#TBT Increase Your Amazon Sales: Turnkey Strategies For Rapid Growth

You got to get out of Amazon or stop spending all your time on Amazon. Find a way to get out of that so that you can do kind of one of those three or four other pillars in order to really be successful other than just being an Amazon business.

Hey, capitalists. In traditional Throwback Thursday fashion, we're re releasing one of our most popular episodes that we've had on capitalism dot com.

Enjoy.

Today we're joined by the mysterious Jeff Lieber. Jeff, what's going on?

Hey, Ryan. Hey, Max. Good to be here.

Yeah, I wanted to have you on because we work with a lot of physical product sellers who are really settling for low profit margins, who are really in the weeds of their business, especially when they're navigating the challenges of Amazon.com and I know you work with a lot of the opposite side of the house. And so I wanted to ask you about freeing up capacity, but also I wanted to talk about how do you use Amazon in a way that builds your brand rather than compromises your brand or your profit margins? But before we jump into that, Jeff, would you give a little bit of a quick overview of what y' all do over at Turnkey?

Sure. So, yeah, Turnkey product management. We've been helping companies automate their sales growth on Amazon for a number of years, and we do it in a variety of ways. We can fully manage the Amazon sales channel for companies, and so we can speak to some of that experience today. And some of our clients, you know, are kind of what you're talking about, where they're heavily on the E commerce side, not on Amazon. So we can speak to that. And then we also do coaching and can also share our strategies to train companies in house. So, yeah, that's a long story short on Turnkey.

Max, I want to rope you into a question, because I know when we started working together, you came from the branding side and you were shocked at how poorly a lot of online physical product sellers did their branding. So I want to get your take on the problem that you and I have both seen in this physical product world. Would you comment on that?

Yeah, I think actually a lot of the problem stems specifically from Amazon. So I'm glad that we're doing this podcast today. But what I was struck with when I first started working with you, when we first got into the space, was how far you can get on Amazon, just focusing on the product that you sell to start, but how low that you're ceiling. A lot of people do really bad design. A lot of people do really bad messaging. Really just talking about features and focusing on the things that are basically the same as everyone else that sells in their category and how they don't think about kind of a big picture like who am I selling to, who is the audience, who is actually buying this and how am I serving them right? And what are the messages, what's the story that they need to hear to make this brand a key part of their life and more than just a product that they buy once or twice. And so, yeah, that's kind of what I was struck with when I first got into this space.

And Jeff, I know you work with a lot of kind of the opposite side of the house. I mean, there's, there seems to be this paradox between those who sell a lot of product on Amazon and then those who build real brands. So what I wanted to ask you is how can companies use Amazon in a way that builds their brand rather than just incentivizes them to focus on product? So what do you have to say about that?

Sure, it's a good question. I think that, and I agree with Max, like, that's a very common thing that we see. And one of the first places, especially when a brand is successful, say on their website or in retail or whatever channels that they're focused on, maybe they're not focused on Amazon, we always try to try to help them translate that branding and that messaging and the same sort of color scheme and all of that to Amazon, because with Amazon you can oftentimes like, it just, it feels very cookie cutter. So, so one way is to try to really pull from what the great branding that you're doing off of Amazon and try to translate that into Amazon through the images, infographics, enhanced brand content, all those areas that need to be utilized. But as far as working together and that paradox at the end of the day, having a diversity of sales channels, you know, it makes your company more sellable, it gives you a higher valuation. And, and so even if 5%, 20% of your sales are on Amazon, that will give you a higher valuation and give you a more sound market. Some of our most successful clients, they're indifferent what sales channel the customer starts out on when they join their brand or try a product in their brand line for the first time. Because if they've built something outside of Amazon, like an audience or someplace or customer experience, or have more products to market to them later, they don't care where that customer starts. So Amazon's a great pool of traffic to start at.

It used to be, in fact, when I was building sheer strength when it was in its kind of first couple of years. A lot of our competitors, when we would go to trade shows, would complain about Amazon. And it used to be this world in which it was seen as a dumping grounds for low priced, low margin products. And I think a lot of physical product sellers still treat it like that where it's a race to the bottom in terms of pricing rather than building up the real brand so they have the margin to advertise off of Amazon. So Jeff, I want to ask you, have you seen companies that are selling products make a successful pivot into real branding so that they're building both platforms? Or do you find that it's only those who are doing it well off of Amazon where that translates over to Amazon?

