Meet the Strategist: Brad Yee

In his role, Brad helps enable customers to gain the most value from the Optimizely product and he recently hosted a webinar on “How to Increase Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities Across Your Business.”

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Brad. Can you tell us a bit about your role as Sr. Strategy Consultant? 

I’m responsible for teaching the strategic frameworks around experimentation that organizations can employ to improve their business KPIs. Essentially, understanding how to design an experiment so that you’re getting the right answers for the questions you’re trying to solve.

A big piece of the puzzle has to do with change management, culture building around experimentation, and how to build a scalable experimentation practice within an organization. 

Sr Strategy Consultant Brad Yee

How did you get started in the field?

I got started in technology consulting for a global firm. As a business analyst, my job was to support teams to build mobile apps. I was always curious if what we were building truly had an impact on the problems of the customer. I found this very simple and intuitive way of figuring those answers out and that is what led me to Optimizely.

While no two engagements are the same, walk us through how you work with customers. 

My goal is always to teach the customer how to fish. 

Step One: What are the goals and KPIs that are most important to your business. For example, are you looking to acquire new customers through or your marketing efforts? Or retain existing ones by building new features? What is the time-frame for these goals? Then from there let’s work towards building an experiment value roadmap to help achieve these goals.

We really want to understand the organization’s business model so that we can help build the best possible approach to provide tangible value. We always kick off our engagements with a success metrics workshop where we tie goals to metrics and discuss how experimentation can help influence these metrics. 

We look closely at the problems in your digital touchpoints blocking a customer from doing X / Y and Z action or function. We then get to the fun part – brainstorming all the potential solutions that can solve a given problem. Then to the absolute heart of experimentation, finding out which of the solutions you brainstormed may the best one?

A Page from the Experimentation 101 Playbook

What kind of resources are needed for successful engagement…

It seems obvious but you really need an executive sponsor, somebody who can drive change outside of the practitioner. It also is helpful to have access to engineering teams to build some of the more sophisticated tests. You need the trust of engineering and in our experience, the orgs that have that are able to move more quickly.

What was your recent Webinar about? 

The general strategy that you can deploy to upsell or cross-sell strategies to increase the average order value of the cart size. Or increase the average quantity of the cart size. In the Webinar we dive into specific strategies and share how customers are deploying these strategies. I also pull apart how customers have adopted these strategies. 

What is the future of experimentation?

More connectivity. Using experimentation and connecting that with more and more other types of digital marketing tools that when combined are even more powerful to improve the customer experience. Tools like chatbots, voice of the customer surveys, and NPS surveys and using those types of tools and connecting Optimizely with it so that customers are not only being able to quantify the effectiveness of those tools but using these tools as another data source for more test ideas to then generate more experiments.

What excites you about your role in the world of experimentation?

Getting an opportunity to work with innovative companies and digital disruptors. Working with fascinating companies and seeing how they’ve found a way to monetize and generate new revenues. Also, getting a glimpse of new kinds of digital businesses and then having the opportunity to improve their businesses through experimentation.

For more insights, tactics and strategy you can watch Brad’s Webinar, “How to Increase Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities Across Your Business” here.