CXChronicles Podcast 178 with Tomer Rabinovich, CEO at Top Dog Global

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #178 we welcomed Tomer Rabinovich, CEO at Top Dog Global.

Tomer grew his Amazon business with zero background in online sales. He has multiple brands that he sells on Amazon and built a full team in the Philippines.

Tomer speaks at events all over the world and also teaches and consults other Amazon sellers actionable tactics that they can use to elevate their own businesses.

In this episode, Tomer and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #178 Highlight Reel:**

1. Riding The Amazon Wave and building amazing customer experiences
2. How building customer success is its own form of magic
3. Building an Amazon brand & business in today's world
4. Paying attention to how history repeats itself while building your business
5. Building asynchronous workflows for today's hybrid working world

Huge thanks to Tomer for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the employee experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Tomer Rabinovich

Click here to learn more about Tomer's New Book Riding The Amazon Wave

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future business leaders to join our customer focused community!

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see all of our customer focused business leader video content + our past podcast episodes!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

#178 -- Tomer Rabinovich

Speaker (00:00:00) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited for today's guest Tomer Rabinovich. Welcome to the CXC podcast. My friend, 

Speaker (00:00:18) - Adrian. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Speaker (00:00:20) - We're pumped to have you, man. So number one, guys, um, as we try to do every single solitary week with the show, we find all sorts of different types of incredible customer focused business leaders from across the world. And Tamir has got a super, super cruel story that he's going to share with us today. So remember, why don't you set the stage, my friend, why don't you take a couple minutes to kind of give the listener a sense for who you are, some of the work that you're doing today with your clients across the world. And then more importantly, um, um, just, just some of the stepping stones, man that got you into the world that you're in today, working with Amazon sellers and working with all these incredible brands, but set the stage. May I give the listeners a sense for who you are and what you've been building? 

Speaker (00:00:56) - Sure. So, um, yeah, I've been selling on Amazon since 2015. I ran multiple brands on my own with a very small team in the Philippines. Uh, so we'll talk about that. And then I built another business for the past four years have been consulting mainly seven, eight figure sellers that are also selling on Amazon. Um, as well as some aggregator companies, those companies basically came in two, three years ago, acquiring different brands on Amazon specifically, or Shopify, and then putting them together and growing them as a whole. So that was very interesting as well. Those sort of maybe nine figure businesses. So that was very challenging as well. For me. 

Speaker (00:01:36) - That's awesome. I think the, one of the things that I'm pumped to chat about today, tomorrow is just this, um, I know we're going to get into it later, but like with the new book riding the Amazon wave, I think so many of our listeners number one, they're definitely, I would say all of them are probably Amazon customers, right? Are users people that are, are buying all their different Willie's, where's an Amazon. But the second thing is this man is a lot of, a lot of CX and CS focused professionals. We lean to whether we love them or we don't love them. We lean to Amazon on a regular basis is, um, one of the modern customer experience examples because Amazon changed the game for every single one of us to me, right. People, um, are, have gotten so conditioned and so used to going to Amazon finding whatever it is that they want. I'm talking, I'm saying whatever it is they want, whether it's a sporting good or a cosmetic or whatever it is that you need for your household items. But you've been in this space now for a while, man, and you know, this space better than most people. What, um, what was the thing that got you kind of close to Amazon? What made you kind of pick this space to pick this world to kind of get inside of it and really to kind of start understanding of mastering? 

Speaker (00:02:39) - Yeah. So the first guy, first thing I will say is that Amazon actually passed Google in terms of like in the U S in terms of where you start your search for any product that you want. People actually go to Amazon before they go to Google to type it in and just look it up. So, um, yeah, so what happened with me is, uh, it was, uh, 2014. I was kind of looking around what to do. It was after college, you know, I mean Israel. So in Israel you go to the army, that's mandatory here in Israel. After that you go to travel a bit, that was in the U S for a few months, I came back to Israel. Um, and then, uh, college, you know, and after college I was like, what am I going to do? Uh, so I found this like pretty boring day job too. 

Speaker (00:03:19) - We, what we did there is we help small businesses grow. Uh, it sounds more interesting than it actually was, but, uh, at the same time I was kind of like, it wasn't nine to five jobs. So I had all this free time and I was like, what am I going to do with all of this free time? So then I stumbled upon a course on health selling Amazon, basically on Facebook ad. So, uh, that's what got me started because I knew I always, I always knew that I'm going to start a business at some point or another. Uh, that was always kind of on my radar. And before doing like any of this stuff before doing like Amazon or anything else, I was actually a professional magician. I started when I was 18 years old, um, all the way up until I think I was like 25, 27, something like that. Uh, so I I've done that for a long time. And I think that actually is very well connected with customer experience as well. Um, and the fact that in different aspects, right, because I, I know how to surprise my customers. You can say so. And I think there is a big part of that when you are trying to deliver a very strong customer experience. 