Yeah, I think it can definitely be done. I mean, the fact is Amazon is still the largest pool of online hungry buyers that are already looking for a product like yours. So if you're not there, then you're missing out on that. And you're letting your competitors just easily steal your market share because they're searching for, you know, sheer strength supplements or vitamin C serums or whatever it is. If you're not there, that's a huge pool of traffic and buyers that you're just letting your competitors take. And if you are there and you're doing a crappy job of optimizing it or branding it, then you're also missing out because your sales could probably be double or triple what it is.

So you have mentioned brand enhanced content. You've mentioned kind of the structure of the listings. What can both physical product sellers and brands be doing specifically on Amazon in order to keep their branding high and not being associated with the dumping ground of low price points and low profit margins that a lot of people assume is the case?

Sure. Well, actually not sure if you guys have heard it, it just happened fairly recently. But on the enhanced brand content side, if you're an Amazon brand registered brand, you can now upload video to be up in your image block. It will be like the ninth image block in the upper left hand corner of your listing. So that's an incredibly powerful asset. If you can put a video up there, video can really brand your product and you can tell your brand story and speak to the customer and really put music in it and narration and really get more emotion than just having a bunch of images. And so if you haven't done it already, if you have a trademark on your brand, get brand registry. And then that EBC video just opened up recently. So make sure you're using that because that's a great way to kind of match your branding. Like you could even take a video that you have on your e commerce website and just simply take that and then just tweak it to where it doesn't mention, you know, buy@shearstrength.com but it just says buy at Amazon. So that's like one quick win that was, you know, we've rolled out with all of our clients recently. Great.

What else are you working with on brands right now in order to keep profit margins really high on Amazon?

Yeah, a lot of our most successful clients, they're not the cheapest products on the search results there. They tend to sell more premium price products because one common theme that we see is when you have a higher margin, you're able to spend more on Amazon. And whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer will usually win in the long run. And on Amazon, when you're given 15% to Amazon, plus shipping and all that, if you're just competing at the lower price points just to try to get some sales, you're not going to win in the long run. It's going to be really tough to win that game. I would try to stay high and stay premium and that will differentiate yourself and pride yourself on quality and getting really great customer reviews that will help merit that price point that you're charging. And then on your website you can always say make a different offer on your website, make stronger offers. So Amazon can be that authority place where because customers almost all the time will go to Amazon, even if they see a Facebook ad to your website, they'll probably go check Amazon just to go see what the reviews are. And if the price point's the same, they may just buy it right there. So if you don't have that and you're not there, you may be losing sales there as well.

I want you to comment on something you said about not being the lowest price on the various Amazon listings because a lot of brands fear that or they're not sure how to compete when their price points are so much higher than everyone else's. So what do you say to that?

I think if your only differentiator on a product is price, you're going to lose in the long run. It's just not possible, in my opinion, to win in the long run or to make much money. I mean, you'd have to do that over hundreds or thousands of products in order to make it worth your while. But at the end of the day, it comes back to just the basics of is your product better? Is it a higher quality? Do you have better customer reviews? Do you have video reviews? Do you have video on your listing? What Max said, are you speaking to the customer? And the benefits and the emotion of the customer on your listings? And most people on Amazon are not doing a great job of that.

I actually want to dive in on that real quick. In my opinion, price competition just means that you've failed to create value in the mind of your customer. So if you find yourself competing on price, if you find yourself racing to the bottom to chase sales, that is because you have failed to create value around the quality of your product, around what your brand is going to do for that person. Like you have so many opportunities to elevate your selling and to bond with the kind of self concept of that person and create that value so that you're not price sensitive. And if you find yourself competing on price, then I think it's likely because you failed to create that value in the mind of the customer.

Yeah. Amen. I think this conversation has people named Max Kerwick doing air high fives all over the world.

So Jeff, I was hoping you could tell. Do you have any case studies of brands that have done this well, either in your ecosystem or companies that you follow that toe this line between the two worlds?

