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Podcast host

Martin Zerrudo

CEO SUEG Group

Martin Zerrudo

CEO SUEG Group

June 10, 2022

Combining Value and Passion With Martin Zerrudo of Seller Universe Ecommerce Group

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Daniel Calleja Martin Zerrudo is the CEO of Seller Universe Ecommerce Group, an agency of Amazonauts focused on growing sales and audience with sponsored ads and DSP. He has over six years of digital marketing experience and is passionate about looking out for the latest data, trends, and research relevant to the industry. Martin uses his knowledge to create and manage strategies, campaigns, platform projects, and to implement marketing efforts to meet the current needs of his client’s brand. Beyond marketing, he has mastered the art of project management and interpersonal collaboration and believes in honesty and transparency in the workplace.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Martin Zerrudo talks about working with business owners that are passionate about their products and scaling their brand
How Martin and his team helped a client grow from $6500 to $113,000 a month
Why proper management of ad campaigns is crucial for brand success
Martin explains his philosophy on budgeting: build, drive, and maintain
How to manage multiple inventory outlets in one platform
Why you should be using SEO to showcase your products’ retail value
Martin shares how to differentiate your product from other competitors through unique key-word marketing

In this episode…

In an oversaturated market, how can you increase awareness and leverage your brand on and off of Amazon? Managing your brand across multiple platforms can be challenging, but is there a way to generate data to manage your inventory?

Increasing awareness begins with a first impression. It does take time to understand and optimize key phrases that resonate with your audience, but Marin Zerrudo has experience developing working strategies that help increase ROI and stabilize a steady revenue. He says that once you have a solid strategy in place, you can track and manage your brand's revenue for long-term growth and scale. Martin and his team have helped clients increase their revenues by almost 1300%. But scaling your brand at this magnitude requires more than a marketing strategy — it requires a healthy inventory account. Join Martin in this episode to level up your Amazon operations.

In this episode of What Do You Do Next?, join Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25 as he sits down with Martin Zerrudo, CEO of Seller Universe Ecommerce Group, to talk about strategies to increase sales. Martin discusses the importance of managing your ad campaign, why focusing on a budget can help you scale, and SEO tips to reach a wider audience with your product.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

This episode is brought to you by Seller Universe Ecommerce Group.

We provide essential Amazon and NetSuite service solutions for brand growth.

Seller Universe Ecommerce Group provides essential service solutions for brand growth and scale. We position brands for success through cost-effective growth initiatives and operational efficiencies. Our synchronized approach allows brands to dominate in today's complex, multiplatform ecommerce marketplace and ecosystem.

Our team at Seller Universe not only helps your brand on Amazon, but we also do Netsuite implementation and anything that gives you a headache around inventory management.

To learn more about what we can do for you and your brand, visit seller universe.agency.

Episode Transcript:

Intro 0:00

Welcome to the What Do You Do Next? podcast brought to you by Seller Universe Ecommerce Group. Whether you're just starting your ecommerce journey, finding ways to grow your online brand or can't seem to find the right tool or partner to help you break through. We're here to help. We interview experienced sellers, strategic service providers and other ecommerce experts who will help you answer the question. What do you do next?

Martin Zerrudo 0:25

Hi, this is Martin Zerrudo, host of the What Do You Do Next? podcast. Whether you're just starting your ecommerce journey, finding ways to grow your online brand or can't seem to find the right tool or partner to help you break through. We're here to help we interview experienced sellers, top strategic service providers and other seasons ecommerce experts who will help you answer the question, what do you do next? In past episodes, we've had guests who comfortable a lot of wide variety of different fields that pertain to ecommerce we'd had Misha by talking about DSP from pact, you Brian talking about NetSuite melanins brands and we had Mike Jack Miss Come on, from ecommerce guru talking about, you know, passion when it comes to starting brands. And a special shout out to Mike for always being a fantastic partner. I don't want to say in crime partner in ecommerce and always trying to help us grow not only in our mutual businesses, but for those who we can help along the way, today is going to be a little bit different. I actually have with me, Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25 here who has done 1000s I want to say millions now of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, and CEOs. And we have flipped the script. And today he will be interviewing me.

