Top Lessons Learned from Running a CRO Agency | CXL Institute Free Webinar

0:00[Music] everybody welcome to the show this is me we're gonna have a great webinar today for you talking about agency stuff this is my name is peplum I'm the founder of C Excel version excel and we have Alex here for some reason Alex would you please leave and Maddie I don't know why she's here remove okay awesome let's let's give it a couple more minutes to before we get going so let's make sure everything works so you guys see there's a chat feature here let's try it out so send me a message on this chat right here say hello ask me a question that you want me to cover stuff like that

1:11cool seems to be working so yeah I love this shirt this is this is a reminder for myself this is a reminder for myself that I shouldn't like my ideas focused on solving that problem okay so the way we're gonna do this guys is that I'm gonna rent for like 40 minutes maybe 30 I don't know and then we're just gonna do Q&A so for a maximum of 60 minutes I'm not sure how long that will take to run through my key lessons learned because I think I've prepared eight so false advertising was supposed to be five but actually had more stuff that I thought was important to share alright

2:01so before we get into it who here is not at cro agency person tell me in chat and tell me why you're here if you don't run over your agency or offer a CEO service I'm just curious you can stay above kicking you out just just tell me I want to understand why you're here what are you looking to get out of this webinar nobody or y'all just chicken [ __ ] studying creative services company all right awesome Joshua studying an agency gonna start better Oh more signups for what this is not a legion webinar here membership site so Josh you're in the wrong place because

3:02we're we're talking agency stuff here uh-huh cool so Joe guys when you use chat do not send to all panelists sent to everyone otherwise other people concede and they think I'm just rambling here think crazy stuff so send all chat to everyone not panelists yeah Carly says I didn't see messages sent two panelists as me so Carly's fix that mistakes until everyone so cool do not use the Q&A feature use only the live chat feature and send everybody so down the line I'm gonna take questions every question that is at rest to panelists I will not answer I will only answer questions thank to everyone all right perfect so

3:51I'm gonna share my screen now and let's get to it during my there is an option to send to everyone not all it's called everyone jerry and most people using it so i'm gonna get into it i'm gonna take questions after so let me go through my rant it should not be all panelists it should be everyone everyone there's an option called everyone so i'll take questions that address to everyone down the line or questions just panelists I'll only cover if there's time left all right cool I'm excited let's let's get to it I'm going to share my screen here and here we go okay so top lessons learned from

4:48running a CEO agency so I started conversion excel see Excel 2011 so six years ago six years ago it's not like a huge long time running a CEO of agency but I have still distilled I'm extracting many lessons from this journey that I think might be of help to you so let's just hop right into it so number one it is so much easier to run this business and agency business if you have a name and if you have an audience because think about it you are in the business if you run a zero agency or any agency for that matter you're in the business of expertise you're in the

5:37business of expertise you are not in the business of selling services people don't pay you for your time they pay you for your expertise they want results and so if I'm thinking why we need to bring in an expert to help me with whatever problem we're having in my company who-who do I turn to do I turn to this well-known expert in the field or this mister nobody who just cold call me last night this is a massive difference some massive difference if you have name recognition and if you have an audience or self to selling CRO cold meaning that you start emailing people you start calling them hey you know I'm

6:19this guy you know want to meet up that's let's talk about zero we can increase your conversion rate blah blah blah it's so difficult it is so difficult to make it in this business by having the call approach have the warm approach with leads come to you if fleets come to you fill out a form Legion form on your webs I say hey I want to buy your services then the Saints call it follows is now about so who are you that you know should I even help you you know you're in the position of power it's a massive difference you're in the position of power so otherwise if you

6:58have to sell them the idea that a a you should do CRO and B you should hire me to do CEO for you it's just it's so much friction in the process I'm gonna just quickly check the check that you're sending to make sure okay love thumb okay no more something on the table got it cool optimizing as we go and build an audience so how do you build an audience the audience of course number one is blogging you can run a podcast YouTube show doesn't matter why they did snapchat I think Instagram if you can pull it off the exact channel makes less difference of course SEO for SEO reasons

7:44blogging is the best way to go about it cuz you know people searching Google and then they can find you but if you real only in your local market you can do events you can do your local meetups local groups local you know whatever the local thing is that you guys do over there so it doesn't have to be blogging but you need to focus on building the audience if you only rely on referrals to get business it's a shitty hard life I mean maybe you're amazing and maybe all your clients give you referrals great but if what if there's a moment when referrals are not coming in because

8:23you're not in control when somebody refers you or where somebody asked people that you know for hey do you know somebody who does zero so you are not controlling you are not controlling the inputs or outputs really so a much better way to do it is in addition to referrals that you will have anyway when running an agency is you have your own email list so if you have a promotion if a new product you offering you can just email qualified leads and make money so if I were you I was just starting out I would do everything I can to build myself a name build an

