Before implementing CRO properly you first need to convince senior stakeholders to support you! But what’s the best way to handle these initial conversations?
Here is a script we use to help win and continue to keep support for the CRO programmes for our clients. It gets across the key elements that will help you explain why CRO is so important for business growth.
Step 1:
“Left untouched all websites will decline in performance over time.”
Goal: Open with something that everyone can agree with
You can show this by going to the Wayback machine to look at some examples of sites from the 1990s, like the original BBC website, a personal favourite! You're basically asking people, would you still use this now? Could you even still use this now?
And whilst they're extreme examples, it makes your point, which is that if we don't continue to make changes, whatever the metrics we have for our site, they will go down and down and down until eventually they will reach zero.
The outcome that you're looking for here is that everyone agrees with this and you can use it as a regroup point. If the conversation goes off track you can take everyone back to it. “So as we talked about earlier if the site is left untouched, it's going to decline in performance over time.” That gets everyone nodding again.
The other thing is it settles you down - this could be quite a big conversation for you! It might be something that you won't get another chance at for another twelve months due to budget cycles.
And what you want is to have those in the room nodding along with what you're saying.
Step 2:
“So we're in a state of constant decline if we do nothing, so we need a constant state of improvement just to keep performance on par.”
Goal: Provide a logical action step from what was agreed in step one
You are saying that even to maintain performance, not improve it initially, but even to maintain it, action is required. Something has to be done.
And alongside that, what you're getting out is this acceptance that if the decline is continuous, the action to offset it needs to equally be continuous. This is a programme, it is not a project. It is not something that we can start and finish and say, oh well, that's done. You are faced with constant decline and therefore you need continuous action in order to offset that.
Step 3:
“And we all know that our improvements aren't always positive.”
Goal: Establish that the changes that you will need to make can be good or bad!
You can do this by highlighting some of the recent challenges that some of your changes may have gone through. If you've got examples from within your organisation use those. If you've not been in the organisation all that long, go and talk to someone who has. I am sure that they will have stories for you about things that they did that didn't go so well!
Don't pick something that happened relatively recently though. The chances are there are people in the room who were involved in it. In some way, it still hurts a bit too much. They can't laugh at it right now and they will likely get defensive about it!
What you're seeking here is, again, a broad consensus on the danger of putting untested changes live. The moment that you put them live you do not know if it's going to work. Nobody knows.
Humour helps! It's easier, once the dust has settled a bit, to have a bit of a laugh about some of the things that you thought were going to be great and just weren't. Emotion is an ally for you within this process.
Change in itself is neutral. It's only when you put the change live and in front of your site visitors, you will know whether it is a good change or a bad change. Is it good for the business or is it bad for the business? It's their opinion that matters.
Step 4:
“So the safest way to go about our improvements is to test them first.”
Goal: Establish both sides of value for testing
On the one hand, you've got the word ‘improvements’. This is about gains. This is about things getting better, more revenue coming in, more profit coming in. It is about positive stuff.
On the other hand, you're leaning into fear of loss using the term ‘safest way’. In larger organisations, that is often the stronger emotion. They are desperate not to move backwards and more so than they have a requirement to move forwards.
The outcome that you're looking for here is to establish that there are multiple values from the same actions. And the reason that that matters is senior people love stuff that wins in two or more areas where they can take a single action and they get multiple benefits.
Step 5:
“That way we can avoid the inevitable decline (see 1) But reduce the risk of going backwards. (see 3).”
Goal: position what you are proposing as a business-critical work stream.
CRO is not something that is turned on or off, but something that needs to be inherent in the way that you go about change. You want to avoid the add-on, replaceable, substitute label.
The outcome you're looking for is that they understand that testing is a method of change management. It is about how we do things, not what we do. Every organisation has to change in order to survive. There are plenty of examples, the Blockbusters and the Kodaks of this world where they didn't do that and their businesses ended because of it.
So once you can accept that change is a non-negotiable, an essential element, the question that you're asking is no longer should we change? It is how do we go about change and how do we go about it with the lowest possible amount of risk?
Every change brings risk with it. So how are we going to mitigate that? And that is where the test and learn principle comes in. It is a way of looking at your changes and saying is this good or is this bad? Putting it out there and letting the people whose opinion matters, your visitors and your customers and prospective customers, letting them determine whether this is or is not a good choice for your business.
Step 6:
“Plus we can save on site rebuilds, a project that seems to come up every time conversion drops below x percent based on the last X years.”
Goal: End with a demonstrable savings message
If you can, use real costs from within your organisation from previous site redesigns that have been done.
If you don't have those, you can use some industry standard numbers for what the average site redesign costs, or indeed go and talk to other members of your organisation who may have been around longer or have access to that information.
This is important because it is a final extra. On top of all of the other things that you've already explained that are of value about this way of working you're ending with something that says, “look how much we could save in doing this!”
Senior people love savings even more than they love gains. If they can deliver the same amount of revenue, but it costs them less, the profit of the business goes up. And often at a senior level, the profitability is a big thing, particularly if they are publicly traded businesses that have to report those sorts of things back.
And the hope is that at this stage, the outcome that you will get is that your senior people are at least ready to discuss what you might need in order to go about this programme of work.
Bonus tip: Avoid using labels like CRO or experimentation
At no stage in our script do we use the term CRO, experimentation, conversion rate optimization or any of those things. And that is because those labels cause people to think about what they already know about this as a discipline. And most of those preconceptions are erroneous and based on very loose experience.
As soon as you use those labels, all of the people in the room start to imagine something ever so slightly different. It is definitely different to what you're proposing and is almost certainly different to what everyone else in the room is thinking.
And as soon as that happens, you're going to have to combat all of those different arguments and you probably do not have enough time in your life to get through all of those, let alone in the time that you've got for that meeting!
It will put the people in the room all on different pages and your chance of roping them all back onto the same track is pretty tough.
So avoid the labels if you can and you will find that path to getting the support that you need much smoother.
Related resources:
Webinar: How to Win C-Suite Support for CRO
Blog: Four hard truths about winning support for CRO
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