How to develop, or become, a CRO professional

If you want to specialise in CRO or are thinking about hiring a professional in the field, be prepared for some challenges. But don't worry: this edition of G&E will help.

Demand is high

Many companies today want people who specialise in conversion optimisation and experimentation.

In research published by eMarketer in 2019, which seems to have been spot-on about where we are today, CRO was the second most frequently mentioned skill among those most needed at digital agencies:

The fact that leaders in the world's most competitive markets are investing more in CRO also heats up the market. Besides competing with one another for talent, these companies tend to have their strategies "copied" by many others, who naturally pursue the same kinds of professionals.

But high demand isn't exclusive to CRO, is it? We can say the same about data science, digital analytics, web development and several other areas of marketing and technology.

The issue is that demand for CRO particularly outstrips the supply of talent.

You can fill national conferences with data scientists, for example. But good luck finding enough CRO professionals to fill a room.

The shortage harms the market

Don't get me wrong. I'm not celebrating this shortage because I work in the field. Quite the opposite. The imbalance between supply and demand today is so large that it actually harms the market.

Increasingly, I see or hear about companies desperate for CRO talent making a series of mistakes.

One common scenario looks like this:

A company hires the first junior or mid-level professional it finds and puts that person in an impossible situation. It expects them, alone, to magically improve conversion rates for the company's KPIs and transform everyone's lives. That's what CRO people do, right?

Wouldn't it be lovely if hiring one person were enough to double conversions?

Obviously, it goes much deeper. You also need technology, processes, culture and other people for a "CRO professional" to have a chance of delivering real results.

Even when a company is willing to make those investments, and it rarely has that level of maturity, doing so properly requires a level of CRO seniority that's almost impossible to find in the market.

The result of this shortage usually looks like this:

• A company hires someone out of desperation.
• The professional can't find or create the conditions needed to deliver results.
• The professional gets frustrated.
• The company gets frustrated.
• CRO loses priority within the company: "CRO doesn't work. We've tried it here."

That's why I'm writing this article: to help professionals develop the right way in CRO, while also helping companies develop their own talent sustainably.

What makes a good CRO professional?

At Supersonic, the consultancy I co-founded, we were CRO pioneers. We started in 2013, when hardly anyone in Brazil had even heard the term. So we knew from day one that we'd have to train our team ourselves. We invested heavily in developing and improving our training.

Today, there may be nowhere else in the world training as many CRO professionals as Supersonic, whether to work in our squads or to be placed directly with clients who hire our training and staffing service.

Countless successes and mistakes over the years have taught us a great deal about identifying promising CRO talent. Here are some important lessons:

T-shaped isn't enough. You need to be key-shaped

One concept that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as the "ideal profile for the modern professional" is the T-shaped professional:

Essentially, T-shaped people have broad knowledge of several disciplines without much depth in them, while also being highly specialised, with deep knowledge, in their main field.

Being T-shaped is good, but unfortunately it isn't enough for CRO. CRO is exceptionally multidisciplinary. To excel, you need solid knowledge, rather than just a general understanding, of very different fields, which we'll discuss shortly.

So rather than being T-shaped, specialising in "only" one area, good CRO professionals need to be key-shaped.

The name describes a more recent concept: like T-shaped people, key-shaped people have broad general knowledge across several areas. The difference is that they can go deep in more than one field:

You can read more about the key-shaped concept here.

Academic qualifications?

They don't matter much. Honestly, I can't remember off the top of my head what most of the CRO people I've managed or trained studied at university.

Precisely because CRO is multidisciplinary, no single degree prepares someone for it. An advertising graduate will need to learn statistics. An information scientist will need to learn psychology.

Far more important than someone's degree is their ability to be key-shaped: knowledgeable across very different fields, with depth in some of them.

Too much "confidence" is a bad sign

Don't ask me why, but here in Brazil we seem unusually inclined to worship gurus. We give far too much attention to people who effortlessly invent millions of infallible "rules" and are completely certain about every random opinion they express.

