Why Your E-commerce Company Needs Standard Operating Procedures

On the 61st episode of Marketing Interruption, Andrew Maff talks about the benefits of e-commerce sellers creating SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and how it can help them scale much quicker than they originally thought.

Tune in and enjoy today's interruption!

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:37

Welcome to number Episode 61 of the marketing interruption podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Maffettone. Today, I'm going to talk to you about slps standard operating procedures. So these are a pain in the ass. They are such a hassle if you do if you do them correctly, they're a big pain in the ass. A lot of people ask me like, oh, when we do slps, why can't we just do a video, and you have to do more than a video because it's just not explaining. Let me let's backtrack. Okay, so if you don't know what an SLP is an SLP is a standard operating procedure. This is essentially an extremely detailed in depth write up with videos and screenshots, we do it my way with screenshots and videos and, and just write up of just exactly how you do something in your business. So ecommerce sellers, let's say you have a product launch that you do. And you always want your Amazon listing to look a certain way. And you want it to go up on a certain time you want an email to go out at a certain time you want your ads to be prepared and look at a certain a certain way for a certain time. If you could actually explain if you think you could train an employee to do it, that means that you can train a VA to do it might not be a VA at, you know overseas for several bucks an hour, it could be someone who knows what they're doing. But if you're not doing it that often, then why hire a full time employee and pay all the extra expenses on that. So if you if you could actually video yourself doing something and you can walk someone through it, you can outsource it. And if you can make an SLP for something you absolutely should, it is the easiest way to scale your business. Every time you do something every time you have a task, you should look at it and go, okay, who can I give this to? How can I teach him how to do this. And so peas are kind of where that comes in. So let me kind of explain how we do it here at Blue Tasker. And then, of course, how a lot of sellers we work with, I just kind of show them like, Hey, here's, here's how we do it. And then I kind of walk them through our process, and they'll implement it internally on their own. But so we use Asana as our project management system. And we use

02:51

I think it's the business, I think it's called a business plan that they have. But essentially, it gives you the ability to do templates, it also gives you the ability to do forms within those templates of each. Basically, there's a project and you can make a template for that project. And then there's a form for each of those projects. And you can have someone fill out that form. And as soon as they submit it, it becomes a task within that project. And then now you have all that information. So if I have, you know, a client who wants us to launch a campaign, for a certain product line, we have a forum where it says, you know, what's the product? Are you What do you want to do a discount can attach your imagery here, like just everything that we need all that stuff, and then all goes into this project. And then we take that project, and we you know, assign tasks to different people. And then it all goes out. And it makes life so much easier. And the big benefit of that template is that next time it happens if a client's like, Oh, you know what I wanted to do this, we should have done this, or Hey, we forgot to do this, I just have to go Oh, shit, I gotta remember that for next time. So all I do is I go back into the template into Asana at it. And then next time, I can't forget, it sits right there. To me, that's not an SLP, though, that's a project. So it's an outline of a project of things that needs to be that I need to remember to get done. It's those individual tasks that are different. So one of the things that we do for all campaigns is document when did the campaign start? When did it end? What did the website do? What did the campaign do? What are the ads do? What are the conversion rates? Like all we are gonna get all that data so that I know for the next campaign, I got to beat that. So what did we learn? I got to compile all that stuff. And a lot of it I like to manually grab just because I'm kind of nitpicky on like I like to see it and then take it myself. And obviously I'm not going to do that myself. So what I've done is I've actually used a platform called process Street. So process tree is specifically meant for SOPs, where you basically create a checklist of do this, then do this, then do this, and every little tiny checklist thing that you have is here's a video of it. Here's a snapshot of the area that you need to be in. Here's the stuff that you need to grab. Here's the links of where you can find them. It's an extremely detailed walkthrough of this task. So basically, we take that, and each of the tasks within Asana for this project all have an SOPs within them. So what happens is, I assign that task to a VA, VA opens it up and says up, there's a, I need to do a checklist in process Street, they open up the checklist that goes to the process Street. And as they start going through each little step, they go, Okay, now do this. Now I have to do this. And then it gets marked off every time they do something, as soon as they finish, I actually get an email, we've rigged it now where else we get a slack message. And it tells me that it's done. So essentially, I know when things are getting done, I know who did it. There's timestamps when and what time they did it, it's great for tracking too. So if you're outsourcing to a VA, but you're not using something like Upwork, you want to know how much time they're spending, that's a great way to do this as well. But the big benefit of SOPs that I find is everyone's end goal, right is to eventually sell their company and retire on a beach somewhere. Even if you you want to run your company all the way until you're 90, eventually you're going to have to sell it or eventually you're going to hand it down to someone else, in which case, they need to learn how to do the business. And having an SLP with an exact example of how to do something specifically means that it's like it's idiot proof, you can't you can't fuck it up. It's very simple. Which means that basically, you built a library of assets, where if you decided one day, you know what, it's time for me to sell this company, you can take your project management system that is basically templated of the concept of what you need to do. And you can take process Street, which is just a library of SOPs. And you can just hand them over to someone and instead of them contracting you and locking you up for two years to train how to do shit, you can just give them that stuff and be like, Look, I'll stick around for three months to make sure that you guys know how to read. And then you can get out. It's a fantastic way to set that kind of stuff up. But it's a great way to scale because then you can outsource everything you can outsource as much as you need to. And you can just sit around and watch checklist notifications on slack go off, which is basically what I'm doing right now. I'll watch sit here as I'm doing this podcast, I'll see like oh good so and so just finished that. So process street Asana, that's our back. That's our tech stack of operations. And it's what a lot of our sellers have started us now too. So highly, highly, highly recommend slps especially for e commerce sellers because everything you do is so repetitive and it's so just like kind of mundane that is certain point you can actually just outsource a lot of that stuff. And most owners really should be spending their time doing more high level tasks. So look into it, check it out. That's what I have for today. Rate review, subscribe, shoot me an email marketing interruption@bluetuskr.com if you have any questions, but I will see you all tomorrow.