Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Marketplace Masters, the podcast where we go beyond the surface and dive deep into the strategies that help Amazon agencies and account managers truly move the needle.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we are shining a spotlight on one of the most important and often most challenging functions inside an agency, account management. Now, this is a live session, so if you're joining us in real time, we'd love to hear from you. Don't hold back, bring your questions, your challenges, and your curiosity. That's what these conversations are all about.
Now, to help us unpack what great Amazon account management really looks like, I am joined by Scott Ohsman, VP of Digital Commerce at Quickfire, a full-service agency supporting consumer brands across marketplaces, SEM, paid social, influencer marketing, and creative strategy.
Now Scott has been in the game for over 30 years, launching more than 200 brands on Amazon. He brings a brand-first mindset shaped by deep retail and e-commerce experience. He also runs his own sales and marketing agency out of the Pacific Northwest. On top of that, he hosts multiple podcasts and fun fact, he's a seasoned podcaster and live event MC, including Seattle Marathon. I think you've done a number of those, Scott. Anyway, it's great to have you here. Welcome to the show.
Scott Ohsman
Thanks so much, Paul, for having me. It was great to see you in Seattle. When you were recently here, we broke bread. That was fantastic. And just, happy, happy to be here.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's great. Now, did I get the, how many Seattle marathons have you called? How many, is it 10 or did I get the number?
Scott Ohsman
It's like 12, 11, 12, 13. I don't remember actually a little, little more than 10, but yeah, been, been quite a, quite a journey. I can't believe it actually.
Paul Sonneveld
Amazing. Amazing. I'm sure there's a whole story there, but we only have half an hour. So we'll get into the account management side of things, which doesn't look so interesting anymore. It is a very hot topic, though, very hard to scale, very hard to do.
So maybe let's just set the scene, Scott, like you've been in this industry, for a long time. You've seen the evolution of the Amazon agency space really firsthand. How has your view of account management changed over time? You know, it's probably a big question, but you know, at a high level, how has it changed?
Scott Ohsman
I mean, it's like everything, it's changed because of the technology, because of the influence of advertising. When I started managing businesses and brands on Amazon, we didn't have what today is Amazon Ads, we didn't have it. So that has changed operational, the complexity, the volume, the scale, all of that has changed. But the simple do's and don'ts in best class and best in class account management has been around for a long, long time. I know things apply not only to Amazon, but across the board.
When I started my career, I managed small specialty independent retailers in the Northwest, Pacific Northwest in the United States and then grew up to key accounts and bigger ones and department stores and national accounts. And all of the things, a lot of the principles I'm going to talk about today are still very vital. And as I built our agency back in the day and hired account managers, all of these things became critical and a lot of lessons learned. I hope I fell through a lot of trap doors. So I hope today to kind of pass on to anybody lessons I learned and things they can kind of bring into their everyday management.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, absolutely and I bend it around these sort of best practice, great account management. It's easy for me as I'm putting the marketing materials together, but from where you're sitting, when it comes to best practice, and I know we'll go deep into this, but you know, at a high level, let's say you sort of walk into an agency, you've never interacted before, you managed to spend some time with the team there, like what does great account management look like to you at an Amazon agency? What are the kind of at a high level, the behaviors or the things you're looking for?
Scott Ohsman
Well, I will contend that it's one of the hardest jobs out there. It is so hard. It is so tough. I have just tremendous respect for really great account managers in this space specifically because the rate of speed is so fast. If you're selling and you're doing a lot of other businesses, there's just not the pace. What does it look like? Great account management? It's low turnover, so you have people who evolved, people who understood and got to the account management role by learning the business bottoms up.
A lot of times those people understand the pieces and parts, so they understand the manufacturing, they understand the processes, the software tools, the reasoning behind them, your customer, all the database, all the things that you guys have to use, your processes in place. And so that's really what great account management looks like is somebody who really has been with the organization, understands from the bottom up the business. And then obviously there's key ones as far as their ability, relationship management. This job is relationship management. We can talk about data, we can talk about everything.
