, commercially? What's the job?
Capita's site was generating enquiries, but nowhere near what you'd expect for a firm of that size and market position. Conversion rates were low. The practice areas weren't presented in a way that helped a buyer understand what Capita could do for them. Mobile experience was poor. And there was no connection between the content the marketing team was producing and any kind of commercial outcome - they were publishing, but they couldn't tell you whether any of it was driving pipeline.
I remember sitting in one of the early stakeholder sessions when a senior marketing person said something that stuck with me: "We know the website is a problem, but we can't prove it's a problem. So it never gets prioritised." That's the trap, right there. If you can't quantify the cost of the status quo, the status quo wins every time. It sits there, quietly underperforming, and everyone works around it.
We didn't start with design. We started with a stakeholder review and a series of CX workshops - getting into the room with the people who understood the buyers and the people who understood the commercial goals, and making them talk to each other. Sounds obvious. It almost never happens.
Three things stood out from that initial review.
First, the site was structured around Capita's org chart, not the buyer's journey. If you were a CTO looking for managed IT services, you had to already know which division of Capita provided that, navigate to the right section, then hope the page you landed on actually spoke to your problem. Most buyers don't work like that. They arrive with a problem and want to see evidence you can solve it.
Second, there were no meaningful conversion paths. A generic "contact us" page and that was about it. No contextual calls to action on service pages, no progressive engagement - nothing that said "if you're interested in this, here's the logical next step." The gap between reading a page and making an enquiry was enormous.
Third - and this one's easy to overlook - the CRM was completely disconnected. Even when enquiries did come in, there was no automated routing, no tracking of which page or piece of content had driven the enquiry, and no way for the sales team to see the buyer's digital journey. Marketing was flying blind.
So we rebuilt on the Kentico Digital Experience Platform with full Salesforce CRM integration. But the technology choice isn't really the point.
We restructured the entire site around buyer intent rather than internal categories. Instead of "Capita's Managed Services Division," it became "Managed IT services for [type of organisation]." Sounds simple. It took weeks of work to get right - and it wasn't always comfortable. There were internal stakeholders who'd spent years defining Capita's services in a particular way, and asking them to reframe everything around how a buyer thinks rather than how the business was organised created some friction. A few of those conversations got a bit heated, if I'm honest. But that tension is usually where the useful work happens.
We built contextual, relevant calls to action on every service page, each one connected to the CRM so that when an enquiry came in, the sales team could see exactly where it originated and what the prospect had been looking at. We redesigned the mobile experience. We improved page speed. We restructured the content so that Capita's thought leadership and case studies were visible and connected to the services they supported, rather than buried in a blog nobody could find.
None of this is revolutionary. That's sort of the point. It's not about inventing something new. It's about doing the basics properly - and being rigorous about connecting design decisions to commercial outcomes.
The immediate results were significant. A 48% increase in new business enquiries. A 268% improvement in conversion rate. An 8% increase in net new visitors and a 16% increase in engagement.
But here's what doesn't get talked about enough: the improvement didn't stop at launch. After the initial rebuild, we ran an optimisation programme - A/B testing, content refinement, conversion rate optimisation - that continued to push performance upward. The 268% figure isn't a launch-day spike. It's the result of treating the website as a commercial asset that gets tuned, not a project that gets delivered and forgotten.
Mark Boorman, Capita's Head of Marketing, put it well: "Working with Distinction has been a true revelation... Their collaborative approach, coupled with their ability to simplify complexity, stood out for me. They punch above their weight."
I'll take that.
If I had to isolate the things that made the biggest difference, it would be these.
The restructuring around buyer intent. Moving from an internal org chart to a buyer-problem architecture was probably responsible for more of the improvement than anything else. When someone arrives on your site and immediately sees their problem reflected back at them, the likelihood they'll engage goes up dramatically. When they have to decode your internal structure to find what they need, most of them leave.
The connected conversion paths. Having a "contact us" page is not a conversion strategy. Having a contextual, relevant next step on every page that matters - "Talk to a specialist about managed services," "Download our approach to IT transformation," "See how we helped [type of firm]" - that's a conversion strategy. And connecting those paths to the CRM meant the sales team could follow up intelligently, not blindly.
The CRM integration. I almost hesitate to call this out separately because it should be table stakes. But the number of B2B service firms I see where the website and the CRM are completely disconnected is frankly a bit nuts. You're spending money driving traffic to a website that can't tell your sales team anything about who visited, what they looked at, or what prompted them to get in touch. It's like running a shop where the front door and the till are in different buildings.
I'm not going to pretend that if you do exactly what we did for Capita, you'll get a 268% improvement in conversion. Your situation is different. Your market is different. Your starting point is different.
What I will say is this: the Capita engagement wasn't an anomaly. A confidential top-50 UK law firm saw a 67% increase in qualified enquiries after a comparable programme. A 150-person consulting firm went from three inbound enquiries a month to thirteen-plus, generating £1.2m in pipeline within six months. We've seen the same pattern across legal, financial services, SaaS, and IT firms. The firms that treat their website as a commercial asset - with structured conversion paths, buyer-centric architecture, and proper measurement - outperform those that don't. Not by a little. By multiples.
The question worth asking yourself is a simple one: can your marketing team tell you which pages are driving pipeline? Are your service pages structured around your buyers' problems or your own internal categories? Does your sales team know what a prospect looked at before they got in touch?
If the answer to any of those is no, you already know what the problem is.
If you want to benchmark where your digital experience sits today, our Customer Experience Dividend scorecard takes about ten minutes and gives you a clear picture of where the gaps are. And if you want the broader commercial case for treating digital experience as an investment rather than a cost, The Customer Experience Dividend guide makes the argument in a lot more depth than I can here.