A 400-person professional services firm had been quoted over £400,000 by two separate agencies for a full website and CRM rebuild. The brief had grown over 18 months of internal discussions, and by the time it reached procurement, nobody was entirely sure what the actual problem was. The COO suspected they were about to spend a significant amount of money solving the wrong thing.
She had seen Distinction's assessment offer and asked a straightforward question: before we commit to a six-figure project, can you tell us whether we even need one?
"We were about to spend £400,000 on a project we did not fully understand. The assessment cost us a fraction of that and told us what we actually needed. It was the most useful two weeks we have had from an external partner in years."
We ran our 14-day assessment. Two senior consultants spent the first week inside the business - interviewing stakeholders across marketing, IT, operations, and client services. We reviewed the existing platform, analysed traffic and conversion data, mapped the client onboarding process, and stress-tested the assumptions baked into the original brief.
In the second week, we synthesised what we had found and delivered a written report to the leadership team. The findings were clear: about 60% of the original brief was unnecessary. The real issues were a broken enquiry-to-onboarding handoff, a CMS that nobody in marketing could update without developer support, and a complete absence of any content strategy for their thought leadership.
We recommended a phased approach: fix the onboarding handoff first (a 90-day sprint), then migrate to a CMS that marketing could actually use (a second sprint), and defer the full visual redesign until both of those were delivering results. Total estimated cost: £80,000 across two sprints, not £400,000 in one go.
The firm cancelled the original RFP process and engaged Distinction for the first sprint. Within 90 days, the onboarding handoff was rebuilt and enquiry-to-client conversion improved by 22%. The CMS migration followed in the next quarter, and the marketing team went from requesting developer support for every content change to publishing independently within a week of launch.
The full redesign was eventually scoped as a third phase - but by that point, the leadership team had data to justify exactly what was needed and what was not.