So relationship management, do they have the ability to gain very good rapport immediately and are they a great communicator and can they establish that unbelievable trust with whoever the point of contact is and then on up as far as the client facing on up in the organization? Which they have to be analytical, they have to be a great communicator, they have to be a great people management and delegator, and they have to be a great prioritization person. There's so many different jack of all trades. That's why it's so hard to find great account managers, because it's an unbelievably tough job.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it is. Absolutely. Having run an agency myself, it is super hard. I mean, the hardest thing is getting people to stay. I guess even where you started here was around, people being, you know, stay with the business, really understand that context. Oh, that's so, so hard. We'll dive a bit deeper into that.
But I want to sort of answer the question from a different angle as well, which is sort of, as you walk into an agency, obviously you don't have the time to sort of get to know every single person and do a full kind of skills and personality assessment, but are there kind of, what are the traits signals or metrics that are signals to you, like saying, Hey, an account manager is doing a good job, or this agency seems to have a well, well run, account for brand management teams?
Scott Ohsman
Well, a lot of that is structure, Paul. A lot of it is how are they multifunctional? Do they have pods, which are very popular? I mean, many large CPG companies and other huge accounts back in the day created I did a lot of work when I created my agency is how do we structure the process? So in today's Amazon world, you have to have the Amazon account manager is really the conductor of the orchestra.
So the one thing I do look at is how are we structured? How are we structured within that account management? And are we doing team management? Do we have an Ad manager? Do we have an operations person? Do we have a customer service and make sure that they're checking everything operationally if it's in Seller Central to store?
Do we have finance involved? Do we have profitability? Who is that account manager and what are the structure and support systems to drive the account manager to make sure they have all the information and they can prioritize it and sort it and then communicate it in a meaningful and productive way.
So a lot of times I go to agencies and I'll talk to them, it's what's their structure and what are the processes? What are the processes behind that structure? And we'll talk about when you're a small agency going to a big agency and how the vulnerabilities are, that's just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of loose wires there. Once you go from 10 to 20, 30, 40, 50 to a hundred clients.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, I think I was going to get onto kind of evolution and structure there. Cause I think, you know, many of our clients have a pop structure that you described there, but it's hard to, it's hard to sort of start there. Right. I mean, a lot of agency agencies there. It's one or two people, they're starting it out. They're doing everything from like sales, business development, managing accounts, and then, you know, trying to scale as they, on more clients.
Scott Ohsman
I mean, there's three things. Just let me quickly. Sorry.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, go for it. No, no, go for it.
Scott Ohsman
I just want to set this up in the fact that there's really three big, big things. And when we talk about account management, that just kind of all the years hits home with me. We should try. Are we trying to, and through different conversations with people, you can understand where they are in this journey. We always want to try to answer the questions before they're asked. That's great account management, period. Do we always hit it? Maybe not. Are we trying to answer the questions before they're asked? Number one.
Number two, are we driving the business? What they hire us for us to do in our expertise and account manager for Amazon is we understand how to manipulate, how to play the game of the machine. That's our expertise. So are we constantly thinking like the brand and trying to drive it?
And the third thing is, do they understand that the greatest defense in client management is a great offense? So those are the big three things that when I sit down and talk about account management, I start with, are we trying to answer the question before we ask? You got to figure out processes, support teams, and your communication cadence and that structure simply to do that. You're going to be fine if you're doing that. And the next one is driving the business. And then when we get into challenging clients, the greatest defense is a great offense. And I'll explain what I mean.
Paul Sonneveld
I was going to actually get a follow up on the last one. I would love to just get a little bit more context on when you have a challenging client and you're talking about the greatest defense is offense, or I think you put it in much more nicely than I did. What does that mean, Scott, in your mind? What does it look like?
Scott Ohsman
Well, okay, there's two big things, and I'm going to say this, and I talk about this all the time, and this is true at QuickFire. It just doesn't matter. The sales teams and everybody in the onboarding and the lead generator, everyone is doing their job and they're doing the best they can. But we have to understand that you can't reason with crazy, okay? I know that's a big, wide, broad statement and there's a lot of more great kinds, but we always have, I have to start out this conversation of how to manage difficult or challenging clients and whatever that shape or form looks like, okay? We all probably have stories we can tell. How you turn that around is by absolutely burying them in proactive offense.