Speaker (00:04:22) - I, number one, you are officially the first former magician that we've ever had on the show. So I have to call that out, but, but Tamera, this is, it is an incredible, um, foundational, um, way to start in any business. Cause I would argue most business owners, most entrepreneurs let's call it risk. Most executives, really, frankly, at any, at any size company, man, every single solitary day, we feel like magicians, you're coming up with new.

Speaker 1 (00:04:50) - She coming up with new tricks. You're trying to, a lot of times you're trying to maybe keep somebody's attention over here while you're doing something over there to try to kind of move things around, let's call it what it is, building businesses and building teams and leading teams. It is magic work. It is. And especially for, for guys and gals that are doing a phenomenal job with it. Those are folks that are they're they're, they're, they're basically playing the magician role every single day. So it's kind of cool that you got to kind of actually cut your teeth in that, in that regard, it had to have helped set the stage too, for the speaking and for some of the selling and some of the consulting work that you do too. Right. That's an incredible way to prepare for that type of work. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:22) - Yeah. I think in business industries in general, like in our industry, like the Amazon selling industry, you can call it there. Like there are a lot of people speaking with a lot of knowledge, but they are not necessarily very good speakers. They're not necessarily like it's like professors in the university, right. They know their material, but maybe they're not very good on the stage. So that definitely helped me. And I really tried to kind of build my way up to speaking on stages as, as fast as I could, I would say before I had any service to offer. And it was just fun for me to do. And just giving value is what was always my mantra. Like just give value for free and not expect anything in return. And I've been doing that since forever, since I've been a magician and also, uh, also to this day. And I think that's like a very good way to also build up a personal brand. Um, and just connections. You know, I, I think I'm very well connected in both industries. They kind of worked in the magic industry and then in the Amazon industry. Uh, and yeah, just providing values is the number one thing for me. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:22) - I love it. A value first is absolutely the way to go, especially this day and age tomorrow, right? We're all, every single solitary, one of us, every single one of our businesses or teams we're competing for such limited attention, right? Like the average consumer gets so many different messages put across his or her desk or his, or her screen on a daily basis that it's, it's almost impossible to catch someone's attention. It is magic to even just get that, that, that attention grab. So I love it. I love that. We're um, that you, you really kind of started with that. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:50) - One more thing I'll mention is that you mentioned that that was an addition that helped me with my business. I think that whenever you are a master of something, doesn't matter what it is. I had a friend of mine, uh, was really into yoga. He was a yoga instructor for a few years. He was just one of the best ones I've ever seen, you know, with all of those weird positions. And we talked about this topic, right? The me and him talked about it. And, uh, he told me how much, like I told him how much my magic helped my Amazon businesses. Yeah. Yoga helped me the same. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, look, I'm stable, I'm focused. I can just zoom in on one thing at a time. So I guess it's, whenever you are very good at one thing that affects the rest of your life, you know, around you, like you, for example, you are very good at customer experience, obviously. So I'm sure that kind of propels to kind of everything around you, you know what I mean, 

Speaker 1 (00:07:39) - A hundred percent, man, it's almost like, it's almost like some of those different, um, those different, like self points of confidence with self points of mastery that different people can kind of unpack. It leads to confidence in other areas in life. And then I think the other thing is this, or let's just say it a little bit simpler if you know, the things that you're good at and it makes it a little bit easier for you to say yes to more and more and more of the things that you're good at. And maybe to, to kind of pause and say no, cause it is okay to say no folks to the things that you're not so good at. That is always an easy way to get ahead, right there, just that power of focus and that power of knowing what to say yes to and what to say no to, um, tomorrow. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:11) - I love it. And thank you for setting the stage. I've got to jump into the first, the first CS pillar team, man. Uh, you've worked with all these different, uh, customers you've worked with all these different Amazon sellers you even worked at, um, at a bunch of different businesses early on in your career. I'd love for you to take a couple minutes to kind of talk about some of the things that you sort of learned or some of the things that you really kind of hone in on when it comes to that first CX pillar of team. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:37) - Yeah. So I guess like a lot of the people that come on this podcast are talking about very big businesses, you know, like over a hundred people over a thousand employees, the companies I deal with are usually very lean businesses. A lot of the cells I'm working with, they might even be over a million dollars in revenue a year, but there are still like a one-man show and that's insane in like most industries. So, um, they don't really know how to build up their, their team or business. And what usually happens in Amazon. You don't have a lot of customers reaching out to you. You might have a few every day because usually they reach out to Amazon directly. They're like the packaging didn't come through or it came, arrived damage or whatever happened. That's usually the main cases, but maybe it doesn't function correctly or something. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:21) - So they reach out to your support through Amazon itself. Um, and then it gets to the actual seller selling the product. So, um, the first thing that that was taught to all stores was customer service. Like that's the first thing I should outsource. So I hired someone for two to three hours a day, every day and, uh, from the Philippines. And then I hired someone to do my product research and, uh, and, um, ads on Amazon, you know, PBC and just the whole, I just hired like a row of like VAs or even time employees or some we've experienced some without, and I had 12 people underneath me at some point.