Jeremy Weisz 1:28

Martin I'm excited about this, you know, and I'm excited because I'm going to be asking the questions that everyone's asking of you and which is how do you grow companies, right? And people want to know, how do you or companies, they want to grow their company. So listen up, because that's what we're really going to dig deep on, and go in the weeds on so that you can grow your company as well. And before we dig into it, this episode is brought to you by Seller Universe Ecommerce Group. And they provide essential Amazon and NetSuite service solutions for brand growth. You know, I know Martin, you were just saying to me a couple months ago that you had one client in manufacturing, they sold on Amazon, but they weren't doing as well as they wanted. And they're like, Hey, can you help us? We need help with our ads. You know, once you dig in, I know you help holistically, but not by the way, and an off offhanded comment you said we have past Amazonians helping run ads at our company. I'm like, yeah, absolutely. Why don't you tell people that that's amazing, you know, but you took to them to to row as to 8.3. In layman's terms, like my terms, that means if you're, you know, they're spending $300,000, they spent $300,000 To make $2.4 million, which correct you want to rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat that all day long. And I know your team at Seller Universe not only helps the brand on Amazon, but you also do NetSuite implementation and anything that gives that company a headache around inventory management, so you can visit selleruniverse.io to learn more. So let's dig in a little bit. There was a how do you grow companies? Right, and there was a wallet company. Now I know you've helped coffee companies, skincare companies, all sorts of companies. But this specific one was a wallet company. And yes. First of all, it's super soft. Tell us about kind of the attributes of that company and how they found you.

Martin Zerrudo 3:18

You know, great question, Jeremy. And again, thank you so much for joining us. Is it a capability agenda, which Dr. Jeremy Jeremy is perfect. You got it. So Jeremy, great question. So whenever we have any kind of discovery when we meet brands for the first time, literally the first slide is our logo. And the second brand is we scale passionate ecommerce brands. So you can literally see that behind me in my passive marketing efforts behind me on the poster. And the reason why we have that is whether you're making a wallet or developing skincare or you know selling desks or lamps. We really are not in the business of working with every single person who's trying to sell and scale a product on Amazon. What we're looking for is finding a congruence see between us who are passionate about scaling Amazon brands and brand owners who are passionate about what it is that they're trying to sell and give back to the world. We really love working with people who kind of can mirror that level of value and passion when it comes to the Amazon marketplace. And so when it came to this particular wallet company, the owner and his friends were bunch of young post graduate men and women I think they were in their like mid 20s had a great idea right so the Apple air tag had just come out and it was the you know, a device that Apple introduced that allows you to find certain things wherever you know if you sync your iPhone with an air tag, you can find the air tag so you can put it to your keys you can put it on your your dog, you can put it anywhere and they decided why don't we make a really cool like luxury wallet and put a slot on the back where you can slide in the air tag so that in case you lose your wallet in case somebody steals your wallet, you can track it because the air tag is in there. So fantastic. idea, right. And for me, the three components really, to having the foundation for a successful business, especially on Amazon is one, you have to have a great product, great idea, right passion behind it, obviously. So the passion behind a really great product is key. Number one, if you don't care about it, you're just here to make money. We'll work with you. But I'm much more interested in people who want to work and have a passion behind it. So that's number one. So you have a great idea, your passion behind it, that's what they have. Number two, you have some capital, you know, Amazon 15 years ago is not the same as Amazon at 2022. It is not the Klondike Gold Rush Wild Wild West, where you can just put up a listing with very minimal effort and make hundreds of 1000s a month, it used to be like that, congratulations to anybody who's listening who has gone through that, you know, journey, you know, 10 years ago. But now it's a little bit more nuanced and significantly more competitive. It's really conservative 100%, and everybody who's listening to this has either listen to another podcast, or has heard somebody else talk in a podcast about, you know, the possibilities of of starting, selling a branded product on Amazon, but it's very, very complicated. It's very, very difficult. So the second criteria, honestly, is you have to have capital, if you don't have between 20 to $50,000, to invest in even getting started. And being willing to risk losing all of that, then I really would not recommend giving Amazon a shot. Because that money can better be spent, maybe investing could better be spent, you know, saving up to buy a home. Amazon really is if you have that sort of headroom, you're

Jeremy Weisz 6:31

gonna know, I was gonna say in my opinion, like, I don't know if it's my opinion, but that's not a lot of money, right? I mean, when you're talking about starting an actual business, if you want to buy into a franchise, right, it could be hundreds of dollars or a million dollars. And that's, you know, buying into the franchise, like, yeah, you know, you have a staff salary and everything like that. So exactly, you say 20, to 50,000. But, you know, start a real, I mean, there's a lot of opportunity on Amazon, for that amount of funds,