So you escalate and overdo, you over-index on your communication, on your report serving. You basically flood them with data. You flood them with communication. You flood them with information. So all of a sudden, all of the, usually, Clients come at you when they don't feel like they're getting enough information, when they're not hearing from you enough, when the communication isn't fast enough.
So how to flip the script on difficult and challenging clients is, you step into a very severe over-indexed offense until you build that trust. Again, this also leads to, I'm going to answer every question that they haven't even thought of. And I am hyper-vigilant on proactive things that we're doing. This is the strategy. We're changing this. You over-communicate, over-report, over-email, over-everything.
And I'm telling you, once also the business gets better sometimes, right? The other problem is you can have a great relationship with everything else. When the business isn't good, that's when people get sad. And that's when a good customer becomes a tough customer or a client, I should say.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. I took a lot of notes there. I think there are some, there's gold there. The over community. I mean, first of all, the con reason with crazy, I think is a good reminder.
{both laughs}
Scott Ohsman
I have tried for years. I still make the mistake. I still trust people. I still get into situations that aren't fun because I don't understand the crazy until I do.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, no. Gotcha. So I want to go back to your kind of three trades, three big things, which, you know, absolutely resonate with me and appreciate you clarifying going much deeper on the last one. I guess my question is, how do you keep those alive as you scale? I think from our own experiences, when we were small, you're just trying to hire a superstar, right? One guy who has it all. And that becomes kind of easy, but it's so person-driven. And guess what? If the person leaves, you're kind of left with not much.
How do you, I hate using this word, but how do you institutionalize those three things? And what does it look like, say, if you're like a 10 client agency to a 30 client agency to say, a 80 client agency, whatever numbers you want to use, I'm okay with it. You know, there are some sort of distinct kind of gears, right, as you scale the business. I mean, what have you seen on that front or what do you look for?
Scott Ohsman
Well, it's extraordinarily difficult. So the people that are doing it at a successful rate and I don't mean about their LinkedIn posts or this, that. I mean, if you dig down deep and you talk to the owner or operator and you might have had this thing, how is it really going? Because the problem is, and this is in many businesses, but the problem with agency life is, you're a Ferris wheel. People get on, people get off. It has no determination or it's no reflection on the job you did or the outcome that you delivered for the price you charged. Many times, somebody gets hired, your point of contact, the new vice president comes in. There's multiple things. They consolidate. We've all been through those.
So trying to scale the agency, number one, is hard because it's a natural Ferris wheel. People get in, people get off. You're just standing there hoping you got a good pipeline. And what I'm talking about is the challenge to scale really is the core root is it's diversification. You have too much volume. So, in all of the agencies that I've been, and again, I was a small agency, we merged, became a bigger agency, and then we merged again and became a ginormous agency. And we fell through all of these things, and we struggled big time. We tried to put process and structure, and we created pods, but we had huge liabilities because not only did the account manager have too large of a client base, and the size and type, this is another trap that agencies fall into. Hey, this person has five accounts. He's got capacity. She's got capacity.
We're going to put two more accounts on them. Well, all the counts aren't created equal, Paul. And I think we've all experienced that if you've been in this business a little bit, is you could have one that's doing. It's not just the dollar amount per month that they're doing that translates perfectly to the time inventory, to the management, to the amount of resources you, the account manager, or the team is going to put towards. So if you have somebody who understands that, that's it. The problem always is, again, you can come back, Paul. The problem is every agency has a pod that has too much volume in one account that pays for the rest of them.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. The cross-subsidisation piece, right?
Scott Ohsman
That's the problem, and it's always, and we want to move, oh, this person, well, we have a personality. We think that this client point of contact will mesh well with this type of style and personality. Well, there's an art and science to that, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But that is, the crux of it is, You have account managers that have to wait only so many time in the day, and they have too many accounts and too many people in the level, their base level, their balance isn't right. And then honestly, that's a trickle down, because if the most the biggest problem we had, and I see this all the time, is the poor Ad manager.
