Want A Bigger Budget For Your Website

Here’s help in your budget pitch (to your Manager or CFO or CEO/MD)
You’ve got plans for your website and you need approval for the budget to get it going.
Our experience with website managers is that they have a lot of clear ideas about what they want to do with their company website. Some of it has been gotten from feedback from other departments (like sales or customer support).  And most of the ideas are from their own ongoing experiences with managing the website.  But the organization of those thoughts into a coherent value proposition for the company (at a financial results perspective) is not there yet.

There are two things you’re going to have to do to get that budget

1. Capture all your random thoughts and organize them by business impact area.  Fill out each area of impact with a much relevant value infromation for your budget decision maker to see
2. Clearly establish the overall importance/impact at the company level of your efforts

Think like an MD/CEO or CFO

When CFO’s have to defend their budget allocations (to your online strategy), they need to be able to justify it at two levels:

1. why there was any allocation to the website
2. the amount and expected ROI from the allocation

You may have a very clear idea about how its valuable but you must give your efforts a value context beyond the latest or coolest website idea.

The Key
A clear understanding of the core business impact of key features of a website.

Here an example:
An interactive package building component that visitors can use to custom build a series of courses for themselves into a curriculum. Its value to prospects is obvious but would your budget decision maker connect the dots to core business value?
Value 1: Sales costs savings by allowing prospects to create their own course packages without speaking to a live person?
Value 2: Business growth by creating ways for prospects to sell themselves on multicourse packages?

The difference is clear — real business value versus a strong website feature.  Don’t leave it up to the higher ups to make that connection, get it clear in your mind and communicate it very clearly in your budget requests.