How Deloitte’s Sam Roddick sells digital transformation to brands

The game may change over the next 10 years, however, as rival groups join Deloitte in offering transformative marketing services – and as it operates in a straightened economic environment.

According to Roddick, Deloitte Digital’s success has changed the way Deloitte itself operates and how its rivals function. Principally, it has led the firm to embrace leftfield business thinking and a diversity of thought that was previously absent.

”We pioneered a much higher level of cognitive diversity. We bought in lots of different skills and capabilities and we got those skills and capabilities working really well together in concert.

”We’re not just about having a bank of first violins, we really are about a whole orchestra coming together to solve a client problem. That’s something that is much more prevalent across the whole firm.”

Adopting the lean and agile methodologies championed by startups over the last decade has also brought it success, he notes. ”We took a test-and-learn approach in everything we do ... that approach is now more prevalent across the whole firm, even for big-ticket ERP implementations.” Clearly it has worked; this June, Gartner declared the consulting group the largest in the world by billings.

Though he describes his organization as ”the antithesis of the holding company,” Roddick suggests those rivals are trying to join Deloitte by matching its service offerings and internal structure, rather than beat it outright.

”There was a lot of talk throughout the first five or 10 years of Deloitte Digital that ’the consultancies are coming.’ It might be time to change that to ’the holding companies are changing.’ How long will the phrase ’holding company’ still have relevance?

”We’ve expanded what we do and there has been some overlap. But ultimately, us and the other consultancies are taking much more of an integrated approach. I would say that we’re probably at the vanguard of that driving integration, where some of the others are somewhere in between a holding company and a truly integrated model.”

Even if Deloitte is, as Roddick argues, at the ”vanguard” of the sector, there’s still pressure from rivals – particularly the recently remodeled Accenture Song.

”There’s some truth to say it is our most frequent competitor,” he says. ”But in truth, we compete with a huge variety of organizations, depending on what we’re doing, the sector we’re serving and what market we’re operating in.”

Growth delivery

According to Roddick, the company considers new work based on its potential to plug into Deloitte’s wider business, as well as the ambition behind it. ”There is a type of work that I think we excel at, where we are focused on delivering a business outcome with a client – often a transformational outcome. That type of work means that, at a bare minimum, we are tasked with doing something that is world-class, ideally something that is world-first. And, increasingly, we look to be world-impacting.”

Furthermore, he argues that worsening economic conditions in the US, UK and EU may work to Deloitte Digital’s advantage. ”The forces that are driving the need for transformation are not diminished by the current economic cycle – if anything, they are amplified. It is not unreasonable to say that client budgets might be more challenged ... but the prioritization of those budgets will continue to be favorable to the services that we’re offering,” he says.

Digitization projects are often motivated by a desire to drive further growth, an objective that becomes an imperative during a recession. ”There’s also a real pressure to show returns and improve margins,” he adds.

”A lot of that plays to the work that the broader Deloitte business does. And a lot of our work is symbiotic between the two. We are driving the top line, but also focusing on cost efficiency as well.”

That’s not to say it’s ignoring hazard signs entirely. The company, which doubled its headcount in the UK through the pandemic, will slow its hiring ”a little” going forward, says Roddick. ”There are definitely some markets where we believe we’ve got the right level of supply for the demand that we’re seeing at the moment and our recruitment has slowed a little from sort of gangbusters growth. But other markets are still driving growth.”

Locking that growth in, however, will mean selling the virtues of transformative projects to clients. Roddick says that’s not always an easy task – wide-reaching organizational overhauls not being as easily digestible for potential customers as an inspiring campaign.

”Sometimes it’s difficult to break through when you’re not just putting up quite a traditional campaign with a societal purpose attached to it.”

The company still gets its share of gold and silver – it recently picked up a Cannes Lion for its ’Prevention Grid,’ which helped Southern Californian Edison power company reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires with the use of proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) software. The project reduced power outages by 70% and lowered the risk of wildfires by 65%, Deloitte claims.

But Roddick says its most successful pitches are those made to powerbrokers beyond a brand’s marketing team. And the wide-reaching implications of Deloitte’s projects – and the difficulty of putting them to work in service of promotional strategies – can lead to some marketers viewing the organization as a risk to their position, he says. That makes reaching out beyond a chief marketer imperative.

”Sometimes, when telling a story like that to a CMO, it can almost be a threat, because you’re kind of going beyond what’s just within their purview to support. Sometimes, there’ll be, ’I just want a simple transformation, a piece of work that falls within my purview and that is within my authority.’”

In contrast, relationships are typically more fruitful when they engage the full range of an organization’s stakeholders, he concludes. ”Funnily enough, those stories are much easier to tell to a broader C-suite audience than they are just a CMO.

”I don’t find it hard to explain the stories to clients. For the biggest transformations we do with clients, we will find ourselves in a conversation with the CFO, and the CMO, and the CIO, because it will be a tech transformation, a customer engagement transformation – and it’s not going to be cheap.”