#594 – Advanced Amazon Tools for 7+ Figure Brands

Join us for an inspiring episode where we feature two incredible guests, Chris Zurcher and Sarah Chung. Sarah shares her unique journey from a small port city in South Korea to the bustling South Bay area of Torrance, California. Her story is filled with determination and resilience, reflecting on her family’s move to the US for better opportunities and her professional growth at Helium 10 over the past three and a half years. Sarah’s first appearance on the podcast gives listeners a heartfelt glimpse into her personal and professional life.

Chris, a familiar voice from previous episodes, reconnects with us to discuss his fascinating transition from an Amazon seller to a valuable member of the Helium 10 team. With a background in acting, photography, and Division One basketball, Chris shares his reasons for moving away from Amazon selling and his passion for supporting sellers through Helium 10’s platform. We explore the current challenges Amazon sellers face in 2024, such as increased fees and competition, and how Helium 10’s data-driven tools can provide the necessary insights for success.

We also dive into the advanced features of Helium 10’s Supercharge plan, which offers enhanced tools and customizable options to meet the specific needs of businesses. From market data and consumer behavior analysis to custom plans and dedicated customer success managers, Helium 10 provides comprehensive support for sellers. Finally, we highlight the benefits of connecting with experts like Sarah and Chris for enterprise-level assistance and share fun, creative ways to make your interactions with them memorable. Don’t miss out on these engaging stories and valuable insights that can help take your Amazon selling to the next level!

In episode 594 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Chris, and Sarah discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Sellers’ Success Stories Helium 10
• 07:16 – Amazon Business Principles and Surprises
• 09:49 – Scaling Brands Using Helium 10 
• 16:01 – E-Commerce Brand Scaling and Consolidation
• 18:55 – Custom Plans and Supercharge Benefits
• 21:45 – Customized Plans Offered For Huge Brands by Helium 10
• 26:23 – Enhancing Helium 10 Platform Features
• 30:49 – Personal Customer Success Manager
• 34:32 – Helium 10 Sales Support Options

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re bringing on a couple of people to the show with interesting backstories and now they both help larger Amazon sellers working here at Helium 10, but one was born in a small Korean town to a blind doctor and the other one learned how to sell on Amazon from Project X. But he’s also an actor and he was even in the recent huge movie Twisters. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

You want to see the size of your niche or your market, maybe. How much sales overall is it generating and, more importantly, how the size of your piece of that pie changes over time. Or maybe you want to know when there’s a new mover or shaker and up-and-comer in your niche that you need to be on the lookout for. You can monitor these things and more with Market Tracker by Helium 10. Find out more information at h10.me/markettracker.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and we’ve got a couple of my co-workers here. One Amazon seller in his past and he’s been on the podcast a couple of times. We’ll talk about that. One person on the, I don’t even know if she’s ever sold on Amazon or not, but I like finding out these things live on the show, just like everybody else is. But this is her first time on the podcast. But welcome, Chris and Sarah.

Chris:

Thanks for having me.

Sarah:

Thank you.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. You see, like in her honor, I even bought this hat, my Dodgers hat. In Hangul letters we got the Korean colors here on the side. I’m looking forward to going to Korea in a few weeks. If anybody wants to join me who’s actually in Korea, I’ll be speaking at the Seller Kingdom Conference. You guys can go to h10.me/sellerkingdom. Anyways, this conference, guys, it’ll be in Korean mainly, but I’ll be obviously speaking in English and there’s full live translation and everything. So if you’re interested in selling in Korean marketplaces or you’re in Korea as an expat or whatever, please come by that show, h10.me/sellerkingdom. Let’s go ahead and start with you, Sarah, since this is your first time on the show. You’ve worked here at Helium 10 for a number of years. What is it like four years now?

Sarah:

No, I think it’s about three and a half years now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Sarah:

It feels like one. It feels like I just joined. It’s a good thing.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. What does Jeff Bezos say? Always day one, or something like that right. Exactly where were you born and raised? In Korea, or US?

Sarah:

I was born in Korea, came to the US when I was seven years old, so it’s been a while.

Bradley Sutton:

Very similar to my mother, who was born in the Philippines, came to the US when she was 10. So very similar trajectory there. Where in Korea were you born?

