Hello again!
Can I ask, do you feel appreciated in your job? Do you feel like others value your opinion, whether that is your clients if you work externally or your colleagues if you work in-house? Or, do you feel like a glorified pixel pusher, implementing the ideas of others?
One of the most common frustrations I encounter among those in our field is that we don’t feel valued. Sure, people make the right noises and thank us for our work. However, stakeholders don’t listen to our ideas or implement our suggestions. We are seen as implementors and nothing more.
The problem is that we are often our own worst enemy in this regards because we fail to demonstrate our value. People don’t value us because they cannot see the value we offer.
The Value of Conversion
I am relaunching my masterclass on Encouraging Clicks today, and that course is an excellent example of the power of demonstrating value. It is a course that helps students improve their conversion rates, and I created it, at least in part, because I have found that working in conversion optimisation changes how clients and stakeholders perceive your value.
I have noticed a distinct difference between the conversion optimisation work I do and the user experience work. When I work on conversion optimisation, people are much more likely to implement my suggestions and are willing to pay more for my advice.
That is because the value of a better conversion rate is more evident to my clients than the value of better user experience.
When you can link the work you do to a financial return for the organisation, you will find that your perceived value among clients and stakeholders increases significantly, meaning they take you more seriously and you can demand higher rates.
So, how do we link our work to value?
Are you Tracking Your Conversion Value?
Well if you work in conversion optimisation, this is relatively straightforward, especially if you are improving an e-commerce site. In such cases, you can track improvements in conversion or average order value. It is easy to see the benefit you are providing.
If you are working on generating more leads, things are still straightforward enough, but you might have to do a bit of homework. In this case, you will need to find out the average order value and the percentage of leads that convert. From there, you can work out how much any increase in leads generated is worth to the business.
Value Beyond Conversion Optimisation
But what if you are not improving the conversion rate? Can you still put a figure on your value? Absolutely! You just need to get more creative.
Let me give you an example. I was eating at Pizza Express a while back watching the poor waitress struggling with their shitty in-house app for placing orders with the kitchen.
I found myself lamenting the fact that nobody ever invests in internal software because they don’t see the value. So how could we prove the value of redesigning that app to Pizza Express management?
Well, to do that we are going to imagine a scenario and make that scenario as realistic as possible.
- So, let’s imagine we could shave 3 seconds off each order the waitress took, and that the average number of orders per table was four people. That would save 12 seconds per table she served.
- Now let’s guess that the restaurant served 100 tables a day. That would equate to 20 minutes of savings.
- A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that Pizza Express has 570 restaurants worldwide, which means every day we would be saving 11400 minutes.
- If Pizza Express only opened 360 days a year that is 69,350 hours that could be saved.
- Now let’s pessimistically presume that they pay their staff the minimum wage here in the U.K., which is £8.21.
- 69,350 hours times £8.21 per hour is £569,363 per year. That means a designer could save the company over half a million a year by redesigning the interface.
Now that example is packed with assumptions on my part. I have guessed at:
- The time saving I could make.
- Average table size.
- The average number of tables served a day.
- Number of days a branch is open.
- The average salary of a waitress.
But you could still follow my logic and see the value of the redesign. It still sounds impressive and puts together a coherent argument, especially if the figures you use are conservative.
Yes, stakeholders and clients will challenge you over the figures, and it is essential to be honest about their accuracy. Encourage them to invest in working out the real figures. However, even if they don’t you have made a correlation between design and business benefit.
The secret is to layout a logical path between the work you do and the business benefit that clients and stakeholders can follow. The details of that path do not need to be 100% accurate to make the link feel real.
You can use this approach, whether you are working on encouraging newsletter sign-ups or improving the experience of existing customers. There is no scenario where you cannot draw this kind of link, and if you really cannot, then chances are you shouldn’t be doing what you are doing!
Getting into this kind of mindset takes a bit of practice, but it does work. If you are struggling to create a similar scenario, drop me an email, and maybe I can help.
Alternatively, you could make your life easier and focus on conversion optimisation instead, in which case you should grab my masterclass on encouraging clicks. It is only open to new enrolment for this week only so now is your only chance for six months.
That subtle advertisement aside, hopefully you can now see how you can demonstrate your value to an organisation, even if you have to use some creative thinking to do so.
Speak to you next time.