Martin Zerrudo 7:04

there is so great way to put that comparison. So when you're buying into a franchise, you get first of all the brand recognition, if you're gonna buy a Tim Hortons, shout out Tim Hortons, or if you're gonna buy, you know, if you're going to invest in like a Chick fil A franchise, shout out to Chick fil A, I was recently in Atlanta, and I ate it almost every day, every single meal, you get you buy into the infrastructure of those brands, they're gonna provide you, you know, all the guides, how to make the meals, how to make the drinks. So all of that support is there. Yes, $20,000 is relatively small in comparison to buying into like a brick and mortar franchise, having said that, they're not going to hold your hand, Amazon is not going to send you a rule book and a guide to scaling your brand, you're on your own, and you have no brand recognition. You know, I could do Jeremy and Martin's, you know, widgets. But nobody knows who Jeremy and Martin are, or how good these widgets are. And if somebody has already sold them, and what we're selling is closer to them, like what a franchise fee. So definitely $25,000 can go a long way, or it can disappear instantly. And in the case of this wallet company, they had a great idea they were passionate behind it. So that's criteria number one check. They had the capital for it, you know, they pulled all their money together. And they think, okay, we think we have a great product here, they were able to source it in China. So they had done a lot of the steps, you know, source it, whether it's Alibaba or wherever, find a manufacturer, you know, get the samples, you're happy with the product, okay, you put in your minimum order quantity, and then they ship it to the to the FBA warehouses. So all of that stuff was done. So what was the missing component, it really was the know how. And when it comes to the know how navigating all the different elements and features on Amazon, you have two choices, you can pay somebody to do it, or you can learn it yourself. And for these kids, they did not, I guess they didn't want to, they didn't want to spend the time learning it and kind of, you know, trial and error. It was a time where the product was just introduced for Apple. So their window of really being first to market with this particular wallet was very, very small or very narrow. So they really needed somebody who could execute and scale quickly, because two out of three is great, but three out of the three where that window is gone, you're not going to see the same kind of sales if you had done it when that opportunity was there. So they reached out to us and said, hey, you know, we have the listing up. Products are in the warehouse, we're doing like 6500 a month in sales. And for people who are listening, you're like, oh, man, that's awesome. 6500 or passive income. And Amazon just takes 15% and math minus all your cogs, maybe you've taken home like 1000 $2,000 in passive, but you're not going into Amazon for 1000 a month, you're going into Amazon to really, you know, make a significant return and grow your brand so that you can scale it and maybe you can turn it into more products and a bigger catalog. Or you can sell it to an aggregator right. Those are again, the other options that you have on the marketplace. So for them, they reached out to us and they said what can you do to really help us scale. So naturally, they have the two out of the three components. We were the third missing component that they needed. And within I want to say four to five months They went from 6500 a month to $113,000 a month in sales. And today, it's May 25 2022, they still hover between 100 to 200,000 a month in sales. And that goes back to them having the the willingness to accept that we have a great product, we have the capital to fund it, we just have to accept that we don't, we don't have the know how to execute. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with reaching out to experts like ourselves or any expert out there to get that final component and really scale on Amazon.

Jeremy Weisz 10:34

I'm wondering, Martin, you know, when they first came to you, what did you What did they want you to do? Because sometimes what people want you to do is, you know, they don't realize there's kind of more layers that you need to do to get to that point. So what were the things they wanted you to do in the beginning? And then what did you actually end up doing?

Martin Zerrudo 10:53

Yeah, so the framework on Amazon is there's so many different features. There's like keyword harvesting, there's copywriting just image sets, there's a plus content, there's PPC campaigns, there's brand governance, there's customer engagement. So all of those things, you can approach an agency or an expert and say, Hey, can you do the copywriting for me and I'll pay you X amount, can you create better images for me, and there are definitely services vendors and agencies out there, we do that, what we do is we take all of those features and elements, and we put them under three different stages, build stage, the drive stage, and then maintain stage. Because for us, in order to scale, a product on Amazon, it's not one or two silver bullet features like Oh, my God, your hero image is so good, you made a million dollars. That's not how it works, it has to be a concerted effort with all of these different elements. So when we go back to those three stages, what we discovered with this particular brand was they were in the build stage. That means they were not retail read the titles was not you optimizing all, you know, 200 bytes that they could the bullet points were not optimizing all 1000 bytes that were that they could aggregate the image keywords were not there, the image sets were not fantastic, the a plus. So we have what we call a retail ready checklist. And when we went through that checklist, we said, hey, guys, great product, you know, Congrats on getting it to this bar. But there's a lot of things, there's a lot of gaps. So our concerted effort within the first month was to get them retail ready. That's the same process that we follow whether we're managing aggregator accounts or brands, or whether we're managing somebody who's very experienced, and they just need a little bit of help that build, drive and earn or build, drive and maintain process. We call that MH, one. That MH one account management structure or approach is what we did with this particular company. After about a month and a half, they graduated from that retail ready build stage. And now we're talking about PPC now we're talking about the drive stage where we're driving traffic or awareness to the listing, excuse me.

