Mastering Amazon: Insider Strategies for E-Commerce Success with Cartograph CEO Chris Moe - 95

In this episode of the D2Z Podcast, Brandon Amoroso welcomes Chris Moe, the founder of Cartograph, a top-tier Amazon agency specializing in CPG and DTC brands. Together, they dive deep into the world of e-commerce, uncovering valuable strategies and insights for listeners eager to excel in the digital marketplace.

Chris shares his wealth of knowledge on navigating the complexities of Amazon, shedding light on the importance of product reviews, omnichannel presence, and understanding consumer behavior. From beginners to seasoned entrepreneurs, this episode offers practical advice and actionable tips for anyone looking to make waves on the Amazon platform.

As the conversation unfolds, Chris offers a candid glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of agency growth and management. From building cohesive teams to nurturing client relationships and planning for future expansion, his insights resonate with entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey.

This episode serves as a beacon of inspiration for those striving to succeed in the competitive world of e-commerce. With its wealth of practical wisdom and insider knowledge, it's a must-listen for anyone looking to carve out their niche and thrive in the dynamic landscape of online retail.

Timestamps

🎙️ Introducing Chris Moe, founder and CEO of Cartograph (00:00:29)

📜 Chris's background and journey to founding Cartograph (00:00:55)

🛒 Contrasts between Amazon and Shopify (00:02:40)

⭐ Importance of Amazon reviews and strategies for building them (00:04:01)

⚠️ Challenges and risks associated with Amazon's policies (00:07:49)

🛠️ Essential services for brands launching on Amazon (00:10:04)

🔄 Transitioning from Shopify to Amazon or vice versa (00:14:08)

📦 Product categories that perform well on Amazon (00:15:09)

🔍 Brand discovery on Amazon vs. traditional e-commerce (00:20:16)

📊 Trends in consumer products on Amazon (00:21:20)

🌐 Positioning of Cartograph in the agency landscape (00:22:26)

🏆 Factors contributing to Cartograph's success (00:24:29)

🏢 Specialization and Timing in Agency Growth (00:26:16)

👥 Challenges of Building and Scaling a Team (00:27:32)

📝 Importance of Process and Training (00:28:20)

💼 Client Relationship Management (00:31:08)

💬 Effective Communication and Setting Expectations (00:33:52)

🔥 Knowing When to Fire a Client (00:37:42)

📈 Future Growth Strategies for Cartograph (00:40:05)

💡 Tips for Brands on Amazon (00:42:20)

🔗 Connect with Chris Moe (00:49:50)

Chris Moe:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismoe1/

Cartograph - https://www.gocartograph.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency, electric, as well as the founder and co-CEO of Scaleless, an HR tech platform. Today I'm talking with Chris Moe, who's the founder and CEO at Cartograph, which is one of the premier Amazon agencies for CPG and D2C brands and is based out of Austin. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, brandon.

Speaker 2: 0:41

I'm excited to chat.

Speaker 1: 0:45

So I know there's a bunch of Amazon nitty-gritty tactics that we want to cover today, but before we dive into all of that, can you give everybody a quick background on yourself and how you got here?

Speaker 2: 0:55

Sure, sure. So yeah, I'm Chris. I'm the founder and CEO of Cartograph. Prior to Cartograph, I was a McKinsey consultant for about five years helping big companies with their growth strategies, did a lot of pricing, digital pricing work, did some education work and then my co-founder he had built the first Amazon team at GE, their Consumer Electronics Division, built that into a really big business, decided he didn't need to sell any more extension cords for the rest of his life. Then met some of our first clients actually like at a party and started doing consulting for them and realized that one there's a real opportunity to help better for you food and bed and D2C brands and that we had a real passion for it. And so Cartograph was born. That was about six years ago now and we've since worked actively with about 200 brands. Number of our clients you might know have had exits, like Lily's chocolates and Justin's, and we work with a lot of leading D2C brands like Starface and Necessaire and Magic Spoon and Kettle and Fire, and so we really consider ourselves experts in understanding how to sell.

Speaker 2: 2:19

challenge your consumer brands on Amazon, Nice.

Speaker 1: 2:26

That was always something that was sort of outside of my purview, because we were all Shopify plus only, and so Amazon was sort of the other channel that somebody else would deal with or manage.

Speaker 2: 2:38

So that's good to get to that. I know relatively little about Shopify myself. So, it's like we're like the neighbors with like the railroad tracks in between us. We're like you, just don't cross that much.

Speaker 1: 2:52

It's funny how similar they are, yet Very different they both are. I've dipped my toes into it a couple times. I think one of the biggest sort of advantages that Amazon has is just its massive customer base and ads platform and the ability to just like be extremely targeted with who you're putting in front of, which type of product or which brand, in a way that Shopify is trying to emulate a little bit now with the shop app and its shop cash campaigns, but it's still nowhere near the ability that Amazon has to serve up the right ad at the right time to the right customer for new product discovery.

