Who to hire for your Amazon Growth Team (Classic)

Who to hire for your Amazon Growth Team (Classic) Unknown Speaker: What's up Badger Nation? Hold on to your hats because we're about to unleash a ferocious classic episode from the deep dark archives of The PPC Den podcast. This episode is guaranteed to set your Amazon PPC instincts on fire. Get ready to navigate the chaos, madness, and mayhem of Amazon advertising and unleash your inner badger. Speaker 1: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to an incredibly special episode. And to be honest, they're all pretty special. But this one's extra special because today I'm very excited to have a friend of the show, back on the show, Mr. Steven Pope. Steven? Unknown Speaker: Hey, Badger Nation. Steven Pope: Thanks for having me back on. Speaker 1: How does it feel to be back in the PPC Den? Steven Pope: I feel like Badger got time for me. Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we always got time for you. Today we played the Avengers theme song. On the intro, and hopefully people are listening to this and we didn't get copy written, copy striked down, but we played the Avengers theme song today because one thing I think is so great about having you on the show is that you see so much of all the interconnectedness of all the activities that happen on Amazon. Last time you were on the show, you and I created A masterpiece, an epic masterpiece about Amazon SEO. We went super deep into how people can think about it and today we wanted to zoom out even further into the operations of really what some of the most successful companies on Amazon really do and really think because it's just becoming more and more important these days to have all of your eyes and cross all your T's. So, in general, I'd love for you to just comment. When people come to you, are they often asking for one thing and then you slowly realize they need help in like four, five, six different areas? Steven Pope: I like to think of myself as the taxi driver of Amazon. So we're going with the Marvel theme today, right? So we're in New York City right now. I'm a taxi driver and all of a sudden we see superheroes spouting off left and right, saving the city, beating villains, doing their thing. And on occasion, one of these superheroes is in my taxi cab. And I dropped them off over at said building, right? Yes. Okay. So as you imagine, you know, I don't necessarily know what's in the head of that superhero, but I know when I see four or five of them getting up to become the Avengers, I know something's going on, right? And so what I've discovered, you know, running an 83-person agency is a holistic approach to growth sales on Amazon is critical. And so sometimes when we think of like, oh, if I just run SEO and ship my stuff in, I'll be good. Or, hey, if I just spend a lot of money on ads, I'll be fine. But in isolation, these strategies typically fail. Until they are combined together to assemble a full cast of opportunities. Speaker 1: Couldn't agree more. And, you know, a lot of times people may have like pretty good Amazon advertising campaigns, like they're listening to the show, they're dialing in their campaigns, they're getting them where they need to be. And sometimes the best way to get better performance and better business results is to actually work on these other areas to assemble the Avengers, which is exactly what we're going to be doing today. Really trying to build out the org chart, if you will. So we had a little fun with today's episode. Steven Pope: Yeah, we actually built an org chart. We're going to release it to you guys. Speaker 1: Yes, we actually have an org chart with Avengers faces in the pictures for the different team members that you can have. And you know what I think is interesting? Have you ever read the e-myth? Steven Pope: I have. I've been reading a lot of business books this year. Speaker 1: You have, haven't you? You're on like a summer reading program right now. Steven Pope: I've got traction on my desk right now just like studying the paragraphs, building out core values and vision statements and people write seats is definitely topical today. Speaker 1: For sure. So like building out that org chart is something that Sometimes people, especially solopreneurs, they come in and what I think is interesting that gets mentioned in the e-myth is, yes, you might be a solopreneur or even a small team. Maybe you have a few people working for you and you're working on a team of maybe three or four. What we've identified today is about nine key areas that you should be Always be thinking about. These are some key areas that I'm going to use the classic business word, synergize together. I think we've all learned from the Avengers movies that when they assemble, they are way more powerful. Steven Pope: Yes, they are. Speaker 1: So we're going to jump into it and let's just get right into it. Let's get into the first one. Steven Pope: So before you do that, you mentioned the e-myth and I think this is a good quote to kind of massage us in there. If your business depends on you, you don't own a business, you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic, right? So that's the plot of E-Myth. And so when we talk about the Avengers cast today, if you're missing components, if you're missing cast members, then you have a job. You don't own a company. All right. So when we dive in, we decided that Nick Fury Being the guy that assembled the cast would make a good owner figure, right? So obviously he's selecting the cast. He's selecting the products. He's your sourcing guy. So we put him at the top of the org chart. And as an owner, what's the most valuable thing that you could do to spend your time today? It's typically people and product and process, right? Like those three things. And so people is really the theme of today's subject matter. And so we'll focus mostly there. But you got to be doing those sort of things. So what do you think of Nick Fury? Speaker 1: You know, Nick Fury, and I hope that many people have seen the Avengers movies. Otherwise, you'll have no idea who these characters are. But there are scenes in the Avengers where something will happen and Nick Fury gets on the phone and he knows who