Well, yeah, actually we've got a couple that come to mind. One would be Vita Cup Coffee. They did an incredible job. Actually we posted an in depth case study, so I won't talk too much on it, but it's actually on the capitalism blog a few months back. But they did an incredible job of being a higher price point coffee company, but they differentiated their product and the ingredients and the story that they did. And almost our most successful clients are typically always great at one or more of the following things. It's either they're really great at building an audience and building that asset of an audience and connecting with them, following up with them regularly. Most companies just are not great at that. Or they're really great at paid advertising and media and this company was really great at both. Actually. They're great at email sequences and they did paid media all over the place. We've got another client that they're getting creative with what they're doing outside of Amazon. Like they even sponsored ufc and right now it's a good time to be or I think it's a good time to be a sponsor of UFC, given all of the attention that's getting with McGregor and all that and so you think of those places that can be different avenues to get eyeballs. So those are two main things. And they're also really great at launching new products and launching innovative products. Listening to the customers, they'll survey them and then they find out what they want and then they literally just go pump it out. Two months later, boom, they got a new SKU that becomes their best seller because they're constantly innovating. And so you got to get out of Amazon or stop spending all your time on Amazon. Find a way to get out of that so that you can do kind of one of those three or four other pillars in order to really be successful other than just being an Amazon business.

Meaning you've got to free up that focus so that you can go build up the other traffic and sales machines like email or media buying or wherever you're putting your focus. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, those are not necessarily like two hour tasks on your to do list. Right.

I was at an event a couple weeks ago and somebody came up to me and said, hey, Ryan, I just wanted to say you told me that we should start advertising on podcasts two years ago and now we sell $1.5 million a year just from our podcast ads. Like, Yep, right. Well, who would have thought traditional advertising, and by traditional, I mean like to your direct target audience, is actually profitable? Who would have ever thought? And Max, I know you've said when you entered this world, you were so surprised that most physical product brand owners didn't even know who their target customer was. So how could you build a real brand if you weren't able to go out and target that ideal person, would you speak to that?

Yeah, I mean, this idea of kind of chasing sales, of just launching products and, you know, just whoever buys them, buys them, and thank you for the money, I'll walk away, you know, laughing all the way to the bank kind of thing, versus, like, I'm really focusing on this person who's buying my customer. And Jeff, I love the example that you gave because they actually went out and asked the customers. I mean, it sounds simple because it is simple. If you have an audience, if you have access to an audience, being able to go out and say, hey, you know, what would you like to see from us? What products are you interested in buying that we would be credible in delivering. Right. That is a very simple process that decreases the risk of product launch immensely. And if your focus is on Amazon and you can find that sweet spot between what your existing audience wants and what has a larger market potential on Amazon for you to acquire more customers, then that's great. But it's just going about it ass backwards. If you're going to go and just launch products because you think that they're cool or whatever and not pulling your audience into that because then how are you gonna market to them, how are you gonna sell to them, how are you gonna promote other products and things like that?

Jeff, let's flip this for a second because we're talking a little bit about if Amazon sellers free up their focus, they can go do the work that's required to build a real brand off Amazon. Let's speak a little bit to the brand that has that dialed in, that's afraid to, or even just doing a poor job of getting reviews and focusing on Amazon as a side channel because they don't want to give up the funnel sales. They don't want to give up the what they perceive as being the maximum customer value. Is it possible to keep that within your control if you're moving from driving cold traffic to a funnel, but now dialing in the Amazon side of the house as well?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that with regards to the funnels and those offers, that stuff is all great and amazing. I highly recommend that they continue to do that. And the one thing you can always do is you can make a stronger offer in your funnels or on your website in order to incentivize them to come back and purchase on your website. At the end of the day, there's always going to be a percentage of some customers that just, they will not give their credit card to a random website. You know, unless you're like maybe nike.com or something like that. But they just are preferring like, well, if it's not on Amazon, then you know, I'm not going to buy it or if I don't like the offer on Amazon, I'm not going to buy it. So one way is just to like, it doesn't have to be exactly the same offer. You can raise the price on Amazon a bit so that it's still there for those people that just need to buy on Amazon, but you can still control the customer there. The other way is once you get the Amazon customer, like I said, a lot of our clients that are more aggressive and they understand like I want to acquire that customer because I have a lot more stuff I want to sell them on the back end. So if I need to get them even at break even on Amazon or just a small margin, they know that they can Find a way to get in front of them, whether that's just through an amazing experience and they know that they're going to come back to buy more of their products because they're cross selling and letting them know about their products, or if they're uploading their Amazon list to Facebook advertising portal and remarketing to them and giving them different offers depending on how they do that. There's a lot of different ways to control the customer afterwards. So that's what our most successful clients tend to do that are good at that.

