How to Sell Conversion Rate Optimization Services

You specialize in conversion rate optimization. Does your perspective client even know what that means? How in the world can you package up premium services? Let’s talk about that in today’s video. Hey. It’s Alzay Calhoun with Coveted Consultant.

What does Conversion Rate Optimization actually mean?

Let’s just be honest, person to person. 10 years ago, conversion rate optimization, CRO, wasn’t even a thing, so no one knew what it was then. People barely understand what it means now. What I want to do is make sure that you aren’t just speaking in jargon and that you actually are talking about things that your client can understand, and services that they would be happy to purchase.

Possibility: Optimize for Sign-Ups

Let’s go through a couple of examples here on the board. Let’s assume that what you’re optimizing for is sign ups on a website. Let’s look at sign ups as the metric. Before you do anything, let’s be clear on what sign ups actually mean. Are we talking about sign ups to a news letter? Are we talking about sign ups for a free consultation? Are we talking about sign ups for a given download? What are we talking about?

You and your client both need an objective metric before you get started on exactly what you’re optimizing. In other words, what I’m saying is, it doesn’t make practical sense to optimize for everything. It doesn’t make sense to promise that you can optimize for everything. The client has no idea what that means.

When you lay out your productized service, when you spell out this road map, when you spell out this flight path, it’s clear that everything that we do is designed to optimize for a certain metric. Let’s work that backwards. In optimizing for that metric, you’re going to have to do some AB testing, clearly. You can’t tell what’s better than what unless you have some comparison point. You know you’ve got to do AB testing. That’s a phase for itself. Before that, what call to action are we actually trying to optimize with, or optimize for? Is it a budget? I’m sorry. Is it a button on the webpage? Is it a landing page that we’re actually optimizing for? What is the precise call to action? What exactly is the action that we’re after? We’ve got to get clear on what that is. Are you changing button colors or are we changing headlines? Et cetera. Et cetera.

Backing that up just a step, let’s establish an appropriate baseline. This is so obvious, but it oftentimes goes misunderstood. If your client doesn’t have a baseline, then you can’t do CRO. When you describe your services, you should be making it clear to clients. If you don’t have an existing baseline, we are not the company for you. We can only help you optimize what currently exists. You should go work with someone else if you don’t have a precise baseline. That’s just being honest with your clients, but now they also know what they do and don’t need before they start working with you. It helps make the engagement more efficient.

Possibility: Optimizing for a Sale

That is that example. Let’s look at another one. Another example, let’s say that we’re optimizing for a sale. Everybody wants more sales, right? What exactly are we talking about? Different businesses have different [sale-ing 00:03:18] methods. If it’s an e-commerce site and folks are buying a $10 purchase right off the website, that’s one thing. If they’re talking to a sales professional on the phone, that’s something else. Tracking those are different. Again, let’s be clear on the number of sales, the amount of sales, the price per purchase, et cetera, but an objective metric before we even get started. Let’s take that step back.

We know we have to do AB testing, because we have to know what we’re comparing against. What’s important if we’re tracking sales is what the tracking method is. If everything is happening online, great. Are folks buying in one session, or do they come back for multiple sessions? Do you have a way of tracking that? If people are, again, leaving the site to place a phone call and talking to a sales person two days later, do you have some way of tracking that? If they’re calling a phone number immediately and talking to someone, can you track that? That’s a whole thing that has to be understood. How are we going to track the tracking? Right?

One step before that is to establish a baseline. Again, what are you currently doing now, client? Are you organized enough to even consider CRO as an option for you at this time? As you know, you’re the expert here. There are many things in between this and you can put more steps in here as appropriate. What’s most important is that your client can clearly see there is a straight line between where they are now. If they set a baseline, we can track accordingly. Do the correct AB testing and then begin to measure and improve how we’re selling. That’s obvious before they begin work with you.

At the same time, internally in your company, you have a method for helping your client set a baseline. It doesn’t take six weeks to figure that out. You have a method for installing complex tracking. You’re not figuring that out as you’re working with the client. You have a methodology for doing AB testing. The software you use and the simple things that you test so you can quickly understand if relevant changes are being made to their sales, to their revenue. The more organized you are in this process when you describe it, the more organized you are in this process when you implement it. Allows you to charge the premium pricing that you believe your expertise deserves. If you do this, you can win. I’ll talk to you in the next video.

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