Jeremy Weisz 12:51

That's the sexy stuff people want. They probably come in, they're like, Martin, just drive a bunch of traffic and lead you lead. Oh my god, let's just blow it out of the water and get an example back. Yeah, gotta keep going. I go ahead.

Martin Zerrudo 13:04

You know, it's funny that you mentioned that. Sometimes we're lucky enough that we get in there before they pull the trigger. I've had discovery calls where some potential clients feel like we're dropping so much money on ad campaigns, but we're not getting any sales. You look at the listing. Unfortunately, it's not great. You know, the titles are not optimized the bullet points, either there are too many there's like 50,000 words there, or there's like five words, the image sets are not high res. And we're talking in the day where people have like 4k phones, you know, and they're looking on like 2k, or 4k monitors, people are purchasing off of their iPad Pros that have very high resolution screen. So you have to imagine as a customer, if they're gonna compare your product, somebody else, and your competitor has 4k images, it's high resolution, lifestyle images look professional. And then your product looks like it was shot like by a Motorola flip phone from like 9098. It's not primed or retail ready, as we call it for conversion. So we've had customers or potential clients come to us and say, How come we're not converting, we spent so much on ads, they've dropped maybe like 10 to $16,000 on PPC. And they were not retail ready. And those are the horror stories that you hear about on Amazon because they're out of sequence. They have not graduated from the build stage yet. And they're playing in the drive stage trying to get people to learn about listing, but when they find out about it, and they go to their product detail page, and it looks like crap, you're not going to convert. So thankfully with this wallet company, we got in at the ground floor. The listing was there, we graduated them from the retail readiness stage, and now we're talking about PPC campaigns. What are the key words what are the key phrases that have particular search volume that we want to leverage so that we hit this market this niche as hard as we can, so they had some ad budget or ad spend budget reserved for us to do that, which was great. Typically, when you're still starting out, you kind of want to put a couple of $100 in there and kind of test a couple of key phrases and incrementally optimize and grow from there but for them they're very comfortable in dropping a couple of 1000 at the beginning because When they were, they were they trusted our credibility being able to perform for their PPC campaigns. And secondly, you want to have enough overhead that if the window to dominate that market is very, very narrow, you want to hit it as hard as you could. So they had fantastic paid ranking, like sponsored ranking, because they were appearing at the top of search results, because they had that budget for it. But they also had fantastic organic ranking, because of the way that the product detail pages were set up. And because they were relatively early, when people were looking for Apple air tech wallet, that was popping up both organically and through ads. So they were primed on both ends, structurally based off the very beginning of the foundation to really scale. So when they hit that maintain stage, where we're just maintaining, you know, income, sorry, income inventory, we're looking at the velocity of sales and making sure that they have enough in their FBA warehouses in their FBM warehouses. That's how you get to November sales of 100. And, you know, over 100,000, was because the due diligence was put in place. And everybody was on the same page in terms of what is the objective at certain points in the relationship? And I think that's very key for anybody who's listening that wants to launch or has tried to launch product on Amazon, and you don't know what's going on. You know, it's an honest conversation of where are you? Are you just starting to build your listing? If you've already built your listing? Or do you have the correct people who are managing your ad campaigns? Right? Some people, you know, Ro S is a number, this gets thrown around, renal return on adspend can be very, very deceiving, right? You can say, oh, my gosh, I could have 10 Ro s. Yeah, but you sold two things, because you spent $1 on ad campaigns versus Hey, you ro ss five, but you sold 100,000. You know, it's all really how you look at it. And, and for this particular wallet company, because we had such a strong partnership at the beginning, they trusted us in the process, they had a great product, there was some capital to fund not only the relationship, but to fund the ad spend. And to continue those purchase orders. As the velocity of sales went up. It was very, very successful in a very short period of time. And I'm not I when I do this pitch, and I tell this to potential clients this story, I never say I'm going to guarantee you 1,600% conversion increase in six months, right? While this is a great case study, I want this to be used as an example of what can happen on Amazon, if everything lines up with the things that we can control. But there are many things that we can't control that even if we were to replicate this process with another brand, it may go differently. And I'm very, very honest and comfortable in saying that because that's Amazon, right?