to call. He knows the Avenger to call. So exactly to your point, understanding the overall business operations, understanding what does our product look like, is our product Does it have perfect product market fit? Are we selling things that people really love? Where do we find good people to fill these roles? That is really the role that we've put first here, which is Nick Fury. You know, regularly evaluating product market fit, keeping an eye maybe on the market conditions and competitors, seeing what's going on in the industry. You know, those kinds of things, top level, Guiding the product which will eventually feed the rest of the company that we have here. Steven Pope: So how desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace, but you kill it because it's fun. You made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did. This is Nick Fury talking to Loki, right? And so this is every owner ever. And so when you run your company, you need to run three departments. So we broke out the org chart into three departments, and that's inclusive of finance, Operations and marketing. Those are your three departments. And in my opinion, you have to get passing grades in all three, but C's get degrees is acceptable in one or two of these departments. And one of these departments though, you have to have an A. And if you don't have an A in at least one of these departments, you're going to fail. So you got to have at least an assembled Avengers cast in one of these three departments that we'll talk about today. Now, ideally, you've got the full cast in all three areas, but that's not realistic for most companies. They're usually really good at one of these three things. They're not really good at all three. So if you're that company, you're not alone. That's normal. Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen people in other You know, tracks of marketing talk about like, hey, this is what your minimum marketing stack needs to look like. This is what your minimum team stack needs to look like. So this is really like your minimum list of activities that should be done. And for larger companies, this is probably going to be an individual different person for every one of these things. And most likely at a smaller company, there might be One person wearing multiple hats, as we all know. So, shall we hit traffic? Steven Pope: Sounds good to me. And if you have to have a variant of yourself running different hats, if you were, people who haven't watched Loki yet, that's a variant reference, then you're gonna have to clone yourself or use yourself from a different dimension to run these other departments. All right, so let's dive into traffic. So, inside of marketing, There's two subcultures in my opinion. You need to do both of these things. You need to grow traffic and you need to convert the customer. Everything that we talk about in marketing always boils down to these two things 100% of the time. In your traffic team, we chose Iron Man to represent PPC and Black Widow to do SEO. Speaker 1: I love this. Steven Pope: So you're the PPC Iron Man. So Michael, what do you think about Iron Man? Speaker 1: Iron Man, he's an engineer. He's a scientist. He is very analytical. He scans the scenario before determining what the best action is. He's decisive. He takes action and then he upgrades and optimizes that action. Depending on what kind of opponent he's fighting. And this is exactly what PPC is. He's also got loads of technology. He's got, you know, technical savvy. He's not afraid of spreadsheets and using big chunks of data to get what he needs in order to win the battle. So Iron Man was an easy shoe-in for PPC for me. And I think most people I mean, everyone listening to the show is doing PPC, so either they have their Iron Man personality themselves or they have an Iron Man on their squad. Steven Pope: Must have, got to have the tech, got to have the things that put the glue together for sure. I Love You 3000 can also come into play on occasion, right? You might have to have a little bit of suave going in that PPC, be able to pick up a campaign or two that you weren't thinking of in a very different way, right? So nobody thought that Iron Man was going to pull out some heartstrings, but he can. He's not just a tech guy. Sometimes he pulls a little bit of stunts. Speaker 1: Which makes a lot of sense because PPC is a very emotional endeavor for many people. A lot of money gets spent. We really are passionate about the results that we get from PPC. So definitely it makes sense that Iron Man is not only that technically savvy person, but can also tug at your heartstrings. Steven Pope: So PPC has definitely got a very close companion in SEO and Michael and I put together a four-part podcast series on SEO and it was easily the best work that I've ever done in a podcast, bar none. I hear more feedback about that series than anything we've ever done. And so I got to give props to Michael because I couldn't have done that without him. He pulled a lot of good nuggets out of me and really spun a web that we did well together. Speaker 1: Yeah, the feedback on the four-part SEO series that we put together, and I have to thank you because you contributed so much to it. People have mentioned that that's some of the best content on Amazon that they've ever heard. Steven Pope: So if you're listening and you haven't watched that, that's next on your queue up list right now. Go back and find the four-part SEO series. Speaker 1: We'll link to it in the show notes. Steven Pope: 100% got to do. And an Avengers cast member that wasn't as obvious to select. So we went with Black Widow. She does have her own movie now, by the way. Snuck it in there in 2021, for those that don't know. There's three phases of SEO that we like to look at. Everything from indexing, incremental indexing, and matriculation of your keywords and promoting them up to the top of the search engine results page. Black Widow can make that happen. She's going to go behind enemy lines. She's going to go behind the competitors who are already ranked. And subterfuge a little bit, go do some analytics gathering data. Oh, hey, here are the 10 World War powers right now. We got to take these guys out and we got to reposition our brand. At the top of rank one, right? So there's a lot of things that I think a Black Widow member of your team can do. She's also not the most well-respected Avengers, if you will, cast member. Maybe forgot about on occasion, said it and forget it. Oh, we've got analytics taken care of. We've got SEO taken care of. It's done, right? Don't have to recheck that box. And Black Widow would, you know, Make you feel a little bit different about that after she comes in and does her thing, right? Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. She was cast out I think at some point forgotten about as You know because SEO takes Work to do and sometimes she would get forgotten about I also think she's a really good SEO fit because I believe she had sort of like a ...nefarious past where she was an actual assassin and then she had to break out of being a bad assassin and switching over to a good assassin. The history of SEO on Amazon kind of has a black hat past, but I think now she's actually joined the Avengers, so she's also being sure that she's doing things that isn't going to get. Steven Pope: When we initially shot our podcast together, it was kosher to have a competitor's brand name in your search term field. Or at least at that time, you wouldn't get in trouble for doing it. And now today, if you have a brand name that's trademarked, you could have your page yanked or suppressed at the very least. And what's really kind of stinky about the situation should have come up with a better Black Widow pun there. I'll have to find that. But in any case, what stinks is because there are many generic words that are trademarked. And now Amazon's being like, well, you can't use the word high chair or whatever, right? Like kind of some ridiculous things that happen. As Amazon enters the maturity phase, its life cycle as a company, They raised the bar and bureaucracy starts to take over, those bearcats, if you will. And so SEO is absolutely right now hitting the peak of being hit with bureaucracy and harder than ever to manage. So my advice on that front, other than go watch those four-hour podcasts that we did together, is to go ham and optimize every single thing that you can. To build out the SEO section to index for as many keywords as you can. So since we're not talking in depth about any one area, we'll have to move on from one of my favorites, which is SEO. So that's how you drive traffic, guys. You've got your org chart with Ironman for PPC and BlackWidow for SEO. That's traffic. Speaker 1: Yes, and part of the reason why we're doing this episode is to really In a perfect world, you have somebody responsible for PPC and somebody responsible for SEO. Steven Pope: They have to talk to each other. Speaker 1: In an imperfect world, this might be the same person and you have to be sure that it's not just blended up like, oh, I do some PPC and some SEO. It's like you really want to think That these are two tasks that are equally as important and you need to hammer on both of them, not, oh, I spend 95% of my time on PPC and then every once in a while I'll, you know, do SEO. Very important to have Equal attention, I believe on both. Steven Pope: And if you only can pick one person to put in both seats, we're going to take Iron Man all day long. We know it, right? But if you try and put Black Widow into the Iron Man PPC seat, it won't work as well as putting Iron Man into the Black Widow seat. Alright, so conversion is the next marketing section. In this section, we had three members and let's see if you guys can guess where we're going to go with this, right? So we'll give you the three Avenger members. You tell us which ones you think should go where. So we're going to have Captain America, Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange. So here are your three options. So you guys can guess right now. I'm giving you some moments while you're listening to this. You're drinking your coffee. You get your podcast going in the morning. So you can just think about, okay, conversion. What could Doctor Strange be doing? What could Scarlet Witch be doing? Well, Captain America is, by and large, very, very easy to fill into the merchandising seat. This is the brand of Marvel. This is the guy that's going to go out there and make everybody like you and is the lovable, not punchable face. Although if you punch him, he'll probably come back for another. Speaker 1: Exactly. Steven Pope: All day long. Is that his famous quote? Speaker 1: That's him. That's him. And yeah, you hit the nail on the head thinking about the brand store, like how people, basically everything that people will see, the look, the feel of the company. Steven Pope: So inside of this, what we consider merchandising or branding is anything that is public facing. This is something that's touchable, feelable, and it's on your detail pages. So your brand store, that would count. Even though we're going to put design in its own category, there's still a merchandising aspect of what products are going to show up In the brand store or your parentage, what items are connected together? That's a merchandising component that will help convert people better. If you have things that increase the average order value, again, merchandising aspect, how you look about converting through merchandising is a very important component. Speaker 1: I think it's so, what would you say the link between, you know, merchandising, the overall world of conversion, back to traffic? Like, how do you think about the connection between conversion and traffic? Specifically, like, building front-facing things, maybe you're changing a product image. This is a separate category other than SEO, right? Because we sometimes hear like, oh, you need to optimize for SEO. I need to change up my title or my bullets for SEO purposes. What about for like merchandising branding conversion purposes? Steven Pope: So did Captain America and Black Widow ever have a fight? I don't know if they have. Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Steven Pope: So I think that's a fight I'd like to see because that happens all the time, right? Like the merchandisers and the SEO team constantly at each other's throats, right? Because the merchandiser wants it to be perfect, wants the consumer to feel at ease, and wants to get the sale. And Black Widow's like, well, that's cool, but if they don't even find the page, it's irrelevant, right? So that's where you're going to have your fight between Captain America's merchandising team and Black Widow's SEO You really have to have a symbiotic relationship between the two because if you don't get people to your page, it's irrelevant how well merchandised your products are. So you have to get them there with traffic. Traffic should always come first. Whenever you're having a fight at your company, you should have very clear lines on who does what. And when you don't, that's when politics occur. And this is the area that probably has the highest risk for politics because the fight between keyword stuffing should win all the time, 100% of the time, with SEO winning. So when you look at your hierarchy or your pyramid, if you will, traffic should be at the top, conversions should be second, without any exception to this. This is a clear black and white choice on my part. How do you feel about that, Michael? Unknown Speaker: Hmm. Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't convert traffic you don't get, plain and simple. Steven Pope: I know you're a little bit more of a perfectionist than I am, right? Like, done is perfect for me, right? And for you, perfect is perfect. So, harder to say, right? Speaker 1: It's harder for me to say. I agree with you when it comes time to, like, hey, should we make this look good or should we make this More easily findable. Damn, I want to say both are important. Steven Pope: You can't do that, though, because that's what creates the politics, right? Like one has to win. So Captain America would win in a fight against Black Widow, in my opinion, but we'll never know until the MCU settles that one. All right, so let's go over to Doctor Strange next. So Doctor Strange is, you know, how many possibilities did that dude see? Like all of them, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to say something like five million possibilities of how they could beat Thanos. Steven Pope: What better way than to make that guy in charge of A.B. testing? Right, so this is your optimization guy. And this is the dude that can see all possibilities. So, you know, we just talked about how we can't settle a fight between Captain America's merchandising team and Black Widow's SEO. Well, Dr. Strange will be the way to make that happen. You could test both. On one product, you could keyword stuff, and on the other, you could merchandise it a little bit more nicely and neatly and see which one does better. You could A-B test that title. Does the title need to be shorter or longer? Does it need to have that one word in there? Does the order of the title matter? Should I have certain words in the front or certain words at the end? Is my A plus content up to snuff? Well, A-B test that one as well. So these are things that these A-B testing questions frequently are not done or discussed. I think this is probably one of the more forgotten areas of your cast. Nobody's thinking about A-B testing. So another tool to throw into your quiver here And we didn't use Hawkeye for this. That would have been a good Hawkeye reference. My bad. We'll save that one. We'll put that one back in the quiver. Speaker 1: We'll put it back in. Steven Pope: And I've already forgotten now what I was about to say. Shoot. Speaker 1: You were going to mention an A-B testing tool. Steven Pope: So, PICFU. You could use Seller Central to run an A-B test manually through the portal, and they can do that in Title and in A-Plus Content. But if you want to A-B test a main photo, my preference would be using PICFU. That's P-I-C-K-F-U. So I recommend you guys use that as a way to settle conversations and fights. One of the cool things I learned from this was putting accessories into your main photo increases CTR. CTR stands for click-through rate, which means more traffic. Speaker 1: Why do you think that is? Why do you think it increases click-through rate? Steven Pope: Context. I think context is key. If I'm looking at 1,000 products, 1,000 variants of the same product, to go with the Avengers theme here, what's special about Loki the alligator? Why do I want that one? Or why do I want Loki 327? It's all about the jacket that it comes with. Or the cap or the horns on the head. I don't even know. Speaker 1: Yes, so that makes a lot of sense and I love what you said too. I could picture the Avengers fighting and then Doctor Strange being able to look at the scenarios of the best plan to take and being like, hey, I've already ran the tests. This is what we should do. Steven Pope: And that guy gets ignored, right? I've been in so many corporate settings where I'm like, here's the data. The data says to do A, and then the staff are like, well, I feel better about B. B is how we've done things all the time. Okay, well, if you want to be the same company, that's great. Cool. Speaker 1: That's tough. Steven Pope: Who wants to do that though? I want to get bigger and I want to evolve, right? Speaker 1: Right. Steven Pope: Getting bigger and evolving at the same time is like a metamorphosis, but getting bigger like it's like molting and doing a metamorphosis at the same time. It's not just getting becoming the caterpillar into the butterfly. It's also like growing and becoming a bigger. Butterfly. Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm going to ask you a question, which is, does A-B testing ever end? Do you ever reach the mountain? So I guess the question is, if someone's never done A-B testing, how often should they be like putting this into their, how often should they be running a test perpetually? Steven Pope: If you've never run a test, I'd say run two tests in the next seven days. Just two. Do a test on an A-B photo and do a test on a title or an A-plus content. You can pick or run all three. Now the frequency depends, right? So once you've done a lot of testing, your best practices upgrade and then you no longer need to run the test to justify the same thing over and over again, right? You already know the answer. But when you're trying to go into an uncharted territory, I would say you probably need to run another test. If you're unsure, if your gut's like 55-45 on something, that is when you should run the test. That's how you justify it. And as one case example, I would say when you should always run a test is anytime you're gonna launch a new product, there should be a minimum of two or three tests that you run. Minimum. Once you're at the top of the SERPs, you get your 3,000 keywords index and you're in the top 10 for your niche or your subcategory, A-B testing might get you up to slot nine. It's going to be slightly incrementally beneficial, but it won't be game changer. So as one example, I have a brand name called Age of Sage. I launched it three weeks before Mother's Day, had one product review on it. And I generated $135,000 in revenue in three weeks with a single product review. And I spent $11,000 on ads. So, the point of that story is not to say, hey, cool, look at me, I generated this thing, right? Speaker 1: But you can say that. I think people can say that. Steven Pope: But it was good. The point is to show that, A, if you launch and you don't have reviews, it's possible, and B, that I had to run so many A-B tests to get it right, right? Like, I changed my main photo every three days in the first nine days. Until I was satisfied that I had it right. And it was through running three AB Photon tests that I figured that out using PickFu. So that's why it's so important. All right, we got to move on to the next Avenger here. So Scarlet Witch is our choice for design. Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, if anyone saw the Scarlet Witch series, WandaVision, which was actually pretty great. Yeah, pretty great. Steven Pope: I did not know what I was getting myself into when I got through, you know, five minutes into episode one. I was like, is this I Love Lucy? What the heck's going on? Speaker 1: Yeah, so what she did in this show, and this is a massive spoiler, so if you're going to watch it, maybe hit the skip forward 30 seconds real quick. She was able to create an entire city, an entire time frame, and she was able to change the look of everything, which is why we gave Scarlet Witch design. Steven Pope: So not only does she know, she is the person that is able to create something out of nothing. The person that you want in your design seat has high ingenuity and the ability to create something out of nothing. And so that Scarlet Witch literally creates a whole design, a whole city It was themed, right, based on her past experiences, but also very unique and different. And so that's the sort of staff or cast member you're looking for whenever you're going to fill the design seat. I think it's probably the easiest seat to fill out of every seat we're going to talk about today. And that's because there's just such a high availability of of designers out there, right? So like you don't have to hire an agency to do design work well, if you know what you're doing, right? If you got a strong other supporting cast, if your Nick Fury knows how to tell the difference between Scarlett Johansson And fill in the blank. I don't know. Who would be like a bad person to put in the design spot? We should have thought of that one. Speaker 1: A bad person to put in the design spot? Maybe the Hulk? Steven Pope: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There we go. So if we had tried to put the Hulk into the design section, it would be a disaster unless you were selling testosterone booster for supplements, right? Now, if you're doing that, cool. Hire the Hulk for your design. But But for most brands, right, you need Scarlet Witch to delicately massage, create something out of nothing, and fill that out, right? And so when we talk about design, we're thinking about your A-plus content. We're thinking about the photos, the whole seven yards on the photos. Your video potentially could also be involved in this. And by the way, if you don't have a video on your listing, there's your five-minute hack today. Pull your phone out of your pocket right now. And go literally shoot a 45 second video on your cell phone and then go load it to your product page. And show me banana for scale and show me the human element to the item, right? Just simply opening a box can be a design element that will improve your conversion rate. Show me like, hey, how does this experience translate when I sell this product? Because in e-commerce, none of us sell products. None of us. We sell feelings. What feeling are you selling when you give this product to person B? How do I feel when Scarlet Witch shows up at my house versus the Hulk showing up? If Scarlet Witch shows up, I might be terrified and also curious. If the Hulk shows up, I'm hiding behind my couch and I'm like, I want my house to be intact before you leave. Speaker 1: When we talk about The conversion pack, we have Dr. Strange doing A-B testing, Scarlet Witch doing design, Captain America doing merchandising and branding. Can any of these be combined into one person? You know, when we start to think about, you know, hey, maybe I can't have nine people on my Amazon Growth Team. Can the conversion piece be one person? Would you say these skills overlap enough? Steven Pope: So I would say that there has to be two people on marketing, without a doubt. There always has to be a traffic and a conversion person. If you're going to merge people together, I would say your designer and your merchandiser could be merged. So Scarlet Witch and Captain America, you guys can have a baby, no problem. But Doctor Strange, no way. I do not want to see the baby of Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch. Ugly baby, right? That's not going to work for me. Speaker 1: Very different skill set. Steven Pope: Yeah. I think Doctor Strange and Iron Man could merge, no problem. I don't want to see their baby either, but maybe Iron Man can find a scientific way to clone and merge the DNA somehow. Speaker 1: Right. Steven Pope: That might be okay. Speaker 1: Right. It would be probably a misstep for most people to have the PPC or the SEO person be in charge of design or doing design. So optimization, fairly analytical, quantitative type work fits right in with an Ironman PPC type personality. Steven Pope: But I do think