9:04audience if you don't know where to start building a name for yourself get supposed to see Excel bar all right next results so you know remember we are in the business or and you are in the business of expertise if you run an agency in the business of expertise and there are no low hanging fruits no matter you know of course if you read you know a bunch of blog post it you might think that it's it's so easy to get results I'll just change this and that and you know make the pictures bigger and button you know more orange no I mean it's is really hard

9:43work and it's even harder work it's even harder work when you work with a well optimized websites it's not that hard to make a shitty website better it is very hard to make a good website even better it's hard hard work so so to run an optimization a testing program there are three metrics to consider that that should be your measures of success so number one is the number of variants tested so like your speed of experimentation and very important number two is win rate the percentage of winning tests or you know it can also be winning experiments that just you just change it and see what happens and three

10:33of uplift per successful experiment now in the speed of implementation speed of testing is all about your capability of execution capability how easy the client needs to work with and also how good your developers are and how many but due to other things how your winrate uplift per successful experiment these only depend on your true expertise the true expertise in competition is nuts think your competition yeah you know if your competitor you think you might think your competitors are not as smart as you are and maybe that's true but you have to bear in mind that your your client might not notice your client they're hearing the same pitch they're

11:24hearing the same pitch from everybody how do they know that that your pitch in me you actually can deliver and if you actually can't deliver I mean you'll be fired very soon so getting results is very hard and in competition is intense and of course you know we can look at the competition pyramid as a basically as a pyramid so the the more you charge an arrow in the pyramid meaning the less competitors you have who do it you charge top fees who like the best of the best companies but the expertise that those companies goes also so in a way the competition is is I mean it's never

12:05easy it's never easy so you need to of course in order to win business in order to win in this business you need two things you need to actually have the damn expertise if you're just winging it oh I read a couple blog posts I can do it no you can't you will fail miserably you will generate bad word of mouth everybody has bad months I mean my agency competes with the best of the agencies out there and clients change agencies every year pretty much sometimes every two years and so I see what my competition I see you know the type of tests they've run kind of

12:49results they've got them for the clients and they see what they've done so everybody has bad months everybody has shitty tests everybody has poor periods and we're talking about the best of the best that have sometimes I'm a month and two and three without results because when you're working with highly optimized websites it's difficult so my advice to you would be to invest intensely and immensely in your expertise and the expertise of your employ [Music] because your competition is gonna eat your lunch if you can't deliver you need to focus on getting those case studies those referrals getting results these is the heart and be prepared for it

13:36another thing to remember here is that you should work with bigger businesses cro conversion optimization in itself does not lend wealth to small businesses and mainly for the fact that a you need a bunch of transactions to even be able to run the testing program so a rough ballpark i like to say that if you don't have one thousand transactions a month and there's a rough ballpark you can't run a testing program you can run maybe one test a month but we can't call it a testing program per se another question I ask before taking on a client is that we know that getting results is

14:16hard we know the kidding results is hard so if we are only able to improve your sales the amount of revenue you make by one percent how much is that worth to you so if you're a company that does 1 million dollars in revenues increase your sales by one percent how much $10,000 so $10,000 and they let's say that that's how much extra money they get and that's not profit it's revenue so who knows what the profit margins are and how many months are they having you as an agency on to do this work and how much do you charge so the there's no RI in there there's no ROI in there for a

15:01company that does 1 million dollars a year and you improve the sales by one percent of course you you might get lucky and improve it by 5% 50,000 a year still still not not a huge but a huge thing because also companies you know if you see out but I charge you know 200 bucks a month well hey you're an idiot and B no company that makes 1 million bucks a year hires a company that charges $200 a month for the services I mean the world does not work way the bigger the business the more they want to pay for the services so so number one is you want to work with

15:40bigger businesses because a 1% is worth more if you work with one of our clients a Marriott hotels online revenue eight billion dollars a year 1% is worth lots of Ferraris lots of Lamborghinis so 1% is amazing if we do 1% every six months still amazing so and of course because they get more value out of it they are more happy with you more referrals to you and you can charge more money easy as that so as a ballpark you should try to not do business with companies that are that do less than 10 million a year in revenue of course there are exceptions and blah blah blah was a rough ballpark

16:29that's that's kind of the magic line so if a company that's more than ten million dollars a year on online revenue it's a great fit for CRO company if it does less it might not be it might not be a good fit do you need to to do testing you know did you see a rope no you you know you can optimize without testing but then the accuracy of your work measure ability of your work becomes shoddy and of course it's definitely that means the business is smaller they can't pay you more money an agency stunt scale agent system scale so meaning that the only way to make more

17:07money is by you know having work cry and so if you have clients that pay a thousand bucks a month my lesson is that one optimizer can work at the same time maximum with three for clients three for clients at a time per optimizer well without sacrificing quality if you work with six seven whatever more at the time the quality goes way down and remember getting results is hard so if you don't have the focus you don't you're not getting results and bad reputation will follow so so you do the math so if you have people in it agency three for clients a person per month how much retail those

