Out of chaos comes innovation. Ecommerce has grown leaps and bound in the last year due to the pandemic, but it’s clear – it’s here to stay.

Conquer Local is in Amsterdam this week talking with Stephanie Kirk, Director of EU & US Operations at Spotzer. Stephanie doesn’t disappoint; she brings invaluable information on ecommerce. She provides talks tracks, breaks down what ecommerce means, and offers advice to the business owner who may be reluctant to jump on board the ecommerce train. It is expected that by 2040, 95% of all purchases will be via ecommerce. The top reason why people make online purchases is that they can shop whenever they want, 24/7.

Stephanie did her degree in Theatre & Film, and gained skills in many transferable areas, even though she found being a Magician’s Assistant wasn’t as fulfilling as she imagined. But adaptability is key to a varied life. In 2010 she began a career in Tech, working her way through several key roles with Yell, the UK’s most prominent directory service. Steph’s remit encompassed customer service & process improvement, and, eventually, she headed up Yell’s Digital Agency, the flagship function after their transformation from print to digital. Being invited to join the team at Spotzer in 2018, after collaborating with them on various projects, was a pivotal moment in Stephanie’s career. In the last 2 years, she’s helped Spotzer continue to be successful through rapid change and expansion and now works on partnerships with 19 partner companies across Europe and the U.S.

At some point, she had time to travel and thoroughly enjoys exploring new places across the globe, mainly by trekking, biking, or sailing. She and her team are really excited to work alongside Vendasta, and she’s eager to inject a little Spotzer magic to ensure top-quality products and services support more SMBs.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Introduction

George: E-commercify your life today on the Conquer Local Podcast. Producer, Colleen has not disappointed today. She has brought in an expert on e-commerce. And this expert deals with business people all over the world in 47 languages, if I remember correctly. Coming up in a moment, the Director of EU and US Operations at Spotzer, our good friend here on the Conquer Local podcast. Stephanie Kirk is our guest next all the way from Amsterdam.

Conquer Local Podcast, we are worldwide, #worldwide. We are on our way to Amsterdam and joining us on the broadcast, good friend of mine, Stephanie Kirk, Stephanie, good to see you again.

Stephanie: Hi George, good to see you.

George: Stephanie is the Director of EU and US Operations for our good friends at Spotzer. If you remember back on broadcast, I think it was a couple of seasons ago, We had Pete Urmson, the CEO. We’re going to talk about e-commerce today, but first I would just love for you to tell us what your day-to-day looks like and your team and where that team is located. Because I know some inside information, but I’d love for the conquerors to hear it from you.

Stephanie: Of course, George, thank you. Thanks for the intro, yeah. I’m based in Amsterdam with some members of my team, but we’re actually based across Europe, mainly. I look after the partner management team, mainly. So I look at the operation day-to-day, in terms of what we’re doing for our partners. We generally white label for our partners across Europe and the US and Australia, but we spend a lot of time working on how we can make the client journey in particular, smarter, more efficient, better for the end user. That’s what we do day to day.

Recently, of course, we’ve been working a lot on how we can help our client base get through the pandemic and everything that’s happening out there and everything that we need to do to to make their lives a little easier.

Setting up for Success

George: Right, I’d love to give our listeners a bit of a lens of the amazing business that is Spotzer. And you know, I know you and I met in the Lisbon Airport for the first time going to a SIINDA Convention, but then had a chance to come to your headquarters and spend a couple of days there. And you know, that was pre pandemic, but it was really interesting. You have the French team and you have the Dutch team and you have the German team. And I was asking Pete and Ash about that at a previous thing and it was like Amsterdam seems to be quite, and easy might not be the right word, because you have to find the talent, but it seems to be easier to find people that speak multiple languages to be able to service that customer base. Because you really do truly have customers all over the world, you are building websites for clients all over the world through a channel partner network.

So I’d love to hear it from you. How have you been able to assemble that team of those experts that can speak in that language and then also to create the content for that customer on their website?