I've noticed that a lot of big brands neglect their Amazon listings and their presences and they tend to have fewer reviews than most of the people who are really all in on Amazon or their rankings are not as high as the scrappy solopreneur who is grinding their way and bullying other people out of the way in Amazon's algorithm. So I'm curious if you've noticed why that is and what they can do about it, because it seems like they would have bigger teams and more experience and more profit margin to be able to do that. And I've been saying for years now that it's only a matter of time that brands really got their tish together and were able to establish themselves on the biggest online marketplace in the world. So, Jeff, why do you think brands are notoriously bad at this and what can they do about it?

Yeah, it's hard to speak to every brand, what they're doing, but obviously if they're making money on their website and through retail and wholesale and whatever channels they're focused on, it makes sense that they're going to neglect Amazon. Because the fact is Amazon does take work. It's not just set it up in two hours and forget it and you're just going to make a million bucks. You know, it does take work. There's a lot of different, like there's no silver bullet on Amazon. There's a lot of steps and actions that need to happen every day or every week, every month on Amazon to be successful. You got to put those review strategies in place. You got to spend the time making the Amazon pages look as good as your website so it matches your branding. So it does take a lot of work. And I don't know, I think, I think it probably just comes down to bandwidth that they just like, well, not sure exactly what to do or, you know, who they're putting on the job that they're like, I don't have time to optimize that. Or maybe they don't Understand the potential sometimes. But you know, with those big brands they, they have the biggest opportunity because they already have the brand people trust. So if they just did a, even just a basic cleanup and optimization job on Amazon, that could literally grow their, their Amazon channel by 10 to 30% in a fairly short period of time.

Yeah, I had a client who in the last year they had really dialed in the media buying side of the house, the email side of the house, but they hadn't dialed in Amazon. But a few emails to the list, a few tweaks in their listing, a few tweaks in the marketing, added $100,000 a month to their top line in like 90 days. Because it's fairly easy to make that transition from a high priced brand and taking those loyal customers and bringing them over to Amazon. Whereas the person who's just starting on Amazon is really scraping for every sale and has a hard time getting out of that trap, much to Max Kerwick's chagrin. Jeff, I know you built and sold a company by navigating both of these worlds. Would you talk a little bit about that company and how it influenced how you help your clients build brands?

Sure, yeah. So I started like probably a lot of your listeners started with launching a brand that I got into the pet brand on, launch it on Amazon. I still think that's the best place to launch a brand and then after that spun off a baby brand off of that. So I was managing two brands and but luckily we did focus on other sales channels as well. It wasn't a ton, like 94% of our sales were on Amazon at the time that we sold it. But what really helped increase the multiple and I think help convince the buyers to buy it was even just having that we had like three other sales channels. You know, I think it was Walmart.com, chewy.com, which is a pet specific niche site as well as our website sales and maybe one other small one even just that that we had launched those and that they were growing a little bit each month. That gave them I think just more confidence and assurance, like, okay, so we have something to build off of here. We're not starting from scratch, we're not a one legged stool on Amazon. And so I've seen that firsthand and that helped sell our business. And so in working with clients at Turnkey, that's one of the most common things that the business owners like to bring up is, you know, selling the business, how to, you know, how to set it up for sale and I'm the first one to recommend that you should diversify your sales channels because that's going to help you at the end of the day as a business owner.

