Why do small and medium-sized sellers work harder than others but still fail to achieve big success?

(This article is contributed by "Cross-border Seller Qige")

Bosses who come from a sales background are often not very good at management:

There are two types of Amazon seller bosses: one is from a technical background , like our top seller Anke , who seems to be a Google engineer; the other type , which accounts for the majority , is from a sales background like Brother Qi .

What are the characteristics of a boss who comes from sales? What a boss who comes from sales hates most is standardization. He needs to be fast (so fast that the pictures are all stolen from Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com). Because Qi Ge has been working on Amazon for so many years, he thinks that winning the market is the core, and quickly dominating the Amazon category is the core. Shipping, listing, dominating the screen, and making money with explosive orders, hurry up. Currently, 5 out of 10 categories are ours, hurry up. You don’t have to call me boss, it’s okay for me, just call me Qi Ge. Don’t call me boss, just call me Qi Ge. So Amazon colleagues should be able to understand that companies where bosses come from sales are not so standardized, and even the names are not so standardized, such as Brother Zhang, Sister Li, and Brother Qi. The boss comes from a sales company, and people don’t listen to the system, but people listen to people. It all depends on the big voice and the volume, but when it developed to more than 100 people, Qi Ge found that this voice didn’t seem to be very good. Could it be that he didn’t protect his voice well and didn’t practice the volume for so many years? At that time, he found that the sound didn’t seem to reach the last row. It's not easy to develop, because it challenges Qi Ge's inertia. When Qi Ge mentions standardization, process, and systematization, his head is buzzing. The company is too big for Qi Ge to handle! His voice cannot reach the last row.

Introducing standardized processes to make the company stronger and bigger

1. Say goodbye to being the only one, and turn excellence from a few to all: The current problems of Amazon are generally limited to the 80/20 principle, and the order sales volume is always limited to a few fixed operations, which means that the boss is kidnapped by the operation. When the base salary + commission reaches a certain stage, the salary structure will fall apart. For example, when the profit reaches 1 million US dollars, the salary that employees receive will be around 100,000 US dollars. Since I have 100,000 US dollars in start-up capital, why should I work for your boss (this is human nature, all operations have the heart to be the boss)? Amazon operations are not foreseen by the boss, and the knowledge level of operations is only at the sales level. Many people who sell out and work alone did not foresee that Amazon is a heavy asset platform, with payment, logistics costs, 14-day fund pledge , withdrawal cycle, etc., because if you issue 100 orders per day, you may need 3,000 goods in circulation. It is far from as simple as we think, and it is not as simple as getting the money back the next day after the product is sold. This is a problem with the company's operating system. Each system is a process of capital circulation, and each process cannot go wrong. If one link goes wrong, the goods may not be sold or the capital chain may be broken. Therefore, the employee promotion channel process, reasonable benefit distribution process, corporate culture process construction (need to be embedded in the company process), etc. need to be gradually built by our Amazon bosses, otherwise the longer the time is delayed, the more serious the problem will be.

2. Change firefighters into coaches: Before the company has a process, have you ever felt that: repeated problems and repeated mistakes, simple problems and repeated mistakes. There are several problems in the operation of the entire company every day, and we become the people who solve problems every day. At this time, we are likely to get stuck. There is simply not enough time. We comfort ourselves that the harder we work, the luckier we are. Some bosses take Boss Xiao's words every day: "Why come to Shenzhen after leaving work at ten o'clock!" as their motto. The process is like a traffic light when crossing the road. It looks like a mechanical indicator light, but if it is gone, there will be a traffic jam immediately; the process is like a navigator. Without it, you will take the wrong road; the process is like the eight extraordinary meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. As long as the meridians are blocked, people will get sick.

3. Turn accidental success into inevitable success: Many operators and bosses will encounter this problem. A product is put on the shelves, but they don’t know how it sells. The boss asked the operator to summarize the experience, but the operator couldn’t say anything. He felt that it was God’s will. Could it be that my family’s Feng Shui made the orders so popular? ! ! There is no reason why Western companies have become stronger and bigger. It is definitely quantifiable, measurable, and inheritable. Only in this way can they have been bigger in the past 100 years. How can a company with a little salt, less water, and some ginger and garlic turn accidental success into inevitable success? Here, Brother Qi simply takes the Amazon operation page as an example: sales = exposure * click-through rate * conversion rate * customer unit price. Let’s take the click-through rate as an example. For example, if the advertising click-through rate only reaches 1%, it is considered to be up to standard. At this time, we can look at the background advertising page to check whether the advertising click-through rate in recent period has met the standard. If it does not meet the standard, is it because our price is too high, the main picture is unattractive, the star rating is not up to standard, etc. A good process must be: simplified, professional, and standardized.

All the companies that have become strong and big must have a standard process system behind them. How can Amazon sellers get rid of accidental success and turn it into inevitable success? No longer burn incense and pray to Buddha to seek wealth and honor in danger? Processes manage things, and systems manage people. Companies without processes have introduced a lot of systems, which will eventually lead to the company neither growing big nor becoming strong.

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