Stephanie: Yeah, you’re not wrong. We are lucky, we’re in a really nice situation where we do have a lot of people coming to live and work in Amsterdam from everywhere across the globe. So you’re right, we have teams of French speakers, German speakers, Italians, Dutch, Flemish. We have lots of different languages spoken in the office. We are able to recruit because Amsterdam is such a hub, isn’t it, it’s such a great place to be. And a lot of young people in particular come to see us. So it’s amazing to to have all those people working with us. And it’s been a big eye-opener for me, before that I was in the UK working with UK employees and clients. So for me, it’s been an amazing few years working with Spotzer and getting to know all these people and from different cultures too.

We have a team lead who speaks six languages. So where we have a partner who works in various different markets, people like that are just well unicorns, I suppose, but we do tend to find them and they love to come and work for Spotzer. In terms of what we provide and how we provide things, we always promise that we’re going to have native speakers. So where we speak direct to clients they should be able to speak to a native. And the copywriters and the proofreaders that we work with, again, native speakers, all trained in their own languages, but also working across the languages too. We work with quite a few bilingual people.

George: I found it interesting. I was in Berlin delivering a keynote. And I don’t even know if I said that, right, but I was invited to speak at that event. And I met one of your team members that is responsible for the German speaking team and your German partners that sell websites in that market. And we were out having a couple of drinks in true George Leith style, and we’re sitting at the bar and there was your account manager and the CEO of two companies. And I’m not gonna mention who it was, they knew each other so well and the relationship was there. And that’s one thing I’ve always admired about your organization and I know that it’s deep in your DNA, that it is customer first and and serving that customer. And you have the same model that we do in our company. You have a channel partner that then works with SMEs, SMBs, and I’m trying to get rid of acronyms. I’m killing acronyms this year, that’s my mission. So small and medium businesses, small and medium enterprises is the term in Europe.

The Importance of Ecommerce

George: But we’re here today to talk to e-commerce and producer, Colleen, she’s brilliant. She brings fabulous guests like you to the table. And e-commerce is such an important thing at this time. We’ve been talking about it on the broadcast for now, well, it seems like forever, but we really started to lean into it even more because we were watching our friends and neighbors that were business folks really suffer because they weren’t able to conduct business online. So I would love to hear from you, because I don’t think there’s anybody else that has as many team members that build e-commerce websites as you. If you were to just give me the elevator pitch of the value of e-commerce, what would Stephanie Kirk say? I’d love to hear that.

Stephanie: Wow, this is a subject I love to talk about, I really do. And I like to talk about it from the position of the small business owner and what it can actually do for them, what it can bring to them to enrich their lives. So you referenced this year in particular has been very difficult. Yeah, of course, it’s been very, very difficult to move. And I remember almost a year ago, Pete coming into the office and saying, okay guys, that’s it, for everybody’s safety, we’re going to be working from home. I’d never run a contact center from home before. And none of us had, so it was a difficult first few days to get all of the tech and all of the people aligned to it, but we did it, but we very quickly said, what are we going to do for the SMBs who rely on our products across the globe? How are we going to keep them going? And so within a week, we were able to offer a new, easy, and fast to deploy e-commerce solution aimed at keeping them going. Now, this is really…

George: Hang on, I’m sorry. I was paying complete attention to you. I thought you said in a week, is that, did you say in a week?

Stephanie: In a week, George, in a week, it was so important to us to get this moving for our partners. We wanted them to take something to market as quickly as possible. We needed to move faster than the pandemic. And so we partner with best in class technology. So we typically use for our e-commerce solutions. I’m blessed with an internal tech team who produce all of these amazing tools in house to make things even easier for clients. So we rallied together very quickly. And the technology that we used just enabled us to bring something to market very, very fast that was very, very sensible and that sensible and common sense is what I love. It has to work. Now, what we’re doing is offering these products now for that massive shift in market that we’ve seen. I have a, if you allow me to just give you a couple of case studies here, because this is really important to me-

George: I would love, and again, I just want to frame this up for our audience. Because what I’ve found is folks like Stephanie that train teams of people who deliver the solution to the client are the people that obviously have to clean up our mess as salespeople. And I mean that in the most loving way possible because we love salespeople and we need salespeople, but there’s that story of the sales person sells it to the customer. And then the person that has to build it actually sells it to the customer. And this is going to be Stephanie’s case study. And I think that our listeners should listen very closely because you’re going to get some talk tracks from Stephanie. I guarantee you, that you could use with your clients to better set expectations on what e-commerce is going to deliver for them. So sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to get everybody’s attention so that they can really consume this goodness that they’re going to get here.

