Ecommerce

Buyers are showing up to sales calls more informed than ever. That means sellers need to show up more prepared than ever. In the past, buyers would reach out to sales when they still knew very little about a product. They wanted to learn more about the features, pricing, and how it compares to competitors – and they expected the salesperson to provide that information. Today, buyers are gathering all that information (and more) long before they talk to sales. They’re reading review sites like G2. They’re scrolling communities like Reddit. They’re watching product walkthroughs on YouTube. Most significantly, they’re doing deep research with LLMs like ChatGPT, asking questions like “Is Product A or Product B better for my business?” Now, when a buyer gets on a call with sales, they expect more than basic information. Instead, they're looking for: Detailed examples of how other companies in their industry are using the product. Custom demos that show how the product works in their specific use case. Clear plans for how the product will be implemented and adopted. Here’s the good news. Just as buyers use AI to learn more about products, salespeople can use it to learn more about prospects. If I were in sales again, I would: 1. Use an AI assistant to do advanced research about your prospects before every call. 2. Use AI to find the best examples of similar companies seeing success with your product. 3. Build bespoke demos that highlight the most relevant features. Buyers today are more informed than ever. The best sellers I know are more prepared than ever. The result? More productive conversations, deeper connections and higher trust.

"Is $20/month too much for our product?" Instead of guessing, we used the Van Westendorp method to find our pricing sweet spot. 4 questions revealed exactly what users would pay (and we haven't touched our pricing since). Here's the framework any founder can steal: 1. Send a survey to actual users, not prospects We surveyed people already using Gamma. They understood the real value of our product, not hypothetical value. Too many founders survey their waitlist or randomly select people who have never used their product. That's like asking someone who's never driven about car prices. 2. Ask these 4 specific questions - At what price would this be too expensive for you to consider it? - At what price is it expensive but still delivering value? - At what price does it feel like a bargain? - At what price is it so cheap you'd question if it's reliable? These create bookends for perceived value. You're mapping the entire spectrum of price psychology, not just asking "what would you pay?" 3. Plot the responses and find where the lines intersect Graph responses from lots of users. Where "too expensive" and "too cheap" lines cross: that's your acceptable range. Where "expensive but fair" meets "bargain": this is your optimal price point. 4. Test within the range, don't just pick the middle The intersection gives you a range, not a number. We ran pricing experiments within that range to see actual conversion rates. A survey shows willingness to pay; testing reveals actual behavior. 5. Lean towards generous (especially for product-led growth) We chose to be more generous with AI usage than our "optimal" price suggested. Word-of-mouth growth matters more than maximizing initial revenue. Not everything shows up in the numbers. 6. Lock it in and stop tinkering Once you find the sweet spot through data, stick with it. We haven't changed pricing in 2 years. Every month debating pricing is a month not improving product. Remember: pricing is a signal, not just a number (Image: First Principles)

A very easy way to improve your Amazon ads efficiency by at least 10% Let’s say you’re spending ₹4–5 lakhs/month on Amazon ads. Your ACoS looks okay. Conversion rate seems fine. But your gut tells you—you’re still wasting some money on irrelevant traffic You’re not wrong At Atomberg, we had found that some of our Amazon spend was going toward search terms that had no business seeing our ads: - “cheap fan” -“rechargeable fan” - “usb fan under 1000” None of these users were in-market for a ₹3,000+ BLDC ceiling fan. But we were still showing up. And paying for those clicks. And it’s not just us. I’ve seen 6–7 brands' Amazon ad accounts across categories over the last few years—same problem, every single time The fix? N-gram analysis Takes less than an hour. You don’t need to be a performance marketing expert. But the results compound What’s N-gram analysis? It’s breaking down every search term into its word components—1-grams, 2-grams, 3-grams—and then identifying patterns that consistently drive waste… or conversion. Example: “cheap rechargeable fan for hostel room” turns into: 1-grams: cheap, rechargeable, fan, hostel, room 2-grams: rechargeable fan, hostel room 3-grams: fan for hostel, etc. When you do this across all your search terms, you start seeing the real picture. Why this matters more than just checking your search term report: Search terms ≠ keywords a) One keyword can trigger 100s of different queries. Some convert. Most don’t. You need to find the patterns. b) Waste is diluted across low-volume terms. Maybe “rechargeable fan for hostel” spent ₹300. You ignore it. But what if 12 other queries with “rechargeable” spent ₹6,000 in total with zero conversions? c) Long-tail is infinite. N-grams are finite. You can’t negate every bad search. But you can block the core terms—“cheap”, “usb”, “mini”—once and be done with it. d) It helps you scale campaigns too. You can find goldmine phrases like “white ceiling fan”, “silent BLDC fan”, “fan for living room”—with 5x+ ROAS. Those became exact match campaigns What you should do: a) Pull last 3 months of search term data b) Break them into unigrams, bigrams, trigrams c) Create a pivot with spend, orders, ROAS by N-gram d) Negate high-spend, low-conversion N-grams (e.g., “cheap”, “rechargeable”) e) Boost high-ROAS ones (e.g., “bldc”, “ceiling fan white”) f) Add exact match campaigns g) Rinse and repeat monthly Try it. Guaranteed to improve efficiency at whatever scale you are operating If you want to read an expanded version of the post, link is in the first comment