Sarah:

So in a little tiny port city in Southern Korea won’t say the name because nobody will know where it is but apparently it was a place where there was only one doctor. My dad picked that doctor because he was the only one and he was thankful. He was almost blind because he didn’t want my mom to deliver-

Bradley Sutton:

The doctor was blind?

Sarah:

Well, no, the doctor was almost blind. He was the oldest doctor on the face of the planet, but the only doctor there. My dad was super happy. He had a plane ticket in the case he needed to rush my mom back into the capital city if there were complications. He didn’t really think it through, but yeah, I was born in a little port city and-

Bradley Sutton:

I watch a lot of Korean dramas based in little towns like that. They have like a different accent down there, down in the south as well, in Korean. I noticed that, but anyways, okay. So growing up in a small tiny town like that, what do you remember back, you know, when you were five years old or six years, what you thought you would be when you grew up, or you kind of didn’t start having those kind of memories until you actually came here to the states?

Sarah:

So actually I was born in the little town but I was raised in Seoul, so I spent yeah, I spent all of my formative years there. I remember everything which is like-

Bradley Sutton:

What do you think you were going to be before you came to America?

Sarah:

I didn’t know because back then I think South Korea was a different country, like it didn’t really start to, you know, modernize until the late 80s, and that was back in the 70s. So probably thought I was going to grow up and be a mom.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What brought your family to the US?  

Sarah:

Well, you know we had some family here and you know my dad, just having two daughters at that time, wanted to bring us to the US so that we could have, you know, all the opportunities you know get educated here in the United States. But honestly, I never had a talk with them about exactly what brought them here. It could have been the opportunities or maybe they just wanted to live by the ocean.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. Now, upon graduating high school here, was it in California, or where did you move to?

Sarah:

California, I’ve been a Cali girl ever since. I grew up in the South Bay area and then came down to Orange County when I was older.

Bradley Sutton:

What part of South Bay? I used to live in Wilmington, Torrance, myself.

Sarah:

Torrance.

Bradley Sutton:

Torrance, boom. We could have been neighbors back in the day. Who knows?

Sarah:

Exactly? Surfing and Redondo Beach.

Bradley Sutton:

For high school, you went to Narbonne or?

Sarah:

No. I went to Torrance High School.

Bradley Sutton:

Isn’t that where Buffy the Vampire Slayer was filmed?

Sarah:

And 90210.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, I can’t even remember what my kids told me yesterday but I remember the most random thing. Something me and Chris share in common is like well, I never was an actor, he was an actor, but I used to be an extra for TV shows and I used to be on Beverly Hills 90210 a few episodes way back in the day and then, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it was that school.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, yeah, I used to go on the shows that I would like, because I was just doing it, just make extra money, so I would like pick which TV shows I like. Hey, let me try and get there and then I can watch myself on TV. It was terrible. I would make like $60 a day or $90 a day. It was terrible but it was fun like to be able to see yourself on your favorite TV show, like how cool is that right? So now, Chris, I don’t remember, you know, the shows that you used to be on but I just found out. I was today years old when I found out that you were in a movie I just watched, like literally for the first time, three, four days ago, Twisters, where you were in one of the scenes. Can you show the audience those who are watching this on YouTube the scene that you were in in this pretty famous movie right here? So that was filmed in Texas.

Chris:

It was filmed in Oklahoma.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, it was actually in Oklahoma. Just there it is. I remember that scene. And then the main actress was like or you were like trying to say that you should put out some alert or something right, like. And then she was like nah nah, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I remember that scene exactly that is crazy right so that’s pretty cool. Helium 10 extraordinaire and blockbuster movie actor.

Chris:

Appreciate it.

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, I digress. That’s totally crazy. I never knew that you were from right over there. Where did you go to university?

Sarah:

Cal State Long Beach.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, that’s not a, Pepperdine is the waves. Why is my mind blanking right now? Oh, my goodness, I know that you’ve got the pyramid is the arena, therefore, but what’s the mascot?

Sarah:

I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay, good. If you’re an alumnus and don’t remember that I wouldn’t feel so band. That’s my thing whenever someone tells which college they went I always think of you know what mascot it is, but my mind is totally blank.