Speaker 2: 3:36

Totally so, like one of the things that always find striking. I mean, it's often a tough mindset for, like a founder, really good growth operator to move from platform to platform and one of the big differences is actually just like every metric has an order of magnitude difference in what target is like audience size, click through, rate, conversion rate, it's like often 10 times different just because of the degree of target.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Like the audiences on Amazon are way smaller.

Speaker 2: 4:09

The click rates are higher. The conversion rates are way higher. You know like you're talking like 30% conversion rate in some cases, which is just forces you to think a little bit differently. The math is different.

Speaker 1: 4:20

How do you deal with, you know, when you're working with a new brand and they don't have Amazon reviews yet? How do you like surpass that, I guess, threshold? Because, at least for me as a consumer, when I go to Amazon you know all shop ads but all those products have hundreds, if not thousands, of you know reviews already and so they're like verified. They're not, you know, the one, one review, five stars type of products. But I mean, that's where you have to start right. So how do you like break through that, especially as some of these listings have like 10,000 plus reviews?

Speaker 2: 4:58

For sure, yeah. So actually like when you think about the moat on Amazon, how you can defend a you know a business on Amazon reviews is one of the big items of moat. The other one is subscriptions. I can get into those later, but first off, just like, how do you think about reviews, which is there's different numeric thresholds that really matter? First off is like somewhere between 50 and 100 is where you see, see detailed page conversion taper, which is like anyone who gets there is like okay, this is like enough.

Speaker 2: 5:33

It's not like making major jumps in conversion Once people are looking at the product. Now, the 100 to 500 to a thousand, to, you know, 10,000 and so forth, those do matter, but it actually tends to matter more on a relative basis and more on a comparative click through basis. And so what you can imagine is that you know, if you're competing in a category where there's somebody with 100,000 reviews, when you're going to be up next to them, it's probably going to be a little bit harder to compete. But if someone's, you know, if you're a thousand and someone's 5,000, it's not going to be that big of a difference.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And so you can actually slice up your targeting and your audiences into like review comparison differences.

Speaker 2: 6:20

And you know you want to account for, like, price differences and stuff like that too, but that kind of like dictates where you can compete on the platform to some extent of like. You know you're not going to have a good time if you serve open ad, where you're always positioned next to somebody who's gotten way more reviews. Now back to your original question, though, and how you build it. So there's a couple of things that you can do.

Speaker 2: 6:45

First off Amazon has a sampling program that called Vine, where you can build up like 30 reviews and you can do that per flavor, per size, so you can build that up pretty quick for really low cost. And then you know there's services out there. You want to be careful to pick ones that don't introduce risk, that have things like influencer agencies where you'll like ship samples out to different folks hoping that they'll they'll only reviews. And so we have that. We've built some tech around that as a service for our clients to help them bridge the gap on, you know, their first couple hundred reviews.

Speaker 1: 7:25

Got it. So it really is. You know Vine and then no exploring all their alternatives to be able to generate those reviews, but without you know getting your wrist slap by Amazon either, which I know there's a lot of rules around what you can and cannot do, and I've heard horror stories about you know getting shut down and you know how do you actually recover from that one. It's a black box.

Speaker 2: 7:52

It's a black box and there's also like a lot of degrees of enforcement by Amazon short term suspension, they'll take certain things away, and so forth. It's actually a big part of why you might hire someone to help you out with.

Speaker 2: 8:06

Amazon is just knowing how to navigate a lot of that stuff, Like some of it has nothing to even do about with, like what you've done. The consumer, for example, they initiate a return and they write in it. People just make stuff up, right, they write in the comment box, they're like oh yeah, it was open when I got here and they're like oh, I just don't want Amazon to reject my return. You can get suppressed for that, and then you have to like submit the right documents.

Speaker 2: 8:34

Yeah, customer complaints is actually a fairly common source of suppression.

Speaker 1: 8:41

The way they have it set up, though, is not very, I would say, customer friendly, because they make me select a return reason and, depending on the return reason that I select, that'll dictate my return options. So why am I going to give you a return reason? That is more my fault. So then I have to go pay for shipping in a box that, like UPS, like I'm obviously going to pick. You know, this shit didn't work, so send me a free, like QR code that I can just go drop off at the Whole Foods or UPS.

Speaker 2: 9:12

Right, right, yeah, the incentives are not always perfectly aligned there, and so, like, as a brand, you just have to be really well equipped with, like here's exactly how our packaging works. Here's our certification of authenticity. We like know it didn't happen. That kind of stuff. It's usually not just one complaint If you say something like. If you say the exact wrong thing, like along lines of like safety or stuff like that, it could be one complaint.

Speaker 2: 9:38

But knowing how to handle those respond to them and give Amazon confidence that, like you've resolved, it is really important.

Speaker 1: 9:46

So, when it comes to like your agency suite of services, what are? How would you bucket them? And like what's what are most important for brands, especially if you're a brand that you know historically has only had a D2C Ecom presence with? Like a Shopify is thinking about going into Amazon, like what's the sort of quick TLDR checklist? These are all the things that I need and how do you slot in in those particular areas?

