Our Clients
Catenion
Website development
The Bloom Group has helped a number of professional services firms revamp their websites over the last three years. Most of them came to us after reading our study on how to organize the content of professional services websites. (See the article here.) We had publicized the study through our website and an article for Consulting magazine ("Out of Site," which you can find here.)
Since publishing the study in 2005, we have received dozens of inquiries from U.S. and Canadian professional firms on how we could improve their websites. But we didn’t expect to be asked to help redo the website of a consulting firm an ocean away, Catenion Strategies, based in Berlin, Germany. "Together we built a fantastic website," says Dr. Matthias Krings, a partner at the firm who spearheaded the development of the new site (see www.catenion.com).
How Catenion found us demonstrates how the Web has created a global market for a professional firm’s services. It also shows the power of a point of view. Catenion was founded in Berlin in 2003 by ex–partners from Mercer Management Consulting. Their focus was on helping to transform the R&D organizations of pharmaceutical and medical product companies. Based in the old East Berlin part of the city near Checkpoint Charlie (one of the three old crossing points from West to East Berlin), the firm has grown to 15 people with offices in Berlin and London, and has worked for a number of global life sciences firms.
By the summer of 2007, Catenion partners Dr. Krings, Christian Elze, Dr. Markus Thunecke and Arno Heuermann decided the firm had outgrown its original website. "Our service offerings had become broader and deeper, and we had moved beyond our original focus on personalized medicine to broader aspects of pharma R&D, strategy development and asset valuation beyond R&D," says Dr. Krings. "But the overall look and feel of the old website did not convey what we were about. We also wanted the content to more clearly communicate what we had become as a firm."
The old website did little to generate leads, a complaint we have heard from many professional firms about their own sites. (In a survey of 37 professional firms that we conducted in 2006, on average they said their websites were mediocre at generating leads but expected them to become much more important sources of leads by 2011.) Krings believes one reason the old Catenion site was not a robust lead generator was that it gave viewers few opportunities to interact online with the firm. For example, visitors could not register for or download the firm’s publications. "We felt we never really used the site to create new prospects, and thus it fell short of its potential," Krings says.
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