Stephanie: No problem, no pressure then.

George: No pressure.

Stephanie: So I think the way I see it is, it sounds kind of kind of trite to quote things but out of chaos comes innovation. We see this a lot. And what we’ve seen is coffeehouses switching to click and collect, fitness centers with a need to offer signups to online classes, hair and beauty salons who were unable to open their doors but could sell their products online. Microbreweries, how many microbreweries have popped up that are wanting to do local deliveries? They are thriving those guys. There are very few businesses who wouldn’t benefit from a really simple and affordable e-commerce solution. What I’ve seen in particular, and this is a key one for me, let’s talk about gift cards. So I have a friend back in the UK, who’s a tattoo artist. His doors had to close this time last year. And he was so concerned he was going to go out of business but he decided to take on e-commerce and sell gift cards. He’s made thousands of dollars in gift cards in the last year. And people all have these ready for when he can open his doors again in the UK.

George: What you just said there is so, you know, that is a pitch. And here’s the thing the business owner needs to understand. There are consumers in the market that feel bad for you. I’m telling you right now, you’ve built loyal fans. So Mr, Ms. Business person, if you put a gift card online, they will buy it just to support you. And they’re like, oh yeah, but you know, people are really worried that we might not even be, no they’re not actually, the people who love your brand will go out, you were right on the money, I’m tipping more than I ever have. And why is that? I used to employ 400 servers at one point in time and I know that they work for their tips. They were going to university. That was what was paying their bills. So here I am and you know, I’m Scottish, so I like to tip, you know, 18%, which I think is pretty good and I’m tipping 30%. But the reason for that is we have empathy for that small business.

I think that you, you know, so thank you for that. The gift card sale is a real important piece. I do want to back up the truck on one item, hair salons, and the product sale. So you may be getting shaggy because you haven’t had a haircut or haven’t had your hair done, or maybe God forbid, you tried to do it yourself or you get your significant other to do it but you still need that product and whatever that product might be. And the one thing that I do know, because my wife is a product expert. She will not change products. So just because I can’t go to the hair salon or I can’t go to the Med Spa, I still need the product, is the actual street level presentation to the client to show value. You mentioned four categories. We had microbreweries with the gift cards, coffee shops. What other area are you seeing e-commerce where you didn’t even think that e-commerce would be a thing?

Finding Solutions with Ecommerce

Stephanie: So I was talking to a director of product today, Dave, very clever guy. And we were doing some coaching today with some of our client management team. And he came up with a really great case study, which is going to suit this down to the ground for you George. So a massage therapist. So one of our partners works with a massage therapist. Who’s offered e-commerce and I went, what would you sell? So he’s like, well, gift vouchers, okay, gift vouchers, cool. Oh, and essential oils and candles. And they even got into selling on the, you know the music that you listen to while you’re getting a massage? They’re selling these CDs and things, right? So they decided to do all of this online and right, this is where e-com, doesn’t just help somebody to stay in business through all this, it helps them to stand out. Because not only could they continue to trade, but the SEO value of being the only company in that area to offer this, brought them better rankings and more and more new customers who would not have seen them otherwise. So you buying a gift card for somebody who hasn’t usually used that company before, they’re going to stay with them again if they like the products that they’re getting.

George: Can we talk about that SEO value? Because the one thing that I’ve noticed is a SEO is voodoo. So depending upon whoever the voodoo artist is that is executing the SEO, they’ve got a different concept. For our our sales audience that is listening to this broadcast. I think I know what you’re saying, but I’d love to understand how Stephanie would coach someone on delivering again, that street level idea of the rank and new eyeballs seeing your, not just the transaction, so I’d really like to understand that a little bit more.