Jeremy Weisz 17:34

Yes, the Asterix results may vary.

Martin Zerrudo 17:38

Results may vary. Sales may be larger than they.

Jeremy Weisz 17:44

But um, no, I mean, the best time and money and energy I've ever spent is hiring an expert, right? Because people can toil and and try and figure it out. But now you're losing time and especially with this company, time to market. But just time in general, there are other competition that crops up there's other things that they're figuring out. So having a dedicated team, and this is all they're doing all day. So you can focus on other things, and your business is invaluable. In my opinion. I want to hear you know, I love talking about the build, I'm gonna dig a little bit into the retail ready checklist and surprises on there. But in the build, and then the drive, right, which is the sexy part everyone's like, hey, let's just, you know, put a lot of PPC in traffic. Do you work pushback you get in that phase? Do you get pushback in that phase? Oh, what do people push back against?

Martin Zerrudo 18:31

So whether it's the early stages or something as sophisticated as like a DSP campaign where we're talking about like hundreds of 1000s of dollars, like you mentioned at the beginning, you know, we ran a DSP campaign. For those who are listening, DSP is like an Amazon ad tool, where you can leverage your products on and off the Amazon marketplace. The goal is, is to increase awareness through impressions, because you're on so many websites, so many streaming sites, so on and so forth. The push back whether something is significant and as expensive as DSP or something very early as PPC is like I had mentioned is that ro s conversation we have a lot of clients who are just so they're so targeted in their zoned in on like, what, what is my row asked, What is my return on adspend? Right? It's like I want it to be 10. It has to be 10 No matter what has to be five no matter what. And it's like, what if your ro ss three? What if your RO s is four, but you have really great profit margins, right? It really all depends. And that conversation of Oh, sorry. And also in that process of getting to that understanding, sometimes it takes time for us to understand and optimize certain key phrases that work and some tests, you got to test you got to test and iterate and take a look at and say, Hey, an uptick or a downtick of a couple points is what we need to understand where we move on from month to month three and being very impatient. Like for example, if people are watching this that you know if we have this on our YouTube, if you see my hand here, right, if the sales are are so slow in the incremental We'll increase on top line revenue. And like what's going on here, I wanted to see like a spike, I want to see a spike, well, the spike will happen or the the eventual ramp up of significant of significant increase in sales will happen in the process of gathering that data through your campaigns. Right? Why would I tell you to drop $10,000 on a key phrase. Now, if we didn't put two to three months into developing a strategy that we know this particular key phrase, nobody is bidding on this particular key phrase, if you want to beat your competitors you want to bid on, now's the time to drop that $10,000 of that PPC campaign, after we've done all the due diligence, and gathered that data, it's so much better to make a strategy for especially for ad campaigns, when you're leveraging data, like historical data versus gut feeling or assumption, or shooting from the hip and say, I need these sales. Now, I only have two weeks, or I have a month to see how much these are going to increase. Let's just roll the dice. It's really not how it works, you know, and the more data you have, the more time you have to leverage it. You really want to have that slow ramp up, and not peaks and valleys of sales, because that means one we don't we're not reading the data correctly. And two are not leveraging the right kind of strategy to stabilize that. Because if you're What if you sell 1000 units one month, and then one unit the next month? And then 50,000, the next month? What do you tell your manufacturer? Oh, yeah, this month, send me 100,000. And then for a year and a half, send me three products. And then the next two months send me 400,000. It's it's not a strategy for long term growth and scale, there has to be structure, there has to be time to test. And that affects everything when it comes to inventory forecasting, introducing new products, all of it.

Jeremy Weisz 21:37

Or no, I'm wondering the philosophy on something for a second, because you probably I don't know, if you have clients, do they? They hey, I want to stay within this budget for for ads. And I had this conversation with someone. And you know, in direct response in general, I guess my philosophy is always like, hey, if I'm breaking even and this is not talking on Amazon, if I'm breaking even, or even making a little bit, I'm acquiring customers for free, and then they come back and buy more. Absolutely. With Amazon. What's the philosophy of getting know? Because for me, like the budgets like well, I don't care what the budget is, if I'm breaking even or above, I'm acquiring customers for free. And maybe that's not the right philosophy on Amazon. At what point? Do you say? Is budget really even part of the conversation? If you're making money on your, your ad spend? Like are they back? Or like if you're at a break even is that fine? Like assuming your costs are? Because those people are going to come back and then you're doing more? What's the philosophy on the budget and breaking even?

