Management and Market Research for Digital Initiatives
Services
Rapid Catalyst provides general consulting and professional services to web agencies, clients, and professionals. Our focus is on the creation of solutions to the unique challenges that our customers face in a complex and continuously evolving industry. We have carefully crafted and tuned the value chain of each service area to ensure high customer service, effectiveness and satisfaction.
Services for Web Agencies
Web Agencies face many challenges and increasing competition. Balancing the needs of clients and trying to maintain a happy and thriving workforce is a constant battle. Rising costs and increased price pressure often mean that our web agency partners must specialize in high yield services and keep resources hyper focused on those specialties in order to ensure sustainable positive margins. This often leaves little room for the development of services and processes considered on the fringe of an agency's core offerings or those that benefit only internal staff. Rapid Catalyst recognizes these challenges and has designed solutions from the ground up that allow our clients to maintain excellence (and profitability) in these often underserved disciplines.
Pre-Sales, Discovery, and Planning Services
Delivery and Operational Services
Pre-Sales, Discovery, and Planning Services
LEAD GENERATION AND REFERRAL PROGRAM
What it is
We believe that no matter how good your delivery and execution model may be, the first step in improving performance and sustainability is by ensuring only the highest quality projects for your organization get added to your agency's portfolio. The lead generation and referral services provided by Rapid Catalyst are designed to bring pre-qualified opportunities to our customers and service subscribers. Through this program, the services, capabilities, interests, desired project profiles and a variety of other characteristics of each subscriber are compiled and used to solicit, screen, and opportunities from a variety of market channels.
When It's Used
Once set up, the referral program is always running. Leads and opportunities that meet filtering criteria will be delivered to your team as soon as they are pre-qualified.
Benefits
Rapid Catalyst is always looking for opportunities in our other lines of business that are good fits for our partners. We talk to A LOT of people, conduct market research, and administer surveys throughout the industry. With the lead generation and referral program, we compile sophisticated screening criteria to bring our partners qualified leads and business opportunities from our extensive network which may otherwise remain unknown.
For more information or to sign up for the lead generation and referral program, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
RFP SCREENING AND SCORING
What it is
Our RFP screening and scoring services are intended to supplement the efforts of your sales team and result in summary reports that outline the nature and important details of any given opportunity. Though a combination of our proprietary opportunity score and other data, these reports provide a quick and effective way to quantifiably evaluate an opportunity's scope, size, risk, and complexity profiles. The result is a drastic reduction in the time it takes our clients to determine whether an opportunity is worth pursuing and, when so, architecting more effective win strategies.
When It's Used
This service is beneficial for any agency with limited sales and consulting capacity that needs to ensure its sales staff are engaged in only the most promising opportunities and worthwhile activities.
Benefits
Screening and responding to RFPs can be a time consuming process. The level of effort to satisfactorily respond to just one opportunity often limits the amount of time senior staff can spend evaluating and screening other opportunities. RFPs themselves can vary wildly in their quality and depth, further taxing an agency's staff and making it difficult to fully capture critical details. With Rapid Catalyst's screening and scoring service in place, your sales team receives a summary of each opportunity, the important dates and facts, and an opportunity score based on our proprietary methodology and your own metrics.
In addition to streamlining a key function of the sales process, this service can also be beneficial for any agency that sometimes finds it difficult to decide internally which opportunities are worth pursuing. Our scoring methodology is often used by clients in these situations to establish quantifiable go/no-go policies for quicker decision making and conflict resolution, allowing them to invest their time in other more highly qualified deals.
For more information or to discuss how the Screening and Scoring service can work for your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
PRICING AND ESTIMATION METHODOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
If you find that your projects are continuously going over budget, you likely need to revisit your estimation, pricing, and contract management procedures and policies. Rapid Catalyst can help you establish the right protocols and tools based on your company's operations, allowing you take back control of project financial performance.
What it is
The pricing and estimation methodology development service results in a toolset and process that is customized specifically for your organization. This system is designed to be used by your own employees or executed by Rapid Catalyst on your behalf. During the process, we help you gather and monitor pertinent performance data to create cost models, performance statistics, and customized tools to help your sales and delivery teams more accurately forecast costs (based off of your own historical performance) and build statements of work that clearly outline the boundaries of scope and delivery.
When it's Used, Benefits
Any agency that struggles with consistently underperforming projects is likely suffering from a variety of broken sales and operational processes. Instituting the Rapid Catalyst pricing and estimation methodology system is one of the first steps that should be taken to help identify and retake control of those systems and overall performance. While the outcome of the process is a toolset, the process of creating this system is, on its own, an extremely effective way at quickly identifying weaknesses in your service value chain.
For more information or to discuss how the Pricing and Estimation Methodology Development service can work for your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
FUNCTIONAL SITE AUDITS AND DECOMPOSITION
What it is
Functional site audits and system decomposition services result in reports that provide both executive summaries, detailed data, and charts that help describe in both quantitative and qualitative terms, the size, complexity, and functionality of a given web property.
When it's Used
Our clients often use these services and reports during the sales and planning phases of a given engagement as an input to their assessment of overall project scope and cost predictions. It is also recommended that follow up audits be conducted at the conclusion of projects to provide a snapshot of the new site. Doing so allows agencies and end customers to compare beginning and end states and also serves as a useful onboarding tool for any new team members going forward.