Sarah:

I don’t think, when I went there, that they excelled in a lot of sports.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, they still don’t.

Sarah:

Yeah, so not a lot of opportunities to see the mascot. 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now what was your major?

Sarah:

Business Administration Econ.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, very similar to me. And then did you get into that after graduating?

Sarah:

Kind of. I think it stays with you. I’ve been in sales ever since and I love being a salesperson.

Bradley Sutton:

So you came to Helium 10 then, with no e-commerce experience.

Sarah:

Very limited other than the consumer side of it, the e-commerce side.

Bradley Sutton:

So what’s the? You know, now that you’ve been in the game for like three, four years and you’ve talked to hundreds of sellers, and a lot of the people you talk to, by definition of your role here is, you know, a lot of seven, eight, nine figure sellers. Well, what do you think of e-commerce? You know, after spending a lifetime in a different world before. What’s cool? What’s not cool?

Sarah:

So I think the thing that really surprised me is that when you’re looking at the business principles of having a business selling to consumers and looking for consumers, a lot of things even from brick and mortar actually translates over to e-commerce. So my assumption was that e-commerce was this really special animal that was very unique. But when you’re looking at the business challenges of a lot of our clients, they’re the same challenges. How do I get my business up and running? Looking at cash flow, looking at how do I advertise, you know. When we’re even thinking about keyword research, I liken it to a aisle in Target. Right, if you’re not in the right aisle and say, for instance, you’re a shampoo brand and you’re in the shoe aisle, what are you gonna sell? Same thing with keywords. So I feel like there’s a lot of parallels that connect the two.

Sarah:

My biggest hurdle when I first joined Helium 10 and I was learning about Amazon was looking at, you know, data around like BSR, like really understanding how Amazon quantifies the performance of products and ASINs. But over time, you know, I started to see, you know, all those parallels. I started to create all those strings and I love to like talk to clients and kind of bring different like real world examples so that if they are new to the space, you know. The first thing I hear is, why do I care about keywords? And I always tell them it’s like Harry Potter stairs at Hogwarts. You’re going to have to make sure you have the right password to get to the door you want, because that stairwell will keep on going from door to door and depending on their search term and your keyword on your listing, that stairwell is not going to match. So that’s why you as a seller have to continuously use a platform like Helium 10 to get that data so that you can make sure your stairwell always points at your customer.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. There you go. All right, now let’s switch back to Chris. Now, Chris, we’re not going to go too much into his backstory, because he’s actually been on the show a couple of times. I think his first episode was 161 way back in 2020. And you know so if you guys want to listen to some of his backstory very, very interesting story. As I said, he’s been an actor and played division one basketball and done photography, a whole bunch of cool stuff. But it was funny because he was on the show way before he ever worked at Helium 10, almost completely unrelated, I had just picked three random people who were brand new sellers and I was like, hey, let’s bring you on the show and chronicle how you’ve been doing and bring you back in a year and Chris was one of them. And then the next year he had a lot of success. And the next year after that he was already working for Helium 10. And another one who was in the group I’m not sure if it was in the same group as him, but she became the host of our Serious Sellers Podcast Spanish show. So like, hey, guys, if I ever ask you to come on the podcast randomly, you never know, you might end up working here at Helium 10. But anyways, Chris, I haven’t talked to you on the show obviously in years but I’m just curious what happened? Did you fully give up on your Amazon business, since you’re working full-time at Helium 10 or what happened there?

Chris:

First I want to say too, it was like the meeting onto on the podcast, like we’ve still kept in touch. I actually heard from her like a month ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, yeah, I haven’t talked to her in ages.

Chris:

Yeah, pretty cool man. But yeah, to answer your question, I stopped selling. I didn’t do the timeline here. It’s like time is moving faster, I think, but I think it was January of this year, mainly because, like for me-

Bradley Sutton:

Oh so you kept it going for a while, then if you just stopped this year.

Chris:

Yeah, I kept it going for a while. My biggest thing was like I wasn’t trying to run my own business. With the acting stuff, I have a lot of other things that I’d want to use my time for and I just never had the entrepreneurial spirit in that regard. So it was just one of those things that I kind of let go after. But it was a great experience when I was doing. It opened a lot of doors. I made the lateral jump over here after doing the customer advice reward, so it was great, man.

