The Challenge
Cleaver-Brooks has built boilers, burners, and controls for commercial and industrial buildings since 1929. By 2020 its corporate website had fallen well behind the company. The homepage was a fixed-width grid of banners, webinar promos, and quick links competing for attention, and the site had no mobile support at all: on a phone, visitors got a shrunken copy of the desktop page.
The company had already made ecommerce a priority. Its parts store, launched in 2018, gave customers direct access to genuine OEM parts, inventory, and their own pricing, and before it existed Cleaver-Brooks’ rep network reached only about 25% of its market. But the store and the corporate site were separate experiences on separate technology, so the brand, the navigation, and the path from “learn about a boiler” to “order its parts” broke at the seam.
What I Did
I was the lead strategist, project manager, and executive liaison, and led a 10-person Xngage team through the program on a 6-month timeline and a $200K budget.
- Set the strategy: rebuild the corporate site on the same Optimizely platform as the parts store, so one team, one platform, and one set of components served both, and the Parts Store sat one click from every page.
- Served as the executive liaison, keeping Cleaver-Brooks leadership aligned on scope, priorities, and decisions from kickoff through launch, and the single point of accountability between their team and ours.
- Owned scope, schedule, and budget, running the program across the corporate rebuild and the next phase of the parts store at once.
- Directed the team of strategists, designers, developers, and QA, turning business goals into a clear plan and holding every release to the same standard.
- Led a mobile-first redesign with a simpler navigation (Products, Solutions, Rentals, Industries, Education & Training, About Us) and the rep finder promoted to the top of every page, so buyers could reach a local Cleaver-Brooks rep in one tap.
- Upgraded the parts store and added new features, keeping it consistent with the new corporate brand.
The Result
The new site launched in October 2020, greeting visitors with “Welcome to our new site.” For the first time, Cleaver-Brooks had a corporate website that worked on any device, built on the same platform as its parts store, with the rep network and the store a click away from anywhere.
The program was part of a broader digital push that paid off. In Optimizely’s published customer story, Cleaver-Brooks reports growing its business more than 20% over 4 years in a declining market, with steady growth in parts store adoption and more customers returning to buy again.