Benefits
Having an unbiased audit of functional scope is critical to any new project, but it also provides your team with a consistent model for comparing projects of varying size and risk profiles to each other over time. This is valuable for both estimation and operational improvement initiatives as well as project scope control.
For more information or to discuss how our Functional Site Audits and Decomposition services can work for your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
Delivery and Operational Services
Our delivery and operational services are designed to complement and supplement the core competencies of our agency partners. We focus on areas that are often difficult for our partners to service as fully as their primary offerings, allowing them to focus on what they do best while also maintaining a high degree of quality across their secondary services.
MANUAL CONTENT LOAD AND CONTENT MIGRATION
Many of our clients have developed ways to programmatically migrate consistently structured and formatted content as part of website redesigns, but there are many situations where automated and programmatic migration isn't feasible. In these scenarios, Rapid Catalyst specializes in helping agencies and end clients move large volumes of unstructured content to new systems methodically and reliably.
Our secret is in our system and specialized content teams. While no installation is the same, Rapid Catalyst leverages the expertise of highly trained team leads and content staff to develop effective and efficient migration strategies for each new project, template type, and scenario. A large network of content editors allows us to rapidly scale up operations to meet migration timelines that would otherwise be insufficient for the core project team.
CMS Specialties
Rapid Catalyst's methodology will work with any system that is web accessible, but we have developed deep specialties in enterprise content management systems like Sitecore and are adding more technologies on a quarterly basis.
For more information or to discuss how the Manual Content Migration Service can work for your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY CONTROL
Rapid Catalysts' Quality Assurance and Quality Control services are designed to help agencies validate that their applications and websites conform to the specifications and expectations of their clients. This service is designed for projects where automated testing may not be feasible and an agency's core project team has limited availability to test and validate the quality of their deliverables.
Our quality assurance testing is designed to supplement the efforts of agencies and their clients, but not to replace critical signoff and validation functions.
When It's Used
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Primary functional testing, specification compliance, and bug fix verification
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Testing and validation across multiple browsers and/or devices
Benefits
The tedious process of functional validation can be extremely time consuming on large, complex and fast-moving projects. When this happens, the development and project management burden can increase significantly as each new issue may result in many hours of development or project re-work. The more quickly new (and fixed) code can be tested and validated, the more time the development and project team has to correct remaining issues or move to the next release.
For more information or to discuss how our Quality Assurance and Quality Control Services can work for your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
Additional Services
VENDOR/CLIENT/EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION SURVEYS AND RESEARCH
What it is
The satisfaction survey service allows our clients to get unbiased feedback from vendors, prospects, customers, and employees.
When it's Used​
The most respected companies perform satisfaction surveys continuously in order to better understand the impact of their operations and projects on their customers and workforce over time. One-off surveys are also popular for capturing unbiased feedback ahead of, during, and/or after a significant event or initiative.
Benefits
Surveys conducted by a third party are often more effective at capturing unfiltered and unbiased feedback from constituents that may otherwise be reluctant or unwilling to provide it directly. Rapid Catalyst administers surveys on behalf of its clients and the industry in general to capture the critical details that help improve performance and move our partners forward.
For more information or to discuss how our Satisfaction Survey services can work for your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
Services for Web Clients
Web clients --any organization that needs assistance from outside sources to develop or maintain their web presence--are not immune from the constant shifts of industry dynamics. At some point, old technology and relationships must be re-evaluated against the evolving needs of one's own organization.
Our objective when working directly with these organizations is to provide honest and unbiased guidance and evaluations during the conceptualization and planning stages of a project to ensure they are positioned for success. We believe there is a fundamental challenge of trust (and sometimes a conflict of interest) between web clients and potential service providers at the outset of any new engagement. These trust issues often result in dysfunctional and defensive positions by all parties at the beginning of an engagement which only serves to undermine project fluidity, progress, and ultimately success. By bridging the gap and playing a neutral and objective role, Rapid Catalyst helps address some of these inherent issues and streamlines critical phases of a projects inception and delivery.
Services for Web Clients:
I. Scoping, Planning, and Procurement Services
• Project scoping and initiation
• RFP writing and RFP process management
• Business Analysis and Requirements Gathering
• Vendor Search and Interviews
II. In-Project Support and Services
• General consulting and project support
• Manual Content Load/Migration
• Quality assurance/control
III. Additional Services
• Market research and reports
• Vendor/Client/Employee satisfaction surveys and research
For more information or to discuss how Rapid Catalyst can help your organization, click on the link below or call 1-844-4-RAPID-1
Services for Web Professionals
Whether new to the industry, a seasoned veteran, or merely curious about the many web-related opportunities that exist, Rapid Catalyst understands the challenges faced by web professionals at all stages of their career and life styles. Our operations are designed not only to solve some of the unique problems faced by agencies and clients, but to also help individuals explore and thrive in their professional and personal lives. From work-from-home opportunities, job searches, professional development and other member benefits, Rapid Catalyst is guided by its core mission of helping web professionals reach their full potential.
If you are interested in flexible work opportunities or would like to know more about how Rapid Catalyst is creating value for web professionals, please fill out our questionnaire below and let us know your interests and how we can help!
Web Professional Questionnaire Form