How Jeff Bezos' 14 Leadership Principles Make Amazon Click | Feedvisor

so I'm Peter Kern's I am the strategic Account Manager with feed by surprise to feed Weiser I was with Amazon for three and a half years I was on the seller Services team I ran the team that recruited new third-party sellers to the marketplace in the consumable space so health and personal care Beauty baby grocery basically what we did was or what Amazon does is looks for offer gaps selection gaps and tries to find new sellers to bring them on to fill those gaps so that Amazon can truly be the everything store I did that for a while and then I moved into strategic FBA also within consumables and then my wife and I decided that we wanted to leave Seattle and move to small town in Montana so I left Amazon and now I'm with feed Weiser and it's exciting because I get to be much more hands-on with sellers like yourselves I'm amazed at what sellers don't know about selling on Amazon even though you are doing some significant business and one of those is really what makes Amazon click we're going to talk about the Amazon leadership principles we're going to talk about what the leadership principles are which one's matter most to third-party sellers and how they can help your business so from the outside looking in Amazon can be daunting and these are words that sellers have told me sellers friends family it can be daunting intimidating confusing and in the words of my mom scary right so and I'll admit while I was with Amazon are there any former Amazonians in here other than mr. Heller okay so I'll admit these are all true when I interviewed with Amazon is very intimidating it's it's a long lengthy process phone screens you submit business case studies then you do what they call a loop it's basically six hours six individual people and then about a couple of days later they all get together in a room and they vote you on or off the Amazon Island so it's a little intimidating once you get there the intimidation while that sort of stuff kind of continues on but there is one thing that Amazon has that really gives every Amazonian the ability to be successful and it's the Amazon leadership principles and just out of curiosity how many people in here have heard of the Amazon wait first how many people yeah how many people in here are selling on Amazon right I hope everyone now keep your hands up how many people of you have heard of the Amazon leadership principles can any of you recite them tell me how many there are no no problem so first let's start with what the Amazon leadership principles are not they are not a beautiful picture with the motivation is saying framed and then hung on a wall in a boardroom or a hallway it is not the Amazon leadership principles are 14 guiding tenants that are woven in to the existence of what Amazon does everything that they do from the top down from be Jeff Bezos down to the low you know part-time associate at a fulfillment center subscribes to these Amazon principles and in the words of Amazon their leadership principles aren't just a pretty inspirational wall-hanging these principles work hard just like we do Amazonians use them every day whether they're discussing ideas for new projects deciding on the best solution for a customer's problem or interviewing a candidate and so it's important they as you sellers start to understand what these are because this is truly how Amazon functions so what are they customer obsession ownership invent and simplify are right a lot higher and develop the best insist on the highest standards think big bias for action frugality learn and be curious earn trust dive deep have backbone disagree and commit and deliver results 14 you can take pictures or you can just Google Amazon leadership principles and you can buy the books that have been written about it you can read the articles these leadership principles could be and have been adopted by other businesses I've seen Church organizations use them they're pretty phenomenal I call this my Amazon MBA right because if you apply any one of these or if you're able to apply all 14 of them to your business you're going to succeed and this is what amazon does every day you could be in a meeting with a VP I could be in a meeting with Jeff Bezos and he could say something and if it wasn't customer obsessed I could say I'm just having backbone disagreeing and and he would agree he would say you're using the leadership principles it's it's that that important right there in everything that they do so when I was with Amazon I'm calling new sellers I'm saying hey come on sell on Amazon trying to get them to start and list their products and some people would want to do it immediately because it's Amazon and they want to talk to them and then other sellers would no I don't know and then after a while we would say I'm sorry you can't sell on Amazon and sellers would stop and into what I said you aren't showing that you have the ability to earn trust or show a bias for action or that your customer-centric and so we would stop the opportunity we'd tell them they could go through self-service they can go through it they can do it themselves but they're not going to get our help and right then and there that's where sellers start to see that Amazon is a little bit different and so I would coach my sellers we have these 14 leadership principles adopt them if you can but pay attention to a few and I'll talk about those in a second so why as a seller should you care about these in the eyes of the customer it's just Amazon right so I bought a product or Eric's backpack I could say hey Eric where'd you get the backpack most likey he'd say Amazon he's not going to say I bought it from a third party seller utilizing fulfillment by Amazon right it's Amazon my mom hey where did you get that oh I got it on Amazon she doesn't care and neither do customers the majority of customers they just think it's Amazon why else should you care in the eyes of Amazon the leadership principles are everything and if you don't follow and adopt you will most likely lose your selling privileges privileges is the key word there