Martin Zerrudo 22:40

Great question. So when it comes to the philosophy on budget, we hear all the time, we know well, what's the budget for let's say DSP, because now we're talking about 10s of 1000, some campaigns 300,000, some products like 50,000, for one product a month, so. So when it comes to something like DSP, right? I've heard Oh, the budget is unlimited. So long as we hit a certain amount of sales, so long as we're hitting a certain amount of requests, then keep up in that budget, your budget is infinite. Here's the problem with that. Sometimes, though, the budget will provide more sales, that increase in budget from say, 50 to 150,000. Maybe that 100,000 was earmarked for something else. Maybe the 100,000 was meant to go into product development, maybe it was meant to go into a different type of social media marketing strategy. Maybe it was meant to go towards bonuses, you know, we never know, for us, we think great, you're making money, sales are coming in, you're making you know, five 810, Ro s, let's keep, let's go from 100,000 to 200,000. So you make a million, then now you make 2 million, because we went up to 500,000. For us, that makes sense. But what we don't have an understanding of is maybe outside of the person that we're dealing with as a direct contact at the brand. There may be some conversations that are happening in the C level, you know, C suite level where that money, they've only ever thought hey, yeah, we're hitting great ro s, let's just keep it at 200 them every month. No need to go up. No need to go down. Let's not rock the boat, we can predict this amount. And the sales that come in, we can move it around, blah, blah, blah. But you're right, if I'm, if I'm generating a certain amount of return on adspend Why would I put my foot off the pedal? I'm gonna keep going. Sure I'll pay myself $1 At the end of the month, who cares? Like we're the it's, it's hot. You know what I mean? Like strike while the animals hot? If it doesn't yield, did you 200,000 sales, and then 150 yields to 350. Then keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. And then if it craters or if it slowly Peters off, then now what we have is historical data of when the last six months is, is your product super hot in the market. So now we can forecast for next year. So let's ramp down to adspend. next couple of months, let's maybe start introducing some new products, make some optimizations, start building new audiences. And then when we hit that same sales, you know, seasonal sales trend, let's ramp it back up. But instead of starting at 100,000 to start I got 300,000. Like, we want to go back to understanding the data. These are the kinds of conversations that sometimes they're super easy for people who understand ecommerce who understands, you know, seasonal trends and, and sales velocity and all that. And then there are there are conversations where some brand owners just, you know, they have wholesale distribution, they have brick and mortars, they have other financial commitments, that though the ad spend may be super sexy and effective on Amazon, it's not the only thing on the ledger that they have to worry about.

Jeremy Weisz 25:29

Yep. So thanks for walking me through. So we have the build stage, the drive stage and the Maintain stage. And and if you're not a normal company, I say that in a positive way. Because you holistically, don't just help people build their brand and Amazon but you also help with integration of the inventory management and you even do NetSuite implementation. Yes. Does that come into play in the maintain or from beginning? Where does that fall in the stages when you're working with a company as far as the maybe it's NetSuite or some other inventory management?

Martin Zerrudo 26:04

So for our, for our agency, we have three verticals that used to be two, we're introducing a third one, which is Shopify, so it's NetSuite, Amazon and Shopify. So when it comes to Amazon, brands and clients that we work with, if they're at that point where they can afford NetSuite as an ERP, because NetSuite is relatively, you know, it requires investment in comparison enterprise ish. Yeah, exactly. Once you're in that level of sales, and level of growth, where we're managing inventory coming from multiple streams, you have multiple marketplaces, and you need to generate a significant amount of data and reporting so that you can track all the different moving parts. These are conversations that are reserved usually for aggregators, we're in the process of implementation and also project managing various NetSuite implementation and integrations for various aggregators at the moment. So if you're at that level, right, so the wallet company is somebody who's just starting off, so for them when they get to that main stage, maintain stage, that's really just about introducing new products, making sure that brand governance is healthy, making sure that the reviews continue to go up. If in three to five years, the wallet company turns into like a wallet conglomerate, and they're like dominating the space, then we would definitely have that conversation of okay, it's maybe time to graduate from Google Sheets and excel sheets to QuickBooks and then maybe from QuickBooks to NetSuite because now you're not just on Amazon, you're on Walmart, you're on Etsy, you have your Shopify, you have your.com, right? All of those things need to be integrated together. And absolutely, NetSuite is the ERP to do that. So I guess in the grand scheme of things, if it's super duper successful, and you literally do the to the moon, you know, journey of your business, then yes, NetSuite would be something we would eventually want to introduce, because of the nature of how big your brand would have gotten to utilize NetSuite effectively.