Bradley Sutton:

Even in your time, you know, a couple of years selling on Amazon, did you think things were getting harder, like I mean, I’m assuming, regardless of you know your time, if you were making $10,000 a month without doing anything, you probably would have just kept it going. So did you have any struggles and that contributed to like saying, nah, you know what, I’m just going to go all in on Helium 10 or what was in the decision of going away?

Chris:

Yeah. So I would say like I mean minor struggles right in terms of running out of stock and like waking up randomly on a Tuesday and like everything about Amazon changes and you have to figure out, like what you’re going to change within your business to accommodate that. So like minor changes, but I wouldn’t say like any any massive change had me decide like I was going to stop. Yeah, it was really just over time, decided it wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Bradley Sutton:

Now that you two have a very similar position here, where you’re talking to a lot of larger sellers and people who have different needs. In 2024, I would say personally from my experience I still am selling on Amazon where it’s like this is the year where we are getting choked by all these new fees and profitability and added competition and stuff like that. Is that something you hear from, because you probably talk to almost just as many sellers as I do in the community? Are you getting that sentiment from people that some are struggling with profitability here in 2024?

Sarah:

No, I have heard that from a lot of different sellers and brands. I think that the competition has ramped up. It’s not just, you know, the Amazon changing the policies, the fees. It’s a lot of different factors and what I typically hear is that they’re trying to control expenses, they’re trying to figure out ways of optimizing the way they sell on Amazon.

Sarah:

In most cases, we actually have a lot of sellers and brands where they haven’t utilized software in the past because, you know, post COVID or even during COVID, they were doing really, really well and competition wasn’t as fierce. You know all these different changes weren’t as fierce and you know, most of the time we’ll get on a call and we’ll spend time trying to figure out, you know, what are some of the areas that they want to shore up, because there’s not going to be a magic wand that takes care of all of your issues at once and it’s really, you know, utilizing some way of looking at data analysis to identify what is your best opportunity. What’s the first thing that you should, you know, prioritize right cause if its influx of orders and that has regardless of what Amazon is charging you for storage fees, changes to any of their reimbursements, the first thing you want to take care of is generating more orders, right. So really understanding from their point of view, yes, they do come with a basket full of different things that they’re concerned about but really isolating what’s really happening within their business.

Sarah:

And then starting there and I think you know that’s usually the value of a platform like Helium 10, because a lot of times they don’t have enough data. You know, they may have it just about their seller account, but they don’t have enough data about what’s happening around them and they’re giving them that ability to kind of see outside of the box. You know, is my entire niche going down? Is it just me? Is it, you know, just a handful of competitors, or have there been a lot of offshore brands that have come in recently, kind of you, you know, diminishing the return on some of these brands so really understanding what the root problem is really key.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I know, Chris, that we, you know, we can’t mention unless somebody has said it’s okay like what kind of customers use us? I mean, it’s kind of crazy. I see huge names you know out there and one that you know I talked to and I think he’s okay with me, but, like you know, I literally have people doing one-on-one calls with me who are on our Supercharge plan and so that it’s like always cool to see these humongous names and so I think a lot of people don’t realize that Helium 10 is, of course, it’s for the average Joe. You learned how to sell on Amazon from like Project X even copied almost the same product and made a moon shelf instead of a coffin shelf. You started from zero and became a little hero, right. But then other, there’s actually large, well-known household name brands who use Helium 10 and people might wonder like wait a minute, like they aren’t on the Diamond plan. But like what does Helium 10 have out there for larger companies, agencies that maybe some people aren’t even aware about?

Chris:

Yeah, yeah, great question. So right now, we’re pushing more towards like the scaling, scaling brands, as well as like the agency plan that we have, which is that Supercharged plan that you mentioned. I do want to like backtrack for a second. I have the same experience where so I go up and spend some time with like my oldest friends since we were like 13. We had one of my buddies has a lake house and we’ll go up there and we’ll bring like birthday gifts, and there was one time we brought a gift. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say the brand name, so I’m gonna stay away from it but we purchased something for him that he always wanted and I had been having calls that whole week with that specific brand getting him set up.

