Podcast transcript
Introduction
We are live with another episode of marketplace Masters, brought to you by MerchantSpring, the leading Marketplace analytics platform for Amazon vendors, and the agencies that support them. Marketplace Masters is all about going deeper into the challenges that Amazon vendors face to lift performance via practical actions and insights.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld. And today, we are discussing how to build a winning game plan. To help us do this, I've invited Christopher Ball to join us on the show and share his expertise. Chris is the founder of Helped.com, with over a decade of In-House marketplace experience across multiple categories and account times. He certainly is not short of knowledge and Amazon expertise. His company help offers a ray of marketplace services including strategy, advertising, design, and optimization. And I look forward into tapping into all of that today. Thank you so much for being on the show, Chris.
Christopher Ball
Thank you very much for inviting me very excited.
Paul Sonneveld
That's great. It's absolutely great to have you. Now, I know you've recently started Helped. It hasn't been that long. So, before we talk about game plan, I'd love to just hear a little bit about the backstory and how did it start?
Christopher Ball
Yeah. So as you mentioned, is not been going for too long. I've was working previously in the house for about 10 years and two years at an agency. So let me just share this with you. Actually, I'll make it a little bit easier to go through. Here we go. Perfect. So what I intend to find each time I was either dealing with clients or being in-house is that we're always looking for like extra help to come in.
But not just that, we were looking for things like training. So we are quite a few clients that were like, Can you help us with training? Can you come into the business? Do you actually understand our business? How can we kind of leverage your knowledge? So what I was finding is that there wasn't just like Marketplace issues. There was other issues so like so like fulfillment so with that background that I have, it was perfect, kind of a perfect mark. It fit really. So, yes, it started it up. Got some clients quite quickly and then just kind of built it up from there. So, it started really well.
Paul Sonneveld
That's great, Chris and I hear you've were chatting before. It's great to see that you've got this amazing traction, you know, in a really short space of time. So it certainly helps. Today we're talking about game plan and it sounds a little bit like you know game plan who needs a game plan? You know, let me just ask the obvious question, right? Why do you need a game plan? Because I'm sure there's a lot of listeners out there. You know, going well, yeah, sure. Sure who needs one? We just need, you know, good operations. And we've done right one. Why do you need one?
Christopher Ball
Yeah, so it kind of all depends what your goals are really. So what are your business goals? Where do you want to get to? What you plan to do really? So the way that we kind of set it up is will have kind of five main point. So we'll kind of work through. So you'll start with where are you now? Like, what's going on in your business? What's going on your Marketplace business and then it's kind of Where do you want to get to?
And then there's a few different questions in between that as well. So where you are now? Where do you want to get to? What do we need to do? How do we need to do it? and How do we measure it? And once you can kind of answer all those five questions, you can build the game plan. And the reason being is that a lot of people know, and there's a lot of information out there. Now, especially these days anyway, of like what needs to be done on an Amazon vendor account. So, Automatization, Merchandising, Inventory etc. but it's not just knowing what needs to be done. It's kind of knowing what order that needs to be looked up and kind of following that methodical path to make sure that you can actually show success really.
Paul Sonneveld
So it sounds like it's a bit of a rogue plan, it's a strategy, it's a clear articulation who does what? And you know, some of those aspects. I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into that in a sec, but I'd love to just on the stand, you know, how do you start? You mean sounds great. But practically, What's a good way into this?
Christopher Ball
Yeah. So usually that the best way to start is to actually audit your account. It's to go through. So basically look through every different parts of the account. So, the bottom bullet point, there is kind of where we tend to start. So this is just like it an acronym, really that we set up within the agency, and it just stands for Marketing, Merchandising, Metrics, Inventory, Shipping, Automation, International and Miscellaneous, which is kind of like, outside traffic into Amazon.
Essentially, what you want to do is you want to audit through your account. So, looking at all the different factors, so making sure, Sure like, what's your Inventory Health like? How much you spend on advertising and what's that returning? What's your tacos? What’s your ACOS? or are you doing it based on selling price to Amazon?
It's just making sure that essentially, you know exactly what's going on that account. So you essentially, that's the easiest place to start is once you order it there, then you can actually answer the first question of Where you are now? Just a quick example, is that we recently signed a client, and there they were only ever measuring their actual sales in to Amazon. And they weren't measuring the sales out. But actually, when we started measuring the sales out, it turned out that the English account, wasn't even the biggest account. It was actually Germany. So, going through those type of thing and being methodical interest. Actually checking like everything on the account and actually measuring it will give you a good starting point.