Jeremy Weisz 27:51

And some people come in in the middle of this journey, I imagine where they have all this and maybe what tends to be a big pain point for someone who is using NetSuite currently. And they're like, you know, we aren't, I don't know the what's causing them a headache in NetSuite to cause them to call.

Martin Zerrudo 28:07

Yeah, so I'm gonna do my best to answer this, the rest of our team, usually just the discovery for NetSuite, because I'm mostly on the Amazon side, but to your question, you know, when it comes to NetSuite implementation can be very easy, but it can be easily derail? And the reason for that is very nature of integrating NetSuite is you need to go from maybe you have three different marketplaces, you have one team that's doing inventory, you have one person who's doing HR, you have one person who's doing, you know, various things that NetSuite can connect to, it's it's wrangling all of these movements are siloed. Exactly. So they're all siloed, but also the way that they're siloed, may be different, right? So it's being able to take all of these different moving parts and departments and combine them into this integration, you know, a smooth NetSuite implementation can start off and be completed in three to six months. But something super extensive, where you have multiple brands across the board can take a significant amount of time, not that it's going to take too long, but definitely will take a significant amount of due diligence. And it requires two people right like us providing the NetSuite implementation service and the brand or the aggregator or the company, giving us access to and being able to communicate with all the various heads of departments and different partners and, and three pls and anybody else that you're connected to, so that we can actually integrate it into NetSuite.

Jeremy Weisz 29:30

Got it, thanks for pointing that out. Because I know people are coming to you in different places their journey, sometimes they're really mature, sometimes they're not as mature and you kind of handle all those those pieces in phases. But so going back to the build, drive, maintain in the built, you mentioned this retail ready checklist, and there's probably a lot of points on this checklist. But what's something that surprises people that is on that checklist that you you checked?

Martin Zerrudo 30:00

Oh, good question. Um honestly, I would say because I come from I come from Amazon copywriting in my in a past life. Honestly, it's the copy, because they'll write whatever. What am I selling here? Widget, Jeremy and Martin's widget. Let's say it's this right? Jeremy Martin's rich widget black round made of plastic 100%. Dishwasher Safe in my mind. And in your mind Jeremy, you might think, Hey, this is perfect, but the brand name but the color, you can put it in the dishwasher. What's the problem, right? And that retail readiness checklist comes understanding with what keywords or key phrases should be in your title, bullet point and description to leverage your product in your category. So what might have been missed in that description, maybe we didn't talk about the type of plastic grade, maybe in this category. You know, polyurethane is a certain keyword that's like, has hundreds of 1000s of search volume for this particular widget. We didn't know that maybe the textured grip on the edge is a feature that a lot of people are looking for. We didn't include that in the features or the bullet points because we thought we just have to say it's black, and it's round and you can buy it. Right? What if we said that it's durable, and that it doesn't easily snap? Right rigidity? You know, the way that it's been temper, the way it has been crafted is superduper durable, maybe durability for this widget as a search volume has very high search volume. So that retail readiness checklist includes a lot of different things. But I think what surprises a lot of people the most is how granular your copy needs to be. Because search volume is king on Amazon because that's how you start any kind of purchasing journey outside of seeing any kind of DSP impressions or Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever you get on Amazon literally happened last night, my wife wanted to buy a hairbrush. I'm not thinking of a hairbrush brand, I'm not looking at a hairbrush ad, I type in hairbrush. And if she wants a certain hairbrush to take out tangles, airbrush for what hair Hair brush for tangles hair brush for newly died hair, these are search volume. These are search terms that will come with specific types of search volume that we have to leverage across your listing. And if you're not doing that, if you're listening to this right now, and you haven't done the due diligence to see what key phrases or keywords are being leveraged effectively in the category, you're selling your product, then you are not retail ready. And every second, every millisecond that you're listing is live, that it's not leveraging as much SEO value on the Amazon algorithm that you can, your competitors are every time you go to sleep. Your listing is not utilizing all the SEO value that it can. And it hurts me every time we do this discovery, we do an audit of these people's listings. And there's so much potential, but the way that it's written, it's just not great. And I'm not saying copywriting is the silver bullet. But in terms of retail readiness, it plays a huge part in making sure that you're ready to actually start doing ad campaigns and graduate to the drive stage. But we wouldn't do that unless your listing is optimized. For sure.