Speaker 2: 10:09

Sure sure. So let me, let me first answer that with, like how we think about a D2C launch on Amazon I can talk to you about. I mean, like the short of it is the bulk of our services that we offer is like a full service and and on Amazon, where we'll do everything from like figure out your assortment, build up your supply chain, figure out pricing, build the content, run the ads and that's what we do most of the time and we'll do, like some, some other stuff, all a cart including, like the tech I mentioned.

Speaker 2: 10:42

But when a D2C brands thinking about launching on Amazon, there's usually a few things you want to consider. So, first off, you really want to consider what you're going to sell on Amazon and how you're going to price it. The thing that comes in, comes up the most, is the shipping threshold, which is like how I'm going to offer something that doesn't like compete with my D2C and necessarily cannibalize something from the D2C site.

Speaker 2: 11:13

Generally we see that when we launch like for like products or SKUs so, like you know, say, your average SKU is a three pack and you sell a three pack on Amazon we're gonna be seeing like 3% cannibalization, low single digits of people who will move between the channels Because how do you measure that?

Speaker 1: 11:33

not to cut you off, but how do you actually measure like that cannibalization, yeah, so it's not easy.

Speaker 2: 11:38

We've done it in the past. So a couple years ago you used to be able to get address data of every order and then you could just compare that to your D2C site to see who might get it over. Then we've had some clients who you know recently do like sell fulfillment rather than using Amazon's warehouses for fulfillment.

Speaker 2: 11:56

In those cases you can compare and that's the best way to like measure. So first thing is like get comfortable with movement between the channels. Figure out what you're going to sell, how you're going to price it, so that you like don't accidentally create incentives to move between the two channels.

Speaker 2: 12:13

Understand like kidding and but products need to arrive at Amazon fully ready to ship. A lot of D2C sites pick and pack per order so they're like okay, you want a red one, a blue one, and are like size variant and they pick that and ship it out. You have to like do that first for Amazon and then ship it ready to go. So those are the big. Those are the big things in like figuring out your ops that you need to do. The second is just sizing up like how big should Amazon be and you know what makes it worthwhile. So the benchmarks we use for that is Amazon should usually be about 10 to 20% of your D2C as a baseline and like usually you want to build to that number and then try to take share in the category which can increase that number.

Speaker 2: 13:08

And then the other metric that we use, which actually usually ends up corresponding to that same percent, is the number of the number of the number of the number of the number of the number is about a quarter of your ad spend in generally paid social for your D2C Result in people pulling up the Amazon ad or, sorry, pulling up the Amazon app typing in your brand name, searching it on Amazon. So the math is if you're spending 200k a month on ads, you should see around 50k in in unattributed sales from people searching your brand. You do the math like let's say you're spending 200, pretty typical. You try to manage that to a blend in 2x. So you've got a 400k D2C biz 50k. On that you're between 10 and 15%. So like that's kind of like your starting baseline of how big the channel should be.

Speaker 1: 14:08

Got it Okay, those are helpful, helpful benchmarks. Do you typically see brands like starting with Shopify and then going into Amazon, or reverse Amazon going into Shopify?

Speaker 2: 14:19

Generally Shopify. First, like we it was probably five years ago you could. You could launch an Amazon only business and there's opportunities because, like there weren't that many, there's a lot of categories without a disruptor or anything like that on Amazon. It's really hard now to do that. And so basically we say, like you have to be on any channel in some way, whether it's building a D2C or or like having a good retail presence or you know something along those lines, just so you have an ability to kind of like jump start momentum on Amazon and then get some of your volume going.

Speaker 1: 14:58

Are there, like certain product categories that lend itself, you know, more to Amazon than to traditional like Ecom.

Speaker 2: 15:09

Good question. Yeah, consumables generally work pretty well on Amazon, like supplements do well on Amazon. A lot of beauty products do pretty well on Amazon, which is relative. On the newer side it used to be like Sephora and Ulta brands didn't go to Amazon, but now they're pretty much all going there. Some categories are tougher like apparel is a lot tougher. A lot of apparel DTC brands. Don't go on Amazon. And I'd say there's like two things that make certain categories hard on Amazon. One's on, like, the acquisition side, the other's on the operation side.

Speaker 1: 15:50

So on the operation side.

Speaker 2: 15:51

If you have like a really complex inventory pulls, inventory management can be pretty challenging on Amazon because you end up having to ship it all there. They might ship it back to you, like the returns management. Inventory management can be pretty challenging and kind of into your P&L. The other is, if you live in a category where there aren't really common English words that people use to describe your set of products, then it can be hard to win on Amazon. So apparel is a really interesting example because, like you know, you think of all like the really cool lifestyle apparel brands out there.

