Productive teams are integral parts of successful companies. The right individuals can start a company, but a team that makes sure each facet of your business performs at its highest level ensures its longevity. Each team and its members must be on the same page about what should be prioritized to grow the business.
One of those priorities is consistently increasing conversions. Conversions occur when visitors complete a desired action, like filling out a form or making a purchase. Without conversions, your business’s longevity is at risk.
Building a team that prioritizes conversions and finding ways to increase conversions will have the most powerful impact on your business. Here are four tips for building your team the right way to optimize conversions for any product or service.
Four Tips for Building a Powerful Team That Increases Conversions
Whether you form a conversion optimization team or a space within each of your departments to address conversion optimization, it’s essential for everyone first to understand such a priority’s purpose and goals.
A massive inter-departmental effort is necessary to ensure external relationships are adequately supported and nurtured through each stage of the customer journey to produce consistent conversions.
Let’s take a look at the following four tips to get you on your way to building a powerful team and increasing your conversions.
Understand the purpose of your team and set specific goals
If you’re creating a special team for conversion rate optimization, the purpose of the team must be thoroughly understood. Seventy-seven percent of businesses that don’t set or track their goals report less than $100k in annual revenue. When team expectations are understood, you’re able to set specific goals for your conversion efforts and track them to ensure they’re working.
Your team should be familiar with your overall conversion goals and the current strategies being used to achieve those goals. Job responsibilities should be formally defined and gone over with each team member.
Part of your team could be identifying your website’s role in specific business metrics or issues through analytics. The other part of your team could be more hands-on with CRO tools to find optimization opportunities.
Use the best team structure for your company culture
Your team should be built based on your company culture. You should factor in answers to the following questions to ensure your structuring your team to fit your company culture:
- What is our mission?
- Who are our company leaders?
- How do employees communicate with managers?
- How do teams across the company work together to achieve goals?
- What technology is used to keep teams productive, communicative, and efficient?
- What social responsibility commitments do we have?
- Are we prioritizing sustainability?
- Who are our customers, and how are we developing relationships with them?
- What pain points are we addressing for our visitors?
- What interpersonal skills do we love in our top employees? Technical skills?
- What different personalities are housed in our company?
- Do we encourage our internal teams to be creative?
The most known structures for conversion optimization teams are centralized, decentralized, or hybrid.
Centralized structure
Your team and its resources are in one place and responsible for the conversion optimization strategy for the entire company. Each department’s needs and contributions are taken into account when identifying opportunities for improvement in conversion strategies, but it is up to that individual department to prioritize and act on said strategies.
Decentralized structure
Each department has someone dedicated to increasing conversions based on the role of each department. For example, let’s say the IT department has identified that a more robust cybersecurity response plan will convince potential customers their purchases are secure. They can enact this plan and increase conversion without talking to any other department.
Hybrid structure
A hybrid structure employs parts of the centralized approach and the decentralized approach. Members of the CRO team may be directly embedded in other departments and oversee changes that will positively affect conversion. For example, let’s say the CRO team identifies an opportunity to increase online conversion by making the company’s website and apps more accessible. They may then detach a member of the centralized team to manage this project and maintain collaboration between the web devs, online marketing department, SEO, etc. This structure can combine the strengths of both structures to form an overall appealing conversion optimization strategy.
Choose team members with different specializations
You may have to start with a jack-of-all-trades, but a powerful team is composed of team members with different specializations. A functional, productive conversion optimization team is a cross-functional team. It’s ideal to hire individuals that are adept in various aspects or departments in your business to ensure that each point in the customer’s journey that leads to them converting to customers is adequately addressed.
For example, marketing, sales, and customer service are all integral to the conversion process. All these lead to stronger customer relationships, and there are many ways to keep these relationships strong once they are established. It’s a great idea to have someone specializing in creating long-lasting customer relationships to ensure customers’ needs are being heard and better connection strategies are being implemented. A thoroughly trained sales-oriented individual can help you identify messaging, products, and services that are resonating best with customers. And a customer solution specialist can help you create service strategies that retain customers.
When team members specialize in different things, you inherit a wealth of knowledge, a wider pool of solutions, and unique perspectives on how to best turn visitors into customers.
Here is a list of roles that could help increase conversions:
- Project manager
- Website developer
- IT analyst
- Customer support analyst
- Customer service specialist
- Marketing manager
- Sales specialist
- Web designer
- Quality assurance role
- Conversion rate optimization specialist
It may also be beneficial to look for team members with specific skill sets or mastery in job responsibilities instead of particular roles. The following skillsets are extremely valuable in any team, but especially for one that prioritizes conversions:
- Collecting and analyzing data thoroughly
- Implementing strategies based on the collected data
- Developing and improving positive customer relations
- Communicating effectively with team members on all levels
- Studying website visitor behavior to create a better user experience
- Digital marketing techniques
- Product development
- Creating content
- Analyzing workflows and other business operations
- Ensure your leads have a great experience
- Comparing behavior on different types of content
- Monitoring the traffic from top traffic sources or optimizing product descriptions
Intentionally nurture individual and team bonds
Once a team is formed, many business owners think the rest will handle itself. Meaning, the team will become close, they’ll work together productively, and goals will be achieved left and right. But, this just isn’t realistic without intention. Understanding your team’s purpose, choosing the team’s best structure, and hiring the team’s right individuals is just the beginning.
For your team to be as impactful as possible, you want to ensure your intentionally nurturing individual relationships within your team and the collective team bond. A powerful team is built over time. Productivity, acquisition, achieving conversion goals, and overall company growth are all dependent on your team’s strength.
A trust-filled relationship among stakeholders is not only meaningful but critical. Keep them working together productively and actively strengthen the team relationships.
Intentionally nurture individual relationships within your team by encouraging team members to get to know each other personally. Encourage them to find mutual interests, passion, and projects outside of work. The better their relationships are with each other, the more able they’ll be to work productively together. You’ll also want to ensure you’re conducting team-building activities, hosting team meetings, and solving team conflicts as a team to incite a solid overall team bond.
Conclusion
Your efforts across all business functions are highly dependent on the teams created within your company. Build a powerful team that increases conversions by understanding your team’s purpose, identifying specific goals for your team, using the best team structure for your company culture, choosing the right team members, and intentionally nurturing individual and team relationships.
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