17:51clients pay for you to make money so realistic is the only way to make more money fast is to charge more money the only way you can charge more money is by working with bigger clients that's really it so do not work with small businesses there's no money in it there's and also there's no fun in it and results of way harder to get small business mom-and-pop where you know 500k revenue business 500 million in revenue the amount of work that goes into it to get results same so why why waste your life working with small businesses everything is hard everything is equally hard so go work with big businesses so

18:34then how do you get big businesses same way you get small businesses pretty much with some differences of course you need to know how to pitch them you need to know how the politics works you need to know how the silos work you need to have some big business experience I'll also come over time and you can learn from other people who've been there and done that but mainly your messaging and your pricing will need to reflect that on your website who is it that you work with a big business comes to your website and you say ah we work with everybody SM B's mom-and-pop startups

19:03and enterprise enterprise is like no it's not gonna work or if they say Oh prices starting from thousand bucks a month there were no we don't pay such small feast so it's weird I know but I mean that's why we have enterprise tools software tools enterprise and and SMB software tools big businesses don't want cheap tools or cheap services alright next talked about competition differentiation is hard you know I hear it all the time and my people hear it all the time when we pitch a client the client says well these are the guys that you're up against they have the exact same pitch are we data-driven we improve your you

19:49know ROI blah blah blah blah blah is there's no difference so if there's no difference why should they hire you right of course you can have more case studies and better case studies and you can help better references and all those things help you can be cheaper and that also helps but there's always somebody cheaper than you so do not make cheap your competitive advantage unless you're just getting started you need to land your first clients to build some case studies I get it that's what I need so so how do you differentiate yourself so of course results you need to have results otherwise there's no pitch so

20:28you need to have something unique about you that other people don't have so branded methodology is a thing that helps we have research Excel conversion research framework we have P Excel test practice ation framework our friend / competitors that wider funnel have their PI prioritization they have their lift model infinity something and and so on so like different agencies have their different things and that really works it's a great pitch to have because we're using this own unique thing and nobody else can say that about themselves alright so branded methodology helps it lifts you up and it's especially good if you can show how other people in the

21:14market have adopted your framework because then your knowledge leader your visionary if you will and remember people are hiring you for your expertise so if you want a guy coming up with the methodologies that the market is using they hire you so if you do you want to hire this guy or you didn't do you want to hire the guy who taught that guy you know that's kind of stuff qualify yes so we talked about beat businesses and you don't want to work with small businesses because there's no money in it it's not a good fit for see a row so does it mean that small business leads are not coming

21:56in should they are they are in and we used to waste so much money small businesses filling out our lead forms giving us a car and then you know after an hour long page and explaining how we do things and it's a showing your case studies they're like alright so my month budget is like $400 like dude my hour on the phone costs more than that so of course you can't be an asset but that's what I'm thinking because you know I'm me and my other people at my agency wasting so much money talking to leads that I'm never gonna give us money it's just a bad fit so how do you get get

22:40around that how do you eliminate that waste and and of course the easiest way is by improving lead qualification so you can apply lead scoring models this elite comes in you have a some sort of a use mad kudu or some other lead scoring tool or you know whatever if you have a marketing automation tools they might do those things for you and so that that's once we need to you need to do some lead scoring or you need to just weed out bad leads by making your website talk to the ideal customer we work with companies 2 to 10 million a year were in e-commerce

23:25that's what that's the ideal customer ecommerce company is making at least 10 million a year you know also in your magic thing with it to get rid of shitty leads was we we added budget drop down onto a legion form what's your budget for this stuff or and then we've been testing it also like what's your annual revenue and the lowest amount is high enough so that the small leads are self deporting themselves basically they're like oh the minimum minimum company size is what or minimum budget is room I didn't know that you know we're talking 10,000 a month here so ended they just don't fill out the form don't go

24:18elsewhere great success all right of course even if you qualify leads even if they have the money you will get sorry for thumping my thing here you will get shitty clients clients from how you guys see the comic clients from hell it's it's highly recommended quickly see in the chat ok nobody complaining about you can't hear me so I'll take the questions after so you need to start paying attention to the signs of a client from hell the client from hell will suck you dry and it's not worth the money it's not worth your life you know like of course we all have because we work in tower to goal we

25:08want to get somewhere with our business and on a way in a basic its process so we're seeing the you know we're chipping away at the cream we're marching towards our vision and along the way it's just daily chronic and the important thing is in order to meet our goals in order to get there we need to enjoy the daily grind we need to enjoy the process so if you have shitty clients they're gonna kill your joyful life and it's not worth the money nothing is worth it I've got them pretty committed firing clients and of course if you're hungry you need to feed your family you need

25:50the money you take what you can get you know I've been there I've done stuff for money I mean only for money that I didn't enjoy and it's not what you think it's that came out from anyways yeah so what are some of the signs are the client from hell well first of all is they wanna use some real-time chat like Skype or whatever they wanna sit in the slack with you so that's things like these people are needing too much attention they need attention all the damn time and then if you don't respond in real time they get mad and stuff so that's what never say