Speaker 2: 16:30

Like how do you describe them? It's like fun print shorts, it's just shorts, right and so, and the dynamics of those search terms is a race to the bottom on cost and so it becomes pretty hard for those. So like brands are getting better at it and like if you support it from off Amazon efforts, you can actually start to get like a halo where it's worth your time, but it's a little bit harder to break out. Other examples of that is for a long time it's like changing now, but like functional beverages, functional products were pretty hard to sell on Amazon because like no one wanted to type in adaptogen or like new tropic or stuff. Like you know. It's like a, it's like a mouth, it's like we're in salad. You're not exactly sure what you're looking for, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 17:23

So you know because it still is very much so like a keyword based search engine.

Speaker 2: 17:28

Pretty much, and the way to think about it too is like you even think about how you, how you shop it yourself. You like type in a keyword, you look at search results, you might refine it and type in more. You might go to a page and try to like look at other different pages. It is kind of like this, a little bit of a meandering, but yeah, it really starts with keywords most of the time.

Speaker 1: 17:52

With that keyword search.

Speaker 2: 17:53

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:56

I noticed, like most of the apparel brands I shop from, they don't even have an Amazon presence. It's not super common.

Speaker 2: 18:02

Like Savage Fenty launched last year the lingerie brand and that was like one of the bigger D to C apparel brands to launch on Amazon. But yeah, it's tough and then, like you know, if you're, if your product is a lot about branding and you know the brand experience and so forth and explaining the products, just it doesn't sing as much on Amazon and it's yeah, it's hard to build the content for it.

Speaker 1: 18:31

Yeah, At least for me. I mean, I think the consumables is typically where and I'll be shopping on Amazon, because it's like I'm sort of building a cart as if I was at the grocery store or something. So you know, I'm getting my, you know, Ali pop or whatever via Amazon.

Speaker 1: 18:48

I'm not buying it on the Shopify storefront and things like that. And, yeah, subscribe and save nature of a lot of the products that I'm getting on it as well. This makes it pretty simple, seamless, and, you know, it's typically easier just to go that route. But the brand discovery aspect I typically don't discover brands on Amazon. I'll discover like products, if that makes sense, like just end use case, like, oh, here's a product, like it's made by some company that's not really a brand. They're just, like, you know, a company that makes Amazon shit. They're not, you know, creating a brand or anything like that. Um, yeah, so I'll, you know, go to Amazon for discovery for things like that. Like, if I need to buy new I don't know door handles for my doors, I'm just going to go to Amazon and order them. I'm not, you know, finding a brand online that has whatever.

Speaker 2: 19:38

There are certain cases where, when there's like consumer products trends, so like the old one, so we do a lot of food and beverage and supplements, and so keto was really big, from like 19 to 21 basically, and people would go on Amazon for keto brand discovery because it was really good at that, because you could type in keto and then all the keto brands would show up and be like okay, this, this has the macros that I want. Um, certain stuff like a lot of the, a lot of the like big e-commerce trending stuff has to do with like what Andrew, what Andrew Huberman's talking about, and so you know, you might type in creatine, like creatine's been crazy trending, right.

Speaker 2: 20:18

Um. You type in creatine, then you start to know, okay, who are all the different creatine brands and suppliers.

Speaker 1: 20:23

That's so funny. I feel like creatine was trending back when I was in high school. Now. Now it's back again.

Speaker 2: 20:29

It is, it is back again, and with a vengeance. There was this research, uh, that was published this summer which then went on the whole podcast circuit about cognitive benefits, like not associated with just working out of like why you should be taking it. And then, um, I think it's, I think it started getting a lot more popular with women, and then you can imagine basically doubles the market, um and so yeah, demand on that term is like it's like one of the hottest trending terms.

Speaker 1: 20:59

I'm going to have to call it Amazon and add creatine to my uh, my supplement stack here.

Speaker 2: 21:04

Price is going down right, like lots of people are supplying and that's and that's the nature of Amazon too Like it's a reasonably efficient market, and so something gets hot. All of a sudden, you see these Amazon brands pop up. If they, if it's like replicable, then they start to sell more and more of it and are you you're primarily working with.

Speaker 1: 21:23

I don't want to call them real brands, but, like you know, you're working with venture backed on a channel.

Speaker 2: 21:29

Yeah, yeah, Our clients. Basically it works. We're we're a shop that if you have spent a lot of time building your brand, have a pretty good idea that you have product market fit. You kind of like know who you are and who you're going for. We can, we can launch you on. Amazon really earn your place and then amplify you from there.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Those are the engagements that work really well.

Speaker 2: 21:55

Of course, we work with um and so in some cases that's with brands, lot launching from the beginning. In some cases, it's brands that have been out there for a while and they're like okay, I want to take a different strategy or different tack and like really, um, figure out how to grow on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 22:13

So stepping back a little bit to more of like the you know, the entrepreneurship side of things. Um, cause you guys only started in in 2018, right?

Speaker 2: 22:22

Yeah, I went full time like the end of 2018.