But professionals full of certainties are really just professionals full of bad habits and fragile egos. And precisely because CRO is so transparent about results, this kind of person tends not to do well in it.

Around 90% of the experiments run by some of the world's best companies lose. Do you think a field like that has room for people full of certainty and inflated egos?

In CRO, this famous quote from Bertrand Russell makes a lot of sense:

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Or perhaps science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov better captures the incompatibility between experimentation and gurus:

Experimentation is the least arrogant method of acquiring knowledge.

Another problem is that people full of certainty usually have little curiosity.

A.n.y.o.n.e can look at a website and say, "This is bad." What separates mediocre optimisation work from good work is the method used to solve the problem.

The person full of certainty will spew superficial, context-free best practices. The curious person will work to truly understand the problem, quantitatively and qualitatively, and will therefore be much better equipped to decide how to fix it.

Choose the curious over the confident.

Nerds

I like nerdy people for CRO. Perhaps because I'm one too. But not "nerdy" in the sense of "I like Marvel films", perhaps because I don't?

The nerdiness that matters for CRO is an endless desire to explore many subjects in depth. Again, it's about curiosity.

When I was younger, I made a point of being the most informed person in my social circle about whatever nerdy thing I liked: that game, that film, that series and so on. I see that same trait in many of the best CRO professionals I've met.

Besides demonstrating curiosity, it's useful because it fits the multidisciplinary nature of the work. CRO professionals need expertise in several fields, as well as understanding the product they sell better than anyone else.

The specific skills

OK. We know you need to be multidisciplinary. But which disciplines does a CRO professional need to know?

We'll cover them now, but first, a caveat:

The specific requirements of a CRO role will vary considerably depending on factors such as the company's industry, its stage of development and the rest of the team supporting the role. The depth of knowledge needed in each discipline will vary too.

Generally, though, these are the main areas in which CRO professionals should continually deepen their knowledge, not necessarily in this order, and why each matters:

Copywriting

In simple terms, a copywriter needs to be exceptionally good at selling products and services mainly, but not exclusively, through written content.

But don't confuse "copywriting" with "writing well". They're completely different things. The vast majority of the best copywriters I know never worked as editorial writers.

To improve conversion rates, understanding sales arguments, positioning and value propositions matters far more than having excellent grammar.

In most businesses, the biggest conversion levers relate to copy at some level: headlines, clear benefits, differentiation from competitors and so on.

A CRO professional without deep copywriting knowledge will therefore have limited impact.

Digital analytics

Every digital marketing professional needs solid digital analytics knowledge to perform at a high level. CRO is no different.

To avoid spewing random "best practices" like the gurus I mentioned earlier, CRO professionals need to diagnose precisely what's going wrong with a website or product before working out how to fix it.

Where are the biggest holes in the conversion funnel? Which elements create friction for users? Which features are popular among the most engaged users?

Hundreds of valuable questions like these can only be asked and answered with a good grounding in digital analytics.

Audience research

While digital analytics tells us what is happening, audience research tells us why.

Why are so many people abandoning the site at checkout? Why don't many users return after the third day of a trial? Why is LTV falling?

The best experimentation hypotheses emerge when digital analytics and audience research are combined to provide a fuller picture of what's working and what isn't for our customers.

UX design and usability

A major enemy of conversion is confusing design that creates unnecessary difficulty for users.

The design's "beauty" isn't what matters. If something is redesigned to be "prettier" but creates more distractions and complexity for the user, the conversion rate will very probably fall.

It's about delivering interfaces that solve users' problems as efficiently as possible, with minimal friction. Even when working alongside designers, CRO professionals should be able to lead projects focused on the most effective design and the best possible usability.

Statistics

Ah, statistics. Hated by many, yet increasingly embedded in everything today.

I regularly see horrors in every field mentioned here. But statistics seems to be a special case, and a particularly dangerous one.