these are Amazon customers they're not your customers and if you've ever gotten any kind of warning or violation they say it in the bottom there there's a little email a little line in the email says you know failure to fix this could result in you're selling privileges being removed so it's important to recognize these but there's a lot of them right 14 they may not all matter to you you may not want to be a frugal company you may want to take your profit and buy a jet right but if you're going to sell on Amazon and this is what I coached my sellers on which one's matter most anybody having to take a guest customer obsession for a nice another one okay i won't i won't hole lack the three that i would coach them on customer obsession ownership and insist on the highest standards so the thing that i haven't talked about yet is that there are descriptions for each one of these leadership principles we could spend all day going through talking about it analyzing your business finding areas of opportunity for you to improve your leadership principles of finding areas of strengths for your leadership principles and i would talk to my sellers and I would tell them though you don't have to focus on the 14 but if you don't focus on these three you're going to have problems so what is customer obsession in Amazon's own words leaders start with the customer and work backwards they work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust although leaders pay attention to competitors they obsess over customers so what does this mean I'll give you a great example over Christmas I bought my son a little Star Wars toy he's four and a half and it arrived and the back of the box had been torn open right so either it was a return that got put back in or something got damaged and I looked in the box and I realized all the parts were there it's not a problem okay I just taped the box back up I mean my son's gonna open the present rip into it and right he's not gonna care about the box but I wanted to make sure that Amazon was aware so I emailed Amazon it just said hey heads up I got the product it just came damaged just so you know or the box was damaged not the product within about fifteen minutes later I received an email from an Amazon associate who had credited me my account for the purchase they had given me the option to get another one sent overnight and then they told me to just keep the one I could donate it or return it so the key here is that the speed and if you go back to the we'll talk about this one in a minute bias fraction the speed at which they responded how that associate responded they didn't go and talk to a manager they gave me they gave me my money back they gave me the product right they totally took care of me and that's what customer session is about let's see it in action so the first thing is that as a seller I think you need to recognize that Amazon is your most important customer because if Amazon goes away your business goes away as you saw in Gilad slides earlier the size of which Amazon is in terms of businesses percentage it's usually 80 to 90 percent right so if you don't treat them as your customer you're going to lose your business it's just like if you ran a restaurant and you have a really good customer and they're always coming in and then one night they come in and they have a little too much to drink and they break all the tables and all that stuff they're still your best customer and you're going to bring them back right you've got to kind of have that relationship with Amazon they're your best friend but you kind of hate them at the same time so treat them as your customer provide great service blow em away take what Amazon does and turn it to 11 apologize to the customer even when they're wrong Cynthia talked about liar buyers right they're out there I'm from Seattle Nordstrom's corporate office is in Seattle there's a joke I don't know some of you've heard it you could buy tires at Les Schwab a local tire place and return them at Nordstrom because their customer service is so good you want to take that kind of approach it's how Amazon grew to be what it is 270 million active customers worldwide it's just kind of insane it's kind of a cult like it's the most trusted brand in America according to Forbes and they started and did it through providing amazing customer service same thing issue refund and or replacement product without delay it's important it's a fourteen fifteen dollar issue right maybe it's more but credit the customer you want to keep them happy the next one is ownership leaders are owners they think long-term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results they act on behalf of the entire company beyond just their team they never say that's not my job that's not my job I think this is one of the things that I loved the most at Amazon is that I loved taking ownership of situations even if it was outside of my role or responsibility right but the thing that's more important is that Amazon empowers their teams to do this right and that's where these leadership comes in so what does it mean what is it in action don't take shortcuts Cynthia talked a little bit about that earlier your suppliers if all of a sudden the supplier comes along that says I can give you the products that you've been purchasing from this supplier but I can give it to you for half the maus the cost that's a shortcut it's probably fake it's probably counterfeit don't take shortcuts in packaging right detail page information owned and learn from your mistakes I've worked with a lot of sellers who have been suspended and they constantly what we didn't do it well we didn't do it wasn't our fault well you've been suspended Amazon would argue otherwise until those sellers literally like you know took their coats off rolled up their sleeves and got into their business and said you know what it's my fault we didn't package it properly or I had an associate who was not paying attention to the shipping invoices and putting the wrong packages in or we weren't paying attention to the expired products sake until you can get over the it's not