Speaker 1: 22:27

So you mentioned that you primarily work with, like the venture back, the omni channel CPG brands Like how did you get into that position to begin with? How did you become sort of the? You know, oh, I have a you know a really strong Shopify storefront and a great brand. You know, I should go talk to Chris and his team at cartograph versus you know X, y or Z agency that out, that's out there. Um, there's a lot of agencies or Shopify Amazon. You know, marketing agencies aren't necessarily a new and novel concept, but there's ones that are very successful and there's ones that are not. So how did you end up in like that particular position? What were some of the things that you did to achieve that?

Speaker 2: 23:06

Yeah, I think a big part of this timing like we were very well timed for um a lot of money going into consumer goods back in like 18, 19. So really the first like Amazon wave, I would say we were a few minutes, a few years late of like the first. Like you know, four hour work week, drop ship brands, like being Amazon FBA seller kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 23:34

And so our wave was actually um, like our X bar had just sold to Kellogg's, and like Justin's and sold to Hormel, and there are people were like Whoa, these like disruptor consumer brands are really um, there's really an opportunity to grow these brands and there's like kind of like a new wave of nutrition.

Speaker 2: 23:56

So we were lucky enough to work with a couple of these brands um very early on, like the, the, the. Our first client we're fortunately still working with um is uh, forth and Hart that they're a GE company so they do like clarified butter and um in the in the very beginning. A co-founder, john, actually met them at a party and they're and they were like complaining about.

Speaker 1: 24:20

Amazon. He's like can I get your?

Speaker 2: 24:22

product on Amazon. It's really good and they're like, oh don't can be started and so fixed up the Amazon and it actually just went from there Like there was just a lack of um of knowledge in the market and capabilities on how to work with Amazon and then paired with a lot of these brands looking for a way to to get their first sales right To like, really get a foothold in it, and so it was really good timing.

Speaker 2: 24:47

I mean, around that time we also took a um. Forth and Hart was a portfolio company of Boulder food group, the uh the VC firm, and so we took a small check from them and really built a um a reputation around being able to take emerging food brands and really grow grow them on the platform, and so we went from there. Um had a bunch of you know we're really lucky with a lot of the early brands that we worked with, you know, forth and Hart, birchbender, justin's Country, archiv, beef jerky, lily's chocolates, like brands that went on to be really successful and then, from there, started to expand a little bit and then got a lot more DC brands um, like you know, like a magic spoon of the world or, uh, mike's hot honey, and then expanded other categories. Now we're doing a lot of supplements, we're doing a lot of beauty, some pet and some baby, but a big part, I think, to our success was like pick a lane and be known for that lane, because then people have a reason to pick you besides liking you.

Speaker 2: 25:54

Um, and there was like a lot of power to in. You know, five years we've probably we probably speak to like 300 brands a year, like like look under the hood. And so at this point it's rare that we almost never do we see a category in in like food or beverage, that we haven't looked at like two of the competitors before. I think that really is a differentiator.

Speaker 1: 26:16

So it really is like the specialization um component of things and going deep and obviously at timing I mean timing is something you can kind of control but also not control but definitely definitely helped in in that instance. And I'd also guess, like location maybe um cause I feel like Austin, boulder, like LA slash San Diego. That's where a lot of the CPG brands were started and operate still. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:44

We had a connection, yeah, yeah, like we were based here. I had moved from New York, which is another hub, our investor was in Boulder and then John had moved here from LA, and so we kind of had like a tick in each of those markets that you mentioned. Um, that, yeah, that we were able to just like get a lot of interest to folks that were in the space.

Speaker 1: 27:09

How, how, um you know how did you go about actually building the, the team, um, because I assume in the beginning it was you, john, maybe a handful of others, who were actually servicing the clients. What was that process like? The actual scaling up of the team and then sort of handing off of some of the day-to-day reigns to other people?

Speaker 2: 27:32

Yeah, I mean that is probably the hardest thing to do in an agency and it ends up being like a lot of the secret sauce. I like to say that there's two waves of it. There's the first wave, where you start to have to trust other people to do the work. That's like getting to like 10 people or so, maybe up to 20 people. And then there's trusting other people to train and guide people to do the work, which is like a second layer of abstraction and that's like 30 people, and so you can almost look at any agency and kind of guess in which of these phases they're at, and the first one's not that hard.

Speaker 2: 28:18

The second one's pretty hard, and the big thing that we did was be really disciplined in building a lot of process around every element of our people organization.

Speaker 2: 28:32

So starting with how we recruit, then how we train, and then how we like do ongoing operations and analytics to like support our team, and so our recruiting process is pretty dialed in.

Speaker 2: 28:46

We have like a homework assignment, blinded scoring of resumes, blinded scoring of the homework assignment. And then there's this evaluation where we like select for kind of like the attributes that we find to be successful in the work, and they're like it's often not experience, it's often like resourcefulness or the ability to problem solve or, you know, ownership, things like that. And then our training we're just like super exhaustive and doing bottom is up training on how to do the platform. So, like in your first 60 days, you have 40 live classroom sessions where we go through like every element of the Amazon platform, Like here's how you do it, and then at the same time you have like a mentor who you're shadowing and like seeing the live on the job implications of each of that work. And so after doing that for a couple years, then the system actually starts to like work and snowball where people you know people have the good training.