After all, worse than not being data-driven is THINKING you're data-driven while actually misinterpreting data or making decisions based on false numbers.

With or without support from statisticians, CRO professionals need to handle the "basics", such as properly planning a valid test and correctly interpreting its results. However simple modern testing tools' visual reports try to make things look, they aren't always simple.

Communication and other soft skills

As mentioned earlier, a CRO professional's impact will be limited without a testing culture. So they need strong soft skills to engage other people and departments.

Presenting test results engagingly or encouraging more people to run their own tests can be major challenges. But they can also bring enormous benefits. To make that possible, good CRO professionals need to communicate very well.

How to learn all this

Detailing exactly how to develop in each of these fields is beyond the scope of this edition. But some general guidance is useful:

Go to the right sources

Avoid consuming content from people who aren't working directly on the front line.

Content from people who aren't specialists in a field usually has at least two problems:

It loses the depth of the original material and offers only the "basics". Digital marketing has an astonishing epidemic of "basic content". It's very difficult to find people publishing truly in-depth material about anything, particularly in Portuguese. Finding decent sources is therefore one of the biggest challenges for anyone trying to become key-shaped.

Misinterpretation. People outside a field don't always understand the nuances of advanced material correctly. They then repeat those misinterpretations in their own content. That's how myths are born.

Instead of always pursuing the most popular content, ask yourself:

Which people and companies do you know are beating their competitors through work in the area you want to learn? That's usually where you'll find more value.

Note: unfortunately, it often goes without saying that accessing the right sources is impossible without English. If English is a challenge for you, prioritise it. It's probably one of the highest-return investments you can make in your professional life.

Is a CRO course worth paying for?

Since I'm not selling a CRO course, I can be more honest about "courses" than many people:

I've never noticed any correlation between a professional's quality and which course they did or didn't take.

Does that mean I think courses aren't worthwhile? Not at all! I think they have an important role. In fact, I hope to find time to offer one again soon.

The point is that courses guarantee nothing.

The main purpose of a good CRO course is to save beginners time by bringing curated material together. But many people have the wrong expectation. They think they'll finish a CRO course as qualified professionals.

The reality is that a course only "shows the paths". No course can go deeply into everything the profession involves. Students have to travel each of those paths themselves to truly master the material.

However hyped the course may be, it's worthless in practice if the professional doesn't study, and execute, extensively on their own.

So if a course looks interesting, take it, especially if you're starting out. Just understand that it's only a first step.

The best way to learn is through practice

The best way for a professional to learn is very similar to the best way for a company to grow: running experiments and learning from them.

The quantitative and qualitative feedback from tests is a fantastic education.

Did your change lose the test? Why? Dig into the numbers, then collect qualitative feedback and understand in detail what you got right and wrong. Start the cycle again.

Nothing replaces this process for developing professionals.

But don't worry. I know not everyone has an environment in which to run statistically valid tests.

In those cases, a good alternative is to ask professionals with a proven track record for feedback on your work. The most important thing is to put as many of the disciplines above into real practice as possible.

Of course, feedback from professionals, however capable they are, is less valuable than real tests with real users. But it's an excellent guide for beginners and can provide valuable lessons. It's one of the methods we use with great results when training Supersonic professionals who work internally or within client teams.

Conclusion

Demand for CRO is high and growing much faster than supply. The only way out of this shortage is to develop new talent.

On one side, professionals need to develop the right skills, understand the field's multidisciplinary nature and choose the right sources of knowledge.

On the other, companies need to abandon the illusion that simply hiring any CRO professional will magically achieve their goals. A more effective approach is to properly support talent development with the right technical guidance, so people can establish an experimentation culture and then deliver real results.

In this article, I've tried to help both sides by showing what professionals should aim for, and how companies can identify the most promising talent and develop it.

Would you like a deeper exploration of any training or hiring topic mentioned here in a future edition? Did I leave out something you're interested in? Keep sending me your suggestions. I read and reply to all of them.