So now we have to have full time Ad managers on certain account base. Well, because of programmatic because of software, hey, my Ad manager can handle 15, 20 accounts. Can they? Are we really getting a quality? So the challenge is the team management style. The pod has to be really thought through and each client has to be thought through on several levels of what it's going to take to give the service that is appropriate and that will return the highest, again, happy outcome, happiness meter, and also revenue. Because you put the highest cost people on the biggest account, that's where it's hard to make money as an agency. Does that answer any of those questions, Paul?
Paul Sonneveld
Well, I still want to go back to the, I have two questions. Let me ask a direct follow-up question here, and then I want to go back to the structure piece. So the direct follow-up question here for me is, let's say the sales team, the BD team, they've just signed up this wonderful client and everyone's excited, right?
And they all head home for the weekend and you're probably the VP of brand management. You go, right, where am I going to put this client? Which part is it going to go in? How are we going to, you know, all of those considerations. And, you know, it's hard to give a theoretical answer here.
What are the things that you're going to look at in terms of the client characteristics beyond personality? I think we understand the personality pit and you want to make sure that people don't clash and bang heads. But beyond that, what are the key business dimensions or metrics you look at in order to assess, hey, where am I going to put this? What is the amount of resource we're going to put in that? What are the considerations there?
Scott Ohsman
So this is every situation is customised. So I'm going to give you a broad answer, everybody.
Paul Sonneveld
Sure, Okay.
Scott Ohsman
But I, you have to do an in-depth, we did this a lot and we still do this. So not only do you have to look at the assortment, right? The catalogue, but you have to look at the revenue. Is it an 80, 20, right? Is 20% of their ASINs doing 80% of their volume? Is it a just a vendor or seller account? Is it 1P, 3P? Is it a hybrid that actually adds complexities? Then you want to look at their Ad revenue. This is a great question. How much are they doing Ads a month? Are they doing PPC search? Are they doing DSP? Are they large enough where they're into streaming TV? These are added complexities that you're going to have to deem resources.
The second big thing that I think is missed a lot in this, is what is the evolution or where are they as a brand? Do they have large distribution? Am I going to be fighting? Is one of the things is the complaints, Hey, I want somebody to get control of my listing. Okay. So there's, there's another weight on the agency. If you have a brand registry or transparency, there's other mechanical things that you're going to have to do to put to this account to solve some of these things.
The last thing is not only what's their distribution and what's their evolution, what are they doing outside of Amazon? And this is a big thing that has changed just in the last five years as far as Amazon account managers. When you assess where I'm going to put this, how much traffic, how much work, how much money are they spending off Amazon? Because the input and the effects of how that is on the account management, Ad management, operations, everything else, is larger than it's ever been.
So I want to assess because that's going to tell me, God, if they don't have anything going and I can't get any brand traffic, I can't get all these things. How difficult in that category, we also just to sum it up is you definitely assess category and competitive set. How hard is this going to be? Because the harder it is, the more time and resources it's going to take. Does that answer? I think there's a captain obvious, but I think there's a lot more.
And then just lastly, sorry, you try the sales team and everybody tries to get deep on this, but as an account manager, sometimes you're blindsided. You need to know operationally, logistics internally, how are they structured? What are they good at? Do they do direct to consumer? Are they fulfilled by Amazon? Is this going to be a whole learning curve? Where are they operationally? Because that also will inform you on where's the right place and how many resources are going to need.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I got you. That's a great checklist, by the way, Scott. I'll have to rewatch this episode and put a Well, put your name on it.
Scott Ohsman
Because you're trying to assess if I've got 10 clients or eight clients. Right. And the problem with this, they try to look at like a factory. Right. If I've got capacity, I got one person. They're really good. How much capacity levels? Well, we're not a factory machine. It's a service. So I implore people that are looking at this. You want to look at service industries, not product industries. Because the service and the intensity of time and resources flows up and down.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I completely get that. Let me go back to my other question, Scott, which is around the evolution of the structure. And let me give you a very specific question, which is, obviously, you've spoken about the idea of a pod system and all of that. At what point, I'm talking particularly about young agencies, maybe agencies have been up and running for six months, 12 months, you know, they've got a handful of clients.
