The Systems & Team Members Needed To Hit $10 Million On Amazon

Welcome Jeff Lieber to the stage. Jeff, come on out.

Thanks, sir.

All right, thank you, Ryan. I'm going to, like you said, talk about the systems and team members needed to hit $10 million on Amazon. And going with the theme of Ryan's weird socks joke. Whoever made that, I did wear my nicest socks today. So thank you, Nordstrom Rack.

So a little bit about me. Five years ago I started where most of you probably started selling on Amazon. I started a pet products brand. Actually it was just one product. I didn't have a brand in mind. Grew it to over a million dollars with over a dozen SKUs and I sold that company. And then since 2015, I've received numerous requests from friends and conferences and networking to help them on Amazon. And so from one consulting client to, you know, many consulting clients today we built Turnkey.

So TurnKey started over three years ago. We have over 15 people on our team right now. Jessica and Jenna are here. They've been awesome. You might have met them at our booth. We manage nearly every aspect of our clients Amazon sales channel. So we try to take it off their plate so that they can focus on all the other important stuff like launching new products, other sales channels, all that good stuff. So.

Currently we're selling over $10 million a year on Amazon. And real quick, here's a case study. This client we, when they signed up with us, they were already doing very well. They were doing about $213,000 a month. And then nine months later, we've helped triple their business to over $700,000 in sales. And here's just a snapshot of their sales in a 30 day period that we were able to grab $670,000.

Here's another client called Vitacup. It's a coffee brand. And when they started with us, they were at $20,000 a month on Amazon. And now we've grown to over $360,000 per month in under a year. And again, there's just a screenshot from Amazon that you've all seen.

Okay, so let's get into what we've learned from companies like that. So we're gonna talk about what most $10 million businesses have. So number one, amazing products. You gotta have really high quality products. Ideally you can, you know, add value to the marketplace by innovating or making a small shift and finding a way to make your product way better than your competition. Number two is a strong customer service team. Especially on Amazon, good customer service and customer experience is gonna result in five star reviews. If you don't have this piece and you're at two stars, three stars, three and a half. You're kind of dead in the water or you need to change something really fast.

The other common theme is we see they have an off Amazon advertising budget of over 5% of their total sales. I think Ezra actually said that he spends, he recommends spending over I think 20% of his total sales and reinvesting it back into the company for advertising. So but at a minimum we would recommend 5%.

Next is your Amazon sales channel tends to be doing over a million dollars.

And then your company needs to be run off of systems and processes and or team. So you gotta find a way to get that in order to get to that level of scale and sell that many products, you have to have the systems and processes. And we'll talk about some of that today.

Lastly, we almost always see our most successful clients. They have one or more additional sales channels that are doing over a million dollars. I love Amazon, but I do not recommend to anyone that 100% or 95% of your sales are on Amazon. I mean, Amazon is, you know, you don't want to be a one trick pony if Amazon changes their review policy. And you know, we've heard horror stories of people today that lost just a ton of reviews and their sales are tanking. So that's why it's good to diversify your sales.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about building and training your team.

So if you feel stuck in your business, or if you feel stuck, whether it's managing Amazon or any task, it doesn't matter what it is. Here's how. We've been able to do that really well at our company. So we tend to do a screen recording video. Does any of you use Zoom or Loom for like screen recordings? Perfect. A lot of you. Cool. So you're already on the right track. That's awesome. You know, we've got an overseas team, we've got a USA team, and so, you know, we all work remotely. And so these screen recording videos are incredibly valuable. They can just follow step by step. The other thing is you want someone on your team, preferably not you, to convert it to a written step by step procedure.

So how to create an effective SOP or standard operating procedure? So first step, record a video, have a team member create it, have a team member actually test it out like, and preferably someone that's not familiar with that task that you're delegating. Because if they can't follow the steps, then the sop is not done well enough. And so then you'll know, oh, at step four, you know, I wasn't sure what to do. So then you fix that. And then once you get one document that's done and video training ready to go, that's off of your plate.

Oh, and then real quick, I just wanted to mention. So we have a whole, like, our whole business is run off of SOPs, and we're actually gonna give you, if it's helpful for you, we have our whole SOP template as well, a training video for how to do it. So we'll give that to you guys at the end of the presentation if that might be helpful for you.

