Copy of 17# the-essential-ecom-team_2023-aug-16-0618pm_retail_initiative trancipt
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[00:00:00] Hey, welcome to today's episode, retail Initiative. Today I wanna talk about building a team that can actually grow your sales. In the last week, I've had like five or six conversations with people that were like trying to hire this role. They were all pretty successful brick and mortar retailers trying to start growing their online sales, and so they wanted to make that next hire in a lot of situations.
[00:00:25] They wanted to make that next hire before working with us, which I, I get the thought behind. [00:00:30] And I would ask like, tell me about the role that you're looking for. And they're like, well, we want someone to be in charge of the website. So they're gonna do social media and they're going to run our ads, and they're gonna manage our site, and they're gonna send our emails and they're gonna put products in and they're gonna do all of these things for us.
[00:00:44] And here's the thing that I've learned. I've worked with hundreds of very successful. Like omnichannel retailers, like successful stores, successful online stores, and I've seen behind the scenes in all of them. And here's what I can tell you, [00:01:00] that role, that skillset doesn't exist. Like there's not this mythical.
[00:01:05] E-commerce person out there that can just do all of the things and they might be able to do it to some degree, but they're not going to be incredible. Like even think about two sides of what we just talked about. Like we had a very creative side where they're managing the creative aspect of the site, but then we had a really tactical side where they are entering items and kind of managing, like there's an inventory management aspect to [00:01:30] that.
[00:01:30] And think about the type of person that's really good at those. How many people have you met that are just super creative and incredibly organized and structured like the, the kinds that would be a personal assistant? Typically, those skill sets don't overlap, and so what ends up happening is we try to find this one role to do all of it, and we don't set them up for success.
[00:01:52] They may actually be a super talented team member that if we put them in the right seat, We know that they'd be able [00:02:00] to succeed. So what are those roles? What are the essential things that you need to have? Because I, what I've boiled it down to is there's three seats. And the reason why I'm using the word seats is a lot of us are coming at a different place.
[00:02:14] Some of us are really, really small and one man show, and we're trying to find employee number one. And so you might be sitting in two seats and they're taking one or others may be massive. And the three seats is like three department heads. And they have a whole team underneath them. [00:02:30] But these are kind of the, the buckets of e-commerce.
[00:02:34] And so for you, if you're, especially if you're just getting started or you're starting to build out your team, what should you look for? So the first thing, there are three roles I. There is the visionary. This is likely you as the c e O. There's the creative and there's the doer. And I wanna dive into each of these and what should you be looking for?
[00:02:53] How should you approach hiring this role and, and then what after that? So number one, the visionary. This is you. I. [00:03:00] Your number one job, especially when it comes to e-commerce, but I think this applies to brick and mortar as well. Your number one job is understanding your perfect customer. Staying so in tune with who they are and your brand and what, how your brand and your perfect customer are relating to one another.
[00:03:19] And from there, that's where you set the vision for this is what our brand focuses, this is everything. And then the, the second priority, uh, this is kind of tied with number one, let's [00:03:30] be honest, but is the way you inspire and educate your team. And I don't even mean tactically. I mean like educating them on the brand and your customer and who they are so they can implement better.
[00:03:42] But ultimately, you as the C E O, your job is to be the visionary, to be in tune with your perfect customer and how your brand connects and serves, serves them. Then you get to the creative. The creative is the person that takes that vision, takes what you have said, Hey, this is our brand [00:04:00] focus right now.
[00:04:00] This is what our customers, these are the events our customer is thinking about, and so here's how our brand is gonna connect with those. And they bring those things to life visually. I. They likely are creating your site graphics. They're updating your site, they are making your social graphics. They may be in charge of your photography.
[00:04:19] They're making your email graphics. Everything that goes into the visuals of the brand would be done by a creative. Now, the mistake that some of us make here, and what I would love for you to avoid is [00:04:30] we go for like a marketing expert in that role, and there's nothing wrong with that, but the truth is, is that person, that role is a high value job.
[00:04:39] The person who can take over the visual aspect and the marketing strategy of your brand and come in on day one, knocking it outta the park, that's like an $80,000 a year job. And, and if you don't have that in your budget, what do you do? What do you look for? How do you hire when maybe that's just not quite there.
[00:04:56] And so what I love to look for is you wanna look for someone [00:05:00] who can write well. You can, you can tell this by going to their Instagram and reading how they caption their posts. Are they a good writer and are they a natural creative? Are their pictures generally really good? Have you seen graphics they've created and they look good?
[00:05:15] If they are a natural, creative and a good writer, everything else can be taught. Everything else can be trained. If you have the right foundation, like the the program that we do where we're designing and developing the site, but teaching traffic, teaching retention, setting up the [00:05:30] right tools and processes there, if you have that kind of foundation in place.
[00:05:33] You can teach them the fundamentals of marketing. You can teach them the fundamentals of copy, but you can't teach how to be a good writer, and you can't teach being a natural creative. And so that's what allows you to get a much more affordable role. Ultimately end up with that, that highly skilled marketer, and then down the road, even once they realize their value, if they're like, Hey, this role should be an 80 K year [00:06:00] job.
[00:06:00] Well, if they've just created 1.8 million in revenue for your brand, I think most of us would say, yeah, I'll, we'll, we'll go with that raise. I, I, I'm okay with that. And so that's, that's number two. The creative, the visionary that's focused on the customer and the brand, and what your focus is, the creative that's bringing that to life.
[00:06:19] Visually, through your site, through your social, through your emails, through your ads, through everywhere the customer sees your brand. But then you get to the tactical role, and this is the doer, the [00:06:30] implementer. This is the person who's likely managing your inventory. They're entering items, they're scheduling site changes.
[00:06:35] They're making sure that all the boxes are checked. And so here you're looking for someone who's incredibly organized and structured in what they do and is able to take all these moving pieces and piece it together in a process so things are launching at the right time and your customer's getting what they need to get.
[00:06:53] So here you get some incredible economy of scale 'cause they're also entering your purchase orders in, in [00:07:00] general inventory management. They don't. They need to be a little bit tech savvy, but they don't need to be like site coders or anything nerdy like that. But with these three roles, like you have everything at your disposal to be able to grow your social following, use paid ads, have a site experience that is updated and I don't even like to call it updates.
[00:07:19] I call it merchandising, and then your retention strategies in place and it becomes a well-oiled machine. And then as you grow those seats, those buckets just grow with it. [00:07:30] The things underneath it is what starts to to grow out. Your creative then kind of becomes a creative lead, and you have site people or social people and so on, but you don't have to worry about that until growth happens.
[00:07:43] So this was a tactical episode. My hope for you is that you can see like, okay, if you're a one man show, where is there a gap? Because you probably are really good at one. Average at the second and actively bad at the third. Like I'm a really good [00:08:00] visionary. I'm an okay creative and I am terrible tactically.
[00:08:04] Like if it's all up to me, everything's gonna fall through the cracks. So for you, what is that third thing? What is that one that will fall through the cracks? If someone isn't helping you, that's where to start with that hire. So if you're an O, if you're a great visionary, okay, creative, start with a tactical role.
[00:08:20] If you're a terrible creative, but you're good tactically and with vision, then bring in a creative to help bring that to life visually. So that's where to get started. I hope this is helpful for [00:08:30] you. If you enjoyed the episode or if you've enjoyed this podcast, I would so appreciate it. Leave a review, subscribe to it, and shoot me a DMM at retail, Josh on Instagram.
[00:08:38] I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you think. So I'll see you next week.