my fault you're never going to get anywhere you've got to figure out how to own and learn from your mistakes and that's one of Amazon's leadership principles or it's being vocally so it was they've changed a little bit but being vocally self-critical where you're able to say I didn't I made a mistake and I need to learn up from it Amazon does that all the time empower your team same thing with Amazon doesn't matter where you are what you do those leadership principles apply to you do that for your team if you have somebody in your warehouse who doesn't think that they have the ability to stop an order from going out because the product has been damaged you want to make sure that that doesn't happen you want your team to feel like they have the ability to say you know what these products are expired we can't sell them this product is damaged we can't sell it this pretty prep packaging isn't as good as it should be we should fix it you want them to be coming to you you want them to feel like they're part of your team and be proactive with communicating with seller performance and seller support so it goes back to own and learn from your mistakes customer comes writes you a report or sends a return to you and you can see it in that low-performing asons report you can see that you can then immediately contact seller support and say hey we reviewed this Aysen we've decided that we're no longer going to sell it because we think that we've seen a high number of returns on it do that before Amazon pings you the third one that I would coach my sellers on is insist on the highest standards I think that a lot of sellers if you've been hurt or been pinged with any kind of product quality or seller performance issues some people think that Amazon standards are a little too high but Amazon puts it right here in writing leaders have relentlessly high standards many people may think these standards are unreasonably high leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products services and processes this last part I think is really key leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed so at Amazon has anyone ever emailed Jeff Bezos yeah nice you know what that's called internally it's called a Bezos escalation right and they're really serious and the first one that I had was really scary and it was an email to Jeff it was like dear Jeff I can't tell you how excited I was when Peter Kern's called me you know it's the first time anyone from Amazon has called me but then I was greatly disappointed when he never called me back and I've been waiting eight weeks to get a response for a UPC exemption this was a few years ago when they offered UPC exemptions so Jeff gets his email and he forwards it out to the senior vice president and then it water falls down so it goes to the senior vice president of the VP the director and then finally to me and I have to give a detailed account of everything that went wrong so I do that I go into my director's office and like Chris am I going to get fired and he says no no you're not gonna get fired but you're not going to do anything this weekend except for work on the six pager that we have to deliver on Monday and so it took a few hours but then I realized he was dead serious what ended up happening was the seller wanted a UPC exemption they got put into a queue that was actually moved from one group to another and the communication between those two groups didn't work very well so they sat there and waited and waited and waited and so we end up diving deep and figuring out what's going on with it and it turns out that there were thousands of sellers that were in the same situation right and so we took that one email dove into it figured out what was wrong and completely changed the process in which we handled that all from that one seller emailing Jeff so it's making sure that defects do not get sent down this line and problems are fixed so they stay fixed and that is one that I think a lot of sellers don't focus on what are others make sure your product listings are 100% so if you are creating detail pages make sure the dimensions are correct the bullet points are correct all of that sort of stuff if you're matching to asons which what a lot of sellers do you have the ability to contribute to that detail page you may not get it right away a you may need to contact seller support after you've made the change but you want to continuously do that provide documentation if your cell I'm a big watch fan and I would look at the the detail pages for watches I know that's that's the wrong movement that's not the right watch movement in that watch and so I would email Amazon and say here this is the right movement here's the description from the manufacturer I would send them a link and about 30 minutes later that would get updated right so make sure you are reviewing your product listings ensure your team is trained on the highest quality control standards a lot of times the issues that you have are in an operational level right there your teams at your fulfillment centers who are pre packaging and sending replenishment orders or they're your team processing customer service so you want to make sure that you're continuously training them and working on them respond to all buyer communication within 24 hours even on the weekend so the great thing about Amazon is you can shop on it 24 hours seven days a week right but as a seller you can't really not work on the weekends so if you are getting dinged for you know not responding to customers you need to figure out how to do that hire somebody but make sure you're responding to customers fast just like I got went back to that Amazon issue where I emailed them it was like 11:30 at night and they responded Amazon has a follow-the-sun process so your seller support and customer service wherever you're you know wherever it is at that time of day there's going to be somebody in your time zone that's going to be able to respond to you so how can these help first they're going to improve your seller performance so your customer satisfaction metrics should be green it's what Cynthia showed you