The lead used to come from the platform
Part one: Paul, Crown, and the deal we grew up on
Paul do Forno called me from the road yesterday, driving home from a B2B commerce show in Indianapolis. The signal kept dropping on I-70. In between, Paul gave me the clearest read on the consulting market I have heard all year.
That didn’t surprise me. Paul has been the person to call about B2B commerce for as long as there has been B2B commerce to call about.
How Crown got bought
I co-founded Crown in 2000 in Dayton, Ohio. We implemented commerce and content platforms for big companies, about 60% B2B and 40% B2C. By 2013 we were a very good firm that almost nobody outside our client list had heard of.
Paul was at Razorfish then, after building the commerce practice at Sapient and doing it again at Razorfish. When Razorfish went looking for more commerce depth, Paul was the one who pushed its leadership to take a flyer on a firm from Dayton.
Razorfish bought Crown in June 2014. M&A Advisor named it Deal of the Year, we tripled the business over the next two years, and I went on to run Razorfish Commerce globally. None of that happens without Paul. I said so on the call.
I owe Paul one. Paul knows it, and now so do you.
Paul makes a habit of it. Jason Goldberg, now one of the best known voices in retail, wrote on LinkedIn recently about his fourteen years with Publicis and traced the whole run back to Paul, who found Jason on Twitter and brought him into Razorfish. In 2012 that made everyone nervous. Paul didn’t care where the talent came from.
Paul has spent more than a decade since at Deloitte Digital, leading the commerce practice, and bet on B2B years before it was fashionable. Paul still spends the weeks on conference stages and in the hallways after, talking to the startups.
The deal we grew up on
Paul and I learned the business on the same deal. The platform’s sales team found an opportunity and called its implementation partner. The partner went in and pitched the work. Hybris had a lead, we pitched it.
For twenty years that was the engine of B2B consulting. Salesforce, SAP, Hybris and Demandware sold the license, and the integrator sold everything after it.
That engine is sputtering. Platform sales teams turn over so fast that a lot of reps cannot explain their own products. Salesforce still runs two commerce products and has gone back and forth for years on merging them, because a merger means a migration and a migration means the customer shops around. At SAP, commerce has been folded into the core, where it competes for attention with ERP upgrades many times its size.
When the platform knows less about its own product than the consultancy does, the consultancy stops waiting for the platform’s lead.
What clients buy instead
B2B buyers sat on their hands through most of the tariff year. This fall they all moved at once. The work came back, but not in the old shape.
What clients buy now is business transformation, then continuous improvement. Not the old “operate,” keeping the lights on and answering tickets. A standing team that works through a backlog of business problems and keeps adding to it.
It looks a lot like business process outsourcing, and that is the point. A CFO can budget for a team and a backlog in a way they never could for a project with a go-live date and a change order behind it. It is one of the shapes the replacement takes now that nobody is buying hours anymore.
The platform used to sell the problem. Now the client brings the problem and looks for whoever understands it.
The platforms have a problem of their own, and they are solving it with a checkbook. That is part two.
The platform used to bring the deal.
Now the client brings the problem.
Somebody has to know the business.
A four part series on where B2B consulting goes next.
One. The lead used to come from the platform. You are here. Crown, Razorfish, and why the platform-led deal is gone.
Two. The platforms are buying their AI. Software companies are buying small AI firms instead of building, and somebody still has to make it work.
Three. Salesforce says the UI is going away. The Dreamforce keynote gave up the screens, kept the data and partnered for the intelligence. What that does to the thesis.
Four. Bring the engineer. The consultancies growing fastest sit next to OpenAI, Anthropic and Palantir, and send forward deployed engineers.