Winning Over Executives

Before you speak to executives about Gatsby, make sure you understand their strategic goals, and align your argument for Gatsby with those specific goals. Focus on the results of Gatsby’s features rather than the specifics of how they work. If some of the big ideas behind Gatsby fit in with the executive’s strategic goals, don’t be afraid to include them in your conversation.

Some things executives care about include:

• Brand visibility Making sure people are learning about your company by showing up in all the right places. This can be accomplished through things like SEO (search engine optimization), buying ad space, and gaining influence through content creation and/or event participation.
• Customer experience Do your customers like using your site and products? Can they find what they need? Do they have a positive impression of your company?
• Innovation Creating and adopting new technology and business models, preferably ones that will have long-term success.
• Competitive edge Distinguishing yourself from your competitors by delivering unique value that helps you claim a greater share of the market.
• Growing the business For most executives, success means gaining clients, leads, users, purchases and awareness - getting more orders moving through that sales funnel.

Basic explanation

Here’s an example of a basic explanation of Gatsby for executives:

Gatsby is a new way to build websites and applications with exceptional performance, reduced risk of downtime, fewer security vulnerabilities, and the flexibility to work with the best tools for your business. Companies that have moved their sites to Gatsby have seen significant improvements in their lead conversion, organic search traffic, and team productivity.

Specific benefits

Sites built with Gatsby have experienced major sales and engagement benefits as a direct result of Gatsby’s built-in features and optimizations. Here are some examples.

Better lead generation and customer engagement

Site speed and performance has a huge impact on sales and customer engagement. A recent Akamai study showed that a 100 millisecond delay in a site’s load time hurt conversion rates by 7%, and 53% of mobile users will leave pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. Gatsby sites are consistently 2-3x faster than similar sites built with different tools, and site owners have seen their lead generation increase by up to 60% after transitioning to Gatsby.

Improved search traffic

Site speed is one of the factors Google uses in its search ranking algorithm, and slow site speeds can have a negative snowball effect on your SEO. Slower sites take longer to be crawled and indexed by search engines, they have higher bounce rates, and lower conversion rates, all of which will hurt your rankings. Gatsby sites have built-in web and mobile performance optimizations. It actually takes more effort to make a Gatsby site perform badly. Learn more about the impact of page speed on SEO on Moz.

Increase productivity

According to Gatsby user survey results, “Gatsby makes you productive right from the start — it takes away the overhead of time-consuming dev and build tooling setup and configuration which leads to faster iterations.” Without the burden of complicated tooling, your development team is more focused, more productive, and more satisfied with their work.

Lower costs

Gatsby sites can be entirely deployed to a CDN which is much less expensive than traditional hosting costs. Plus, CDN hosting basically eliminates your risk of downtime during traffic spikes so you don’t miss out on those lead-conversion opportunities. Finally, Gatsby is open source, so you’re also saving on software licensing costs.

Keep your applications ahead of the curve

Gatsby is one of the technologies at the forefront of a new approach to web and application development known as the JAMStack. The JAMStack represents a shift away from the limitations of CMS-centered sites and failure points of server-side code towards faster, light-weight, modular site construction. The JAMStack approach and Gatsby have been rapidly gaining popularity in the last few years with no sign of slowing down. (Check out Gatsby and JAMStack on Google Trends.) For companies that want to be leaders in technology trends and that want to differentiate themselves on important factors like site performance, this is a prime window of opportunity. Learn how you can partner with Gatsby.

Case studies

Case studies are a great way to help executives see Gatsby’s potential and gain more practical insight into its benefits. Here are some case studies you might want to share:

• Youfit uses Gatsby to increase lead generation by 60%
• IBM Uses Gatsby to Manage Enterprise-Level Content
• Gatsby Fuels Content and Sales in Design+Code Rebuild
• Growing Housecall Pro by 973% with Gatsby

For even more examples of Gatsby sites, check out the Showcase

Conclusion

Executives are always looking for ways to improve their business’s efficiency, profits, and to grow their organization. Pointing out the financial benefits of Gatsby will help your case, but be sure to go into the many other ways Gatsby will help move your business forward. If you can show your executive(s) how the benefits of Gatsby significantly outweigh the risks and costs involved in adopting it, odds are good that they’ll be very receptive to the idea.