Chris:

It was just. It was a cool experience, yeah. But to go back to your question, like so that Supercharge plan is really where we’re geared and it’s geared towards going and it’s a consolidation place, like what I find is, especially in the e-commerce space, people have, like you know, four different tools for like different aspects and like different billing cycles and with this plan we’re just getting everything in one place be going through different tools. So you have your advertising, your market analytics, your refunds. You have, in its extended usages, like 10,000 keyword trackers, 5,000 product alerts, 50,000 emails. You get the refund service, which I’ve had some clients, depending on you know what niche they’re in, but they recouped the cost of their whole Helium 10 plan in like two months. So like the plan essentially paid for itself, yeah, so I would say like the direction that we’re headed is like that scaling brand and more, more of the agencies and aggregators, and it’s been fun to watch the watch the transition.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the starting price of Supercharge is how much per month? Is it like 1200 bucks or something like that?

Sarah:

It’ll differ depending on the type of organization that would like to leverage the tools. So you know what we typically ask is that you know you book some time with us, we get a better understanding of your business questions, your business challenges, and then we will create bespoke plans for them. So typically it can start as low as 1799, but you know, depending on the size of company and the different limits that we need to include in the licensing plan, it can go upwards.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Yeah, I mean, obviously you know agencies that need like 100 seats at the table or something probably would be more expensive than just a larger seller. Now you kind of alluded, Chris, to some of those tools that are unique to Supercharge plan. Let’s talk a little bit about it, because these are ones that some, you know, some of them are not as applicable even to me, like I’m not a big enough seller to need some of those services. And so, first of all, what are those tools that are kind of like unique to that plan? And then, at what level of seller should start considering, like I’m around, you know, like high six figures, low seven figures, you know, depending on the year and to me, like a lot of this stuff is a little bit above my head, it’s like a little bit too advanced. So, like you know from your experience, like you know, is there a certain cutoff where you’re like man, if you’re doing this kind of money on Amazon, this you should probably take a look. There’s definitely some things that can help you. What can you say about that?

Chris:

So I would say generally speaking from just what I’m saying, I would feel like if your annual revenue is above that million dollar mark, I feel like it would be a good fit. Okay, in terms of specific tools, the one thing that I’ll say is you have your standard tools that have been kind of adjusted. So a perfect example would be our Adtomic tool right. Right now, the standard Adtomic add-on, the threshold, I believe, is $10,000 and anything above that there’s a 2% fee. On the Supercharge plan it starts off with a 40K threshold, anything above that there’s a 1.75% fee. So all the add-on tools have been kind of tailored for this plan. The managed refund service is only available on the Supercharge plan, which is one reason why I recommend the million-dollar revenue. I kind of like I don’t know me to put you on the spot here, Sarah, but I think she could probably speak a little better, a bit better to like the repeat customer metrics and stuff like that. I know that’s only available on the Supercharge plan, which people love.

Sarah:

So, on the Supercharge plan, I think some of the benefits for clients would be those who are in the process of scaling, so it’s not just tied to an amount of revenues. We have some clients that are working towards maybe the million dollar mark, but, you know, one of the things that they’re struggling with might be the number of reviews that they’re getting. So you know there’s incremental increases in different components of the licensing, but some of the biggest value adds when it comes to Supercharge would be things like, you know, inclusion of Market Tracker 360, being able to pull market data so that you can analyze what’s happening in your niche across different competitors, across different ASINs, but then also getting access to data around consumer behavior. So what Chris alluded to, that we actually have customer insights, the ability to look at the lifetime value of a customer, the loyalty data, maybe even the sequencing and purchases.

Sarah:

Imagine you’re a supplement brand. You’ve got, you know, multivitamins, a sleep aid, and then you have, you know, a variety of specialty vitamins. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much is it costing your organization to get a new customer right? And when you get a new customer, how long do they stay? And when they do stay, you know what is the sequence of product purchases. Do they always just come in and buy the multivitamin and stay there? Or do they buy the multivitamin, go into the world of sleep supplements and then start to kind of evaluate some of your other products?