At what point should they seriously consider moving to a pod structure? You know, obviously there's cost implications involved and affordability and all of that. I mean, and I just don't need, I don't have an easy answer on the transition here, but what advice do you have around how to tackle that transition and evolution in terms of account management?
Scott Ohsman
This is a dollars and cents. And I learned this, unfortunately, I wish I would have learned it faster. So what you have to do is you have to take the client set, right, the revenue set that the agency is getting from that client set. And this is a margin analysis. Okay, this is and I see the question here. Should I answer the question? I love it. What's a pod structure? So pod structure is what I'm talking about pods is and this is again been around forever is you have the account manager, then you have an Ad manager, then you have an operations manager, then you have, if it's finance, if any other parts of it, you have a team, excuse me, you have a team structure that is assigned to a specific client. So you have a brand manager, you have an assistant brand manager, you have an Ad manager, you have an operations manager, The pod is one pod. This is cross-functional team management that is assigned to a specific client. That's one pod. Does that make sense to everybody, hopefully? Great question, by the way.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. Thank you, Andre. I really appreciate that.
Scott Ohsman
So what was the original question as I got distracted as I do?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, it was around, how do you evolve? from a maybe a one person do it all type approach to pod structure.
Scott Ohsman
So to me, this is margin analysis. Okay. You take that client set, the amount of revenue, and this becomes to a, cause you're in a small business. When you go from that to when you go from a single operator to you're going to go hire people. And now you have a lot of flexibility in fractional contractor help, which I highly suggest to do that actually, because that can ebb and flow and constrict. and expand with you, but it comes down to margin analysis.
Okay. I've got X amount of revenue with this client set. I think it's going to go to this next level. Okay. Then is when I'm going to take each pod, right? I'm going to take each total revenue for the account team. And it becomes on my margin. How much money am I making that pod? When can I get it to a factor where I can add two pods? I lived this night and day for 15 years. When do we have enough revenue? Or I think enough revenue is coming where I can take the risk to basically get another support system, either account manager or an additional service supplier.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Makes sense. Let me talk about, I know it's about dollar and cents, but as a broader question, which is here around, how do you balance offshore versus onshore, right? We deal with a whole range of agencies. Some of them are a hundred percent offshore, not a hundred percent, 90%. Some of them have a deliberate strategy, right? Everything onshore.
Part of this goes, the heart of this question goes to kind of, you know, profitability, operational efficiency, or at least at the surface level, it seems it does. What is your take on that question? Let me make the question clearer. To what extent should agencies consider offshore resources in order to achieve a better trade-off between service and cost?
Scott Ohsman
I mean, this is a tricky wickets, as you know, but we, again, my former buy box experts, right? We had, we developed, this is not, I didn't have anything to do with this, so I can't take any credit, but we developed a tremendous team in the Philippines. I think today it comes down to profitability, to be honest with you. It's a profitability. Now, the rates and the income revenue streams of how agencies now get revenue from clients has not only grown dramatically, but the way.
So revenue shares is still a very popular model, which is a huge high risk, high income, and then also Ad spend, right? So percentage of revenue or percentage of Ad spend has become very popular and very commonplace. So I think offshore is actually, it's gotta be some part of your business. This gets back to, if you have great account managers that are actually great leaders, and they're great leaders in the fact that they understand the relationships and they build relationships within their team, their support team. I had, and I still do, the person, my catalogue support team, that person, my customer service, she's on every single call. She's on every single email. I empower my teammates to make sure that they can deliver. So I am not a roadblock. I don't want to be, the account manager cannot be a clog.
Back to my second big thing, Paul, and about this is offshore and onshore, it doesn't matter. If you have somebody who's there, who's driving the business, because the brand operator always wants somebody to think like a brand. And that's what we say at Quickfire, because we're all actually from manufacturing and brands. We're more brand than we are agency, because to a fault, we are always thinking about the brand. We literally are putting every conversation, every analysis of spreadsheets and KPIs as the brand owner. That makes a great account manager as well.
