Book Review: The everything store. The book about how amazon.com became a multi trillion dollar business
I was in Manchester to give a sales training recently and as my personal tradition i visit two places in every city i enter: coffee shops and bookstores
I visited Waterstones bookstore and bought a copy of the book above ‘THE EVERYDAY STORE’ for approximately £10 (N10,000) as you can see from the beautiful picture i took of it in my study at home. The book was so good i bought the digital copy for £7.99 (N8,000) as well so that when i am on the move i can read it on my ipad.
Truly the price of a book and the cost of taking time to read it, both have asymmetrical relationship to the benefits you’ll get from the book. I am reminded of what the Billionaire Charlie Munger said after making money from an idea in got from a newsletter
“Yes. I read Barron’s for fifty years. In fifty years I found one investment opportunity in Barron’s, out of which I made about $80 million with almost no risk. I took the $80 million and gave it to Li Lu, who turned it into $400-500 million. So I have made $400-500 million out of reading Barron’s newsletter for fifty years“
Here are the lessons and highlights i got from the book
On Customer Obsession: “His customer-service department tracked two important metrics: average talk time (the amount of time an employee spent on the phone with a customer) and contacts per order (the number of times a purchase necessitated a customer phone call or e-mail). Bezos demanded that his staff reduce both” Notice one of his metrics was not how many products they sold! Because he knew that if he could get the complains down, the clients will leave good review, tell their friends and their friends will shop with amazon.com. I believe that if you focus on the right value adding metrics on your job or business the rest will take care of themselves.
I have shopped with amazon consistently now for almost one year and i have spoken to their customer service team only once!!!!!
Like the bible teaches ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all the other things will be added to you” It is counter intuitive, but it works.
On Network Effects: Network effects means that a product or service become increasingly more valuable as more people use them. Your phone is valuable to you because other people have a telephone so your phone has network effect, social media platforms are valuable to you because your clients and friends use them, zoom or amazon is more valuable because a lot of people us them. So amazon realize that for it to have network effects it must have amazing service which will fuel word of mouth for them
On The Power Of The Media Or PR: “Amazon was featured on the front-page of WSJ (Wall Street Journal) article, ‘How Wall Street Whiz Found a Niche Selling Books on the Internet,’ and Bezos had his first stippled-and-hatched portrait in the country’s largest financial newspaper. The number of orders each day immediately doubled. The world now knew about amazon”
I tell businesses that until the Lion can talk every story will glorify the Hunter. For every achievement of your business do a press release. It will give you more sales, publicity, goodwill and attract talented staff or contractors to want to work with you. It will cost you money in the short term, but you’ll make it back many times over in the long term.
If you can’t afford to pay newspapers, do a whatsapp broadcast to tell all your contacts about what you’re building this is also a form of PR
On Partnerships: “That summer, the company launched what could be considered its first big innovation: allowing other websites to collect a fee when they sent customers directly to Amazon to buy a book. Amazon gave these approved sites an 8 percent commission for the referral. The Associates program wasn’t exactly the first of its kind, but it was the most prominent and it helped spawn a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry called affiliate marketing. It also allowed Amazon, very early on, to extend its reach across the Web to other sites, entrenching it in advance of the looming competition.”
There are certain markets you business cannot and will never access if you don’t partner with the kings and queens of the land. I call them community gateway leaders. I remember paying an instagram influencer to go live on instagram with me on their page. I made the money back!!!!
This was why i started the affiliate program in my whatsapp group and one guy Sam Ajayi just made N100,000 in commissions cash!! by referring his friends to my group because of the insane value he his getting. You can join my whatsapp group here: Sales Factory Whatsapp Community. Join us now and participate in our podcast review of Andrew Huberman on July 30.
Amazon knew this so they partnered with small sites to drive customers to them for 8% fee. Now remember due to their customer focus and obsession that customer will return again and again creating a long LTV or life time value
On Having Coffee With Your Mentor Or Coach: One saturday morning Jeff Bezos had coffee inside a Barnes & Noble store with his retail mentor Jim Sinegal the Billionaire founder of COSTCO. I like two of the advice Jim gave Jeff
A. “ My approach has always been value trumps everything else”
B. “ I’ve always had the opinion that we shamelessly stolen good ideas”
In recent times you saw how Mark Zuckerberg stole twitter’s idea to start thread.
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