Stephanie: Of course, yeah. And look, I’m not the SEO guru. So maybe you need to speak to Dave Elliott at some point on this, but I’ll tell you how he said it to me. Because again, I always say this from the business owner’s point of view, not from the techie side of it, I’m not the SEO wizard, but my understanding of this. So the value is in standing out, being different, offering something different. So Google will go, okay, we have all of these massage therapists in this same local area, which one of them does something more? Which one of them does something different? And it picks up that, hey, there’s an e-commerce solution going on on this website, I’m going to value that higher than the others in this same location. So I’m going to push that out further. So this is about being the first there to be able to to gather these customers up and get more traffic to your website, get more calls in, more emails. The other thing about this is with the e-com solutions that we offer, SMBs can push out all of their products across their social media networks too. So you update your store, click of a button, everything’s out there across your social media network. So of course, that’s going to add to this too.

George: That’s a really important point. And I’d love to understand from you what some messaging might be. I think that what this is, is this idea of a merging of the various channels of local presence. And what I find in talking to business owners, they have no bloody clue what to put on their social media channels.

Stephanie: No.

George: They’ve attracted a following. They have an audience there. And what you’re saying is with a proper e-commerce solution, you could use that as content to that audience on social media, and then it drives it back to the site.

Stephanie: Yeah, of course you can. Anything that you’re linking through. So any posts that you are linking back to your site will link to your shop. And of course, if you’re keeping your stock up to date, then you know, you update your stock, as soon as somebody goes on through the social media, everything’s the latest, it’s got everything on there, straight away for them. So your reach is much further.

George: I’m going to share a story with you. Last may, I went to my clothier here in town, great guy, Gord, and I had bought a pair of shoes, they’re amazing called, Lloyd’s, German product, amazing product. And then pandemic hits, the Gord store shut down for 60 days. I sent him an email and said, put the put the brown pair aside for me. And when you guys go back to work, I’ll come pick it up. And then when I went to pick up the shoes, I said, we should really help you get an e-commerce website. And Gord said to me, he said, well, we just put a new inventory system in. And I think that that’s going to be a lot of work and a lot of money to tie it all together. I’m sure that you’ve heard this piece before and I think what Gord was saying was, I don’t really understand how it all comes together so that I’m not selling the brown pair of Lloyd shoes to you and I don’t have it in stock. Again, it’s that physical idea of sales compared to the e-commerce idea, How would you deal with that objection? And then how would you, and I don’t even think it was an objection, I think it’s a plea for more information. So how would you coach on dealing with that Stephanie?

Stephanie: So one of the things with these solutions is that the client can have a dashboard in the palm of their hand, where they can update all of their stock and take care of it and make sure that all the images are up to date and all of that, it’s dead simple, a lot of our users, just drag and drop technology. But also with the products that we sell, we would never just fulfill it and walk away. So whoever’s going to sell these products. We’re going to fulfill those products. We’re going to upload the first few products for the client with a really simple tool that was produced in house. We give them a link, they upload the images for the products and the descriptions and the tool just generates a file for us. We can put it straight in the site so that they can get up and running very, very quickly with their first few products. But then what we’ll do is we’ll make sure that their sales agent is up to date with how to then look after it themselves so that they can give them the keys directly and show them exactly how to do it. And of course, with ongoing support programs in place, we will answer any questions that are needed at all, but this technology is really simple and we will make sure that people are up to date on how to use it.