that almost all five of these Avengers need to have higher attention to detail. I'm a big fan of Culture Index. If you are listening to this and you like Culture Index, we drink the same cup of tea, I'm telling you. I would say that all could have a variety of different drive or extroversion versus introversion, and I would say that some of them could have more patience or impatience, dependingly, but almost all of these cast members here need to have high attention to detail, without a doubt. Maybe the A-B tester could be a little light. On the detail orientation, maybe they're the person that just comes up with the big ideas. They don't have to necessarily execute down to the tactical level, but almost all the other ones do. Speaker 1: Let's move on over to operations here. So when we think of operations, we've got two characters. And again, you can guess what roles we gave these people. In operations, we have Hawkeye. And we have The Hulk. Steven Pope: I think Hulk will be easier to guess for people. People are like, I don't know, what should we do with Hawkeye? Speaker 1: Right. So here's a hint. When I think of Hulk, I think of kind of like grunt work, just muscling through this arduous task that just needs to get done. Which is why we gave Hulk inventory management. Steven Pope: You can't sell anything if it's not there. Speaker 1: Right. I don't know much about inventory management other than I know when it comes to PPC, inventory management is massive. I'll get messages from clients that say, we need to slow down here or we need to ramp up here because of inventory issues that are coming. You know, products get delayed, all of those things. So my experience with inventory management is from the PPC side, allocating budgets, all of those good things, pacing, product pacing when it comes to PPC. I'm sure there's so many things. It's a classic, what I know about a topic, I can write one book. What I don't know, I could write a million books. So there's tons of stuff that I don't know about inventory management. Steven Pope: But we all know that if you don't have the inventory, you're SOL, right? Speaker 1: That is correct. Steven Pope: My tip today on this one is make sure that Bruce Banner can turn into the Hulk, a la make sure you know that when Q4 hits, you're not going to be out of stock without a Hulk. Right, like you have to have the whole, otherwise you don't have a Christmas, right? And so the concept of just-in-time supply chain management, dead, right? Like I post-mortem that one a year ago and I clarified it was dead. I declared it rather, right? I still think it's dead and I think that the post-mortem will last another two years well into 2023. So bearish on inventory management, supply chain, getting stuff out of China. Cost me freaking $24,000 to get my last 40-foot container out of China. Like what the heck, right? But at the end of the day, your 3PL, your warehouse, like take things into your own control. Store a year's supply of stuff at your warehouse right now. Be able to flip on Fulfill Buy Merchant on December 1st, right? Because your FBA inventory is going to run out, don't forget to, by the way, in e-commerce, there's four things that you can do, right? You can sell more products to more people more often for more money. And that fourth one is the most forgotten one, for more money. I had a coaching call on December 2nd with Advanced Supply. They're publicly endorsing this with a video testimonial. I increased their net profits in the month of December alone by $100,000. Because I told them, raise your prices by 22% now. And they jumped off the call and within two hours had raised their prices and still had the same conversion rate after the price raise and made an extra $100,000. They would have run out of stock. They still did. That's why inventory management is such a critical one. Speaker 1: Yeah, price optimization with anything is typically the easiest, fastest way to change The average order value or the lifetime value of anything because it often only involves, you know, hitting backspace button a few times and then entering a new number. So I couldn't agree more. Steven Pope: I've also run the 10% price adjustment tests, you know, lower to the dollar, raise it a dollar, almost zero impact on conversion. There are barriers at the $20 mark. There's barriers at the 99.99 mark. Absolutely. But in general, if you're raising 10%, you probably won't see an impact on your conversion rate. So don't be shy. Go test it out. Speaker 1: So when people are thinking about inventory management, you know, you can kind of think about it at a larger company, this would probably be one person, potentially an entire department who's in charge of this. At a smaller company, is this something that can be outsourced to a contractor, you know, maybe who's working a couple hours a week? What are your thoughts on who this person is that maybe just a solopreneur or maybe a five-person team currently? Steven Pope: I think that Amazon FBA is the form of most of the outsourcing historically right now. With inventory limitations, it's a whole different ballgame, right? Like you now need to have your own warehouse. If you don't have your own warehouse, And, you know, in Q4 of 2021, you probably are going to stock out of FBA and not be able to ship enough stuff in and have a series of chain-linked events, right? So, you know, could you do this one part-time? 100%. I think this is probably the shoe that should stay on the owners a little bit longer because the purse is really heavily affected by this one, right? Your ability to dip into the financial purse to buy more inventory, store more inventory, making sure it's on time, though, is probably the one thing I would outsource potentially first, and that's getting things from China to the U.S., having a sourcing agent to support that, somebody who's going to take care of that, FOB all the way across the sea. Speaker 1: Yeah, I often see the owner in charge of inventory management quite often, and it seems to be fine. I don't know if I hear, because they're often the ones that feel it the most when they stock out. They're like, damn it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Steven Pope: They can also feel ahead