5 Key Learnings For Digital Transformation - Ping Roundtable

Daniel McQuillan, Digital Performance Manager of Destination Gold Coast keynoted our first PING Roundtable at Kingsley’s Restaurant in March.

In addition to revealing a host of best-practice insights on how he and his team achieved the astonishing 400+% increase in their key KPI for the website (leads to industry), Dan also shared his key learnings on how to undertake a huge digital transformation project like this.

1. Just get started - and once you start everything else just prioritises itself or other people will prioritise it for you. So once the ball sort of starts rolling it makes the project a whole heap easier.
2. Sell the tech investment to the people that you can and the ones that are receptive to it. There’s a lot of time wasted trying to convince people that we should invest in a CDP which means nothing to them other than seeing a line item. So essentially the way I tackled it was to give all the executives little ‘cookies’ (demos of simple personalisation tactics) at each of the meetings I had with them so that they then say, ‘that’s cool - how do we do that too?’
3. The right partners are key. What I've really enjoyed about working with PING is that they’ve been true partners through the whole process. A lot of the others just wanted to sort of deliver and walk away. We felt that they were really aligned with the vision of what we were trying to achieve. They understood the challenges - and also actively participate in developing strategies around proof of concept or proof of utility for tools that we've been deploying over the last 12 months.
4. Integration is everything. In this project, the scope expanded rapidly and we went into the project with the context that this is going to get so much bigger than what we originally scoped. I think going into the project with that context set us up for success. So, there was no going back to PING and saying we need to entirely rescope a whole new website for Trade. There's no going back to Sitecore saying we need to renegotiate our contracts so we can bring in all these other business units or organisations.
5. Speed, scalability and performance. This is essentially about “Done is better than perfect”. And we led that through the MVP approach and then the iterative nature of bringing all the other business units into the ecosystem as well.