#18 – Managing Multiple Clients as a CRO Expert: Tips and Strategies

My name is Khalil Slade and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live Hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh man. I bring tough questions like do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, It's a good question. It depends first on how knowledgeable that CRO person is. Let's put juniors aside, somebody who's just starting out in conversion optimization. Let's talk about somebody who's doing CRO for two years versus somebody who's been doing CRO for 10, 12 years. Completely different standards. Another consideration that you want to think about is the support that CRO person gets. Because CRO doesn't happen in a vacuum for us. A CRO usually works with a designer, a CRO works with the developer, and then there's a quality control person and then there's a project manager. Now if the CRO, regardless to how much they know, CRO will have to do, for example, the quality control. So they are validating that the test is actually implemented correctly and that there's no bugs. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of testing that needs to happen to validate that there's no issues with the test. And when I say it's a lot of time, I mean sometimes running through the quality control for a test might take a couple of days. When you run the tests and experiment through different browsers and different operating systems, if the CRO has to do that, imagine that will eat up two of his days or her days per week in a month. That is almost 30% of their time. So that's the reason I say the support that the CRO gets is very important. Does the CRO have to do the follow ups for us at invesp, we have a project manager who handles that. So the CRO is really just focused on CRO work. So let me take that case. I think somebody who has a couple of years of experience probably can comfortably handle three to four clients. Again. Again. Also, it depends how much traffic and conversions and how many experiments you're going to run for the client. But let's take a typical client where you're running four to five experiments per month. In that case, I think the CRO will be able to handle three to four companies that they are working with. That means they're able to Design anywhere between 12 to 16 maximum 20 experiments per month. Now, when I say you design an experiment, that means you do the ideation, digging through the data to say, oh, here's a page that we should be optimizing. Here's the problem, here's the hypothesis, and then work with the designer to create the design for that experiment. An expert CRO, somebody who's been doing CRO for a long time, can easily probably handle six to eight clients. Good example is Ayat. And I always tell her, be careful. You're not the standard. She looks at the page and she come up with so many different ideas and they're in her mind, she can prioritize them. So quickly it became second nature. And if you've read the book, blink. Where somebody looks at something and they're able just through their experience, make that judgment call. They're looking at the statue. Experts have ran a whole bunch of tests to say, yeah, the statue is actually authentic. An expert walks through the statue and looks at it and says, oh, this is not authentic. So it's a fake. And they're like, what? We've done all this testing. You must be out of your mind. And the expert says, well, I'm not sure why, but I know it's fake. And then so they go and they do a little bit more testing and they discover it is actually a fake. How did that person who's been kind of doing this work for 30 years, how were they able to make that call? Well, because, you know, it's second nature. They've done so much, there's so much stored in their brains that they're able to make those decisions instantaneously. And that's what happens with an expert CRO, where they're able to run six to eight different companies, think about their tests, and they are able to think through 24, 30 different experiments a month at some point. And this is back in 2012. So we've been doing conversion optimization for a while. And at that point in time, there were very few companies doing conversion optimization. I mean, really specialized in conversion optimization. So much demand. And I'm like, oh, great, more sales, more revenue. Let's take on more clients. And at some point, I had was handling 18 clients. That was stupid, I have to tell you, because at some point, you start making silly mistakes. Correct. And trying to keep up between different companies. And it's funny, at that point in time, we thought to ourselves, we should hire. So we brought in a designer, absolutely amazing designer. But we hired a person to help as a CRO and we didn't know how to hire. That was one of our first hires. This lady, I can mention, Em, came to us from a company. We were based in Michigan. She was also in Michigan. She was in Ann Arbor. She came to us from a company in Ann Arbor. And I remember when I hired her, I'm like, hey, how many clients are you handling? She's like, oh, I handle 50 clients. She didn't do conversion optimization, but she. She was doing digital marketing. I'm like, wow, 50 clients. That's impressive. Well, if you're managing 50 clients, at best, you might be giving a client two hours per month, correct? 120 hours. You still need some time to meet with people, talk to 120 hours divided between 50 clients. So we take her and we put her on four clients. And for her to go from, oh, I'm doing two hours per client per month, into oh, I need to be doing about 40 hours per client per month. She did not know how to manage that. Completely overwhelmed. Completely thought that we are very, very stupid for the way we run invesp. That was kind of the funny thing. You've just joined us, like, two weeks ago. Just learn our methods before you tell us that we're really stupid. And she struggled. And then. Which was sort of funny because it's one of the first time I had to fire somebody. Turns out that she talked to one of our clients to like, oh, those guys don't know what they're doing. Why don't you come? I'll work with you directly. The client came to us because they know Khalid and they know Ayat. So the client turned around and said, hey, I don't know this lady that you just brought on, but this is really inappropriate conversation. Next day, I fired her. But it was just kind of an interesting kind of load and time at investment and how we manage things.