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18
B Y J A C Q U E L I N E M A D A R A N G
Experience
Management:
A Tale of Two Firms
D
espite differences in goals, practices, and
strategies for winning new business,
many firms experience similar underlying
pain points. I observed this first hand when making a
recent move between firms.
Both Blank Rome and my prior firm had
attempted to tackle the siloed data problem with first
generation and homegrown experience solutions.
While the solutions promised improvement, there
were common shortcomings in easily integrating all
relevant firm data sources, customizing and expanding
the system to meet changing business needs, and
locating and leveraging data to meet ever evolving
requirements.
For example, after a challenging experience using
a legacy solution, my former business development
team retreated to individually tracking experience
in spreadsheets and re-using content from previous
proposals. Resulting silos made it difficult to find
the best experiences to leverage team wide. Proposal
content was inconsistent, and the process was
painfully slow due to manual intervention at each step
of the process.
Blank Rome had similar challenges when trying
to make a go of a now defunct experience solution.
Unfortunately, the system the vendor delivered didn't
match up to marketing promises, wasting cycles and
burning budget.
In the end, both firms chose a more strategic
platform for business development to collect, enhance,
and use data to help win and keep new business. I was