Paul Sonneveld
Interesting. Very interesting. I think you're saying it doesn't matter, right? But I guess if you can make it work, then it doesn't matter because it should unlock some better profitability, right?
Scott Ohsman
It should. And the other thing is, I'll just wrap it up, and I know we're getting close to time. There is tremendously brilliant, smart, outstanding talent around the world. And this has been proven. Some of the greatest agencies of all time have massive, great teammates that are all over the world, frankly. Yes, there's a cost benefit. But there's, there's a lot of other intangibles that, uh, or do you, but it comes back to people. If you have the right people, I don't care where they are. You're going to be successful.
Paul Sonneveld
Yep. Good summary. Scott, I've got one or two more questions for you. I know we're at the half an hour mark, but I'd love to just, we talked to him a lot about structure and how you set things up and what you're looking for. I want to sort of look at it from a different angle, like, from the account manager themselves, this job can be tough demanding going back to your can't reason with crazy statement, you know, you're going to have really difficult clients, right?
But then there's also the bit around, you know, you want people to stay around for a long time. There's a lot of knowledge there, the relationships, all of that. So really what we're, what I'm trying to get into now is the question of morale, motivation particularly when, you know, if you're a, say like the head of account management, brand management, you know, how do you think about motivating your team?
Particularly in the context of maybe where there's been some really tough conversations with clients, clients have left, I know account managers who take this stuff very, very personal, right? Because they invest their lives in it. They, the relationships are genuine to them. So it can, you know, ups and downs in terms of motivation. So, you know, how do you think, I mean, this is not an easy question. I mean, motivating staff in any business is a hard one, but how do you think about motivating account managers and overall, let's call it pod morale within the context of an Amazon agency?
Scott Ohsman
So this gets back to finding, try to get the best talent you can. They don't have to be Amazon experts. If they have some curiosity, they have the gumption, they have the drive, they have the ambition, right? Because yes, they take on ownership and you take personally and people are rude to account managers, which this is back to one of the great lessons that you can, if you have somebody who's been through it, who can provide great training in this.
One of the things that account managers right away have to do is they have to train the client. And what I mean by that is they have to set up boundaries. And this is comes to morale. So if you get a new client and it gets on board and all of a sudden you do see you on your phone on the weekend or whatever, after hours, and you do see an email come through, if you answer it right away, you're toast. You're just, you're then trained. This is no lie. This is like parenting. This is like any relationship.
You have to create boundaries, healthy boundaries. And by doing that is, and I still do today, if somebody emails me or sends me a Slack message out time, I consciously sit there and go, I'm not going to answer that until Monday morning. Okay. I don't want to assume, Oh my God. And the problem with account managers these days, and this is forever, excuse me, is we're living fear.
We live in fear because we've got to keep the client happy client client. It's like, we're working in a resort, you know, trying to make sure the client's as happy as possible because a lot of morale and a lot of things is retention. Hey, I'm going to give you a compensation. You're going to have an ability to increase your income. If your customers stay. I'm all for that within reason. Sometimes there's different layers of why somebody is unhappy and it has nothing to do with the account manager. So you have retention compensation things you have.
This is gets back to great management. We had a thing called glads and sads. Where you bring somebody in, right? I blame my teammates came in, the people that work for me. And we had a it's never going to be 100% honest. We had a glad and sad. You have three things you're going to tell me about yourself and your performance and your job that you're glad about. And you can tell me three things that you're sad about. I'm going to tell you from my perspective, three things that I'm glad about, three things I'm sad or areas of improvement.
And lastly, you get to tell me for the company, what are some things, if you have one or two things that you think that you're not happy with, or you think is an area of improvement? If you keep those communications, those check-ins, those, quote, one-on-ones reviews, which I never did because I think they're garbage, but I understand from a large agency, you have to do them, but I informalize them, meaning I just want to sit down and have as much of an honest conversation of glads and sads. If people are happy and they like the people they work with, and their market value and compensation is there, then people stay.