Speaker 1 (00:09:56) - Uh, but they were all reporting to me. You know, I was like, it was even worse than doing it all on my own. So I ended up letting everyone go on the same day and started from scratch. And what I realized is that I should really do things differently in terms of how to hire, especially the first and second employees when you grow. What I mean by that is when you hire someone, um, you should hire them as if they were a manager. So I'm basically hiring the first, I, I recommend sellers to hire their first person that will become a manager at some point. So the first and second hires are critical to the success of your company. And if you look at even startup companies, they usually start with like a few people, right? Like four or five people. Um, and those are like the core people in that company. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:45) - So that's kind of how you should treat your business. Either. You were doing it with your, uh, most businesses, again, start by yourself or with a spouse or with a business partner, but it's usually one or two people. And then the first few hires that you do are critical and those should be manager oriented. So basically I gave that new person customer support, and then I gave her some, um, product research to do in talking to photographers, graphic designers, copywriters about creating our listing on Amazon and, and all of that creative work. So then what I realized is that I'm much more analytic. So my first hire should be someone who is very creative and that should be the same for everyone. So if you are very creative, you should hire someone who is very strong at numbers and a very analytic person. Um, and a lot of times you don't really want to, because you will, we'll get along a lot better with someone who is exactly like you, but the first hire should really be someone from the other side of it. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:39) - I love that. Tell me a couple of things that you said that I think we immediately call out. The first one was just this idea of like, number one, you cannot do all this stuff by yourself guys. Right. And I, and I love by the way, you're right. We do have there's many, uh, many of our past guests they're coming from bigger businesses, venture capital fueled, right? So you're, you're, you're scaling quicker. But what I love about today's episode tomorrow is we're talking about some of these incredibly Indy hacking types of companies, some of these small lean, sharp, super high performing financially businesses. You just mentioned a million dollars of revenue with one head. Not, not, not, not to cause any consternation with some of our past guests, but like, come on. Some of, some of these venture capital companies, they might have a hundred people and they don't even have $10 million, their first $10 million of ARR. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:21) - Right? So, so theoretically, you're looking at some businesses and you're looking at some, some different groups who are doing an incredible job of financial performance, right? One person per million. That's incredible. Right. But I think you're right. There's, there's this other piece of whether it's a one to 10 person shop or a one to 100% Chopra, 100 to a thousand percent job finding a which types of people and finding which types of early contributors that are, are literally going to be able to build out your four pillars as you grow, as you scale, as you find more customers, that's hard, man. And I'll tell you right now, I think for a lot of our listeners, um, what Tomer just said about this idea of making sure that you're doing like complimentary hiring or complimentary additions, you don't want a bunch of people that think like, you act like you talk like you sound like you, you want diversity, you want different people with different experience sets. Maybe they come from other businesses where they've seen a hundred other different things done wildly different than you. That's the type of way that you can really quickly get better at, at building your business, building your brand, building some of the, or finding some of the different ways where you can really dominate like some of the specific niche areas where you can really do it better than it, frankly, anybody or most of the markets. So I love, I love some of those ideas there, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:35) - So, so tomorrow a couple of a couple, a couple of quick questions to follow up on. Um, as far as, um, in some of your experiences, where do you find some of the, the different, um, Amazon resellers that you're working with and how, what type of what's a common or an average team look like? So like a lot of people hear about Amazon resellers and they hear, you know, you see all these articles about such and such finding a product and selling a million dollars a month, X, Y, Z. I bet you, people are wondering what are some of these teams actually look like, like to be able to sell, um, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a month of a, of a headphone or a $150,000 a month of a sporting equipment. What are the guys of the gals look like? They come together to make these teams, what's an average reselling team kind of look like, and what are some of the things that you've seen inside of it? 