Sarah:

This type of data is super important for larger brands because this could also inform them on bundling options in the future. What is the entry level product? You know, where do people usually gravitate towards, where they’re more likely to be willing to, you know, experience more ASINs within their portfolio. Things like that are super important to clients. And you know, yes, you can get this data. If you did this manually, if you had weeks and weeks and weeks or months, you probably can do this. But with most of these organizations, they don’t have a lot of resources to spend hours looking for this data on, you know, seller central or on vendor central. So they’re utilizing a planet Supercharge so that they can speed up the data collection, optimize the amount of time they’re spending on data collection, so they can start looking for insights.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, now, keeping with you there, I don’t know too much about this side of Helium 10. But I remember back in the day you would do a lot of like custom plans. Maybe somebody didn’t want to do a Supercharge or something, but then you know somebody had some like very unique use case where they’re like I need like 50 billion keywords to track, or I need an API to Cerebro for my agency, or I need you know blankety blank, you know so many emails. Is there still like an option for for anybody, regardless of their size to have these like kind of like custom weird request to Helium 10? Are we still honoring those kind of things and do those still go to you?

Sarah:

Well, it comes to the entire team now, so you no longer have to kind of like try to get in touch with me. Every member of the sales team is able to create a bespoke plan that is tailored to the requirements of the client. Again, you know, maybe you don’t have a lot of revenue where you’re not as worried about you know different areas of your business as of yet. But if you’re coming in and you’re like I’ve got half a million transactions and I need more follow-up emails, we can definitely accommodate that. But we’re also going to have a conversation with those clients to say, well, what else is happening? Because the last thing you want to do is, you know, basically, you know, throw band-aids on small problems and try to shore this up. In most cases, we like to see if there’s other things that you can leverage the same platform for, so that you’re going to spend, you know, more time within the platform getting more things done and hopefully, for a better value.

Chris:

And Bradley just to jump in here. Sorry to interrupt. I want to piggyback on that because we’ve had a lot of conversations within our unit about that’s kind of what we’re trying to do is like every business is different, right, and so we’re trying to really get on calls with people and hear what are you trying to accomplish? What are you currently using the tools for, and then customizing packages, like tailoring each package towards the business use case that the people that we’re talking to. So that’s really what we’re trying to do.

Sarah:

I think the biggest shift that we’ve had within our team is the way we sell and what we sell. I think back in the day, we had two distinct plans. We might be able to customize it, but now what we’re offering clients is the ability to continue to scale on Helium 10, regardless of whether you’re the seller that has one ASIN trying things out on Amazon, you know, and as your portfolio grows, your team grows or your business needs grow, we now have a solution for all of those steps. Yeah, so we do always encourage our clients. You know, pop into one of the calls with someone in sales so that we can have a business discussion to identify. You know, is there an easier way for you to do this? You know, as you’re thinking about expanding, can you leverage, you know, a little bit of technology. Along with, you know, maybe additional employees, but, you know, finding a nice, efficient balance between the two.

Bradley Sutton:

Now we’re going to talk about some wins and losses from some of your clients and network, and also some more strategies, maybe, that some people are using. But before I forget, because my memory is bad, let’s say somebody already is about to say Bradley, you had me at hello here. I want to find out more information. How can they reach out to one like should they? Can they go directly to you or is there a page they can? They can go and book something or to get more information on these custom plans or the Supercharge plan to see if it’s a good fit for them.

Sarah:

Oh, Bradley, we’re both. Chris and I are both in sales, so we’d love to just give out our email address. However, the proper way to do this is anyone could visit helium10.com and on the right upper right hand corner there is a talk to sales button where they can input their information and we’ll reach out to them, schedule some time so that they can have a dedicated one-on-one conversation with one of the members on the sales team.

Bradley Sutton:

I see that they’re at the top right. Chris, going back to you now, I talked about wanting to talk about some wins and so obviously you have these calls and then people come to you and they’re like hey, this is why I need Helium 10 or this is what I’m struggling with. And sometimes you give solutions and solutions don’t hundred percent work you know all the time because no two Amazon accounts are the same. Think about the wins. Some of the wins where you were able to give them like, you know, maybe they were, they had Helium 10. They didn’t even know there was a certain feature, or maybe they never. They’re brand new to Helium 10 and they’re trying this new feature in Market Tracker 360. But can you remember, can you give a couple anecdotes here about some wins, that somebody uses specific strategy and what difference did it make for them? You know, did you hear back on?