Speaker 2: 29:55

The other thing I'd say that's really important to what we do is our culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing. So every week, on our all hands just now, like 60 people we have 15 minutes where we say, all right, what do people learn on Amazon this week? What are new discoveries? And people like share oh, there's this new ad format, there's this new merchandising thing, there's this new reporting all those kinds of little things. We actually then publish those on our LinkedIn every week like our three best per week, but we also have a scoreboard for our team like who's making good contributions and what it is is like developing this culture of continuous improvement and learning, just so we don't end up with like a stale approach or like inconsistent approaches across the work.

Speaker 1: 30:52

Yeah, because I feel like you, you know all the SOPs, all the processes, the procedures are great, but then sometimes that can stifle. You know innovation or being able to stay up to date with things. Yeah, so you sort of mean like a fine balance of both.

Speaker 2: 31:08

Yeah, and then, like ultimately in the agency experience, like a couple of years ago, we really did some thinking of like what makes a good agency engagement, like what makes people really excited to work with an agency, and it usually has to do with somebody like really listening and asking questions and trying to answer the strategic priorities of the client.

Speaker 2: 31:35

And so it's not about just like knowing the Amazon basics and executing against a playbook. It's like, okay, I know what you care about, I'm going to make sure that that's like fits into my priorities and really works. And so, like it really requires somebody who's who's not just following a process, but like the process has to be to be really client focused in order for, in order to build those like long term, really really good client relationships, yeah.

Speaker 1: 32:06

I feel like the client relationship is the most difficult part of running an agency.

Speaker 2: 32:14

Yeah, it's, and we've learned so many interesting lessons about it though that like there's so many ways you can hack it. Maybe not any hacks, not the right, not the right word, but probably the single best one. That that we did was like realizing so much of satisfaction with with anyone you work with is setting expectation, like aligning on your expectations and then meeting those expectations Sounds super simple but actually pretty hard in a in like a service provider engagement, and so what we do is we set every month, we set a top line goal spend goal and effectively like a P and L goal and then we manage to that and we've like built analytics to do in dashboards to do this.

Speaker 2: 33:03

We manage to that on a daily basis and so when the client agrees with that in the beginning and then watches you work towards it in the week, there is like a lot of the. A lot of the biggest problems in like an agency relationship have to do with when someone says I'm not sure they're doing the right stuff or I'm not sure they're working hard enough or like I'm not really sure they're spending their day.

Speaker 2: 33:31

And if you say everything will be good because we agreed upon this number and this spend thing and look at. And then of course you have to show your work and meet them and stuff like that. But when we started doing that, people loved it. We're like, okay, we're like three percent on a day-to-day basis, we're 3% ahead of goal, but we're like 5% behind on spend. Here's what we're going to do to like adjust those gaps.

Speaker 2: 33:56

People love that because then it also makes it easier for the team, because it creates like an automatic to-do list, which is like close the gap. Come up with something that's not working like you know. Come up with something new and to do it and so that you can create systems that let people be better at the client stuff, the relationship stuff, which I think is really crucial.

Speaker 1: 34:26

I think a lot of the any issues that we ever ran into were not even necessarily skill-based.

Speaker 1: 34:35

It was more about presentation or the way that information or ideas were being delivered, because you could have a team member who really knew their stuff and who was presenting something that would work. But you have a client who is maybe a little bit more aggressive or just sort of that like type A personality, and so you would start to almost deflect or pass the baton over back to the client, as if it's like providing these recommendations and suggestions as a question Like sort of what do you think? Whereas no, like, in fact, as an agency, you're being paid for your expertise in your skill set. So sometimes you do have to push back, or sometimes you do have to be authoritative and saying you know, this is the way that I think we should do something and not be sort of allowed to get pushed over by that big personality that might be the brand founder who's on the call. So a lot of what we had to work through if our team was on sort of up leveling confidence more than anything not necessarily the actual skill set.

Speaker 2: 35:40

Right, right, and so much of that too is like is, I think, problem definition? If you define like, okay, this is the problem, or this is the metric and this is the number, and sometimes it feels like super exacting. But one thing I talked to the team about is like if you show, five numbers.

Speaker 2: 36:01

Everyone on the call is going to pick a different one and look at it Like pick the number and make sure you all agree that it's the right important number and how you're going to measure it, and then the conversation will go that way, and so you know when founders get on and they're like. I find like client customers will do a couple of different things.

Speaker 2: 36:22

One, they will be nervous about another metric that's not being talked about, and they might even do this subconsciously and be like shoot, like our mix is off, like the piano looks fine, but like I need this launch to work and so they might not say that. And so like really understanding, like okay, are we actually solving for the right metrics? And then the other thing that sometimes folks will do when they're like strong headed and stuff like.

