How to Convince Your Boss to Choose GDD Over Traditional Web Design

For those of us in the trenches of marketing and web design every day, it's easy to see the benefit of new technologies. But it's sometimes difficult to communicate those benefits to the boss writing the check.

If you know that your website strategy needs to change but aren't sure how to convince your boss to try a new system, this guide will give you actionable benefits that you can use to argue your point. For those considering a Growth-Driven Design program, here is how you can convince your boss it's a worthy investment.

A Quick Summary of Growth-Driven Design

While speaking high-level, you can use this summary to quickly convey what exactly GDD is. A whopping 94% of visitors reported they closed out of a website or didn’t trust it simply because of an outdated design. (Source) Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is a new approach to web design that stops this issue in its tracks.

In a Growth-Driven Design approach, websites are continuously updated every month, with substantive changes to keep your users engaged and moving through the buyer’s journey. It’s a three-step, ongoing process:

1. Strategy: Develop overall goals for the site to measure success.
2. Launch Pad: A functional, but slightly more minimal, site that’s launched in 1-3 months.
3. Continuous Improvement: The site is continuously updated and modified, using feedback from the goals set in step 1.

This strategy halts stagnation because you are constantly updating your website to meet your goals.

Why is GDD Better than Traditional Web Design?

There are several reasons why GDD is a better approach, but the three main benefits are:

• Shorter timeframe
• Better ROI
• Significantly lower short-term costs

Through GDD, you streamline your entire web design process to focus on the exact customers you want to attract, and continuously update your website to stay on top of shifting tech and behavioral trends.

How to Convince Your Boss to Choose Growth-Driven Design

We recommend following HubSpot's guide to pitching GDD, which consists of 3 main acts:

1. Problem: explain what is the problem to solve.
2. Complication: explain why it is critical to solve the problem, and be clear about the consequences of not solving it.
3. Resolution: Introduce the solution and how it is better than the traditional one-and-done approach.

Act One: Problem

Before you can pitch a solution, you need to showcase the current problems and have everyone come to an agreement that these need to be addressed. There are four main areas where problems exist:

• Goals
• Importance of the website
• Website performance
• Organization & processes

Define Your Goals

Take a look at your organizational-level growth goals, such as:

• What’s the current overall revenue?
• What’s the growth goal for the next year?
• What’s the growth goal in 5 years?
• What are the initiatives in place to make that happen?
• How much is marketing expected to contribute to those goals?

Once these are defined, you'll also want to dig into other key initiatives in the organization that are unrelated to growth (such as improving customer service) as well as your boss' goals for the company. Now you need to connect these goals back to your website, and explain how your website currently is failing these goals. This explanation from HubSpot is succinct, accurate and a great script to use:

Your website is your #1 salesperson. Your website is the first place where qualified buyers will go to learn more about how your product can help them solve their problem. A bad website will make you waste marketing dollars.

HubSpot provides an in-depth and step-by-step guide to breaking down all your goals, but the main point to emphasize here is:

• How much of your revenue can be tied back to the website today, and could it be higher?
• ...or if it can't be tied back right now because there is no tracking in place - that's a big problem.

It's important to arm yourself with accurate data from your current website and marketing efforts. This is the problem you want GDD to solve: the revenue from the website is minimal, or is currently untracked. It's impossible to ascribe a value to current marketing efforts if you can't say with certainty how much money is currently coming from the website.

Act Two: Complication

If your boss is still unsure after you lay out the current problems, you can address their concerns proactively by showing how the current website is impacting your goals, using these soundbites:

2.1 What is the impact to the organization?

• The website conversion performance does not improve from its current levels, the cost of opportunity to the organization would represent a loss of $___ potential revenue over the next __years, considering only website-originated leads.
• In addition, a poor performing website could impact up to ___% of deals originated through other channels, as the website acts as a positive influencer for most buyers in the consideration and decision stages of the buying process regardless if they were marketing originated or not.
• To make up for the loss of revenue from the website channel, the company would need to invest in other less efficient lead generation channels, and potentially elongate the sales process.
• Other consequences of a poor performing website include a poor view from industry analysts and qualified job applicants.

