Too often business owners make important decisions based on non-factual data. Risky assumptions can be rewarding, but the same goes for the Roulette… Do you really want to gamble with your business?
Take this scenario for instance: a site is 100% geared towards lead acquisition. It has “Try us for FREE” buttons and call-to-action all over the place. In fact, you could not buy their product directly if you wanted, all you can do is take advantage of that “free offer”. They run on that model for a few years, and begin to really understand how that machine works.
Then, one day the big cheese decides to skip this lead acquisition process and attempt to go straight into a direct purchase model. He may have his legitimate reasons for doing so, and it might make sense, but it’s REALLY important to realize that doing so is taking a huge leap into unknown ground! Continuing our story, they add a shopping cart to the site and give that “Purchase Now” more attention than the “Free offer” lead gen catcher. They still offer that “Free offer”, it’s just a bit over shadowed by the “Purchase Now” call-to-action.
So far so good, they need to test those grounds and see what happens as it could be a tremendous step forward for their business.
As any goals oriented individual would do, the big cheese asks the team to create some goals around this new strategy, and the problem begins…
There’s nothing wrong with being an optimistic team, but it’s suicidal to setup goals based on the top performing lead generation model when you’re turning your online business into a “Buy Now” machine. EVERYTHING changes!! Sure, maybe there isn’t too much difference to the naked eye, the site is still the same – we only have a new bigger and brighter button everywhere that says “Buy Now” or whatever.
This addition may be a small change in the site, or a small change for the parties in charge, but it’s a HUGE ASS CHANGE for the consumer!!! Now, all of a sudden you can buy something that you used to get for free, WHOA!
Just take this into consideration… Whenever you run into a situation where you’re making changes to your site, however small they may be, really pay attention at how that is affecting your business model. And be really careful at how you’re measuring your success. It’s important to set high goals, and they also need to be realistic – and realistic goals are almost never built on assumptions. Remember the old saying? “When you assume you make an ASS our of U and ME”.