That's how you do morale. Morale is nothing but being honest, being truthful. And if you say you're going to do something, you try to do it. You try to do it. That actually organically creates great morale. Because when people are just leaving all the time, you know, when I was at Columbia Sportswear, one of the largest companies in the world, we, it became so bad in the office. People would go, you know, say they had a dentist appointment and they come back. How was the dentist appointment? Nailed it. That means they were on their second interview. And everybody left because morale was bad because nobody was happy.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. No, really, really good point. Really good point. Um, well, we are five minutes over, so we're going to have to wrap, wrap up, but maybe in order to sort of, you know, land this thing for us today, maybe I'd love for you to maybe just reiterate. I think that the three big things that you spoke about at the start of it are really powerful. And I thought maybe we can just leave on those for you just to reiterate those and fix those firmly in our minds as before we say goodbye.
Scott Ohsman
This is if you wake up every day as an account manager on Amazon or this will serve you anywhere. If you have client-facing jobs, if you wake up in the morning and you're looking at Seller Central, Vendor Central, whatever, all your analytics, your dashboard, your MerchantSpring, by the way, your dashboard. I am I trying to what questions do I know and listening to my client, knowing my client. Can I answer some questions before they're asked? That should be your high mark. That should be your goal every single day, every single quarter, every single month, every single year. I'm going to try to answer questions before they're asked. If you do that, I'm telling you, you're going to have a really good career. You're going to be successful and the client's going to be happy.
Second of all is, am I driving the business? Am I thinking like the operator and creative and working with my teammates and have instilling a philosophy or a mindset that we are going to drive the business? Okay, the last thing Paul is we're gonna have problems Okay, business is gonna be up his is gonna be down clients are getting unhappy. We're getting new people problems and challenging and difficult people happy minute don't take it personally. Half the time when you get the nasty gram email it has nothing to do with the account manager has nothing to do with you. It's because it's it's more about that person than it is to you.
The way to switch the deal is you have to have, you over flood them with reporting communication and you give them so much love, they almost retract and go, wow, okay, I wasn't happy. They heard me, they see me. Now I'm seeing the effects of that and I feel like we're in a better groove. And then that slowly will start to dissolve away where it's not you're over-indexing your time to make an unhappy client happy.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic, Scott. You could write a book about that, right? The three keys to Amazon or agency account management.
Scott Ohsman
Perception management is one of the biggest keys in communication style and emails. I could go on and on and on, but thank you for your time.
Paul Sonneveld
We are out of time, so we're going to have to wrap it up. Scott, let me just really thank you for your time today. I love your passion, your insights. And the fact that you're just facing some of these challenges head on. I think a lot of us are listening, those who have been in the agency space or are currently headed to go. Yeah, there's a lot of truths in there and hopefully there's a couple of things where people go, okay, I'm going to try this this week or we're going to take this on board.
Scott Ohsman
Yeah, reach out to me.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I was going to say, what is the best way for people to get hold of you if they want to sort of continue getting, I mean, anyone's in Seattle, hit this guy up and have some, what do we have? Burritos or some Mexican food?
Scott Ohsman
Yeah, we had great.
Paul Sonneveld
Definitely, it guaranteed a great conversation.
Scott Ohsman
LinkedIn is probably the linky, as I call it, is probably the best place. You can hit me up. You can ask me questions. I do look at them. I do answer people, even if they're trying to sell me stuff. But LinkedIn is fine. My email, again, is really simple, scott@quickfirenow.com. And then obviously, everybody's got a pulse, a pair of shoes and a podcast. And so always off-brand. It's a totally different kind of show. So you can always reach us through that as well.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. All right. Thank you so much, Scott. All right, everyone, that is it for today's live episode of Marketplace Masters. Thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you're looking for more insights, please ensure to check out our video on-demand library at merchantspring.io for a wealth of content.
And of course, if you are in the Amazon agency space, you're an account manager and you're not a MerchantSpring customer yet, don't hesitate to have a chat to you. We'd love to share how MerchantSpring can help you to what Scott was talking about, be proactive and spot things before your clients see it. So we'd love to talk to you about that as well.
But most importantly, I love these podcasts. So if there is a particular topic or a speaker that you'd love me to bring on or talk about, I'd love to know. So drop me a message on LinkedIn and I'll get right on it. All right. Until next time, please take care.