26:35yes to any real-time chat arrange weekly meetings whether in person the phone hang out whatever it is but have you have structure in place second is they are anal retentive about every little detail that goes into the contract there are anal retentive about every little thing about how you do things and then what happens and then they'll they'll send you pages and pages of documents to revise they want to have seventeen meetings before they're ready to sign anything to clear science acquired from hell if you think the closing process was hard wait until you start doing the work don't suck the life out of you so now now my process is that

27:21lead comes in and they're like asking too many questions they're like every little detail needs to be like we need to three meetings about it I'm like you know guys actually I don't think this is a fit or if you're already in it you just need to say guys I don't think this is working out I'll give them two options I know we change the way we work where you give us more freedom to do our stuff or we we go separate ways because the way you want to consume this service is not the way we want to provide it and you'll find somebody else yeah

28:02alright productize so if you're an agency the shittiest thing you can do is sell our oh we build ours so we need 20 hours of work so our cost you know hundred bucks so that's what mobility know you are in the business of expertise nobody hires you to spend hours and also a charging billing hourly it's a really dick move because somebody more experienced get stuff done ten times faster than somebody junior and your agency has a fixed rate for billable hours how is that fair to advanced and if you charge hourly it is you in your interests to do everything is low as possible how is that good for

28:48the client no value-based pricing so value-based pricing so I talked about work with big businesses think how much is one percent improvement in sales worth through the client that's how we charge always a flat fee so we charge a flat monthly retainer in our case the minimum is 10k a month up to 20 km month or more depending on the client sides so if one percent improvement in sales means it means a lot of lumber guineas we'll charge you 20 K or more if so basically I want to make sure that what whatever we're doing means five six seven times ROI on the the money that

29:31they're spending with us that's the goal so so you need to productize your offering so you I highly recommend you I mean first of all no project-based stuff because CRO is on the project it's continuous continuous work so you need to set up a retainer for Ciara work so figure out a monthly flat rate for your retainer and of course you need to figure out what that flat retainer includes then you can break it into different pieces so what costs time for you up front conversion research is time so that's a separate product we sell just conversion research that contains you know this kind of qualitative stuff

30:16analytics blah blah blah blah blah it's a product you can buy and so on but it's also how we start every retainer and we charge a separate keep a fee for just a conversion research product researches product now we get to the ongoing testing and ongoing testing again like do you just tell people what to test or do you also design the test code up to test write the copy for the tests and I recommend that you do because if you only thing you do is consulting keep advice I think you should you know do something with your homepage I think that's the problem over there then I

30:51mean the problem is that people extremely shitty at execution I used to be a consultant back in the early 2000s marketing consultant where I used to go in and tell people what to do and I didn't do any of just said you should do this and that and then later people came to the hanging we need everything you said and results a [ __ ] and I went and I took a look and is like this is what you implement it oh my god this is horrible and that's when I changed that's when I started the agency because like I realized people are extremely shitty at

31:24execution so I highly recommend that she you also you come up with all the best treatments copy design and code them up in the testing tools because also in most companies design and development resources scarce the IT has a six month backlog of you know building new features and stuff so if you come in tell marketing that hey give your marketing budget to us and we'll code all the tests that you need its upgrade we don't need to wait for the IT anymore we can just run it's great it's a great value proposition of course you need to figure out how many tests per month you

32:06offer because you can't I mean it obviously depends on how much traffic and transactions the client has so you're limited but if it's a low traffic website you're limited by how many tests are statistically impossible to run but if it's a high traffic website millions and millions of people then I mean then the constraint is going to be in your end and you need to figure out how many tests you can produce and then you should your monthly retainer Church should reflect a certain number of tests per month a test launched per month and like how many for desktop how many for mobile and so on so that needs to be in

32:46there also of course weekly get-together stuff like that beautiful report you name it you can also productize one-time audits so you know conversion research is a type of audit somebody who has a list of a budget they want some quick ideas heuristic feedback can be a product analytics audit we see whether everything that needs to be measured is is being measured data integrity does the data actually make sense you know are we tracking all the things that need to be tracked all those things GA audit or whatever testing tool they're using can be a product you can charge good money for it another thing is that okay you finish the audit

33:27you find one million problems one with their Google Analytics then fixing it analytics and tag manager implementation again can be great I mean there's it's a very underserved market you know people charge fifty thousand for e-commerce GA and GTM implementation all that stuff so product ice everything should be everything there's a one-time product like an audit or fixing certain problems should be a this is this is what we do this is how where it starts ends takes 30 days cost as much and then retainer charge flat fee I often get questions about revenue share so I typically do not recommend doing remedy share two reasons companies that want you to do

34:19revenue share instead of flat fee are companies that don't have the money no big company will ever take a revenue share because the upside is for you is it's just huge and getting results is hard so if you don't get the results you're [ __ ] screwed so a good and also I mean if if there's success you're good you're good at what you do your tests are winning when it come when the time comes to share the money it's gonna be fights it's gonna be terrible fights it's like well we also contributed to the idea so we don't think you should get all that much and you know we also