2.2 What is the impact to your boss’ personal goals?

• Without improving our website’s conversion performance, our ability to meet [Marketing’s contribution to revenue objective of ___% (place top KPI of your boss here)] will not be possible to achieve.

 2.3 Establish the need for a website redesign.

• To achieve the conversion performance we need from the website we need to reengineer the website.
• Redesigning our website using a traditional one-and-done approach might boost performance in the short term, but...
• If we don’t measure and understand what worked and what didn’t, we are voluntarily signing up for a high-risk, complex project with uncertain return.
• Leaving the website untouched until the next redesign 2-3 years from now, bounds the website to long periods of underperformance without anybody looking at it.
• This is not the way to manage what we consider our biggest marketing asset. We need an iterative approach.

Act Three: Resolution

Once you've explained the need for a new website, this is where you'll want to present GDD as the solution. Start with another summary of GDD, for example:

• Growth-Driven Design is a proven methodology that iteratively updates websites using real data to address our goals.

Next, your boss will want to see how GDD works.

The Three Goals of Growth-Driven Design

1. Minimize Challenges: Avoid the challenges of traditional web design by shortening the time to launch, focusing on impact, continuous improvement, and learning.

2. Continuous Improvement and Learning: Constantly research, test and learn about your users to guide website improvements. Make small improvements inside a consistent process, and measure to prove results.

3. As We Learn, Inform Both Marketing and Sales: Marketing and Sales are tightly integrated throughout the process. The insights we get from user data will inform and impact sales and marketing strategies.

The Growth-Driven Design Process

Growth-Driven Design is broken down into three key stages:

1. Strategy

Create a plan for your website to solve problems for your users.

• Business and website goals
• User experience(UX) research
• Jobs to be done
• Fundamental assumptions
• Buyer Personas
• Journey mapping
• Global strategy
• Brainstorm wish list
• Keyword/content plan
• Competitive analysis

2. Launch Pad

Quickly build a website that's better than what you have today, but isn't a final product. Rather, your Launch Pad is the foundation to grow, optimize and build from.

• Customize an acceleration approach
• Run sprint workshops
• Effective content development
• Invest in internal efficiencies

3. Continuous Improvement

With your Launch Pad website live and collecting data, we'll start identifying high-impact actions to grow your business.

Growth-Driven Web Design is not only easier on your wallet, but it’s also easier on your team and better for your customers. Growth-Driven Web Design works by creating a functional “launch pad” website that looks great and is based on your customers’ needs, but that’s smaller-scale and launches quickly – typically in 1-3 months versus the 6-12 month timetable of traditional web design. We then track users’ actions when they visit your site and make additions, changes and improvements based on that data.

If you want even more fuel to use in your presentation, you can use our 10 Reasons Why Growth-Driven Web Design is Better Than Traditional Web Design blog to go more in-depth on why GDD is a better alternative.

Conclusion

It can be difficult to convince your boss to sign in on a brand new strategy, but if you can show value it will help you in your efforts. The best way to sell GDD is not by selling - but instead understanding your boss' goals and positioning GDD as the natural step to achieving those goals.

To recap, here are your talking points:

• Act 1 - Problem: What is the business/marketing problem to solve.
• Act 2 - Complication: What are the consequences of not dealing with the problem
• Act 3 - Resolution: How does GDD solve the problems and impact the business.

Armed with these talking points, you have the power to justify your recommendation and a shot at getting it approved. Remember: GDD is backed up by data and will help you reach your goals. That is the most powerful motivator.

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Get Better Results with Growth-Driven Web Design - Free eBook

Growth-Driven Web Design is not only easier on your team and wallet- continuous updates and improvements to your website will keep your customers coming back for more. This free eBook goes over Growth-Driven Web Design and what you need to know to get started.

Download Our FREE Growth-Driven Web Design eBook

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