Yeah, I want to edify and echo this because I have worked with sellers and brand owners who have one sales channel only. And it's not Amazon, it's Shopify or it's Clickbank or it's something else. And those businesses are not easily sellable. But if you have Amazon dialed in, you at least are sellable. It doesn't mean you're gonna get the maximum price point for your business as you would if you were on multiple channels, but you're more sellable on a big marketplace than if you're keeping everything within your control. Max, I know you've worked with a lot of brands on the other side of the house, meaning brands who were running their own traffic, who were in traditional retail stores, who had raised money. So how, how would you comment on coming over to Amazon and keeping profit margins really high?

It's a great question and I'm glad you asked because the whole time that you guys were talking about that, I was kind of chomping at the bit here, but the line that I wrote down that you said, Ryan was the biggest online marketplace in the world, because that's what Amazon is. The reason that these big giant companies get on Amazon and they have a shitty listing that they clearly didn't spend very much time writing copy or writing the headline or optimizing images or anything like that, is because Amazon has basically dragged them into being on their platform by becoming the biggest online marketplace in the world. They are there because they feel an obligation to their customers, right? Because they know who their customer is. They know that their customer shops on Amazon all the time, is a prime member wants to be able to buy their stuff on Amazon. And because they are customer centric and because they their customer first, they kind of begrudgingly put their stuff on Amazon and make it available so the customers that want to buy it can buy it there. But they're going to focus their time and money on channels that they can control more easily because they have those audiences available and they have the marketing dollars and the large teams that you talked about and everything that can help channel those people to the channels where they have more control when making that.

Shift over to Amazon, how would you recommend they pivot and position themselves so they can keep as much control and as much profit margin as possible and not fall prey to that price war that inevitably happens when people are Just on Amazon and not doing it well.

Well, I think you look at it as you're kind of doing it to start as like a favor for your existing customers. Right. You're putting them first because they buy from Amazon all the time and you're just making it easier for them to purchase. So that's how you're helping your existing customers and you're helping your future customers because this is a great entry point into your brand from a place where they already like to shop. I think if you do Amazon correctly, if you enter Amazon correctly and you stand firm on your price, that you still have a lot of potential to acquire new customers, to have them experience you for the first time. And as long as you can kind of dial in those follow up sequences and get them to engage with your brand either through social media or, or going to your website and downloading some sort of user guide or something like that, get them to experience the value that you bring beyond just the product that you're selling and the listing on Amazon. I still think it is a fantastic way to acquire a new set of customers to be visible in a place. I mean it's essentially selling into the same as selling into Walmart. Right. It's like you're getting a bunch of people to see your product. A lot of visibility to your product, to a different set of customers than you would get if you were just selling online. Treat it as an additional sales channel.

Yeah, I want to add one comment to this because most people who are selling on Amazon think in terms of where they're ranking for keywords and what pay per click traffic they can drive to the listing. They're basically going from Amazon internal traffic to Amazon internal listing, which is great. If you want to run a one to $3 million business with okay profit margins and hope to sell it one day and you're a one or two person show, it's great. If you're a brand then the thing that has to be dialed in if you are going to have really high profit margins is your on page listing, the quality of your images, using video and your reviews. Because the biggest impact that is going to come from your Amazon presence is people who see you elsewhere, look you up on Amazon and immediately become a customer because their defenses are down. Because the purchase process on Amazon is much, much easier than elsewhere. And if you dial that in really well, then Amazon rewards you by allowing you to rank faster and easier. The review count keeps your conversion rate really high, which makes it easier to bring in new customers and new sales from keywords and from pay per click. So if you use the Amazon 101 optimization strategies or you use somebody like Jeff to have the outside traffic coming to you, that one, two punch basically destroys everybody else who is trying to get out there without this. Jeff, I want you to tell me if you agree or disagree.

Yeah, I agree completely with both of you guys and the only thing I can, I think I can add to that is back to your question about why do larger brands hesitate or just not take action on Amazon? And I was thinking we see it all the time when people come to us and asking for help. Some of them have 100 or 200 or 500 SKUs, right? A ton of products. And maybe they're going into it thinking that, oh my gosh, like how do I optimize 500 listings? And you don't have to, like, if you're not sure how big of an impact it might have, just start with your biggest two, you know, or your biggest five or use 8020 rule to find, you know, those most important products that have the biggest impact. So just test it on 1 or 3 or 5 and see what happens. And maybe once you see those results and measure it, then, okay, well let's go on to the next 10 SKUs from there. And if it doesn't work out, then it didn't work out, but at least you tried.