Speaker 1 (00:14:16) - Yeah. So I wouldn't call this like resellers. What we are actually doing is, is private label it's called. So that basically means that we are taking a product. So let's say headphones, right? So let's say, I want to sell headphones on Amazon. I'm not selling like beats headphones or apple headphones. That's not what I'm doing. I'm actually looking for ways to improve the product that is already on Amazon. Reach out to suppliers in China. Usually China, it depends what the product is. If it's, let's say supplements, I'm going to reach out to suppliers in the U S for them, of course, those from China. So I'm going to reach out to Chinese suppliers for headphones, give them my specs, my ideas on how to improve their product. Those are usually by the way, based on negative reviews on Amazon, just see what people are complaining about, improving the product, and then bring it, bring it in to Amazon with my logo on it, my Brandy, my packaging, my everything. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:06) - And then it's my product. Like it's not me reselling someone else's buy. It's actually my own product that is being sold. So all of these businesses, as far as I know, usually start with like one or two people on the team, as I mentioned. And a lot of them either stay that way. I would say probably 1990 9% of the businesses are not more than 10 people. That's usually usually it. Um, and those are kind of diverse. What I, uh, what I kind of preach, uh, is that I have seven people on my team. So have two managers, one more creative, one more analytic. And then the analytical person has two people underneath. So she has an inventory manager and a PPC person handling all the ads on Amazon. And then we, the creative manager is handling three people. So one is customer experience, handling customer support, checking out the competitors on what they're doing. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:59) - Then we have a creative person working with photographers, graphic designers, copywriters, um, and then we have a social media person handling launches and all of our social media channels, uh, working with influencers as well. So that's kind of like a seven people team, but then, uh, all of them are like, you can say basic employees. I don't really like the term, but all of them were like low tier employees when I hired them. Uh, and I trained them up and then we outsource everything to the best of the best in the industry. So if it had like photographers, for example, we don't have anyone in-house we just all sorts do like the best photographers in the U S or if it's like fight forwarding to ship our goods from China to the U S or whatever it may be. We just outsource to the best we can find. Um, and then the team just handles everything. So everyone of the team is kind of like a manager, if that makes sense, 

Speaker 1 (00:16:49) - That doesn't make sense. I love it. So just number one, just kind of the way that you've broken the team out, the way that you've also leveraged internal resources and external resources. And tomorrow, I'm glad you brought this up because as you know, many of our listeners on the CX and the CS side, right, they're growing teams are scaling. Teams are building teams, guys to mergers gave us an awesome idea, which is the reality is a lot of, uh, mature, large organizations. They're constantly thinking about this idea of blended models. I think what Tamera showing us even small emerging really kind of high growth companies. They're also leveraging this idea of blended models, figuring out which roles and rich areas, which responsibility sets are really, really mandatory to have some incredible in-house internal folks that are, are running it, managing and thinking about it. But then there's other things guys that other people do even better than us, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:17:33) - Whether it's, whether it's outsourcing sourcing certain comms, or maybe certain areas of procurement where it's, someone can buy things faster. There's a number of different examples there. So tomorrow I love that you're, you're, you're kind of setting that first stage for, for the first pillar of team there. Let's dive into the second six pillar tools, man, spend a couple minutes talking about tools. This one's interesting. Cause I want to know, like, when I think when a lot of people think of Amazon, they probably think of, you know, they think of Amazon. I think you've searched, you've mentioned some of the advertising that you're running already, but like, what are some of the tools that you and the team have to use to be able to grow a business from selling your first $10,000 worth of stuff to your first million dollars worth of stuff? What does the toolkit look like? 

Speaker 1 (00:18:11) - Yeah. So there are basic Amazon tools that sellers use. There's a tool called helium 10. That's probably deleting tool in our industry that basically helps you with finding a product, knowing the keywords to kind of target and put in your title and bullet points in the listing, your images and so on. Uh, so that's probably leading to under audit tools. That's kind of gives you a better reporting and stuff like that from Amazon. So everything connects to Amazon's API and just feeds you data. Um, now again, the issue is that most sellers are not using anything besides those Amazon tools, because that's what the courses taught them or that's what they of saw on YouTube or whatever. So what I kind of helped sellers with is I basically say there are, um, there are a few things that you need, so you need, the first thing that you need is a communication tool. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:59) - And a communication tool is basically a tool that was created to communicate with your team. Um, and that the communication I recommend is slack. I think, uh, every startup it, I know we have a lot of startups here in Israel and Tel Aviv. So every time, you know, it's kind of using slack, everyone's on slack. Um, I personally love slack. I can also say that I've seen so many sellers using Skype or WhatsApp, or what's up is probably the worst because I know in the U S it's not that common to use WhatsApp, but in Europe and Israel, that's what we use for personal communication. And if you mix that with your business communication, that's, that's not a good recipe. So, um, so I highly recommend slack for many different reasons. Um, second thing that you need is information. Information is critical. So information, what I mean by that is any piece of information in your business. So not files files is the next one, but information is basically, uh, all of the names of your suppliers, what you're sourcing with them. What's their addresses phone numbers.