Chris:

Yeah, I sure can. I don’t have specific numbers in terms of difference, but it was a real interesting call. So we occasionally I’ll build markets out for people just so they can cause a lot of our plans come with annual commitments. So we want to make sure people are comfortable with the tools that they’re getting into. So we know we’ll go through the tools really in depth with them so they get a better sense of what the tools actually will accomplish.

Chris:

And we had pulled up one of their markets and they were an apparel, a pretty big apparel brand. And we looked in the last, basically last six months, but there was, like I think it was like four months prior, there’s a big, it’s like skyrocket shoot of one of their main competitors and everyone else was staying low and then the next month a second main competitor also skyrocketed and they were just like fighting amongst themselves. So we dug a little deeper to find out, like what caused this growth? And they had the first month the first brand had launched a very specific type of apparel and then the very next month the competing brand launched the exact same thing. So we’re sitting on the call like maybe that’s a lateral move that you want to make, instead of waiting a year and saying like, oh, this is popular, like you’re kind of ahead of the curve and like riding along with the trends because of the 360 tool.

Chris:

So I know it was fun to watch them be like dude. This is crazy. I’m not sure what the outcome was in terms of numbers, when I know they were very interested in that new product though for sure. 

Bradley Sutton:

That’s something that, hey, you know, you might be only to even surface that kind of data inside of Market Tracker 360. How about you, Sarah? Do you have one before we go back to Chris for another?

Sarah:

So it’s a consolidation of the number of them. But one of the big things that I saw in the last year were brands that were working with agencies, but in some cases they were bringing in how some of the features that you know the agencies were working on and their biggest struggle was do we have the people and do we have enough people to actually facilitate this transition right? In most cases they were leaving, like the ad spend piece, you know, so that they the agencies could manage their PPC campaigns. But a lot of the listing creation, optimization, keyword research, it was going to come down to a lot of people learning how to do this, and some of the biggest wins on Supercharge are these clients that are leveraging the platform so that they can have, you know, the customer success manager go in and actually train their teams how to use the platform, helping them onboard their teams in a quicker fashion. So when they’re doing this transition, they didn’t have to completely stop.

Sarah:

But, honestly, the majority of the stories that I’m hearing when we follow up with a lot of these clients that do these transitions is the fact that their teams feel like they know what they’re doing right and utilizing their time with even some of the other work that they have to do using tools like Listing Builder, utilizing Market Tracker 360, the ability to use Insights Dashboard to automate all of the data collection on their competitors and changes. The success story for them is not just the dollars that they save but really the time that they save, the fact that they’re saving weeks worth of time in doing some of these manual tasks. So the biggest reward is the fact that they didn’t freak out their entire staff bringing in some of these, you know these different tasks in-house and they feel empowered utilizing our platform. So, yeah, not a real dollar amount next to it but lots of happy faces.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, nice. Now, you know we have a lot of competitors out there. A lot of competitors are great and they have you, you know some good tools. But, you know, the company who sometimes tries to throw me under the bus is Jungle Scout or not me personally, but sometimes they try and I throw some shade with some of these blogs and stuff and so, like I like to pick on the last few weeks I like to pick on them a little bit because I’m just giving them back a little bit of what they give me. But I’ve heard from some customers when I talk at conferences where they’re like oh man, when I went to Market Tracker 360, the data was just so and the features are just so much better than Jungle Scout Cobalt and other tools. Is that something you hear, Chris? I’ve never used like I said, market Tracker 360 too much. I definitely have never used Jungle Scout Cobalt, so I’m not going to talk smack about something I don’t even know. But what are you hearing out there from people who come from other tools?

Chris:

Yeah, sure, it’s so funny. You asked that cause I people will ask me all the time on calls like what are you hearing? And I like to sit on a fence cause kind of like what you just said, like I don’t want to sit here and say anything negative about a competitor.