Speaker 2: 36:47

That is like like candidly they would do, like want to push the team harder, they want to work harder, and so which like is fair, I mean, come on like we've all been there, but but yeah, I mean, like we spend a ton of time thinking about, like the meta of working, of like did you tell them exactly what you wanted? Do you know that they're capable of you? Like, agreed upon the metric, like all that kind of stuff. Because, like, if you, if you do that and we actually talk about in the context of managing our own team internally if you do that, you're just going to be a lot happier. If you really think about like okay, did we agree upon something? Did we follow up? Did we understand why we are assumptions were wrong or not. That kind of, that kind of really process obsession is what can build. Build real alignment.

Speaker 1: 37:42

What was the first time you had to like fire a client?

Speaker 2: 37:47

It was reasonably early and there have been times that I thought we that like maybe we should have done it earlier. I think there's there's kind of like two things that have had. I mean there's like obviously been the clients were were like we felt like just like how people were behaving in the engagement wasn't reasonable, like I'm not going to pay you for this month but you have to work, you know, stuff like that. That's kind of like the obvious stuff. The tougher stuff is like we're not the lowest cost agency in the world.

Speaker 2: 38:28

And there is like a presumptive number at which hiring us makes sense. And so having the grace to say like hey, we had all hoped for your business to be this size, based upon your assumptions about the size of the category. What you're doing elsewhere and if you just don't hit that number, it and what I try to do with our team is like ask yourself the question like what would have to be true in order to hit that number. Like you would have to spend this much on paid ads elsewhere. Or like change your product. Or like your reviews that have to improve. You know all that, all that kind of stuff. And if those, if that's not the case, being honest with your clients and being like look, this is the forecast we're going to deliver.

Speaker 2: 39:19

And like I think that's a lesson you learn in that that forecast that we're going to deliver is like not, is like not a positive P and L, and so like we can go forward or we might not. And it's a lesson that you learn a couple of years into the agency world when you write a couple of forecasts that are too big and but I think, I think, and then your team gets burnt out and people aren't happy and you know all that kind of stuff and so they like the big thing is just like.

Speaker 2: 39:50

Proper expectation setting prevents you having to fire clients.

Speaker 1: 39:56

I think yeah, I agree with that sentiment Could have fired more and sooner, right.

Speaker 2: 40:05

We're not even started with them.

Speaker 1: 40:07

Right, yes, definitely not started, because you know any revenue was revenue and there were some, there were some blatant red flags that may or may not have been, you know, sort of brushed under the rug, because you know we were growing and we wanted to keep growing. But, right, right, do you think like, do you think you'll stay at the size, or you just you know what's the end goal You're going to keep growing, keep scaling, yeah. Start making in-house brands, like what are the different things that you're thinking about for growth, moving forward?

Speaker 2: 40:40

Yeah, we're continuing to grow in scale. You know we've grown every year. We're pretty lucky to be on a peak. We're like 120 on the 5,000. So we grew pretty fast and you know we're not we're growing double digit percentage. We're pretty lucky in the agency world, especially in digital, and I think we'll continue to do that. Like the way that our org is structured and the way our comp is structured is that like advancement comes from growth for our people and so it kind of creates a mandate for us. Like we want to grow, to create opportunities for our team to continue to grow, and so the ways that we're going to grow is new categories. So, like two, three years ago, we weren't doing beauty supplements, baby and pet very much. So that's like our new growth. And then some of the like the add-on tech services. Really, it's like we're doing a lot of off-Amazon work now, directing to Amazon, asking questions like everyone's got an email list, everyone's got an SMS list for their DTC, why don't you have that for Amazon?

Speaker 1: 41:50

And you have your own ads for Amazon.

Speaker 2: 41:51

Why don't you have your? So like building things like that. Those are kind of like our big growth factors and then, I think, eventually sell the business, like be part of, like a bigger agency platform or something along those lines.

Speaker 1: 42:11

Yeah, there's definitely been quite a few of those that I've seen happening in like the last year, year and a half at least, in the Shopify ecosystem, yeah, where one agency you know merges with another, which then merges with a larger one, which then merges with another larger one, and then you know all of a sudden you've got a 500-person agency versus you know a couple of 75-person agencies.

Speaker 2: 42:35

Right.

Speaker 1: 42:35

And there's pros and cons to that too, yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:39

The goal is to be one of the people who goes, enters into that from a position of strength, rather than like I'm tired of the agency thing, I'll take the price you offer, kind of thing which is hard, right, I mean selling on the day you feel like you can do it all yourself, not the day that you feel tired.

Speaker 1: 42:59

That's the thing that I miss about the agency business is the direct sort of input and output to like company growth. It's like very fast or quick, like you close the client, you sign it, you know it's the MRR every month. It's pretty, it's not overwhelmingly complex. Yeah, all the other aspects are, but, like the financial nature of the business is relatively straightforward.

Speaker 2: 43:23

I always tell our board we have a beautifully simple business More clients, more revenue per client, you know, and that's basically it. And like, make sure people are well taken care of and are growing and we continue to get better and don't get, you know, taken by competition, but otherwise it's. It's a yeah, find better brands, grow your brands, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 43:47

Yeah. So that's the question I have for you here before before we hop. What's like one tip or trick you'd give a brand on Amazon? You know, this year that has been working well.