George: Well, I think that you just delivered a great talk track for our conquerors out there is we’re going to get the client to put their best selling products in first, we’re going to get them comfortable with that. They’re actually going to see transactions flow through their store, and then you will get their attention. So I think what Gord was saying, and I didn’t really interrogate it too much more. I just was planting the seed and hopefully someone could help him. I hear that a lot from sales reps where they’re saying, I think what they’re trying to do is they’re biting off, they’re trying to eat the whole elephant. And then the client gets again, confused, scared, it’s that risk. And I’ve been working on an analogy. I’ll try it on you to see what you think. You have to build the trust and in building the trust, you actually reduce the fear and the fear of the new solutions. So if they trust that you’re going to help them down the journey, but then there has to be another proof point other than just your voice. The sales rep, unfortunately, sales reps have to prove over and over and over again. So by saying, give me your five best-selling products, let’s put those in first, let’s show you that there’s value to investing more of your time. And then what we do know about business people is as soon as they realize that this is the way that they can do a better job of feeding their kids, they will invest that time. But to ask them to do the whole thing, I have 7,000 product SKUs and put them all, like that is daunting, isn’t it?

Stephanie: Absolutely, yeah, bit by bit is the way to go. And let you say, George, absolutely great analogy. And put on the best selling products first. If I may, can I give your listeners one more thing that I think is really important as well, and this is the time-saving piece. This is really important to me and would be if I was a small business owner.

So imagine you’re a small business and your website usually generates about six calls a day. And for ease of maths, we’ll say each call takes 10 minutes a day. So that’s an hour a day, okay? Not every one of those calls results in a sale. Now imagine you have an e-commerce solution. Those clients can find you, work out that you’re the best in the area, go to your website, choose the products, and buy them 24/7, anytime day or night. You can be fast asleep and your shop is still open. So let’s say time poor business owner, who wouldn’t want to get an hour a day back. And do you know what I do with it? During these times, it’s really difficult to manage our people, look after our people and as managers and business owners, we have a duty of care to look after them through this really tough time. If I had that 60 minutes back per day, as a small business owner, I would be nurturing my people. I’d be checking in, future planning, getting a click and collect coffee, maybe, whatever, but that’s where I would spend my time. And I’m pretty sure that your guys out there can think of many, many other things that their clients could be doing with that hour a day.

George: Well, you can tell that you lead a large team because that is a great leadership lesson for those business folks to be investing in their teams. I have two other items that I think are really important and I know that you’re going to continue to educate us because I’ve learned a lot already. The Google Carousel. So right now I go online and I searched for a product or service and I get Wayfair and I get Walmart and I get whatever it might be. And some of those brands are quite daunting, when I’m the local business owner. But with an e-commerce solution set up properly you would be able to appear in that carousel, in that market.

Stephanie: Absolutely, absolutely.

George: Am I lying?

Stephanie: No you’re not lying

George: Or am I telling the truth in advance or am I over selling it?

Stephanie: You’re not lying at all, and it must be extremely daunting for small business owners to look at the Amazons of the world and say, well, hell, you know, how am I going to compete with them? But again, it’s like we were saying earlier, you are local, people are gonna look for local providers and you can come up and you can compete with some of the big hitters if you have e-commerce, absolutely.

George: So, you know, the interesting thing about this also from a delivery mechanism of the trusted local advisor, the salesperson, that is taking this prospect on a tour of what life might be like, you have to, I find that if you draw a parallel to experiences that they’ve already had, so, you know, Mr, Ms. Business person, what’s the last thing that you purchased? And they’ll tell you a gazebo, oh, where’d you buy it from? I bought it from Costco. How did you come to determination to buy it from Costco or Walmart or Home Depot? Anyways, insert brand, insert large massive brand here. It was a Google search and it was probably the carousel. Now the transaction happened on the e-commerce website. So what I’ve found with businesses, they need to understand, to your point of local, is with the local ranking you’re going to get from a GMB profile and maybe a little bit of SEO work. And not even a lot of SEO work, a little bit of SEO work. When I search for gazebo in my local market, and the e-commerce site is plumbed to that carousel properly or whatever, Facebook Marketplace doesn’t matter. You will now rank alongside those massive global brands which I think they all want, but they just don’t know how to get there.

Stephanie: Yeah, of course, absolutely. And you know, anything we can advise them on, we will try to advise them on no problem at all. It’s yeah, like you say, it’s the locality piece, George, it’s the looking for that service in my area. Yeah, okay, at some point on that page, the Home Depot or whatever is going to come up, but who’s going to come up on that map? Who’s going to come up on that map at the top of the page?

