Finding the best CRO consultant for your business isn’t always an easy task… In fact, it’s often quite difficult. The hiring process can raise many questions, but to help you choose the right candidate, we’ve gathered all the information you need to consider.
In this article, learn:
- What a CRO consultant does (and does not do)
- The qualities to look for in a CRO consultant
- The differences between hiring a freelancer and an agency
- The cost of a CRO consultant
Ready? Let’s go!
What is a CRO consultant?
A CRO consultant, also known as a CRO specialist or a CRO expert, is the chief strategist behind your Conversion Rate Optimization. If you’re unsure what that is, we recommend you read our article about CRO and its principles.
The role of a great CRO consultant is to develop a comprehensive strategy that will increase your conversion and as a result, your profit. To do so, their approach usually consists of the following:
- Research
- Prioritization
- Execution
- Analysis
- Scaling
Read our CRO guide to learn more about the different phases of a CRO approach.
What does a CRO consultant do?
As we mentioned above, a CRO consultant’s main goal is to help you optimize your website and your channels to increase performance in terms of conversion rates. For that, they’ll:
- Research and identify friction points preventing visitors from evolving throughout your conversion funnel.
- Develop a comprehensive testing strategy, including an agenda, a roadmap of experiments and their prioritization to lead you to long-term results.
- Analyze and evaluate experiments to help you reach your goals and maximize your ROI.
What doesn’t a CRO consultant do?
Although most CRO consultants are polymaths, they generally do not specialize themselves in :
- Design
- Web Development
- Quality Assurance
For this kind of work, you’ll have to include other people or collaborate with a full-stack CRO agency. Also, you probably don’t want to pay a lot of money for someone who might be good at many things, but not great at what you actually hired them for in the first place. But we’ll talk about this a bit later, so don’t move (well, you can still scroll).
What are the qualities of a good CRO specialist?
The qualities you’re looking for in a good CRO consultant mostly depends on how you work and what you expect for your business. When interviewing a candidate, here’s what we ask for at CoffeeX:
- To be data-driven: Implementing best practices or relying on your intuition will not get you very far in terms of CRO. You need someone who knows all the secrets of AB testing, analytics and statistics in order to elaborate a good and profitable strategy for your activity.
- To be methodic: If the candidate follows a particular CRO approach, that’s great!
- To be a great communicator: The best CRO consultants can interpret data, articulate their vision, explain their choices, justify their decisions and share them with stakeholders.
- To be interested in trends and always up-to-date. Using outdated methods when the culture has evolved means your strategy will flop.
- To be empathetic: Hire someone that can put himself in your customers’ shoes — understand their behavior, pains and needs — and react with the best solution.
How to hire a CRO consultant?
When you’re ready to work with a CRO consultant, you need to know what to ask during an interview to ensure they’re a perfect fit for your business.
To see if the candidate in front of you is the best you can find, we invite you to design a case with a current problem on your website. You’ll be able to see how the applicant would solve it and determine if his approach matches your way of working.
How much does a CRO consultant cost?
The answer is: it depends.
First of all, let’s talk about the cost of a CRO consultant. Their fee depends on their expertise, the service delivered, the software used, etc. What you need to keep in mind is that you need to be able to get a positive ROI. And for that, the improvements outweigh the costs. The partner you’ll be choosing needs to have the same mindset.
Should I work with a freelance or an agency?
Working with a freelancer can be a bit limiting because he is only be specialized in his field, while a whole agency has more resources and branches.
For example, at CoffeeX, we partner with companies to offer a complete conversion optimization service. That can include data analytics, content optimization and website development. That’s what’s great when working with a full-stack team: we do not depend on others which means we can keep pace in our experiments. When working with a freelancer, you’ll only get a sprint; with CoffeeX, you’ll get his design and implementation also!
Also, if a freelancer is stuck in his work, he’s alone and has to ask for your opinion. That can be a good thing because, as stated before, you need to work with a great communicator. But if the problem is related to CRO and you don’t have an answer, you’re both stuck. That won’t happen with an agency and you can expect that they’ll handle 100% of the work. An agency has an entire team to support and help your CRO consultant and your business.
The same applies to deadlines. If your freelancer is overworked, he might get a bit lost in his projects and fail in his delivery. On the contrary, a whole agency generally involves more people and your timing is more likely to be respected.
Lastly, a freelancer has less history running experiments than a full-stack agency. So when working with a whole team, you’ll benefit from a vast database of past experiments, more brains for the ideation and more combined experience to design big swing experiments. And whether or not they’ve been run with clients in your field, this can always bring you something valuable, like a different approach.
If you feel that CRO may benefit your business (CRO is always a good idea, actually), contact us! We’ll be happy to discuss your activity and see how we can improve it.