Bradley Sutton:

I probably went like four years without even uttering like competitors names, but then I just got. I just got to the point where I’m like, if these people are going to keep like mentioning me and misleading people with information, can I at least state some facts about that. You know, so I’m like okay yeah, don’t feel bad.

Chris:

What I will say is I personally have never been in Cobalt in used it. I will say that I’ve worked with people who have used both and the majority of them are still using Market Tracker 360. Nice Side note. One thing that I do want to bring up about that Supercharge plan that I don’t know if I hit on, that I think is really important. That doesn’t come with the other plans is the customer success manager. So you’ll have a personal point of contact within Helium 10 who will meet with you. You can tell them this is what we’re trying to accomplish and we want to use this tool. We don’t know how to. They’ll show you how to use the tool. So it’s, it’s a lot. We don’t just like give you all these tools and like say good luck, like you will have somebody that will walk you through it if you need help. Just want to throw that in there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Cool, cool. Is that a US based customer success individually? So for some people that’s important, like for some people that they might not like that if they’re from Europe or Asia, they’re like, well, maybe I won’t be able to communicate, but for the US or English speaking countries you know, sometimes I know they worry about that. All right. So this is going to be a question I’m going to have for both Sarah and Chris. Since you guys have talked to so many customers and I ask this to all my guest is, hey, if I were to make you or I don’t have the power to make somebody this but if you were to be made the CTO of Helium 10 for a day and guide the product roadmap, Sarah, what is something that you’re getting requests from, from your network, about something that Helium 10 doesn’t have right now? And so what would you like on your day one? What would you say? All right, we’re going to make a team that’s going to focus on adding this feature, adding this tool.

Sarah:

One of the big questions that we’re getting from teams from larger groups would be ways of creating separate folders or separate data access within the platform. Because, as you know, if I’m working on dog leashes and other teams working on dog beds, one of the questions that you know that I receive a lot would be you know, hey, to create even more efficiency, can we just make it so that the dog bed team can come in and just look at their dog beds and then just the leash team to come and look at the leashed data? At this current time, within Helium 10, it’s a shared environment which provides really good opportunity for teams to collaborate as they’re creating content, looking for keywords, basically not having to double and triple the workload for everyone redoing the same work. But one of the big asks that we do get is different ways of cutting up data within the platform so that they can have different access.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. What about you, Chris? What are you hearing? What would be your day one action as leader of the product team?

Chris:

Dude, I got three things. I’ll make them quick. First one really a lot of agency conversations would be user-based permissions instead of tool-based permissions. So, for example, if they connect multiple clients, they don’t want to give their clients access to the Helium 10 because then those clients could toggle between other brands that they’re not a part of.

Chris:

So being able to limit the client to like just their brand within the Helium 10 would be super helpful. Also, within Adtomic, I’m getting a lot of questions about being able to export like reporting that they can present to clients so a lot of these are in the agency realm to export like reporting that they can present to clients. So a lot of these are in the agency realm. And then I have a product idea that I think might be interesting, that if you use it, I have a perfect name for it. It’s going to be like your Market Tracker 360 setup, but it’s going to be for keywords and historical trend of search volume, so you can cut it up by category, what’s in the title and all that stuff. But that way you can get a bird’s eye view of actual demand within that market and what the top keywords are and how it’s shifting. And if you do decide to go for it, I just ask that you name it Zurch Search.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. All right. Hey, we’ve got you know strange names to people outside the company, like Cerebro and Frankenstein and some other tools, so that sounds like a good one. All right, you heard it here first. He’s going for the patent already on it. I love it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, guys, thank you so much for coming on here again. If anybody’s interested to talk to them directly, want to get some help with one of your bigger brands, or maybe think bringing an agency here to Helium 10, or have some enterprise level support or have your own customer success manager, Like I said, go to helium10.com and on the top right side, hit contact sales and you will be connected to one of them. Maybe, maybe not, I’m not sure if you can ask, but you can just say, hey, connect me with Sarah or connect me with Chris, and then you know you can give Sarah some Korean sweet treats and then that might make it more likely she’ll help you or challenge Chris to a basketball game. I’m not sure what will bribe Chris, but thank you, guys, so much for joining us and let’s have you back on next year and see what kind of cool new stories you have for us.

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