Next, let's talk about the team that's required for success on Amazon alone. This is what we recommend. You need to have someone on your team that's an Amazon PPC expert. Amazon ppc. And we've got some clients that are, you know, they were at $20,000 a month in ad spend and they were not paying attention to it. And then we took it over. And just by paying attention to it and, you know, trying to practice and get better at it, now they've been able to grow to over $100,000 in ad spend a month. So that's a potential there. And preferably you should not be doing it yourself. Let somebody who's really good and enjoys that stuff, that role. Number two, someone that's in charge of account and product listing, health and maintenance. If you're experiencing, say, hijackers or just people leaving questions or bad reviews on your page, that's where someone needs to be monitoring that because that can really hurt your sales. Number three is a customer service representative or team. Is there anyone here that's still helping out in the customer service, like replying to customer messages on Amazon or on your website? Some of you. Oh, a lot of you. Okay. Does anyone. How many of you enjoy doing customer service messages for your team? This guy. Okay, audio. All right, well, if you guys like doing it, keep doing it. But at my first company, the Pet Products company, I did it for about two years and was still getting, like, phone calls, you know, forwarded to my phone, and then just finally hired one person that could take that over. And, you know, I would highly, highly recommend that you should not be doing that if you're the CEO of the company.

Next is a shipping and logistics expert. So someone that's on top of your inventory orders, inventory projections, all that good stuff. And then lastly is a sales growth and Amazon tactics expert. It's okay, if it's you, like probably a lot of you are that role right now because you're at a conference like this trying to learn the latest and greatest. But ideally you can have someone else in charge of that and testing and trying new things every single month on your Amazon account.

Okay, so real quick, I'm going to cover how to hire an Amazon customer service representative if that might be helpful for those folks. But really this whole training process can apply to any position. So if you need to hire a PPC.

Manager position, then just insert that into the equation. So at Turnkey, we have over 15 people on our team. They're amazing and we have a very step by step hiring process and it helps filter out bad candidates, it builds in specific tests, like test tasks that you can let multiple applicants do before hiring them. And then we recommend putting them through a trial period first before hiring so you're not on the hook for anything and they have to prove themselves. And then lastly this, this whole hiring process document that we have, if it's useful for you guys, you can apply it to any position. We're going to give that to you guys for free as well. Since you guys, Ryan's audience.

And then the second piece of that, once you have a customer service person or team is you need to train them. Right. And what we do is we have a whole step by step training document as well as an faq. And what it includes is everything from how to check buyer messages in Amazon within 24 hours and where to check how to remove negative seller feedbacks, how to monitor customer reviews. And then it's also a self managing FAQ document that you can train your team to, you know, as new frequent questions come up over and over and over. You know, if they have a template and a template response that's gonna save your time and their time and then you can officially hand it off to somebody. And for this customer service rep, cause Ryan said that's a big need for you guys. So we'll provide you guys that as well, completely for free, our whole FAQ document and training.

Okay, so let's talk about some different ways to succeed on Amazon. So number one is profitable Amazon giveaways, you guys. So this is not talking about the, what most people call giveaways on Amazon where you give away 200 units over seven days for 90% off and you lose $5,000 or you invest out $5,000, which does work. We do use that for some of our clients, but this is a different type. So if you haven't Heard of it. This is actually on Amazon.com they have completely Terms of service compliant giveaways. Where how it works is. Let's say you say, I'm gonna give away two units of my product in exchange for 2,000 customer entries. And those customer entries, you can require them to watch a YouTube video, which can be a sales video for your product. You can also require them to follow you on social media and you can gain followers, all for the cost of two products that you give away. And then the other cool thing is that the other 1998 people who did not win the giveaway, you can automatically have Amazon send them a coupon code discount to go buy our product. And on most of our clients, we're seeing that we'll get dozens of sales from that. So give away two products, get, you know, thousands of views and be profitable with your sales on the back end. And then if it works, run it over and over and over again until it stops working.

Okay, next. Hopefully everyone in the room is already doing this, but I've already talked to people that weren't aware of it. So convert your Amazon list to a Facebook customer list for advertising purposes. So is anyone not doing this in here that's on Amazon and wants to upload their customers to Facebook? Facebook, cool. So how you do this is you just take your customer list from Amazon, upload it to the Facebook advertising portal, and then from there you can do two main things or a lot of things. But I'll cover two. One is you can build a lookalike audience. And if you're not familiar with that, I would highly like. I would just check out Ezra's. Ezra Firestone's got great trainings on that. But it's where you can give Amazon or give Facebook a list of, say, 2,000Amazon customers, and then ask Facebook to go make over a million people a list of a million people that look very similar to those customers. They have the same interests as you. They live in the United States. They have similar incomes, because Facebook has a creepy amount of data on all of us, and so we might as well use that. So next, you can also directly retarget your Amazon customers through Facebook ads called retargeting ads. And from there, you can even, you know, target different segments. You can target your repeat customers. You can also do Facebook ads to convert them to Facebook messenger bot sequences. There's a lot of stuff you can do with that. And so this is an incredibly powerful tool that a lot of our clients do use.

