DOOR3

Could you share any results of the engagement?

We had a junk web presence with multiple sites. These don’t sound huge for consumer side numbers, but from a B2B [business-to-business] perspective, we went from about 1,000 marketing leads a month to a little bit over 4,000. quIt was a little bit over a 250% increase in leads as a result of the way the site was structured by DOOR3.

One of the important aspects of it for us was that our customers were very aware of our imaging platform, but they didn’t always realize we had a lot of accessory products. The site was built in a way that we focused on our nine major medical specialty areas, and then within each of those areas, we highlighted the procedures, and for each procedure, the product suite that we offered in addition to what everybody knew we offered.

We really wanted to upsell through the site and remind people that we offered all these different medical devices and different products as opposed to just the imaging platform. That was a really big part of it. For the people that were aware of our products, we wanted to make sure that it was easily accessible to get directly to the product they were looking for. We wanted to balance growing awareness and specifically being able to get to the product that you were looking for.

How did DOOR3 perform from a project management standpoint?

DOOR3 was very good. We actually did a lot of onsite work at their office. So instead of having their team travel out, I went to them and did a lot of onboarding to get them up to speed before they came onsite to meet with the rest of our marketing team. There was definitely a learning curve there. They picked that up pretty quickly, so that was good.

We actually had a situation where our surgical business was in Boston, our ENT [ear, nose, & throat] business was in Tennessee, and our respiratory and gastroenterology business was in Pennsylvania. The kickoff meeting that we had for the website that DOOR3 conducted was actually the first time those parties all sat in the same room at the same time, which is hard to believe, but they did a really good job of helping facilitate the process of getting everybody on the same page. The concern was that our GI [gastrointestinal] business was so big that it would have different needs than some of our other businesses that maybe didn’t have a massive market share. What we decided to do, which DOOR3 facilitated, was to split the groups up, have them go through what their priorities were for the site, and then brought everybody back together, talked through, and reconciled the priorities. They found that they were actually pretty well aligned, even though they all thought they were going to be very different.

That had a huge impact on the project simply because the groups realized that their goals were actually very equal, and it wasn’t one part of the business getting something that the other part wasn’t. That was a big early hurdle to get over. The company actually implemented an annual joint marketing meeting, so every year now they all get together and talk about what they’re doing. The very first time they did was for the web project that DOOR3 helped us lead for the discovery and defining phase.

What did you find most impressive about DOOR3?

We selected them because we felt, during the presentation, that they had a really strong user experience approach, and I think the output that we had on the site definitely validated that. From that perspective, I can definitely speak. Again, we didn’t use them on the technical side, so I can’t talk to that aspect of it.

Are there any areas DOOR3 could improve?

From the actual work perspective, I thought they did an excellent job. They did bring one of the team members on a few weeks into the project, and they missed a lot of the onboarding. As a result, I had to talk through a lot of what we had already talked through, so there was a bit of repetition due to that. The business development person at the time had their take on why they did that, but from my perspective in managing the vendor, I don’t want to have to do that twice and spend the hours to have to repeat what we had already gone over at the start. That was definitely something that I think could’ve been handled better. Maybe they just didn’t have the person in place. I know they did hire him for that project; I don’t know if he stayed on after that or not.

The other area was in the defining of what was going to be delivered. There was a lot of back and forth in the sense that there were some things written within the contract that should be delivered, that they felt were not deliverables. Ultimately we got everything we needed, but if there are areas of constructive criticism, that would be it. I don’t know if it was a case where they ran out of hours, which I’m theorizing that they may have invested more hours than they thought they were going to, so as a result, they tried to talk themselves out of some of the things. It was not a big deal. We got what we needed, so from that perspective, it’s not a problem. The budget was the budget. We didn’t get into having to pay more for things or anything like that.

I’d say those were the two biggest areas where I thought there was a little frustration. Otherwise, the output and the product was fantastic, and it was split groups, so it wasn’t like we were negotiating with the user experience designer or anything. It was two different conversations; I just happened to be in both of them.