Speaker 1 (00:20:00) - Uh, anything that you want to kind of write in terms of like, uh, I dunno there, um, kids, you know, their wife's name or, uh, influencers you worked with, uh, specs about your products, like any written texts, uh, is information. So for that you can use Google sites. You can use notion you can use, uh, Coda, you can use a whole bunch of different tools for information. Um, and next is files. So files is like Dropbox or Google drive. I think that's kind of self explanatory, but you have to use something on the cloud. Like if, even if you are like a one-man show, you still want to use like something on the cloud. Um, you don't want to put everything on your laptop. Um, next one is tasks. So tasks is like a Sonic click up Monday. I personally recommend the sun and click up, uh, for, um, Amazon sellers mostly. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:52) - And the last one that is not, I think the most obvious one is actually something that I call like decisions. And GreenLights what I mean by that is let's say I have product a or product B, and I can only buy, I only have a budget for one of them, or I'm thinking, should I order like 2000 units of this part or 4,000 units of this product? How should I launch it? So for that, we use Google sheets, um, because we need to make our decisions based on data. We cannot just make them out of thin air. Right? And I think a lot of sales come to me and say, should I do this or that? I'm like, show me the data. Like I cannot I'll do make a decision. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense. So we created like different spreadsheets to support different aspects of the business. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:32) - I love that. It's a, I love this question because it's always amazing to me to hear. It's funny, man, whether you're doing a million dollars a year in sales, or whether you're doing a hundred million in sales, you constantly in this question here to marry it with customer focused position or smaller, you hear similar tools, right? You mentioned slack, you mentioned Google. You mentioned, um, a number of other sauna. Like this is a huge one. That's so many different CX and product and UX and uh, even, even sales oriented leaders, these are the tools that they're using to keep things on the track. But there's another thought. There's another thing that I want to go back to. You mentioned the information section. This is super interesting. Remember because like in your, in your world, you guys have to have that, that access to information ready to go at any minute, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:22:16) - Whether you're pulling off product information, maybe it's process information for some of the, some of the different things that have to happen behind the scenes with Amazon. But there there's something that we talk about all, all the time on the show tomorrow, which is just like, even just like documenting and capturing the learnings, the findings, the wins, the losses, right? Because the reality is even when you're a one, a one to 10 person team, like somebody has to be chronically in that history. Somebody has to be chronicling what worked or what did not work. And somebody's gotta be chronicling all of the different information because as you grow, as you scale, as your business gets bigger and bigger, and your team gets bigger, that's the history man that becomes the history. And that's, you know, for, I, I don't know, uh, you know, uh, I don't know what you told me, but I'm a huge fan of history, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:22:59) - It typically tends to repeat itself or some iteration version of it. And if you think about it, guys, it's like, this is one of the easiest things you can be doing when you're growing your team or when you're on a, on a startup team or a founding team where you're helping to literally write the history. And typically you're going to learn and you're going to pivot from that history. So I love that you call that out. Um, I want one last question before, before we move off on tools tomorrow, how, how do you keep track or how does you and your team kind of think about, I got to imagine every day of the week, there's some new piece of software, some new piece of technology that's claiming to help folks out there that are working on building an Amazon focused business. How do you keep track of all these new inbound pieces of technology? And is there anything that you do with them regularly, or is it just a matter of kind of keeping your ear to the ground and listening to what the market's asking for? 

Speaker 1 (00:23:47) - Yeah. So what we, what I've done early on is actually I opened up on slack. I opened a channel for news basically. And what we've done is we connected that to an RSS feed on all of the main blogs podcasts in our industry. And that just feeds automatically into that channel, uh, very easily. So we just kind of stay up to date on everything that's going on. Also the network that they have really helps because I can just kind of know everything that's new or, or is happening or someone just messages me and say, Hey, this out my new tool, uh, it does 1, 2, 3, or he'll 10 text me and say, Hey, we have this new feature, check it out. Um, so it's kind of like that, I guess. And once you're in it, you just kind of know what's going on. Um, but in terms of testing, in terms of documentation, I would say that I thought when I started with, with a very small team, um, with the first thing that they had, I thought I need to have everything ready. I need to have a soapy, I need to have everything kind of in place, but you don't really like you hired those people so they could help you build your company. So what I ended up doing the second time around is that.