George: That’s absolutely right. The second thing that I wanted to interrogate, I think when we say e-commerce, everybody thinks of a store, but yet we have this idea of conducting business online is e-commerce and sometimes the transaction is just booking a meeting or sometimes the transaction is booking in the calendar of the massage therapist. Sometimes the transaction is a virtual showroom, is that the way that you see e-commerce as well, as it’s more than just the shopping cart experience?

Stephanie: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And again, going back to what we were talking about how different businesses have had to pivot to these new times. I still use a fitness center back in Yorkshire in the UK, and I go online and I book in my sessions and I go to the Zoom meetings and I see all the folks that I used to go to the gym with, all there on camera. And it’s superb because I haven’t lost that community. I still have that community in my life. And I hate exercising on my own, it has to be a social thing. So I’ve managed to keep that up. And yeah it’s things like that are of absolute value. E-commerce absolutely right. This is not about going online and purchasing a sweater. It’s a lot more than that now. Go on.

George: I’m sorry, I keep interrupting.

Stephanie: It’s fine.

George: I find also that what you said about the candles and the oils and the experience, I went right to experience. So you go to the massage therapist, and they’re great, or you wouldn’t keep going, right? But there are things happening in that room that add to that experience, the scent, the music, and the ability to tie those things together. Producer, Coleen, and I go to the same yoga studio. She doesn’t know that because I haven’t been in awhile, but I went to that. And when you would walk into the foyer of the studio, it would have the mats, it would have the DVDs of the episodes or of the classes. It would have the experience that people are having. And I’ve found if we can tie that talk track in as well. And you know, what does a local business person like talking about more than anything? They like to talk about the thing they built. And a lot of that has to do with the experience more than the product, because I can get the product, we just talked about that, I could get the gazebo from anywhere. So you brought up a couple of items, are there any other tips on how the business could capture that experience through e-commerce?

Stephanie: Wow, I mean, you were just referencing the experience. And I know of a business owner who has a hair salon. She’s been selling her products as we referenced earlier, no problem. But she’s also been selling online tutorials as to how to use them, which I just think is phenomenal. Let’s all learn a new skill. That’s what everybody wants to do in lockdown, right, learn a new skill. And it also just comes to mind now, is, I was talking to a colleague, who recently, their favorite restaurant they can’t go to at the moment. We’re still pretty much locked down over here. And my gosh, I am really missing restaurants. Now my favorite restaurant here where I live in Haarlem, is a beautiful fusion restaurant. And a lot of it is the experience, it’s going there, so yeah, they’re doing deliveries at the moment, fantastic. I can order their food but it’s just not the same. My colleague who is living in Amsterdam, his favorite restaurant is a Thai restaurant in Amsterdam and they refuse to deliver their food hot. What they do is they deliver all of the ingredients and they give you all of the instructions and they tell you what wines you should pair with it and all of that. What an experience, I mean, this is like date night, getting takeout, yeah, great. But date night, cooking together and making the meals that you have from your favorite restaurant with the best wines, superb, what an experience.

Conclusion

George: What a brilliant message there. And I’m also thinking about my restaurant friends, because I did spend some time in the restaurant business. And I’m thinking about, you know, that candle on the table that you buy for two pennies, because you use 100,000 of them in a month. Why not a more upgraded candle and then sell it online as a part of that experience, because we’re not going to go to the restaurant seven days a week but we could have that experience more nights during the week. And that’s what you’re speaking to.