Jeremy Weisz 33:06

Martin, you're like the Navy Seal of Amazon. I remember I interviewed Mark Devine, the Navy SEAL. And that's actually the mindset he would have. He's like someone is in a cave somewhere training to kill me. And I need to be training, you know, as much or more to them. When we meet some day. You have the eye you have the edge. Exactly. And that's that's your the Amazon Navy SEAL. But I want to point out like there's some really gold here, which is, you know, you're talking people just talking about features. They also don't talk about benefits, and you almost merge copywriting and market research into this into to one right. It's not just copywriting what you're doing, you are actually taking the copywriting and the market research or what people are actually searching it and merging it into one

Martin Zerrudo 33:52

is going to blow your mind. Jeremy has a third layer. So there's the basic copywriting. We're looking at search volume to see are we utilizing all of the SEO value? Are we looking at all the search terms and the volume of searches? Sometimes you're looking for things that have a lot of search volume? Maybe sometimes you're looking for things that don't? Right? Maybe some things that are kind of flying under the radar, but if you differentiate yourself, you can capture that market. So if we go back to this widget example, what if we said in our listing, it's collapsible, and nine out of 10 listings don't say collapsible, but for whatever reason there's 100 people every month looking for collapsible widgets, collapsible black round widgets, you put that in your title, and guess what you've now captured all of those 100 people who are looking to buy a collapsible widget because you put it in your title, you pull it in your features, right? So it's a very granular feature, I'm sorry, very granular approach to copywriting. But here's the third layer. We have a tool that allows us to compare the SEO, I guess you want to say, what's the term here? I don't wanna say ranking. It's like, maybe value score. Let me use that term. I can't say specifically because As of NDA, but there's a tool that allows us to compare Jeremy and Martin's widget copies value versus maybe Dave, and Mike's widget copy. And if this person is using certain key phrases, and if they the tool will take all of the copy and save their SEO copy value is eight out of 10. And yours is six out of 10. So we make certain adjustments, the tool does a thing and it says Now Jeremy, and Martin's widget has nine out of 10, copy value score. And you are now you know, a point ahead of your competitor, Dave, and Mike. So we do that for all of the Amazon accounts that we manage as well as we compare the SEO value, not just off Amazon's search volume, but our own relationship with this internal tool that allows us to compare SEO value score, which is very, very, very granular and very, very helpful because best believe there are certain brands out there who say I want to eat market share into Jeremy and Martin's widget, what keywords are they using? What key phrases are they using? I want my SEO value or score to be higher than theirs, right? These are strategic moves that brands do all the time. And it's another layer of granularity. And we're just talking about copyrighting. We're not even talking about image sets. We're not even talking about a plus content. We're not even talking about brands store, Amazon posts, the buying program, so many things that need to happen before we would consider you retail ready.

Jeremy Weisz 36:25

Martin, first of all, thank you, I want to I'm gonna have to re listen to this. There's a lot of nuances to this. I want to just point people to a more listen to more episodes of the podcast point people to selleruniverse.agency, are there any other places online, people should check out to learn more?

Martin Zerrudo 36:43

No SellerUniverse.agency, go to our website, read us a little bit about ourselves, excuse the picture of the CEO over there in the pretentious brown suit. That guy needs to take some new photos. But yeah, you know, fill out the form. And let's just have a conversation. Again, like I mentioned at the very beginning, if you just need some advice, or some help on how to scale your brand, and you just want to, you know, see where the relationship can go. totally open to it. Like I said, I'm hoping and I'm open to and my goal is to work with passionate ecommerce brands people who really believe in the product and you know what, shout out to you Jeremy to Rise25.com You guys have been fantastic and really helping us in our podcast infrastructure as well. So you know, ecommerce is is booming. It's a huge huge industry obviously around the world but the people who can really provide value and help like yourself, like Mike a lot of different experts in the space you know, they're few and far between. So if you find the ones who can really provide value, you know, give back say thank you like I'm doing right now thank you Jeremy and let's help each other out because at the end of the day, you can make money in a lot of different ways. But if we're in the ecommerce space together, then let's succeed together you know as partners,

Jeremy Weisz 38:00

selleruniverse.agency, always a pleasure. Thanks Martin.

Martin Zerrudo 38:04

Thank you Jeremy. Hopefully I did okay as a guest on my podcast

Outro 38:12

Thanks for listening to the What Do You Do Next? podcast. Make sure to tune in again next time and make sure to click subscribe to get updates on future episodes. Take care

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