Speaker 1 (00:24:51) - I might record a short video using gloom or whatever software you want to use or zoom or whatever. So I recorded a short video, send it to my employee. They write the SOP based on what they understand. And then if needed, they record a new video of them going through it. And then I actually know if they understood it, like if I'm writing the SOP and they just go through it and maybe they do the task, I don't know if they really understood it, you know, because if they are actually teaching themselves how to do it by writing the SOP, I obviously, we all know that teaching is the best way to learn, right? So they're basically teaching themselves how to do it. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:27) - I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm glad you brought this up, man, because this video we just, and this is some of the stuff's fresh in my head. We just had Ethan Bude from bomb, chief evangelists, Obama. I'm on the show recently. And then we were on, on his podcast on the customer experience podcast recently talking about CX Chronicles. And for folks who don't know, BombBomb is a video messaging tool and tomorrow I'm so I'm so glad you brought this up because it's amazing how many companies, number one, aren't really that good at chronically and or, or scribing or writing things down. But we live in day in and age when you cannot keep adult adults, you know, cameras out of their own face, the regular putting things on Facebook. They're putting things on, on Instagram, Tik TOK for God's sake is like blown up. But then when you think about the business world, and you think about adults at their, at their place of work, there's like nobody there, or, sorry, there's, there's a many companies that are leveraged, but like there's still this unfamiliar place where people aren't taking a 62nd video and saying, Hey, Hey team, I just reworked XYZ process. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:24) - Here's what we came up with. And then in 60 seconds, you get to listen to Tamera, to Adrian or to teammate here what they just came up with and then better. Yeah. I love your idea of like leverage video to actually populate some of the written stuff. So like for some of our listeners who are building up, their knowledge base is building up their playbooks, thinking about some of their remote processes that, that all of us need now, right. In the hybrid world. But like using video guys, it's such an easy way to start. And the last thing is this. I think customers, man, you made me immediately think of customers, which is like, um, one of the easiest ways, especially if you're smaller business and it's okay to, to own the fact that you're a smaller business. You're not a big multi-national with tens of thousands of employees. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:02) - That video can be such an easy way to humanize back and forth exchange, right. To merits like such an easy way to get the quick and the dirty out there, whether it's for feedback, whether it's for, thank you, thank you for buying, whether it's for, Hey, wanted to see how the purchase went. So love those ideas, man, really, really awesome. Um, ideas there to them to dive into the third CS pillar of processes. Um, and you can take this one more wherever you want, because they know that a lot of the work that you guys are doing, you're thinking about some of these Amazon processes and you're thinking about customer acquisition processes, but I'd love to kind of hear, hear you talk for a few minutes about some of the things that you sort of found along your own journey that have worked really well for sort of number one, managing process. But then number two, how, how do you kind of optimize and tinker and edit on how you can make a process go from like a V one starting point to two, maybe two or three versions later where it's a totally different, uh, set of set of plays or set of guides to help someone understand what they need to do. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:57) - Yeah. So one thing I would say about processes, um, the biggest thing in Amazon is obviously launching new products. That's like the biggest, uh, biggest task you can have. Like if you're not launching new products, your business will probably plateau. You know, it won't keep scaling probably. So you have to keep launching new products. You can think of any business out there. It's probably not checking your products no matter what, if it doesn't, it's usually starts to plateau at some point. So, um, so with that, uh, we have product research. We need to do sourcing. You need to do all those different things. So what I can say is that, um, one thing that might, uh, help everyone here listening is that when you think about anything, doesn't matter what it is in this case, it's a product launch. When is the actual Greenlight happening? 

Speaker 1 (00:28:42) - So, and everything until then is basically product research. So a lot of sellers, like when they do product research to look at the numbers and when they see like a good part of, they say, okay, I'm going for this one. But when they get a sample, let's say from a supplier, they say, oh, this is not a bad, it's not a very good product, but I did all this work already. Let's launch it anyway. Yeah. That's probably not a very good idea. So you should everything by the time you pay the first deposit, the actual deposit, the supplier, everything by that point is just research. Um, so whenever you sell a stock to me and ask me, should I do this or that? I'm like, it's not time yet to make a decision. You have three more steps until you actually make that decision. And you should document that either in, again, a sauna clicker or whatever you're using with all the subtests in it. And that really helps to kind of see where is the actual decision needs to be made. And then you'd use again, Google sheets or whatever analytic tool to just make a smart decision. Um, so I think that's really important in process to just document every single thing that you need to do in order to kind of complete the process. Um, the other thing I would say about process is this took me like a long time to figure out, but.

Speaker 1 (00:29:49) - With my five, five people team, like underneath it to managers, I basically created five departments. I call them departments. It's not really the departments because it's only five employees, but I guess seal creative customer experience, social media, these are all like departments in the company. And what I've done is on slack. I started with five channels, just for those five things. Then on a Google drive, I opened five folders for each department. Then in information, we opened like five I'll get like type of folders, uh, as well. So I basically took those five departments and just kind of duplicated them throughout the company. And then everything kind of stays organized. You know, it doesn't get lost, just know where everything is. And we had another one for management for the two managers to kind of, when we talked, they were just with the managers on slack and then we opened kind of a lot of sub channels. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:38) - And this is like a quick trick on slack and slack. You cannot really do sub channels as you know. And so what we've done is we just did like a, so let's say a C stands for creative. So we do see dash creative and then we got a C underline and we might do like product research, you know, and that will just appear underneath creative. And then we opened like a lot more channels over time. Um, and another mistake I think people do with slack or organizing things is they do it based on project or based on product, or, but it should really be on a higher level. And then you can talk about multiple things on the same channel. Um, well, not, uh, well, not losing your mind, I guess when you do it, 

