It’s Friday again and as you already know, it means that yesterday another episode of The Ecommerce Growth Show has aired.
Our special guest this time was Sean Sheppard!
Before we get into the weekend mood let’s take a look at what happened in this episode and how Sean blew our minds yet again.
Who is Sean Sheppard?
Sean is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy, with three successful exits, who has successfully grown dozens of early-stage companies across a wide variety of products and markets.
He was recently named the #2 Online Sales Influencer and contributor at The Huffington Post. He’s now committed to working with countries, companies, entrepreneurs, and those who want to work with them on building startup ecosystems and developing the next generation of leaders for the innovation economy.
Key Takeaways from this Episode
How can you stand out as an entrepreneur in the eCommerce industry?
Startups are very different than established businesses. I like to say that being a startup is being a stranger with a strange offering in a strange place asking other strangers to do strange things with them.
Everyone who wants to use e-commerce as a way to conduct business and help people has an opportunity. How large is that opportunity? That depends. You shouldn’t have to compare yourself to Amazon, better learn from what Amazon has done well and use it to your own advantage. But you need to have something that’s very unique.
You need to have a unique point of view. You know what’s your “why” and why are you doing what you’re doing and you should be able to share that story with the world.
And then you have to have some sort of unique differentiator. What makes you different than everyone else it’s doing what you’re doing. And then how do you express that through your energy and focus to the world.
Express your your difference in your uniqueness through your energy and your focus. And so how does that manifest itself. I think it means that you can select one very small niche in a global marketplace and do your best to become the best at it.
Master that one thing everybody wants to talk to subject matter experts.
Focus on the priorities that buyers have today and don’t try to guess these things.
You’ve got to be open to pivoting in real time. We see it in manufacturing and I know that this is a specific use case but we’ve all heard the stories about manufacturers starting to make ventilators and hand sanitizer and not just because they were forced by the government but because there was a clear opportunity to do it and they had the skill set to make something different.
So why not pivot to the things that are most resilient right now or at least open up new channels and new offerings. But in order to do that you’ve got to be willing to take that ”risk”.
In my view and so I would be really very much focused on what what is what are people’s priorities today and try and address those today priorities and don’t just guess on these things.
If you have existing relationships that you can leverage and learn, go speak to those people.
How to re-engage with your customers?
You have to start with a hypothesis about what are you hoping to learn and then you need to build a narrative that says:”I’d like to speak to you about this for this reason.”
You have to give people a reason, give them a why.
Hopefully, if they are current customers then you’ve earned the right to ask these questions if, of course, you’ve been able to deliver on the promises that you’ve made previously to them.
Make to not miss out on this episode, watch it now here.
Next Thursday we are meeting with Raul Galera, Partner Manager @ReferralCandy and we will discuss the importance of Customer Retention and Loyalty.
Make sure to register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/ecommerce-growth-show-ep7
