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DON'T hire an Amazon Agency until you ask these questions...
119 Plays4 months ago
In this episode, I share essential tips for hiring the right Amazon agency. Finding and hiring the correct Amazon agency can be difficult because there are so many out there to choose from. After watching this video, you will feel more confident about finding the right agency for you and how to go about it. I’ll explain the risks of hiring the wrong agency and how it can lead to losing money and damaging your account. I give you a list of easy questions to ask before hiring an agency. These questions will help you figure out if the agency is right for you.
If you are looking for an Amazon agency get an audit from my team and see how I can help scale your business: https://hubs.la/Q02FxK1J0
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Transcript
The Risks of Hiring the Wrong Amazon Agency
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint Podcast.
00:00:06
Speaker
Hiring an Amazon agency can be a complete disaster if you hire the wrong agency. You can end up losing a ton of money and it can destroy your entire account, but there's a few simple questions that if you ask, you can avoid all of this. I will walk you through every single one of those questions and make sure to ask every single one, even though you don't want to. Make sure to ask every single one because it will save you a lot of time, energy, and pain if you hire the wrong agency.
Types of Amazon Agencies
00:00:28
Speaker
There is a ton of Amazon agencies out there. Every single day more and more pop up. People that were freelancers all of a sudden are an agency. Someone who worked for an agency for a year is all of a sudden now an agency. I will help you figure out which one is the right agency for you and exactly what to ask them before hiring them.
00:00:44
Speaker
Alright, let's start with some basics. What is an Amazon agency? So an Amazon agency can be any agency that helps brands on Amazon. They could be doing PPC, they could be doing DSP, they could be doing creatives, they could be doing inventory management, they could be doing SEO, they could be doing brand protection and account health. There's so many things that they could be doing. Some agencies are specialists, so they specialize in things like creatives or PPC. I started out as a PPC agency and I specialized only in PPC. And then there are other agencies that are full account management. So basically they have a suite of resources like PPC, DSP, creatives, reviews, all of those kinds of things inside of their agency. And that's what Trivium
Who Should Consider Hiring an Agency?
00:01:18
Speaker
is right now. It's a full service agency that helps brands on Amazon across all different services.
00:01:22
Speaker
Now, who's an Amazon agency for? There's two types of people that Amazon agencies are for. Number one, people who need special help with a certain thing. For example, they need PPC management or for example, they need their main image optimized or they need their listing built. The other type is a brand that's looking to fully hand over their Amazon account management to another agency. Now, if you are an Amazon seller and most of your money comes from Amazon, I do not suggest that you hand over your account to a full service agency. However, if you're a direct-to-consumer brand that's omnipresent, maybe you have a Shopify store, you're also on Amazon, Walmart, et cetera, it would be a good idea to hand over your account to a full service agency. And the reason is when you are an Amazon seller, you're spending your entire day focused and obsessing over one thing and is how to grow your sales on Amazon. So there is no reason that you should be giving that responsibility to someone else or else they would be the business owner. However, when you're building a brand and you're omnipresent, you're focused on building Facebook ads, building Google ads, scaling in retail, scaling on Walmart, scaling on Amazon, to so many different things. So you have to hire a lot of different teams to help you grow
Benefits of Amazon Agencies
00:02:22
Speaker
your brand. Now, do you need a lot of money to hire an Amazon agency? The answer is no. There are a lot of agencies that are affordable, including Trivium. One example is actually one of my first clients was a wallet brand and I charged him $1,000 a month and we took him from zero to $1 million dollars a month in revenue over the course of 15 months.
00:02:40
Speaker
Now, this is obviously an exception and it's a brand that performed really, really well. However, with that being said, all brands of all sizes can benefit from agencies. All right, so what are some pros and cons of hiring an Amazon agency? Let's talk about pros. A good agency knows what it's doing and will help you scale your brand faster than you will do it on your own. Also, it's better than having one in-house employee because they have a team of people that specialize in certain things. So one person can be a strategist, one person can be a PPC manager, one person can be a creatives person, one person can be for discounts and coupons, things like that. And it will probably cost you the same as one full-time employee. Also, agencies have been there and done that. They've worked on a lot of different accounts. So they've had a lot of experience with a lot of different accounts, they've seen a lot of different things, and they can apply that knowledge to your brand.
00:03:21
Speaker
Also, working on a lot of different brands, they're in touch with so many different things that are happening on Amazon and they're probably going to catch it a lot faster than you will.
Pitfalls of Choosing the Wrong Agency
00:03:28
Speaker
All right. What are some of the cons? Well, they're going to cost you money and sometimes they could cost you a lot of money, especially if they're the wrong hire. Working with the wrong agency can definitely screw your account over and they can assign you a junior account manager that doesn't really know what they're doing. There could be no quality control and you could end up losing a lot of money. So make sure to follow along because the questions I'm going to tell you to ask are going to help you identify those agencies. Also, some of them take a percentage of sales. I really don't like this and we don't do this at Trivium, but that will end up creeping up and they will take more and more money out of your revenue. And sometimes that's not a line because your revenue could be high, but also your ad spend is really high and your profit is non-existent. And the only person that gets paid is the agency.
