I don't want to belabour this point too much, but yes.
The conversation does not look like this:
"Hey guys, I have 10 years of experience doing consulting, my rates are $3000 / hour, hire me for two weeks and to improve your conversion."
According to my consultant friend, it's a lot more like this (bad maths all mine, also note that I have no idea what real numbers here would look like, so I could be wildly off-base):
A: "So you currently do $20 million in revenue through your website. Based on initial analytics me and the tech team have put in place, we estimate that one out of a hundred visitors to your site become paying customers, in other words you have a 1% conversion rate. All things being the same, what would it mean to your annual revenue if I could increase that rate by 0.5 of a percent, to 1.5% over the course of a year?"
B: "Well, if you could do that it would mean an increase in revenue by $10 million."
A: "Right, so what I propose is that you bring me on board for a couple of weeks to put systems in place to monitor that conversion and test ideas for increasing it in a way that makes sense for your organisation. My fee for this would be $200,000."
To be perfectly honest I don't have any specifics or solid facts to back this up, just the single anecdote and even that is second hand. The point I was trying to press home is that patio11 is selling himself short.