35:01had a TV ad campaign running at the same time so we don't we think in part of the results because of that so you should turn you shouldn't get all that stuff so it ends in a fight sometimes it takes more time for lawyers to agree on the language in the contract then the actual optimization project project itself I have seen some successful implementations of a dual pricing model where it is a flat retainer and there's an upside so if we achieve certain milestone certain targets agency gets a bonus um so you know agency is motivated but if times are hard you're not screwing yourself up as

35:44well so if you can still pay your bills that can work but pure revenue share stay away [Music] training CRO folks takes a long I think time if you're gonna hire people that I've never done see a row before man I used to have the philosophy that hire for talent trained for scale because you can get motivated young people as a reasonable fee cost salary but before they're any good I mean it's one year minimum so they could actually talk to the client without saying a lot of [ __ ] and and in two years to actually become decent at it it takes a really [ __ ] long time and why is it

36:33and of course it's it's because optimizers need to know a lot about a lot you need to know design in the u.s. you need to know copywriting you need to know analytics statistics testing coding coding [ __ ] up not required but would be good if you know front encoding psychology that and that's only about the categorical support if you run an agency its second part of your skills its politics human relationships if you're an agency imagine a 2x2 matrix so two axes one axis is a relationship with the client and there are the other one is results so if the results are great but the

37:16relationship is [ __ ] you're gonna get fired eventually if there is a result results are [ __ ] but the relationship is good you get more time you have more time to get results if results are shared and relationship is shared you're fired but if if the results are great and the relationship is great you can keep that client for years and years and in fact that is the only way to keep the client for years and years and years and predictable income in an agency where it's a high overhead type of business it's called that's why you wanna be so you people need to be good

37:53at so many things you can't have introverts in the best well I mean you can but if they need to talk to they should not be talking to humans I have had great analysts but then when they had to like hold the hand and cultivate the relationship and shake hands as like I'm not saying introvert some introverts are great have great people skills it's just they need to like force themselves some people it's natural but also the work needs to be good so the way I structure it is I assign a team of five to work on a client project a team of five so that includes two of the main

38:35social out of whom one is the main project manager main contact but also does the optimization work and then there's a designer there's a developer and there's usually a junior person who does a lot of that important dirty work but that doesn't you know cost much we don't need the more expensive people for that so my two recommendations would be here like if you're gonna hire somebody young somebody who hasn't done this you need to make sure these people are gonna stick around for a long time because if there's if you have a employee retention issues they're changing jobs every year it's too expensive for you it's too

39:17expensive the results are going to be [ __ ] your agency is gonna be not be able to deliver so it's much better to hire experienced CRO people if you can find them and afford them both difficult is a huge demand for for experienced CRO people I know we'll always having tough time firing ourselves and and that's you know and we have name recognition in the industry still having a tough time so training takes a long time but you can speed things up you can speed things up by giving formal training to these people obviously so and it's not just on the job on the job is most important but

40:00also there's some sort of a formal training program going that these people are getting trained at very important they need to need to catch up and this goes for everybody like you need to find people or one single mentor who've been there done that who've done what you're trying to do who made the mistakes that you're making who set ups team structures who set up Products Pricing who know how things were who know how clients want to buy find those people and ask them hey you know when I first started my agency I was in reinventing the wheel and inventing the wheel all the time how do

40:43you know what the hell I was doing I was just I think that sounds like a reasonable idea let's go with that and then I started to go to industry conferences and then I didn't just go there to just listen to the talks because that's what you know whatever it's it's good but you know the main value in every conference is the people who are there so I identified all the people who are running CRO successful so your agencies and I was like hey dude you know what are you charging what are you delivering for that money how is this wing how is this thing structured

41:15how do you do that blah blah blah so I was taking notes and just interviewing one successful agency owner after another and and and brought that back to my team say guys we're gonna change everything everything so you need to find people they'll really accelerate your learning and if you can find a mentor so mentor somebody who will invest in you somebody who'll spend time with you and will answer your questions that's measurable I had a look of having that person in my life I still do still do and this is this guy Craig Sullivan optimization dude in the UK he is amazing he's been mentor to many in the

42:01industry many names you know his big I he I hired him for my internal workshops I mean he's not cheap the guy knows his [ __ ] of course for you guys end of this month we're starting a CRO agency after class 8 1 hour long classes when this guy is teaching you a how to get clients be how to get results all that stuff that you need to know for a really low price and there's a hundred bucks off coupon here on this slide so I you know my company pay this guy thousands of thousands of pounds to deliver internal workshops you you guys can get

42:41it for such a low fee myself I run a conversion coaching program I had a couple spots left starts next week no coupon here this is just an eight-week program me teaching you conversion stuff and conversion agency stuff if you want in you got a joint like today or tomorrow all the spots are gone all right thank you so much and let's take questions okay so all right let me scroll back up here and start seeing where the questions is mm-hmm okay in my new agency we started whirling with some small local business and they don't have traffic to run tests on yep absolutely that is the thing thousand transactions