Speaker 2: 44:05

Okay. So I think the thing that we progress probably the Well. Okay, I'll let me give two. Let me give two because one won't apply to that many brands, but so one is like more on the advanced media front, which is there are serious benefits to being willing to enter your DTC data into like a clean room, create like a hash list and connect it to Amazon's TSP. You can do stuff like in the negate audiences, look at crossover, look at how people flow from one to the other. Then actually really amplifies your power in like acquisition and brand building. You know, in order to do that, you're spending six figures a month on Amazon and you know probably a lot more than that on DTC, but it really has been pretty powerful and that's like on the newer side of Amazon's tech.

Speaker 2: 44:55

Okay, for the other one that I'd recommend is really thinking about Amazon tech poll days. Like you know, everyone's got their high season Prime Day, black Friday, holidays. You know every kind of category has its own season. Really think about those as like month long periods of ramp up and ramp down. We're like because of the way that Amazon works, basically, when there's a surge in traffic in your category or just in general, amazon farms out that traffic in order of who's performing better on the platform, and so your job is to make sure you are very highly ranked in the run up to your big season, so you get a bigger share of that traffic, and so there's a bunch of implications to that. But like basically thinking about those days, two months, three months ahead and saying, okay, what are we gonna do to make sure that we are taking share running into high season. I think that has been a major difference maker for us in the last year or so.

Speaker 1: 46:08

Got it. Oh, but those are both super helpful. The first one was very interesting and it just goes to show you that again, like at scale, you know there's a lot of benefits to scale. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:22

And it's also really interesting. Like you know, three years ago D2C founders were like, no, I'm not gonna touch Amazon, it's gonna cannibalize, I don't need the data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We're not getting that much anymore. But like the openness to really thinking of your media is continuous across channels does become interesting and like your ability to like attribute across different acquisition channels and different conversion channels just makes you that much better and like able to spend your dollars better.

Speaker 1: 47:01

Are you doing anything with Buy With Prime?

Speaker 2: 47:04

We're doing some, we've tested some. It's a really interesting program. So just to give the short brief on it, basically you get to put the Prime sticker on your D2C and then it uses Amazon's FBA network. There's a couple of caveats. One is it's considerably more expensive than shipping on Amazon itself, so that's often like a difference maker, but it still has really good use cases. So there's kind of like two use cases. So one is the Buy With Prime team has done a good job of like changing the way that they push it and they say let us just A-B test having the button and prove that there are incremental, not cannibalizing, conversions from it. That's like, I think, a good baseline to start the other. The thing that's really interesting that we've had some of our clients do is use it as a just in time shipping option In the run up to holidays, like you have to cut off when you're shipping, when your D2C shipping stops you can get like three more days of peak.

Speaker 2: 48:16

If you turn around something like Buy With Prime, which ends up being a lot right, peak ends up being pretty chunk of your total sales, and so that, I think, is a cool way to just like use the tool in a very targeted way and you can turn it off.

Speaker 1: 48:32

It was more so complimentary additive than necessarily a replacement for the staff.

Speaker 2: 48:37

Yeah, and that's their goal too is to have it be complimentary.

Speaker 1: 48:41

The other thing that's like super late.

Speaker 2: 48:44

breaking like this is I don't know if it's out yet, but it's coming out in the like this month is the ability to use Amazon's DSP to drive to your D2C if you have Buy With Prime, and so that's pretty like people have always thought, talked about like the movement from the two channels. This is the first one where you can like truly move in theory pass purchasers on Amazon to your D2C, to a cross-element or upsell.

Speaker 1: 49:14

Now I mean that would be a huge unlock. So, like as we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, amazon's targeting is unmatched because of the fact that it's a closed platform.

Speaker 2: 49:25

Right, right, so it's. Yeah, I mean you have to be willing to trial it. You probably need to be at scale too, like you have to have a scale on business and D2C, but like then, all of a sudden, you have the ability to move people. It's pretty interesting.

Speaker 1: 49:39

Yeah, well, hey, thank you so much for coming on. This was super insightful. I really appreciate it. Before we hop, can you let everybody know where they can connect with you online if they're interested in chatting or working together?

Speaker 2: 49:50

Yeah, absolutely. The best place is find us on LinkedIn, either cartograph, or you can look up me, chris Moe. Feel free to add me, message me, whatever.

Speaker 1: 49:59

Our website is wwwgocardographcom.

Speaker 2: 50:05

There's like a reach out form or you can just email me directly. I'm Chris at gocardographcom and more than happy to chat. We do full service engagements, full funnel advertising and all that kind of stuff. We can also help you out If you have like a review problem or want to build like a VIP customer list or some of these off Amazon tactics.

Speaker 1: 50:25

Awesome, Well, as always. Thank you everybody for listening. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or electricmargaincom and I will see you next time. We'll see you then.