of time, like when a seasonality is coming. They also have the context of all three going around like, oh, I remember that one time when I was stocked out. It's almost like playing blackjack where you're like, oh, I know that if I don't hit right now, I will have a 15 and there's no chance for me to win. Speaker 1: Yeah, makes total sense. So if we were to move on to Hawkeye, what comes to your mind when you think about Hawkeye? Steven Pope: Well, no superpowers, right? Speaker 1: Right. Steven Pope: So, the dude just shoots arrows. We need those. We do, though, clearly. I mean, obviously, the Avengers needed him. Speaker 1: The arrows do explode sometimes, and he's very good at it. Steven Pope: So, we kind of put together customer service and virtual assistants into this category, right? Every proverbial quiver needs some arrows. You need people to run some checks left and right. You need them to check for hidden suppressions because no tool on the market can do that. Love Helium 10, don't get me wrong, but no tool on the market can check for hidden suppressions right now. So you gotta have some manual labor going in and doing that. Making sure that you're responding to messages in under 24 hours. That's a VA task, definitely. Speaker 1: Yeah, so that makes sense. And I think of Hawkeye, it's very, It's kind of not exciting work, like replying to things. Steven Pope: Running audits. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not very exciting. So it was a fitting thing for him because he doesn't have any superpowers. And it's so kind of unexciting. I don't even know what else to say about this particular character. Steven Pope: I don't either. Other than to say this is the first one you should outsource. Speaker 1: First one you should outsource. Yes. And what is that, you know, the actual tasks of that job posting? Can you just run through those real quick? Steven Pope: Like an SOP inside of this is the easiest thing to put together. So like you're giving them a checklist of things that you want to get off your plate. So think about the five hours to ten hours a week of work that you could give somebody else safely if they would just literally check boxes. Not make new boxes, not check boxes you didn't know existed, right? You need an iron man for that, but you don't need that for Mr. Hawkeye. You just want him to notch the arrow and fire it at the target that you give. So I gave you a generic answer on purpose because for some companies this is going to be different than others. But by and large, customer service, checking the listings to make sure that they reflect correctly, troubleshooting tickets could fall in this category as well. Speaker 1: Perfect. And I think we're ready for the last category, which is another department, finance. And for finance, we went with a character who can be a little greedy. He always wants to be king. Specifically, he wants to be king of Asgard, which is Loki. You watched the Loki series. Steven Pope: Freaking loved it. I thought it was clever. Speaker 1: It was pretty good. Yeah, a lot of fun. Steven Pope: And more people on Reddit and other forums were talking about the alligator than they were talking about the plot. But yeah, the plot actually made sense and that's important. So we liked Loki being in charge of finance because we felt like he was the greediest character we knew in The series and he also always seemed to have lots of capital available to him. He could just paint it out of thin air, right? Who wouldn't want Loki on their team, right? Like I would love Loki to come on my team. Yeah, just find me some extra gem bags over here, please. Speaker 1: And what I think is so interesting is that Loki as its own sort of character in our org chart being the finance person allows If someone is dedicated to finance, and my perspective on this is being a PPC person, a lot of times we'll get initiatives on PPC that are maybe different than what the finance person would want. So being able to analyze what is best, what should our actual PPC budget be for the health of the company, that's how I often interact with the finance component of this. And what I think is interesting about Finance for so many companies is that there's so many fractional chief financial officers. It is very much a service. So when people think about bookkeepers and accountants, one emerging field that I keep seeing that I've had consultation calls with these types of people, fractional chief financial officers, I think it's really fascinating at helping companies get better intelligence into How they're spending money, how they're earning it, that component. What's your perspective on Loki being the finance person? Steven Pope: I think that it makes sense to have somebody who cares deeply about hitting the target, right? Like Loki is really big into goal setting and he's also very sure of himself but also very understanding of his limitations in some regard, right? And the character grows obviously in the Loki series and some of that will make more sense for those that have watched it. But I think that no matter what you do, if you don't have capital, The rest of the Avengers fall apart. It's over. It's game over. You lay them off if you don't have capital or you downsize or you don't have the inventory to purchase to grow your business. So if we were to ask company owners on a scale of 1 to 10 where they were From profits on a one to growth at a ten, you need to know your number. If you can't answer that number right now within five seconds, that's a problem. That means your company can't answer that question in five seconds. That means they don't understand your vision. And it means you don't know how much finance and capital you need, right? Now, if you're sitting on a million dollars cold cash in the bank, maybe you don't care. Maybe finance is just a checkbox that you're done with. But for most people listening to a podcast, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you had a million dollars in the bank sitting there doing nothing, unless you're looking for ideas, right? It's usually because like, oh man, where do I finance? Where do I get capital? How do I make a decision between these three products and the other 20 on my list, right? My closet is chock full of samples I've ordered from competitors, samples I've ordered from China. Like how do I make these financial decisions? It's critical. Gotta have it. Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. And last but not least, we have this character who swooped in when there was trouble on the battlefield when the Avengers were fighting. Thanos, he swooped in on his new axe that he had to craft. It is Thor. Steven Pope: Can't have an Avengers squad without the God of Thunder. Speaker 1: Of course not. Steven Pope: And so we're putting him into kind of the operations team. He's a little bit of buddy-buddy with Hawkeye, if you will, and that's catalog troubleshooting. So this is probably the second easiest area to outsource. This is the guy that you need to get the listing yank fixed with. This is the guy that's going to File a hundred tickets, Squeaky Wheel gets the oil, Axe gets the lightning rod. Yes. To make sure that that title finally freaking updates, right? Amazon locked my listing down. You pull in Thor because this dude has some ideas to go around the system. He's like, You have a tent here, Thor 1, to go back to Thor 1 with me, for those that don't remember, his hammer was landed, they put a bunch of tents around it and Thor's like, I'm gonna walk in and grab my hammer, no problem. That's the guy you want on the catalog troubleshooting team. This is the guy that's like, Thanos, I'm just gonna take my axe and just whack his head off, right? Like, just gonna make it happen. And so it's okay if it's a bull in a china shop, that's the guy you want troubleshooting your catalog. Speaker 1: And you know, as we lay out all of these characters and to run through them once again, we have Nick Fury, the owner, Iron Man PPC, Black Widow SEO, Doctor Strange AV testing, Scarlet Witch Design, Captain America, merchandising and branding, finance, Loki, Thor, catalog troubleshooting, Hulk, inventory management, Hawkeye, customer service, and VAs. What I think is so valuable here is that There are times where I hear stories of like the PPC person. Having to do catalog troubleshooting. It's like, hey, this needs to get done. Can you go do this? And like, they don't know the strategies to get responses quickly and efficiently from Amazon. Or I'll hear maybe the design person having to think about SEO. And I think a lot of times when these things aren't optimized, when they're not being given the time and attention that they all need, everything can kind of fall down, right? So you end up with these 10 categories, these 10 characters that are sort of weak. And I think simply just writing them down at your company, who's going to be in charge of each one, making sure that we have professional development in each area can be super valuable towards the success of a company. Steven Pope: So that's your cast of Avengers. Which cast member are you missing today? And what are you going to do to go find them, right? If you don't Think of hiring as always be hiring, then you're going to be solving problems with what instead of who, right? Here's another book to add your list. Who Not How is another good one because you need to find the right talent. The right Avengers to assemble. If you put the wrong Avenger into the wrong seats, you get a wrong person, wrong seat problem. But maybe that guy that was Thor that you put into design, maybe he's the right person, just the wrong seats. Maybe you need to adjust their seats a little bit and push them over, right? So wherever you are with your cast, hopefully you found this helpful to think about as you assemble Avengers. Wait, wait, wait. We gotta end with Avengers assemble, right? Speaker 1: That is it. So I'll close this out here. Steven, thank you so much for being back on the show. It is such a joy to hang. Brainstorm, and did you think that you'd be talking about the Avengers for about two hours today? Steven Pope: I did not, but. Speaker 1: We're like looking up on Wikipedia. Steven Pope: That's what business owners do all day long, right? They just sit around and play with Marvel action figures, right? Speaker 1: That's right. So I hope that this episode inspires some action in people. I just had a call actually earlier today as someone was building out his team and he wanted perspective on You know, different people to hire and what kinds of things they should be doing. And I think that's what spurred on this episode. Steven Pope: And don't forget, we're giving the sword chart away. Unknown Speaker: It's in the show notes. Steven Pope: Go take a look at it. Let us know what you think. Do you think we're missing a particular member of the Avengers cast? Do you think we cast somebody wrong? I want to hear it in the comment section. Speaker 1: I'll be honest. I think we cast this perfectly. I cannot imagine somebody being like, no, this person needs to be in finance or Thor should have been in PPC or something like that. Steven Pope: We're going to get something like, where's Spider-Man? And we're like, well, come on. Speaker 1: Right. And no deep cuts, no characters that I've never heard of before because that's kind of unfair. Steven Pope: What do you mean? The wasp wasn't included? Speaker 1: Ant-Man, here we go. Right. I think there's even deeper cuts like that go back to like some random... I actually think Marvel... Steven Pope: He's She-Hulk. Yeah, She-Hulk. Speaker 1: He's She-Hulk. I think Marvel actually owns like thousands and thousands of characters. They just buy them up as from people. Steven Pope: Walt Disney Princesses now. Speaker 1: I hope all of you had a lot of fun with this episode, as much fun as I know I did. Thank you so much, Steven. Steven, I didn't even mention this because I just figured everybody knows, but people can find you. Just search my Amazon guy, Steven Pope. Is there anywhere else specific that people should probably go to. Steven Pope: And just to check you out even further, other than our four-part SEO series, we have 750 videos on our YouTube channel with literally every Amazon problem solved and explained. If we don't have it solved yet, just ask. We'll make one for you. Speaker 1: Easy enough for me. So I hope you all take this information. And finally, Avengers, assemble.