Paul Sonneveld
I think it's one of those things that I think is humans were terrible at right? Actually take stock to look back and say where are we? What are the learnings? What actually what did we learn about the current status. It's very hard to build on something that you don't really know what's there at the moment. So, although, I must say that acronym that you've got there. I'm going to have to watch this back myself. To remember what that stood for. There's a lot of thought that’s got into that one.
Christopher Ball
Yeah, so pretty much everything on that you do it within a vendor account will kind of fall within those one of those categories and it's just a really good start putting some kind of breakdown. And then what we do after, we've broken down and we've actually audited the accounts in which you should be doing yourself is actually building an impact story.
So, depending what you want the impact to be. Is your impact main goal going to be profitability, or is it going to be growth? So we kind of look at three things within that. So would literally have a spreadsheet and we’d mark it down and going to give it a score in factor. So we'd look at impact, we’d look at time and we look at cost. So anything that has a large impact takes a small amount of time and has no cost or minimal cost and that would be really high up on the list of the next things to do. But if something had little impact, it took a lot of time and was a high cost, it be near the bottom.
Just kind of going through that methodical approach to say, this is what we should be doing first. Essentially, it's like a fancy way of doing the low-hanging fruit essentially but it just kind of breaks it down so you can kind of see exactly what needs to be done. And pretty much everything that you do within those going to boil down to like these three main things: one is inventory, gain clicks and gain conversions. There, the three basic overview. So, pretty much everything within that.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. And maybe I'm dropping the gun on your little bit, but how do you take some of that and how do you sort of phase that out? So you’ve spoken about the quick wins you know, how do you work out you know what's first six months? Next 12 months, sort of 18 months plus. How do you give shape to that?
Christopher Ball
Yeah, so it is really account specific, to be honest. So for example, we've got an apparel client on vendor and they might have like a hundred and forty four children listings on one parent, so it can take a lot more time. So it's kind of there's other people that we work with and he might only have like10 per ASINS in total. So it all depends on there but it is kind of building a project. What we tend to do in house is that we’ll build out a Gantt chart and we'll make sure that all the linking parts kind of link correctly together. So for example, we know that we can only do advertising When's the optimizations being done and we can only sell. Yeah, that's basically just putting everything in the correct order. So, we looking at like, doing the images once the copy is being done and it's kind of essentially building a road map. And, the biggest thing that we tend to see as well as much we've grown to businesses is that they tend to lose focus.
It will be like the managing directors really wants to get this product going and is possibly one of the worst selling products and it's like, well, the impact of actually make all those changes them listings might take I don’t know hypothetical two weeks, for example, whereas we put them two weeks into one of the listings that are always doing great or one of the products that's already doing amazing. Then what's the impact of that going to be? And that's kind of what itis. It’s just don't lose. Focus on it.
So one thing I didn’t kind of mentioned the beginning as well as that. When we go into every single client we have, we do some conference. So what we do is at least once or twice a month sometimes more often, the beginning will actually go into the business and kind of go through all this with them and it's easier once you kind of in front of him, you're explaining like we can't lose focus on this. These are products were focusing on. If we get a lose focus on these, then there's not going to be as big as impact on the accounts, which is what the kind of want that kind of why bring this in really.
Paul Sonneveld
So what I'm kind of hearing you say is, you know, there's a really clear discipline around prioritization, focus on where it really matters. It sounds like there's a fair amount of reminding your clients that that is the priority list.
Christopher Ball
Hell yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
The journey. Yeah. And things on track.
Christopher Ball
Yeah, they've got a buy-in at the beginning and explain the process. I mean, it does get easier because this has worked in the past and we've got case studies and has worked in house and it basically it works. So it's always easier to get buy-in. And also when you're actually going into the businesses and you're explaining like, and you sitting down with a group of people and you're going through like, this is the process, this is why we do it. You're going to see a better return by doing it this way and then you just throw in products and we want this one change, want this one change, this one change. So, yeah, you just got to, it's all about focus which is hard in some businesses.
Paul Sonneveld
Can I just drill down a little bit more into that area of quick wins. The things that you go after first sort of that high return low-cost, what are the things you typically find on that on that short list of quick wins? And vice versa, the follow-up question would be what are the things that you often tend to push off that list that you clients may want to put on there, but you're trying to be very disciplined kind of push that off to get that real clear prioritization.