43:39a month is kind of the ballpark I mean if you have a test that is a high uplift compared to the original you can you know have less transactions per month but that should be kind of like is this a good fit for a testing project or not what are the small differences you notice going from working with ten million a year company to 100 millionaire companies more politics on the client side there's typically slower to get stuff done there's a there's a hierarchy and decision making if they're really big enterprises then there's also the pleasure of working with branding and legal team so it's like you create

44:23couple treatments for the homepage and then before there's that line and those marketing said who even even even before that they need to go to lead off will review every small copy change and assess it from the point of view can anybody sue us if we say that and then they'll a month later they come back and they know or then Brandon will say oh this is not on brand so like [ __ ] like that so you need to start finding legal and branding and getting tests up will take longer but the beautiful thing about working with this big companies is that you're on a

45:01monthly retainer you send out in verses every single month and they pay them even if you released one or maybe zero tests so it was because the sluggishness is kind of their fault of course you as an agency it's also your job to help them fix their structure and decision-making and facilitate building building up speed of optimization which is your job and that's why also people pay off for expertise in setting this up but I mean it's other other than that other than the the bureaucracy poiitics and slowness i prefer big companies any day it's more exciting work oh so you get better results mmm how do you get around the hourly

45:49argument when you say charge more per hour than amateurs that's why they go by I mean I just do not speak our language at all in any anybody anybody who says that they're charging hourly I'll tell the client which to say that some other company bills them hour and I say well it is in their interest to not do the [ __ ] job and just low and put junior people on it so I mean you win the argument against hourly pricing easily if you want a good book about value-based pricing look up a book it's called a million dollar consulting by alan weiss buy that book is all about

46:32value-based pricing and why you should not charge hourly change my perspective brandon is asking how do you combat agencies that offer performance-based pricing or performance guarantees sure it is it is difficult to deal without argument so you can put performance bonuses on top of yours but also you don't want to work with clients who are counting every penny it's one of the signs of of a client from hell if they're very price sensitive you don't want the very price sensitive you want companies that are value sensitive who care about the best value that's delivered and of course you need to have case studies you need to have proof and

47:21companies are irrational in the sense that if this is a health care company they want to see case studies from other health care companies even though the experience with other health care companies is not really it's not really needed because the conversion research processes is what really matters how do you deal with clients who don't believe in or understand the need for conversion research is a required step well I mean they're paying the lottery how do you know what to test if you don't do conversion research the goal of conversion research is to figure out what the problems are where the problems are and why these problems are problems

48:04to begin with because an a/b test any change you make on the website it's a solution to an identified problem anybody else anybody else who is not doing research is just blank laundry let's try this let's try that so and those ideas what are the chances that there will produce any results very low unless the website is extremely shitty like everything is wrong with it it's it's it's not hard it's not hard to make a case for a conversion research it's not hard mmm can you go over how you create a retainer fee when sub 10k is more likely to be an initial price point well you just decide what you can

48:51profitably deliver for a fixed price so retainer fees that you just charge a flat monthly fee and for that you deliver something per month some some sort of fixed deliverables will run for tests a month will have one or two weekly meetings with your team we will do you know we will code up all this test will run you know so basically you decide what goes into the package and you put a price on it and then obviously if you're just starting out you start with lower prices you know you need to you need to make a profit so you need to be careful while how you price yourself but then from

49:30there on you need to start testing price elasticity price elasticity compressed elasticity is you know the the theory micro economics 101 if the theory is that if the price goes up demand goes down but until you hit the point of priced elasticity maybe the price goes up the demand that does not go down so let's say you win a contract that's $4,000 a month next client that you pitch pitch 5,000 months they'll take it great next client I'll pitch 6,000 a month or you can increase in $500 increments or whatever but always keep testing higher price with the next client until you get resistance and then

50:13stay in that level and see if you can keep selling at that level see if you can spot any difference between the clients and just keep going you know when I first started we charge $400 a month for a be testing $400 a month and we've been testing price levels now 10k a month is our minimum fee Dave says thanks for being a virtual mentor my pleasure Dave great partner Thanks awesome Johan says Craig has been advising their agency to absolutely Craig's great bet so you only work within bomb leaves no on board activities that's true and we tried actually setting up an outbound sales mechanism and we died we tried two

51:01things first of all I hired you know they're the sales development agencies so basically with people who will do based on your criteria lead scouting they'll build basically a lead pipeline 10,000 you know 10,000 companies that seem like a good fit to start identifying the right people emailing them setting up phone calls and then do the first sales pitch and then pass the lead to me we did we closed zero clients working three months with the sales development agency 10,000 companies went through closed zero second thing we started to do this ourselves like we you know people who are joining our email list because like 150 200 emails a day