We could probably go on for hours and I look forward to our next meeting, hopefully face to face, but Stephanie, it’s always a pleasure meeting you. You definitely are one of the top talents I have met in this space, and it’s interesting folks, as you listened to Stephanie, there was zero sales pitch in there. It was all about helping the local business. And I’ve got this new thing, Stephanie, and those who know me well, know that George always has some new thing, but this is my new thing. I believe that sales in 2021 is being a tour guide, and you are going to work with the customer and understand what their destination or outcome is. And then your job is to take them on the tour and to help them navigate the waters. And I think you’ve probably been on a few tours in your life, I know I have been. and I’ve never had a tour guide lead me down the back alley where I got beat up. The tour guide’s job is to take you in the places that you need to go to have the best experience to reach the outcome that you have. And I think that that puts a whole different lens on sales. Also the other thing is it’s not all about the product. It’s about the story around the area that we’re visiting on the tour and why it’s important and what you’ve heard from other people that they liked about it. And that’s delivering a case study. So, you know what you did here over the last, you know, 25 minutes or so was took us on an amazing tour of how to take e-commerce to our customers and show them that there may be a new normal for them that they should embrace. And at the end of the day, they’re able to feed their kids which is what this is all about is helping those local businesses.

So true pleasure seeing you again. It’s great to see that you’re well, take care in one of my favorite cities on earth, please, because I’m hoping to get back there very soon and say hello to all our friends at Spotzer. I wouldn’t be a sales person though if I didn’t say, Spotzer has an amazing offer inside the marketplace, we have worked with them on numerous, very large installations of hundreds of sites. We also worked with them on individual sites, and it doesn’t matter. I don’t know how you guys do it, but you offer that same level of white glove service to every customer. And we really appreciate the partnership. So great speaking to you.

Stephanie: Absolutely is too, thank you so much George, it has just been really interesting to talk to you.

George: We could talk to Stephanie for hours, obviously. And also, you know, I find it helps when you’ve met somebody face to face and been in their offices and can see the environment that they’re in. And I did have that privilege. It really was an impressive organization. Watching those teams communicate in the native language of the customers that they have in all of those different countries. You know, Pete Urmson has been on the broadcast before, the CEO of Spotzer, he’s a long time media executive with numerous organizations in Australia and he’s built something pretty special there at Spotzer. I like him a lot.

Stephanie’s brilliant, you can tell that. One of the things I like about Stephanie is she really must talk to a lot of business people because she delivered, there was no product pitch there at all, she didn’t talk about how fast the website would be, how many pages, what the technology was, she didn’t mention the names of the technology but it was more to to tell us about the world-class technology they were using. What she did talk about is a lesson for every sales person that was on this broadcast today listening, it was the outcome that was being delivered for the customer, there was 32 case studies. Don’t quote me on that number, but there was a lot of case studies in there that were delivered. And that is the way that you sell. You deliver a story about how you’ve solved a similar problem for a similar business. And you paint an outcome that you can actually deliver for the customer. So many talk tracks that you could deliver on the street to your customers in this broadcast. I can’t, there’s just so many of them.

First off, I love the idea, massage therapist, freaking out ’cause they can’t massage, worried that their customers are going to buy that gun thing with the knob on it and then drill themselves. And now they won’t need a massage therapist. But I’ll tell you what, it won’t smell the way that it does at the massage therapy clinic, it won’t have the same essential oils that you can put places, it won’t have the music that’s being played in the studio. Like I didn’t even think of that. And I’m sitting here going, boy, my drill that I bought on Amazon would work a hell of a lot better if I had those candles that my massage therapist has.

So, it is that idea of creating something out of chaos. In fact, she’s got a great line that she quoted, and I love that line, it is out of chaos comes innovation. And what we need to understand is when we are faced with some of our biggest challenges, is where we might come up with a new idea that will redefine our business. We’ve talked about COVID as being a forcing function. We’ve been out there as conquerors talking to our client base for bloody years about you need e-commerce, you need to book online, you need to do these things, oh, by the way, make sure your listing data is right. And here we are with an event that has made all of those things completely vital to the lifeblood of that business. So now we swoop in and we help that business owner but I don’t think we should walk in there and dump product all over them. I think we should walk in there and be like Stephanie and talk about how we’ve solved challenges for other businesses in the same space, give them some trust, remove the fear of the new solution that you’re putting in front of them.

Such a great broadcast. Thank you to Stephanie for joining us. We really do appreciate it. And you know, she really embodied what we’re all about here at the Conquer Local Podcast. It is being the trusted expert and delivering solutions that will help your client feed their kids. Thanks for joining us this week. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.