Christopher Ball
Yeah. So let's start with last one first. So one thing that we always see is like predominately we do work with UK businesses. So that is UK first and then they go International markets. And usually when we start working with the client it'll always be like well we've kind of exhausted the UK and we want to move into Germany, want to move into the U.S. from going to be International. So that always seems to be the first thing that they think it's like yeah let's just move directly like we've got a set of sales in the UK. Let's just move directly onto an International Market.
Paul Sonneveld
So would your advice in that case, well actually hold your horses. Yeah, it sort of mention is not the priority right now, actually the priority is based business in the UK in most cases.
Christopher Balls
Yeah, in most cases, sometimes. I mean, I can think of one client specifically were, it was the other way around. Just because there was a lot more search volume for that product in Germany. But 99% of the case it's like, yeah, again it comes just comes back to that focus. Just like, we've not even got that far with the UK. Yeah, we’ve got a thousand ASINs. I don't know how we've managed to sort out a hundred. You've still got loads more to go. What I mean, it's like, and then they're just like, yeah, let's set up International. Let’s go to move to Germany and things on.
It's never quite as easy as that. That's always the one that tends to be the farthest away. Like some of the quick wins that we regularly see is like, depending on the products again, is like, just things like setting up business discounts. So we'll go into the account will look through the reports and it'll be like 10% of their sales are coming from business. And then we'll have a look through that that tends to be one of them. A lot of it is just like optimization stuff. So the impact can be high. It does take time, but the cost is relatively low to the actual client themselves. There's no supplementary cost. If they’re advertising is a supplementary cost on top. So yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
Okay. In terms of governance and you touched on this a little bit either as an agency or you know for vendors who are perhaps tuning into this. What specific steps do you undertake? You mentioned a little bit around this around the comment before. But you know particularly those vendors that we’re looking to do in the themselves, what advice would you have around them to help them stay on track, to stick to their game plan. Are there procedures, governance, processes you’d steer them towards?
Christopher Ball
Yeah. So essentially what you want to do is you do want to measure everything so like it just as a few examples so we have something called a Product Update Tracker. So as we're going through, we are tracking all the updates that we're making to the account. Updates for making to the listings, just basically tracking everything. And then what we can do is we can historically go back then and actually see, was there any impact? So for example, we've made a change to the copy of the listing or we've made the change. We've done a different variation of A-plus content and it's just tracking those changes.
Tracking the changes, looking to see if there's been any change in the conversion rate. We can also look, sometimes what we see is that if it's a seasonal product, you can make changes to the product, but because it's seasonal, it might be a peak or trough anyway. So what would it be using these things? Like the best-selling rank to see it actually flows within the category and then we'd also be looking to track keywords. So using like third-party tools to track. Keyword changes over time and how they go up within the Serbs.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that really makes sense Chris. So more broadly, we're starting to talk about, how do you know if your your game plan is successful and you mentioned, you know, tracking things and the like. What advice do you have for vendors? What are the metrics that you expect them to track consistently, regularly at I guess at the account level and beyond that?
Christopher Ball
Yeah. Probably some of the biggest ones are, which I've kind of already touched on really, is one is going to be like the conversion rate, your product, your sales into Amazon, your sales out from Amazon directly to the consumer. You be also looking at like, attributed advertising cost. So it depends how you want to work it out. So, I mean, it wasn't quite where the same for seller or vendor but you’d be looking at some kind of ACOS TACOS. It depends how you want to work out, but definitely want to be tracking, how your advertisers measuring. Probably the main ones within sight and also your Inventory Health, unfortunately, which is just changing the last few days, which is a pain. But usually it be kind of tracking to see how much stock Amazon's holding of our products and kind of see now that fluctuates over time. And historically going back.
Also looking at things like return rates, just pretty much measure, whatever information you can get out of Amazon. And basically taken over on a certain day every month, put into a separate spreadsheet and then you can just track it over time. And then again, third-party tools should be looking to essentially like track keywords and using keeper data for example, or helium 10 data. It's to see how you change over time.
Paul Sonneveld
Yep. that makes sense. Now, this all, you know, if you're playing The Devil's Advocate, This all sounds, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. I know with Amazon never is. It, never is, Why is it not as simple as it sounds? We must be missing something here.
Christopher Ball
Yeah. So it isn't and it isn't, to be honest. I kind of going back to my very first point is there's a lot of moving parts, there's a lot of things going on. And you need a lot of like aces in places, what we like to say. Anyway, is making sure you've got the right, people doing the right things. So sometimes when we go into business, as someone who never really touched Amazon before, like, managing the Amazon account, managed it in the Amazon vendor account. So you don't really have a too much of a clue of exactly what's going on. Never mind like all this extra planning or extra pages.