51:48joining our email list so they out of those emails we identified bigger companies and then email bigger companies right away tried to get them on a phone call but again buying conversion optimization service it's an expensive and complicated product so you need to have the need and the budget for it it's not something it's not an impulse purchase is a considered purchase so cold pitches for expensive products very difficult if you have successfully pulled it off let me know I'd like to learn from you near assurance is how many tests you run per month I don't know it depends on the clients some clients we do or four tests

52:30a month some of the clients we do eight test month depends yours when you've done the researchers typically also some just do it stuff that doesn't need testing how do you help funds with that and how do you productize that so we never touch the actual website code of our clients so then we just if we just tell them you know fix this fix that change this change that or we can give them a design mock-up we my designer you know in conjunction with my optimizers will design treatment that they should just fix I mean if needed we can also write the front end code for it but then all the

53:10implementation will still be up for the client and and the reason is why you don't want to touch the backend code of the client is that if [ __ ] goes wrong you they're gonna sue your ass and you don't want to be responsible for any broken stuff on the web it would be companies that's massive lots of money Massimo suits I mean all the companies to the work the big companies also have to carry liability insurance I have to be insured for a million bucks or or more what's the red thing on the wall ah this is a acoustic noise panel so I have like several in my office here on the

53:47walls so without these panels my office was a quaint little box so this is to minimize echo and cuz I do podcast and [ __ ] so I can't have any echo in this room Bobby says what was the one thing that produced the most surprising result when it came to growing her agency I think increasing the prices I was surprised by testing testing the prime and just charged more money over time and we were able to get away with it I like I think it was the Reed Hoffman from LinkedIn that said that if you're not embarrassed by how much money you're charging you're not charging enough that

54:37was a surprise for me when I got started any advice on running great service when trying to understand who your customers are tools and questions Danielle I mean we have lots of great blog posts to go to conversion XL comm put in the search survey questions what's the blog post about that your it says one of the most common objections you hear from potential clients and how do you handle them can you guarantee a result that's the most common thing most the answer is that we we guarantee 0% but look at all these case studies that we have every client is different so they yeah they

55:16want to quantify they want us to you know look at the crystal ball and predict outcome how do you charge for a monthly CRO retainer and on average how many tests the average client run per month our standard the lowest package we have is 10k a month that includes four tests a month a four tests launched new four new test launch now fat says do you think it's easier to focus some b2b companies or e-commerce both there's no difference for us ecommerce is a bigger chunk of the business but also a little simply to B do you have any automation tools for optimizing agency workflows they

55:57prescribes and what do you want to optimize so that it depends we use Trello we use yridian for the workflow management there's effective experiments there's experiment engine yeah like my question is how what do you do when there isn't a lot of big companies in the market the bottom of the top 20 biggest companies are under 1 million well I'm from Estonia my agency people are in Estonia so nobody knows small market challenges like I do so do i do you restrict yourself geographically to where you are our agency people are in Tallinn Estonia 1 million population 1 million 90% of our clients are US companies another 7%

56:49Australian we have 0 Estonian clients so don't don't focus on your local market how do you approach your Minter's how did you make it worth it for them to work with you why it's a it's a two-way street so you need to give something back first lots of engagement in Twitter that was my thing to get started and then I mean most people are just great human beings so I went to events bought them a beer just had a chat and you know the great secret to networking is that it's not that you go and here you can you help me with this that's boy I get hundred

57:28emails a daily boss from [ __ ] from me delete delete delete delete delete them because it's overwhelming but if people come and they are they're just cool guys that's the secret of networking you go to a conference and all the speakers and whatever people that you want to you know becomes friends with just hang out that MPA cooled I do not ask for anything played a long game and of course you can hire all these people to deliver workshops money creases all the wheels always books you'd recommend no do you have any experience or thoughts are working with startups that aren't making money but have VC money and want to one

58:12see a road to help grow faster well if they don't have revenue yet do they have customers I mean you need to have something to measure and they need to have our eye there so you can always sell research in the company it doesn't matter what size they are you can always sell conversion research so that that's something you can always sell but in order to run test they need to have some sort of volume traffic transaction volume so there's no there's just math you know you can't change the way math works and also like if it's a let's say that they they have enough traffic to

58:52run one test a month but they did they're not making enough revenue so then getting results is hard so if you add one percent to the revenue you're just gonna get fired so you can try you can try days says what are the salary ranges of optimizers are you seeing new disciplines job types developing in this space it varies from country to country I look up conversion excel blog state of the industry report google it we have the salaries in there from last year our next report is coming out later this month do you ever sell a months to see a row retainer without the research never

59:32because that would be ripping people off Joshua said well there's someone who favorite testing tools if we want to roll our sleeves up and get to work is to one or two go to tools you would recommend most tools are great so VW Optimizely conduct rigs same thickness and the main thing is that you know never used a visual editor always use the code there either to code up tests I like VW because of their use of the Bandit sorry a Bayesian algorithm how conductress where they can deal with a machine learning based segment targeting I like Saint in the sandwich they can deal with multivariate instead you need