Next tip is to study your competitors to beat them. So this is almost one of the first steps every single time that we take on a new client or try to help someone on Amazon is we don't look at their listing, we look at their, their competitors listings. And the reason that is is because your competitors might be doing some things better than you and you can learn from it. So what are they doing in their sales copy that's different than yours? What are they doing in their reviews? Read through their negative reviews and their positive reviews, find the customer pain points and then you can incorporate that into your listing. So next is product images, infographics, giveaways, are they giving away anything like a free ebook or a recipe book or a guided meditation? If you see these things and they happen regularly as they're being updated, you want to be like, wow, that's a good idea. I could totally do that as well. So that's another good tip for sure.

So what is the number one secret? Well, unfortunately there is no one strategy or secret that will get you to $10 million in sales a year. But it really is just a combination of strategies and systems and team members that will get you there.

So ask yourself, do you have the systems and the team to become a $10 million plus company? What pieces are you missing or need improvement and then find a way to solve it. So just to recap, we'll cover this slide. So who on your team is working on these $10 million business pillars? Who's launching new products? Who's doing your customer service?

Do you have a budget off of Amazon for advertising of 5% or more? If not, who is helping build that out? And hopefully it doesn't need to be you that does all these things. Hopefully, hopefully you can have different team members do those items.

Next, just to review this, do you have these five team roles in place just for Amazon? Specifically, do you have the PPC expert? Do you have the customer service team? Do you have the shipping logistics expert? Do you have the sales growth and Amazon tactics expert? If not, if you're just missing one, then go find a way to hire for that position and go fill that need and then your business is going to grow so much more. If you have three of them missing, then try to find a way to fill the three.

So if you are missing the team and the systems to manage Amazon currently, then at turnkey we have full service management. That's where we'll actually manage Seller central for you. We'll manage the whole sales channel for you and take the Amazon day to day operations off of your plate. And all we're doing is trying to optimize, grow your sales run strategies, manage the advertising spend for you guys so that you guys are freed up to go invent new products, launch new products, focus on other sales channels, hire other people to do Facebook ads or Instagram, swipe up ads, all that good stuff that you know you should be doing. That's what our best clients are able to do. And then if you do have the team already, or if you want to keep Amazon in house, which is also awesome, turnkey systems for Amazon may be for you, that's a nine module Amazon training program and that's where like all those sops I talked about today, some of those are, all of those are in that course and we basically hand you all of our systems, all of our SOPs and all the training videos to your team so that you can have your own team go through it. So and then lastly, if you want one on one Amazon coaching, like if you just need a little coaching and advice and just have some direct questions, we also have what's called the turnkey inner circle one on one coaching.

And then you can also just visit me or Jessica or Jenna at our booth. We're just right out there, turnkey product management. And we can see if we can help you if it might be a good fit.

Okay, so this is last slide. Promise. So do you want some all the trainings I talked about today, this is where you can go get it. Go to that link at the bottom. Turnkeyproductmanagement.com Ryan Moran we made a special landing page just for you guys. That, that way we know you guys came from here and then we'll send all the, all those lessons that I talked about today and even those first, a couple of those lessons weren't even mentioned today, but you'll get those for free. Get the profitable Amazon giveaway strategy, sales copy improvements for page ranking, image improvements, how to hire, how to train your customer service rep, and then also the SOP template training. So and you also get a copy of this slide presentation if that's useful for you. And so yeah, go to that link at the bottom if you want it. And if not, we'll hopefully meet you tonight or tomorrow and just want to say thank you to Ryan and his whole team for having us here. It's a pleasure, pleasure to be up here and looking forward to connecting with you guys. So thank you all.

Yes, Lieber, everybody. Thank you, sir. Hey Bob, before you leave, just, we were having a conversation at lunch. Somebody was saying, talking about how they weren't sure how to build a team, and they were talking about wanting to be free, to be able to go build the brand and do the things that actually create scalability. And I was like, well, the first thing you need to do is what is it that you're spending all your time on? They're like, Amazon management. And I was like, you might want to hand that to somebody. So, Jeff is usually who I send people to, because he knows all the ninja shit that's going on that he just shared with you, and then he just goes and does it. So he's who I usually recommend people use, which is why he's on stage.

So, Jeff, thank you. Thanks, sir. Appreciate that.

Thank you.

SA.