Jeff, is there anyone that you have seen or anything that you have seen not be effective that you see brands trying when they're trying to make a pivot from, you know, branding over to Amazon? What are, what mistakes are you seeing brands make when they're trying to expand?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones is that they'll, even though they'll come to us for help, but then they'll still not be focusing off of Amazon or launching new products. So they, it's just getting stuck in the minutia of Amazon is just a big pattern that we see. It doesn't happen to everybody, but we do see that as one and then just kind of getting caught up in the small stuff like getting caught up on short term profit or just they're getting stuck in these small things.

And they just need to focus on those bigger things that can really move the needle for their business. I would say it's just kind of an overarching theme.

And have you seen any patterns of what you would consider those big, those big items that really move the needle?

I think we've already kind of talked about a lot of them today, but yeah, I mean it comes down to launching new products, setting up those. How are you going to build your customer list? Where do you want to focus that? Are you really good at building an email list and do you actually have a sequence built out? If so, then focus on that. But if you're not good at that, but you like Facebook and you know, building a Facebook group or an Instagram following, then focus on that. So to try to pick one or two that you can really focus on outside of Amazon and just start there and try to build that consistently over time. And like I said, our most successful clients, they're usually really, really good at at least one non Amazon thing. They're usually not great at 4 or 5. Neither am I. And so it's kind of like stick to your strengths is the common pattern.

I want to ask you more about turnkey, but before we go over there, Max, I want to ensure that you get a chance to have the final word if you'd like it.

Yeah, no, I think that we've covered everything. I guess the only thing that I want to go or want to add in on a very tactical level, as we've talked about a lot of different things on the listing, this opportunity to add video optimizing bullets and copy and headlines, I really think that the listing images are probably the biggest missed opportunity I see to tell kind of a cohesive story that includes the brand. A lot of people with the images still focus on very, very, very kind of like product and feature level images. And I think that that stuff needs to be included. But I don't think that you lose anything from a conversion standpoint by including something that's more of a branded image, something that includes a tagline or kind of a promise statement or something that can be consistent across products and you can start to kind of form that relationship of this is who we stand for as a company and you are in the right place when you land here if you believe these things as well. So I think that that's a big missed opportunity I see from companies that are trying to do this.

Jeff, I know you put out a ton of content on this topic. Where can people follow you and give us a quick plug for Turnkey?

Sure, yeah. The easiest place would be to just go to turnkeyproductmanagement.com Ryan Moran we built a page just specifically with some free stuff that think would be applicable for your audience. Ryan, if you're interested in getting help on Amazon in any capacity, we could probably help you in some way if you're missing the team or the systems to manage Amazon. We do offer full service channel management for Amazon and it'll take it off of your plate and that's typically our sweet spot is typically with companies that are doing around 100k a month or more. There are some exceptions to that if you're growing fast. So still contact us and we'll see if it's a good fit. And if you have the team or you want to keep Amazon in house, that's awesome too. We like to help companies accomplish that. So we have Turnkey systems Amazon, it's a online training program where we basically hand you all these tactical strategies and standard operating procedures and then we also have one on one coaching for people that just want to get the advice and the shortcuts to what's happening on Amazon or if they're facing issues and sometimes they'll actually end up becoming a full service member down the road. So. But yeah, I would definitely just head over to turnkey product management.com Ryan Moran Start there, get some free stuff. Yeah, I hope that it's helpful but appreciate all your guys time today. It's been awesome.

This is I think the biggest for me. It's so bizarre how few people get both sides of this right. How they get the branding off of Amazon dialed in while also leveraging the biggest marketplace in the world to their advantage. And the ones that manage both at the same time are those that build eight figure companies and nine figure companies and do it well and are sellable and are in a position to have a large exit. And those who don't always stay in this hamster wheel of being stuck in either having low price points on Amazon or or being passed by people who are using that marketplace well. And there's a delicate dance of being able to do the branding well while also having that carry over to Amazon. And if it's done well it creates all the difference in the world.

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