What to Look for in an Agency: Choosing the Right Amazon Growth Partner – Episode 57 of The Agency Operators Podcast

What to Look for in an Agency: Choosing the Right Amazon Growth Partner – Episode 57 of The Agency Operators Podcast Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Speaker 2: Welcome to the Operator's Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Blake Gale of Blazon. How are you doing, Blake? Speaker 1: Doing pretty good. Living the dream. Speaker 2: Yeah, awesome. I'd love to hear that. So, agencies, right? That's what we're going to talk about today. Not all of them are the same. Not every agency is created different. There's a lot of, you can call it noise, and there's a lot of, what do they call it, churn and burn, like kind of VAs overseas. There's lots of like these schools where they create people who become so-called experts, and unfortunately, you know, they populate the space with You know they maybe bring on a couple of their friends and call it an agency and that's what you and I kind of are pooled together with. But obviously there's a lot that stands between us and them and I think that's just experience more than anything else. But I'm very excited to talk to you about that today. Before we dive in, Blake, do you want to chat a little bit about your experience? I love to hear people's stories and hear what they've gone through because the agency space is fun and challenging and we all end up here in different ways. So I'd love to hear your story a little bit about your background. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. I started out at a company called Nozani. It was a small business. We were charging our clients, gosh, like $300 or $400 a month. I wasn't the owner. I was pulled on as employee number 15 or so at the time. Anyway, there was a huge demand for Amazon services and there weren't a lot of agencies or companies that provided that service. That agency boomed pretty quickly. Anyway, so I worked for them for, gosh, about two and a half years or so. They were bought out by buy box experts and I recognized that I wasn't getting paid nearly as much as I was bringing in for the company. Put it into perspective, I was raking in over $300,000 a year for them and they were paying me roughly 40 and I was like, you know, this isn't working. So I quickly, you know, I separated, split ways with them. And I started my own thing and replaced my income within two months. So, and we've been growing for the last five years. Yeah. Speaker 2: Wow. That's pretty amazing. So, how have you guys been growing? Is it just word of mouth? Speaker 1: Yeah, the best way to put us is we've been a diamond in the rough, honestly. Word of mouth, referrals. This year is the first year where we've really started pushing marketing. I mean, I'm kind of shocked at how we survived five years without, well, that we've grown over the course of five years to what we are today organically. And, you know, the quality of service kind of speaks for itself. And that's where I found other agencies that are like minded, where we've kind of teamed up and we have conversations like you and I are having today where our service is exceptionally better than what a lot of these other agencies are providing. But they're just doing better at marketing. They're just getting their Their message out there better and that's really where I need to step up and and share more of our value In larger scope of work. Speaker 2: So so what is that value? And I know you have a presentation that you put together So you if you want to present that now just to kind of explain that value or if you want to just kind of Whichever way you want to do it. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll share that in a little bit. I'll just talk a little bit more about it because basically the value comes down to everything that you can do as an Amazon seller. Most agencies do not focus on Every piece of Amazon, they only focus on two things. Advertising and listing optimization. Those are the two main things that they focus on. Everything else is foreign to them. We have clients that have come to us and they've worked with four or five different agencies and like it's mountaineering time, we found an agency that actually knows what we're talking about, that is in the weeds with Amazon and they can provide a service that is valuable enough for us to pay for. Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's something that I have noticed as well. There's so many parts of Amazon where It's like reading between the lines, right? There's so much profitability in things like what kind of container are you shipping into Amazon? Like how big is the actual product packaging, volumetric weight and everything like that? What volumes are you sending in? Are you understocking or overstocking that's killing the momentum or you're just overstocking and getting bloated with all these storage fees? So once you start diving into the numbers and you look at compliance and you look at what the competition is doing, Then you actually start seeing that there's a whole other side of this operation, which is not related to just the listing, the advertising, right? Compliance stuff, like I can't tell you. It's so funny because you say, oh, what's included in the service is case management and people can do it. Yeah, why do I need case management, right? And it's like I spend a lot, the team spends crazy amounts of time dealing with case support and seller, you know, all these different issues that come up with the listings and with the account and with the compliance and with the IPI score or whatever. So, yeah, I think the Amazon game has just changed in a lot of ways and slowly sellers are becoming aware of that fact for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Any seller that's trying to manage it themselves, they quickly realize, holy cow, there is so much to this. But it's hard to I present that information to a new to Amazon seller. It's like, yeah, let's just work together, get everything set up and we'll split ways. And it's like, okay, yeah, we definitely can do that. However, if you don't maintain it and you don't manage it and you don't do the casework, you know, all that work you did to get your listing exactly how you wanted it to and your sales started taking off, it's all going to disappear. So you need constant eyes on it. And then the big question too for these sellers is, do I hire somebody in house? Or do I work with an agency? Like, do I just manage it myself? How difficult can it be? And ultimately what a lot of sellers have found is they found a solid agency to work with versus hiring somebody in-house. Even if they're doing 10, 20 million dollars a year plus, they're still working with agencies because agencies can see consistencies across multiple selling accounts so that they know, oh hey, there's this weird thing that's going on Is it site-wide? Is it a technical glitch? Is it just for my account? I don't know what it is. So an agency has a lot more visibility than a single person working on an account. So highly recommend an agency over an in-house employee is what we've heard from sellers and what I recommend too. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. And also just from like a cost standpoint, like if you're hiring one person, they're not going to be able to do all of the things excellent level, right? Like they're not going to be a 10 out of 10 at the copywriting, the graphic design, the video design, the ad management, the operations, knowing everything about Amazon, staying up to date about all the things, right? I agree with you. Like having somebody that essentially you're, you're renting out like a fractionalized Amazon team. And they have that exposure across multiple different categories. And they are being exposed to different problems that are maybe not in your account right now, but could be in your account. And so if you're having an employee or two employees, you're probably paying Huge salaries and you're limiting them and what exposure you're giving them because all they see is your account. So what if there's a new problem? They have no idea. At the very least, they should be, you know, speaking in some kind of like WhatsApp groups or listening to podcasts like these or, you know, try to stay up to date somehow. But as I said earlier, I think the best way is experience. So with that being said, I'd love to pull up this presentation, Blake. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and kind of going back to the price points too for having in-house employees is to get a really good Amazon expert, you know, somebody at our level, you're looking at paying easily $120,000 a year salary for somebody at this caliber. If you're If you're not paying somebody that much, then expect subpar quality service because they just don't know exactly what they're doing. And so you really have to take a look at, okay, is my Amazon business worth this much? Is it? You know, profitable enough to pay somebody this much. And for some brands, yes, it definitely is. But working at this other agency before I started BLAZON, we had huge turnover in account management. And honestly, I could count on one hand the number of account managers that I would recommend to service my Amazon business. There's just not a lot of people that are able to be as tenacious that they need to be in order to generate the results and generate the service that sellers are needing. But yeah, I did want to share this. This is quotes from our frustrated Amazon sellers about agencies. So this is what we've heard from potential clients or clients that end up signing with us. So I just want to go through some of these. So we talked circles around them. They had no idea what an A plus content page was. This is a brand that we worked with, and they were extremely frustrated with other agencies. They had, gosh, three different agencies, and they're like, we're just gonna manage it ourselves, and then they found us. And they kept getting frustrated because they were constantly talking about things on Amazon that their Amazon agency had no idea what it was. And A Plus Content being one of them, other programs, et cetera. Some of these other ones, we worked with four different agencies over the course of three years, then hired an in-house employee and sent him to Seattle for training, only to discover months later that he still had no idea what he was doing and they didn't see any increases in sales, so they wasted a ton of money. They ended up working with us and we threw out their sales in three months. How come my last agency didn't bring this to my attention? We hear this quote all the time. And it's quite frustrating because for the seller, because they're spending all this money, you're like, well, how much did you pay them? They're like, oh, we paid them, you know, $3,500 a month or $5,000 a month. And they worked with them for like six months to a year. We're like, you're paying them anywhere $60,000 and you're not, getting the level of service that you need. So it's crazy. And one of the big things that we'll do is that we do here at BLAZON and I'll show us with you in a minute. It's called our secret sauce. It's this 150 plus point checklist of everything you can do as an Amazon seller. We will go in and do audits on accounts that are doing 10 to $20 million plus a year on Amazon. And then we will find that only 40% of the items on our checklist are actually complete. And they're missing so much and they've been working with other agencies and paying an arm and a leg for the service and they just get burned. Speaker 2: So crazy. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely crazy, man. These last two quotes, that explains, you know, why they kept telling me my ads were doing so good when clearly I'm wasting so much money. So, this is actually something pretty common. I paired this little slide with it. This is a case study for one of the brands we worked with called Crine's Coffee Pouches. They're working with an agency that was full service, but in reality, they were only doing advertising management. So on their website, they kept saying, it said on there, full service, full service, full service. But ultimately, they were just doing advertising management. So we took over. They were spending about $40,000 a month on ads. That equates to about 20% top cost because they're averaging $185,000 in sales. We quickly realized that they were spending that $40,000 a month on seven keywords that were all brand focused keywords where the client would have been generating those sales anyway. And so we were able to take their 20% tacos and reduce it down to 9% and grow their sales from $185,000 to $400,000 a month. And so it's just so frustrating for us being in the agency space where we are swimming in a pool with other agencies that claim they do full service when in reality they only focus on ads and listing optimization. Unknown Speaker: So. Speaker 2: Could you go back there for a second? There's something interesting that I saw. So, 8% AMZ referral fee from the 15%. Is that a catalog, a category change? Speaker 1: No. So, since they're in the grocery category, if your product price points are under $15, then you get a referral fee discount from 15% to 8%. Speaker 2: So you can talk the price for them, but I suppose if you start doing the math, you can justify that where you're offering the customer a discount in exchange for potentially more sales and you probably end up making the same money because of the savings you get for the referral fee. Is that how you kind of played it? Speaker 1: Correct. Yeah. So looking at their referral fee and FBA fees by reducing their price points, because they were at $15.99 and we dropped it down to $14.99, that actually increased their margin by 20 cents per unit. And then they were selling, you know, 15,000 Units a year, I believe, for the for those products under that $15 mark. And so we're able to pay for ourselves essentially with that one change. Speaker 2: Love it. Yeah, I think this kind of explains it a little bit more clearly for people where, you know, it's not just about listings and ads. You really do have to take a look at the catalog. You have to look for fees and try to understand on a granular level what's going on. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Similar to what we see in our field. We're like plumbers, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. I know it's hard to explain. When we do audits of a potential account, we go in there and start looking at things. This is essentially what we see where it's a construction nightmare like we've all seen it on social media where there's people that are posting pictures of like a DIY project gone horribly wrong or they hired a cheap contractor to do a job and it's just and it's just garbage. Well, we see the same things on Amazon, but you can't just look at it and be like, oh my gosh, like I completely understand the story here, you know, too many too many sellers don't Don't see the writing on the wall and it kind of has to be explained to them. And so when a seller finds an agency like us and we do an audit and kind of show them what's been missing, then this picture becomes very clear. Like, holy cow, these are all the things that are going wrong. Speaker 2: Those are real pictures? Speaker 1: Yeah, these are real pictures I pulled up online. Social media, I think, does a great, great job at sharing this sort of content. But yeah, so when you're looking at agencies, there are a couple of things to be very careful of. A lot of people will say full service. Full service does not equal full service. You really have to ask them specifically what they do because like, oh yeah, full service, but they just do advertising. I've had conversations with other agencies where they say, yeah, we do full service management, but then I have a dinner with the owner. I'm like, okay, well talk to me about this. What's your guys' take on this? And they're like, oh, we don't do any of that. Or this or that. They don't they don't touch a lot of these additional things we're talking about, like reducing your FBA fees, changing your referral fee, moving the categories or the casework, et cetera. They'll focus solely on the advertising piece. And I've heard from these other agency owners that their team gets frustrated when they get questions about stuff like premium A plus content or, you know, casework on certain things because they only really focus on ads, but they sell full service. They're only focused on ads and slight listing optimization. We work with a company, well we're currently working with a company that worked with four different agencies and then they were looking for another agency because they just fired their in-house person because that wasn't working out. They spoke to 12 different agencies and they ended up going with us because we could provide clear information. The problem is sellers don't recognize this. Amazon sellers don't recognize this and then they end up getting burned. They have to go through the process of getting burned multiple times by these bad acting agencies in order to know what to look for. So I want to provide some information on things, provide some information today on things to look for looking at agencies. Unknown Speaker: So. Speaker 1: Here are the top 10 things. First, what's included in your service? What are you looking for? You've got to make sure, is it just PPC? Is it just listing, optimization, brand or shoe support? What exactly is being covered? Do you offer performance-based pricing or flat fees? How do you report results and how often? What experience do you have in my specific product category? Can I see case studies or client references? This is actually a really good one. I would highly recommend anybody that's looking at an agency to ask if they can talk to any of their current clients or past clients just to get a better idea of their services. I think I lost my other slide. It disappeared. Anyway, there's top five things. Speaker 2: Really cool. Okay. So, with that being said, I mean, how does pricing work and where can people find you? Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. So, pricing, we have one-time projects, then we have advanced management, which includes The reason why I would say advanced is because there's brands that need advanced advertising support versus the basic advertising support. And so this is our pricing structure here. It honestly varies on the number of SKUs you have. We don't base it on the size of your business if you're doing like 10 million plus. We don't price you more just because you sell more on Amazon, but we do it based on the number of SKUs, the status of your account, the category you're in, the restrictions you have, etc. So you can find us at blazonpros.com or you can reach out to me directly at blakegale at blazonpros.com. And we can do a quote for you for free and check everything out. But one of the biggest things that separates us from our competition is this here. This is our checklist of everything you can do as an Amazon seller. We go into account setup. There's a lot of settings that can be hurting your business. I'll share a couple examples here in a minute. We go over everything you can do on your listings like 20% MSRP, 3D images, brand story, premium A plus content, virtual bundles, actual bundles, business-to-business pricing, etc. Account health management and monitoring, advertising, third-party tools, value adds. There's a lot of things in here like if you're in the medical space, do you know you can add HSA or FSA badges to all of your listings? Speaker 2: Very cool. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of things in here. But that's our secret sauce and why clients see the success that they do with us is because we provide all those details and we get everything completed. Speaker 2: Love it. Check these guys out, everybody. Thank you, Blake. I appreciate the time, man. I think we painted a pretty clear picture here for people. Speaker 1: Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you. Speaker 2: All right. Thanks, everybody, for watching. I'll catch you on the next one. Speaker 1: See you. Speaker 2: Bye. Bye.