1:00:16to have very high traffic website there those those would be my starting tools should we use QR form to send questions I know what skew are on average Demetrios how long do you work with one client is there a point when client own needs here sir zero services anymore no they this really depends on the size of the client so the bigger the client in terms of revenue online revenue the longer the engagement so if they make ten million a month hundred million a month and you increase a results one percent per month they'll keep going forever they keep you on until this stuff is profitable until is measurably

1:00:58profitable with small businesses the point of diminishing returns will come very fast so small businesses then on the like ten million year old maybe slightly under there like seven million a year usually it's like three months engagements maximum six months because we will hit the point where we've gotten the big wins and the 1% wins which are just not worth it to them anymore what is the difference in skills between CRO and UX designer massive massive differences I mean CRO needs to do be really savvy about analytics copywriting statistics running tests politics qualitative research it's just a design designer you know I mean I guess designers depending will also do user

1:01:52research most qualitative stuff but all the quantitative stuff there and the politics alessandro thanks for his honest webinar how do you how many hours do you work in a day what was the worst mistake in growing your agency I worked like six seven hours a day because that's my peak productivity level actually that's my number one productivity tip is that if you if you know you're gonna not if you know if you work 14 hours a day you have the perception that you have all day long to get [ __ ] and of course when I started I I was less a hustling a lot more when I was putting

1:02:37in more hours but now I have two kids as a family I'm aging so means like I need to invest in my health working out so something's gotta give kind of win everything yeah my worst mistake I don't know man I haven't had any catastrophic mistakes to be honest advice for someone who fell need to see a role more they didn't we all man I'm signing up for courses read a ton of books but you really got success by instinct and just I've had really good success by instinct and going with my god well that's great for you Allen but luck will run out so it's

1:03:17time to get some some quality process and stuff in it as well I hope you don't just hope ya Carly so how do you start from zero when you have no previous work to show the client land your first clients four for free that's it work for free and if you don't have the experience then go work for an agency offer yourself as an intern play the long game don't play the don't be in it this is a marathon like are you gonna be doing this 20 years from now if so it makes sense I worked for free two years at the start of my career for free just to get

1:04:02experience so play along game planning is valuable and and start start blogging now start blogging now people ask Seth Godin once the best time to start promoting my book and Seth Godin said before you write it same for crl fab says did your product I support and teaching stuff to clients how much you charge yeah we do internal workshops which are as depending on like the duration of the workshop and if it's custom or centered content I think we're we're minimum 10k a day type of stuff and then of course now we have cxl Institute Kristen says crate-trained thanks how do you start to calculate ROI

1:04:50so you can create value based packages we've done CRO audits before and a few months retainers not sure how to find the so numbers for our case studies so look up a blog post on our blog how to measure ROI of optimisation goes really in-depth with that stuff it is difficult it's no easy feat to measure ROI the best thing is that if you run a B tests an a/b tests measure the relative improvement over what was there versus what you mad it so relative improvement and then you're gonna make an assumption you know it's a model it's it's a flawed model but it's better than nothing you

1:05:30make an assumption that that uplift that you gained will be there six maybe twelve months from now and then you add up all those uplifts so that that's the best way to go if if you can't run tests I mean it's it's it's good shot here I'll be getting a recording yes almost traffic to clients need to start the conversion tests traffic is irrelevant major transactions thousand transactions per month is starting point ballpark have you seen agency model the mixing bound BBC plus here of sure but the thing is when you're like we do it all type of stuff yeah so the problem with that is that if I'm the buyer and I have

1:06:16two agents pitching me one does it all and one does just see arrow the question is who's better at zero so the perception of expertise is much higher with the company that just the CRO and the actual expertise is much better since they do just zero so there's a time and place for you know we do it all full stack agencies but focus bug beats everything why did you recommend not using the because all your tests will break and it's [ __ ] also with visual editor you can just do tiny cosmetic changes so you're testing [ __ ] that the visual editor enables you to test like some copy and button [ __ ]

1:07:00you're not testing actual solutions to actual problems that you have identified through conversion optimization and their automatic code the visual editor is right it just breaks in half the browser's this massive QA issues your tests they just your test will fail that's it don't use visual editors ever how much meaning no traffic on a website to let you do good test I said thousand transactions traffic is irrelevant where is CRO going any insights for the future quantitative tools will get better insights from quantitative tools will get better personalization automated personalization will get better while so-so tools will get easier and better but so that means what what's left for

1:07:51humans I mean invest in just strategic approach investing process in less than knowing how to work with these new tools that are becoming available investing qualitative research tools have not yet figured out humans so nobody humans and understanding your audience is our superpower have a great weekend creative electric and Italian office go ahead man have you ever worked with Russian companies I don't think so alright questions are over time we've already gone 10 minutes over thanks so much guys as I said if I were you running an agency I would look into the CRO agency master class starting end of this month my coaching program starts

1:08:46next week we'll send you the recording after and crisis Felix