Speaker 1 (00:31:18) - I love it. I, I've a couple of things, a couple of things. Number one, just like every business in the world. And certainly every customer focused business leader needs to be able to take time to think about how you can effectively compartmentalize all the things that are going on on the day-to-day on the week to week on the month to month, if you're operating on quarterly OKR objectives and key results on a quarterly cadence, right? Whatever your cadence is, it doesn't matter. But to be able to compartmentalize things into department or into channels or indigenous general audiences, right? Cause, cause let's go with summer's example, your guys, even if all you have is five departments and maybe you have more than five people, maybe it's five departments and five people per department, but that ability to compartmentalize key bits of information, key learnings, key findings, key call-outs right. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:00) - Cause let's every single solitary day when we show up to work, as we're learning new things and where we are having the ability of essentially socializing those gains or socializing those new CTS or calls to action with our team. Right? So, so just number one, like this idea of being able to help a compartmentalization is awesome. The second big thing is socialization, man. Like even some of the best companies on planet earth, some of the biggest, the brightest, the sharpest, the fastest growing companies on planet earth. They're not good. It's socializing this stuff. They're not good at basically telling their, their internal team, their internal users, their internal people that are building the business and managing your customers what's going on in the business. Right. And that's the cheap, easy, easy, easy thing to fix to Amir mentioned slack. I think bit, I'm going to go back to videos again and I'm glad you, you call the, uh, tools like loom or two tools like Bob Balmer or video, like put, put, put together a daily video message if you have two per department, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:32:52) - And then here's one of the thoughts. Most companies, especially post pandemic, and especially after this whole idea of the great resignation, right? A lot of people have moved, moved jobs, they move careers, they moved businesses in the last 12 minutes, 12 months. One of the fastest ways you can make sure that some of your new teammates are up to speed in terms of what's going on in the business, let them understand and let them feel and breathe. What some of the other teams and other departments are doing. It gives you whether you're in sales or ops or product or, or, or customer experience knowing what other people and other, what other folks are doing across the aisle from you. It does give you a little bit of additional, um, fuel for how to understand sort of what you're doing for your customers or what you're doing for your team. So, um, a bunch of really, really good ideas there tomorrow. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:34) - One other thing I will mention is that I thought about this just now, but, uh, the other thing that I've done with this specific structure for my own Amazon business is again, the bigger task is new products. So if you think about it, it starts with like creative. Then it goes to like inventory. It goes to SEL. So I basically forced my team to work together based on the task in hand. So I build the departments ahead of time to support the biggest task of the business and forced them to work together. Instead of just reporting to me or to the managers, they just have to talk to each other in order to complete the process. And they think that's how that's the right way to build it. You not kind of force your team, Hey, you should talk to this guy once a week because I said, so it should be because they need to talk to each other. Otherwise they cannot complete the task 

Speaker 1 (00:34:21) - A hundred percent, man, let, let, let like the organic version of collaboration take place. I completely agree. But also letting people know that most businesses, you know, today that are, that are really kind of crushing it, open door policies, man, if you need to go talk to someone or if you want to go talk to someone they're there, uh, and make it easy for them to do that. So all great ideas there tomorrow. I'd love to dive into the fourth and the final seeks pillar feedback. So this one's cool because I promise you, I know you and I were joking around about this the other day, but, um, man, this notion of like what I think Amazon has done such a brilliant job with, which is like when you click, whatever it is that you're shopping on Amazon, most people, I don't think it's just me being a CX guy, but most people, the first thing they do is they're looking for your star ratings, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:35:02) - And they're looking for your different reviews. You devoted a whole chapter in your new book. And I know you're going to talk about the book in a bit, but like you devoted this whole chapter, this idea of like coming up with a six star, uh, uh, experience, not just to pass over to six star periods, uh, but like spend a couple minutes talking about feedback and I'd love for you to maybe get granular. Like what are some of the things that you've really kind of learned in terms of, I guess, two big questions, number one, how do you get a bunch of feedback, right? From a, from a, from an Amazon product or from an Amazon page and the number two, what do you do with some of the feedback that you guys are getting from some of the products or some of the things that you're selling? 

Speaker 1 (00:35:37) - Yeah. So firstly like the six star experience is basically I aim for six stars to land at five because if I get anything under five, it just spring the closer to four, three stars. And you and I both know that if you go from, if you look at a product that is four and a half or four stars on Amazon, probably going to buy it four and a half. So, um, Amazon sellers obviously know that. So they tried to kind of keep a 4.3 star rating to say it 4.5, as long as they can, or some products are even 4.8. So they're like five star ratings for a long time. Um, so the first question was like, what do I do to get feedback? Right. So, um, I guess like there is another chapter in the book. This is about under promising and over delivering. 

Speaker 1 (00:36:17) - And I, I hate the fact that it's kind of like a strategy, you know, I don't think it's a strategy. I think it's just a better way to run a business. Totally. Basically claiming less than what you're actually going to deliver. I think a lot of parts on Amazon or products in general are just, or services are just claiming more than they actually are. Um, and then they start getting negative reviews, refunds and so on. So what I kind of found out early on is, again, coming back to being a magician, I had this, a makeup brush set that they used to sell on Amazon. And what we've done is we gave like a silicone thing to clean your face before applying the brush. Um, and we just put it in the, in the packaging without saying anything. And we didn't get any feedback from customers saying that in the reviews. So what we've done is we just put it in a big, a small black box with a red ribbon around it with a small note. Uh, and just for you or I don't remember what it said. It was something playful, I would say. And then we started getting a lot of reviews, mentioning that small thing because they knew all of a sudden it's actually a gift. And it wasn't like on the listing because when you buy on Amazon, you buy so much stuff. You don't remember what you bought 