earlier it's this seven or eight you know ODR that sort of stuff there's the perfect order percentage if you're insisting on high standards your perfect order percentage would be at a hundred percent so if you are following these leadership principles you should see be green it's easier to adapt and implement to new policy changes like the return dissatisfaction rate and customer service - satis action rate which are on their way right there all in beta phase if you guys all seen those most people are probably read on those it's a you know it's one thing to get the order right now it's another thing to get the return right but if you are following those leadership principles you would have taken a bias fraction to learn what it means you would have empowered your team to start making the necessary changes so when those are enforced which is coming it won't be an issue you're ahead of it and the third thing is decreased seller performance and PQ policy violations so selling performance and policy violations so there's two different teams there's seller performance and then there's a sub sub team for product quality so if you're adhering to those leadership principles you're going to have less time and less issues with these how else can it help can give you new opportunities what I mean by that seller fulfil prime anybody in here do that one - do you like it yeah seller fulfilled prime means that your unit that you're selling is prime badged but it lives and stays in your own facility you have to pay the costs on it but you still get the power of prime so customers shop on Amazon I don't know about you but everything I shop for is I only look at the prime eligible offers and if it's not a prime arable offer I go and look for the product from the manufacturer right so if it's not an FBA why is that because I want it I pay $100 a year I want my product in two days so does you know third of the rest of the US households I think about twenty twenty half of all US households will be Prime members so adhering to those leadership principles it gives you the ability to participate in new opportunities one of those is seller fulfill prime another one is a hazardous materials pilot anyone in here say sell hazmat yeah so hazmat Amazon has facilities where you can send your products into FBA and their hazardous and they live in a hazardous materials facility if it's an aerosol actually gets contained in a 12 or like a 6x6 chain-link fence cage so if it gets punctured it flies around on and no one gets hurt right if it's flammable it lives in a little cube that has a sprinkler in it so if it catches fire it puts it all out so the pilot allows you to send in hazardous material products to FBA however you can't if you've ever had a hazardous material policy violation meaning you knew it was hazardous but you sent it to FBA anyway right you took a shortcut the others to subscribe and save pilot everyone here know what subscribe and save is subscribe and save is incredibly powerful right it is where you as a customer buy a product is something you buy all the time cat food in my house right we go through a lot of cat food and I get tired of always going to the store so I just subscribed to it rise on my door the 5th of every month right it used to be only Amazon so only Amazon retail would allow you for subscribe and save a year ago they started opening it up to third-party sellers but only a small amount of third-party sellers because they met those performance metrics right so subscribe and save is huge but if you're not hitting those numbers if you're not driving the right metrics you're not going to be able to participate in it Lightning Deals another one it's not necessarily the same but there are a prime day remember that in July bigger than Christmas or whatever they were going to say incredibly successful though for Amazon and they'll continue to do it but to participate you had to have a particular metric we had two particular levels to be in that Lightning Deals so they allow you to tap into those new opportunities these are the ones that I know about right now right what I don't know about is what's going to happen with drone delivery are you going to be eligible for that you know I don't know about the one-hour delivery that's happening and I think 17 different markets right now are you eligible for that so those are the sorts of things where you're thinking and we can go back to the slide but it's you know think big so even though you're not a Amazon but you are a seller and you're thinking big and how you're going to be able to apply these things to your business the other way that can help is improve business performance increase by box share and our eligibility better metrics better by box more sales pretty simple it allows you to focus on expanding your business instead of maintaining or in some cases saving it so you're focused on growing your business you're not focused on writing a plan of action on how you're going to get this Aysen reinstated because customers complain that it was fake like you saw a high number of returns you would have just removed it immediately and been done with it right it's not worth it and it's going to increase your sales when FBA started there were a lot of businesses that were like no way I'm not going to do FBA I'm not going to do FBA I'm not going to do FBA and then we recruited them in and they were like why didn't I do FBA a year ago I saw thirteen hundred percent increase in sales I'm not kidding thirteen hundred I've seen a since the minimum twenty twenty-five percent increase in sales right so adhering to these leadership principles allows you to increase your sales and that's what's most important and with that I thank you

Channel: Feedvisor

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Keywords: amazon leadership principles, amazon 14 leadership principles, amazon insider, amazon, amazon business growth, amazon success, jeff bezos philosophy, amazon philosophy, amazon business philosophy, peter kearns, ecommerce, e-commerce, feedvisor

Id: lObTcXUSUd4

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2016