Probably one of the best advice that I can actually give to any brands is to just go into the account and literally open every single page on vendor and just go through anything that you're unsure of. Hit it into Google. Find out exactly what it means and that will help with yours in process as well. The more you know, and the more weight you know where you can pull information from, then the better it can be really. And then if you are really stuck then obviously there’s software like yours and agencies like us to give help where needed.
Paul Sonneveld
That makes sense. I really like that advice. I mean I think that's you know we're no longer in the agency business but certainly a couple of years ago we were starting out. There was a lot of googling going on and actually there's a lot of information there unfortunately not as much when it comes to the vendor site. But there's I mean I guess that's part of what you and I are trying to do here today to try and great some more content and more awareness of how to do that. You know, there's certainly, you know what I found there's lots of people willing to help which is really fantastic.
So, I guess in closing really just you know, keen to understand. What other tips and tricks do you have? You know, for those that are motivated, you know hopefully as a result of today's session to actually get, let's put let's set some time aside. Let's build the game plan, what are some of the other things you may want to just challenge in long terms of tips, tricks, pitfalls to avoid?
Christopher Ball
Yeah. So again, it kind of comes down to about this about too much already. But yeah. It's kind of like, tracking what you do in. So we've been any business, obviously of people who start and people who leave. So if you do it, like for example, you might learn something and then that person may leave further down the line or they might go to different part of the business.
So a really good thing really is to start building SOPs. Even if they are just like loosely covers, they don't have to be followed exactly to the to the letter of the law of there. But at least it gives people some guidance of like, this is what happens when a purchase order comes in. This is what happens when we need to make a change to the list in this them kind of things. So you can do it in a kind of s written documents so you can build SOPs.
And another thing that I've recently found when I'm going to start at the agency was like there's programs like Tango and it just gives you each time you click on a certain part of the page. It's just kind of records in terms of its full document for it, which is absolutely amazing. So, that's kind of one of the things we use here.
Things like, Loom, just to record little, you don't even have to put your face on it or anything. You can literally just record the screen and talk. And again Gantt chart. So we absolutely love Gantt charts here so for roadmaps, for planning, just anything to do with project so it's basically just kind of getting organized really.
Paul Sonneveld
Is there a favorite piece of software you like to use when it comes to project management or you're a Google Sheets or an Excel person?
Christopher Ball
Yeah. We are Google based but yeah we use everything within the agency. We use Trello. Big Trello fan.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Makes absolute sense. We use it for many, many years. Amongst all the tools and I must say, yeah.
Christopher Ball
Oh yeah. I mean, there's so many good ones like each time, I can't send so many messages and, like, this looks pretty cool. I'm not sure if I'd use it, but it looks really cool.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. Very good. Well Chris, we are almost out of time. It's been great to talk about this. Actually, it's one of these things. We don't stand still and talk about were always into action. You know what listings to optimize? Well, what campaigns to optimize, you know, all that sort of, you know, important too but makes much less sense without the context of the game plan to know where you're going and what a metrics you looking forward to really here to ensure that successful.
So thank you for coming on the show today and thank you for demystifying this topic of the game plan. Now I'm sure that a lot of people kind of you know, watching today, or maybe listening to us on our podcast afterwards and love to get in touch. What's the best way for anyone to get in touch with you? Maybe for them to pick your brain or seek advice? Or maybe something more?
Christopher Ball
Yeah, so I mean there's multiple ways so the main one is that it's going to be the website, which is helped.co.uk. Then yeah. LinkedIn it’s probably the next biggest one. So I'm usually stuck between those two. So we've been fully honest.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. I was going to say I've written it down here, but I was going to guess your email address, chris@helped.co.uk
Christopher Ball
Sure that. Yeah. So just drop me a quick message and then we'll get back as soon as possible.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, wholesome that is great Chris and I appreciate your willingness to help out and do your bit for the Amazon Vendor community. Thank you so much for being on the show and I look forward to having you on the show again. Chris.
Christopher Ball
Thanks very much for having me Paul, much appreciated that. Thank you!
Paul Sonneveld
Alright everyone thank you so much for tuning in Via LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or via our podcasts afterwards. I hope you enjoy the show and make sure you check out some great episodes that we've got coming up especially for Amazon Vendors. Until next time, thank you for listening.