Speaker 1 (00:37:24) - Arrives. And then you're like, oh, I guess this comes with it. I didn't know that if I wouldn't tell you when it now. Um, so anything that you do in any, like with a physical product, any opportunity is an opportunity for an experience, right? So when they open the packaging, the inside flap can say something and have a note that cost close to zero to, to do the insert is like the first impression when the opening, do you have an insert inside? It says something, they have a story about the brand or something playful. We need to say about it. Like we have, uh, one example is we have a baby brand. And what we do there is we are saying, um, the it's like a note from the baby to their parents. So like their mom and dad, you could buy anything for yourself, but decide to buy this for me instead. And it just playful, uh, any dads value, right? Because it's something I didn't expect. It that's value. So when you will be asked for review, either from Amazon or from my email or whatever, you will kind of feel more obligated to leave one because you got more than you paid for. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:25) - Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Not only that it's remembering, man, right tomorrow, you just gave a couple examples of like, if people remember a transaction, they remember a purchase, they remember a buying experience they're 10 times more likely to be able to go and let other people know about what they liked about it, what they remembered about, uh, why it was so important, why it was memorable. And I think you're right. It's like be creative here too. This is the other thing. I don't know why, I guess there's more and more brands, but like it's okay to humanize your brand. It's okay to have playful, thoughtful, funny. I mean, a lot of companies have done a really great job of kind of putting some funny, some humorous stuff into it, but I love that. Well, what about the second part to remember? What are some of the things that you guys, what are some of the actions or some of the calls to action that you take when you get a bunch of feedback and maybe, maybe some of the feedback, it gives you some ideas, but like how do you guys take action on some of the feedback that's coming in from some of the different products or some of the different companies that you guys are helping to, to build? 

Speaker 1 (00:39:18) - Yeah. So when the past, when someone left, like a 1, 2, 3 star review on your Amazon listing could actually find out who, who they are, uh, either with their address and just send stuff to them, or like ask them to kind of convert that reviewer. You can message them directly through Amazon, but that's against terms of service in Amazon right now. Like they don't want us to have that information for some reason, I guess a lot of people just abused it, you know, and just kind of butchered it a bit. So they kind of like, I'm sure harass customers in to some degree, I would say. Uh, so now you just kind of hold that feedback and look, if you see a few negative reviews mentioning the item arrived broken, maybe you had a bad batch, like ship to Amazon and you have to kind of maybe even remove that entire batch fixation bringing back in. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:03) - Um, so we really look at that closely. Like we have again, alerts from different software that just tells us, you just got a new negative review deal with it. You know, sometimes you can even reach the customer. The also Amazon gives us like the reason, um, some when they refund, they give us the reason, like maybe it was unwanted, maybe the right damage. So we have all of that feedback coming in from Amazon. And that obviously helps a bit, but I wished we had a better way to kind of engage with those customers because Amazon doesn't really let us do that. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:32) - Yeah. I, I, you know, I mean at the same experience with my book and I think it was telling you just the other day to remember like, you know, every month, we're so lucky to have people buying our book, the four, six pillars to grow your business. Now I feel really bad. I can't, there's no way that I can actually have a personal touch on them so that anybody that's listening to advisor book with Tony air saying Amazon has built some, um, some protectiveness into their platform where you don't necessarily always get the name, the email address, the, the, the, the address it's hard to sometimes be able to send a follow-up unless somebody tells you offline or off platform. Right. Hey, tomorrow I just grabbed your book. It's awesome. I love it. Cool. So then, you know, that Adrian grabbed the book, but like, that could be another tricky thing guys. So it's like, definitely thinking about how you can kind of keep some of these things in mind and certainly thinking about how you can kind of leverage some of the things that Tamir is talking about with just even what you can do with feedback in today's world. Um, tomorrow this has been absolutely fantastic. Before we wrap up, where can people find out more about user and where could people find a copy of your brand new, a book ride the Amazon with? 

Speaker 1 (00:41:29) - Yeah. So if you just go to Amazon and type it right. Games on where we'll just see it right there, or my name Tamar benefits is the other option. Um, my website is joint top dog.com. You're welcome to go there just to see my services or leave a message. And yeah, they can also find me on Facebook, LinkedIn as well. Uh, just messaged me. I would love to connect with anyone. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:50) - I love it. And guys, tomorrow's got some pretty awesome, um, some awesome talks out there to make sure that you check out some of the stuff that he's got on YouTube has got some incredible speeches and presentations that he's done across the world. And for folks that are just trying to get ideas or trying to get an understanding for what this space encompasses and how deep and wide the world of Amazon is going to continue to go check out some of the stuff that he's doing. But to me, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, man, I look forward to chatting with you again in the future, and I'm super appreciative of you joining the CX nation today. My friend, 

Speaker 1 (00:42:15) - Thank you so much.