How to Choose the Right Agency
00:04:05
Speaker
All right, what are some ways that you can find an Amazon agency? Number one, word of mouth. Asking people, asking your network, being in the Facebook groups, going to conferences and asking people who've had good experience with their Amazon agency. That's usually the best because
00:04:17
Speaker
people have already tried them. Also, you can use agency directories and websites like Clutch and Trustpilot. Finally, you can also look at brands that are doing well on Amazon but not way ahead of you, just a little bit ahead of you, and you can ask them who they're using for their Amazon agency. So let's say you're doing 500K a year in revenue, look for brands that are doing 5 million a year in revenue and ask them. But if they're doing 20 or 30 million a year, their in-house team or their agency is probably not the right fit for you. All right, let's get into the questions. Number one, am I at the right stage? Will an agency actually help me or do I think that an agency is going to save me? But actually, I have a really bad product or I don't have any reviews on Amazon and I don't actually need help with PPC. I just need to build a better listing. I need to get more reviews. I need a better product, etc. A lot of times people will come to us and they're looking for us to save them. But all an Amazon agency is going to do is they're just going to work on your account. So they're going to improve your PPC. They're going to launch campaigns. They're going to optimize bids. They're going to optimize your listing. They're going to optimize your main image, your bullet points, your description.
00:05:15
Speaker
These are all things that are going to add incremental improvement to your product and to your listing, but it is not going to save a product that is never going to win. All right. Next, ask for the credentials and why they start an agency. The answer is very, very important. Credentials is huge because some people work for an agency for a year or they freelance for a little bit and they decided that they want to start their own agency. They are not qualified to do that. However, if it's someone that's owned their own brand and sold it or owned their own brand and it was successful and they turned into an agency or someone that's worked for a very long time for an agency, did very well, was at a very high leadership role and then decided to build their own agency, those are good examples. Also ask them for similar clients and ask them to connect you to those similar clients. So let's say you have a supplement brand like me, a hydration product, what other supplement brands have they managed and can I talk to those founders? Any agency that's afraid to connect you to references or clients that they're actively working with something is shady and that is a red flag and you shouldn't hire them. Next, ask them for success stories and why they're successful. This is very important because you want to see the success that they've had and you want to understand why they've had it. Another brand similar to yours being super successful because they are very big off of Amazon does not help you. However, if they've taken a very similar brand just like yours and they've built it up from scratch or maybe they took a brand like yours and they scaled it from 1 million to 8 million,
00:06:30
Speaker
That's the type of success that you want to see and you want to understand how it happened and you want to make sure that they can actually replicate that for yourself. Also, ask them to name three clients that they failed with. They have to be open about their mistakes and what happened and why they failed.
Ensuring Alignment with Your Agency
00:06:43
Speaker
And if you notice that they're not taking accountability or they're blaming the client or blaming the product or saying it didn't have enough reviews or it was this or that or bad or the market or something external that's not them, That's not a person you want to do business with because that's not a person that's accountable. Then ask them how they measure success. This is critical. They need to measure success the exact same way that you measure success. So you have to ask them, how do you measure the success of us working together? Does it mean that there is more profit? Maybe you don't only care about profit. Maybe you want profit and you want really good communication and you want constant communication. So make sure that you guys are aligned on the definition of success.
00:07:16
Speaker
Also, ask them how long they expect it will take before seeing results. This question matters a lot because if they say six months or 12 months, maybe that's not the timeline you're looking for. Maybe you're more looking for 60 days or 90 days. And if they give you a very short period, like two to four weeks, they're probably lying. And if they give you a very long period of time, then maybe you're not happy waiting 12 months until you see success. Next, ask them what they're going to update you on and how often they're going to update you on. Updates are very, very important. How they update you? Is it on Slack? Is it email? Is it calls? Very important. I work in Slack. I want to be communicated with every single day. I want to get updates every single day, every other day. If it's an Amazon account, if it's my Amazon account, I want an every single day update. I can't wait for a weekly call and then we're going to see why the results for a week were bad. If something happens wrong in one day, I want it immediately fixed. So you can also ask them to share examples of reports and communication.
Client Education and Communication
00:08:07
Speaker
Tell them, open up, show me, show me a report that you've done for a client. A lot of the times, they can easily just redact confidential information and they can share the whole thing with you. It's not a problem. Also, ask them if they're going to educate you. An important thing when working with another agency is that you learn from them. It's not just, hey, you're plugging someone in, they're just going to do whatever, and then you're going to be like, okay, I don't know if this is good or not. They should be educating you. One of our biggest pillars here at Trivium is education. You'll notice how many YouTube videos I put out there, how many podcasts, how many interviews I do. I put out so much free content because I want to help other people. If you feel like they're gatekeeping their content or there's some secret sauce that they have,
00:08:42
Speaker
It's a red flag and you should probably not work with them. Next, ask if you can meet the team that's actually going to be working on your account.
Trivium's Comprehensive Services
00:08:49
Speaker
A lot of the times you're going to have a call with the founder or the salespeople and they will do anything to sell you the service. However, when it comes time to working with the team, you get assigned a different team. You start talking to them. you realize that the promises the salespeople made you or the founder made you, none of that is going to actually happen on your account or with the people that you're working with. So make sure to meet the team before working with them so you can understand what kind of people you will be working with. And finally, ask what the cost structure is like.
00:09:14
Speaker
If they are charging a percentage of revenue or a percentage of spend, that might not align with your goals. so Some people it might align. Like if your goal is to grow your revenue so much that you want to give the agency a cut to incentivize them to grow a revenue, you could do that. But some people will charge a percentage of spend, which doesn't make any sense. All I would do is just spend more and more money. So find an agency that has a cost structure that you like. So for example, what we like to do at Trivium is a flat fee, retainer base. So it's the same amount every single month. and a small percentage of profit sometimes for some bigger accounts so we can incentivize a team to grow profits, right? Because profits is what matters. All right, guys. I hope this was very useful for you. Trivium is a full service Amazon agency. So if you're looking for help with PPC, DSP, reviews, creatives, SEO, inventory management, account health, any of that kind of stuff, if you're looking to scale your brand on Amazon, feel free to reach out.