Early in my facilitation career, I made a big mistake. Spent hours crafting engaging activities and perfecting every little detail… Thinking that amazing learning design is what would make my workshops stand out and get me rehired. Some went great. Some bombed. You know the ones, sessions where: - One participant dominated the conversation. - People quietly disengaged, barely participating. - half the group visibly frustrated but not saying anything. I would push through, hoping things would course-correct. But by the end, it was a bit… meh. I knew my learning design was great so... What was I missing? Why the inconsistency between sessions? 💡I relied too much on implicit agreements. I realised that I either skipped or rushed the 'working agreements'. Treating it like a 'tick' box exercise. And it's here I needed to invest more time Other names for this: Contract, Culture or Design Alliance, etc... Now, I never start a session without setting a working agreement. And the longer I'm with the group, the longer I spend on it. 25 years of doing this. Here are my go-to Qs: 🔹 What would make this session a valuable use of your time? → This sets the north star. It ensures participants express their needs, not just my agenda. 🔹 What atmosphere do we want to create? → This sets the mood. Do they want an energising space? A reflective one? Let them decide. 🔹 What behaviours will support this? → This makes things concrete. It turns abstract hopes into tangible agreements. 🔹 How do we want to handle disagreement? → This makes it practical. Conflict isn’t the problem—how we navigate it is. ... The result? - More engaged participants. - Smoother facilitation. - Ultimately, a reputation as the go-to person for high-impact sessions. You probably already know this. But if things don't go smoothly in your session. Might be worth investing a bit more time at the start to prevent problems later on. Great facilitation doesn't just happen, It's intentional, and it's designed. ~~ ♻️ Share if this is a useful reminder ✍️ Have you ever used a working agreement in your workshops? What’s one question you always ask? Drop it in the comments!

Retail is dead. Foot traffic is down across the board. That’s the narrative we hear over and over being pushed in the media. Yet TALA - Grace Beverley’s brand born online - has opened their first physical store in Carnaby Street this weekend, to queues around Soho & a sell-out ticketed event. So rather than being dead, what if the role of brand retail has simply transformed? My take 👉 The store is no longer solely top of the funnel or entirely about discoverability. It’s the destination. The community hub. The clubhouse. It’s where content becomes tangible. Where brand world becomes real world. Where you walk through the door and it feels like stepping into their Instagram, their TikToks, their values. We’re not just talking racks and rails - there’s a coffee bar, photobooths, events, and experiences. This is community-led commerce. It’s a cultural space disguised as a high street shop. And I believe this is where we see the real revival of the high street - not as a retail destination, but as a brand world brought to life. A place to deepen connection with your community - ultimately strengthening the life time value of that customer. The blueprint is clear: Content captures. Community keeps. IRL deepens. TALA joins the ranks of Gymshark, Odd Muse and Glossier, Inc. - brands that built strong digital tribes before laying a single brick and now use their stores as destinations for the community to connect IRL. And in a world where discovery is unpredictable - spanning podcasts, group chats, TikToks and Substack - trying to funnel people in linearly is a lost cause. The smartest brands aren’t forcing a path. They’re showing up where their community already is & then inviting them in deeper. Retail isn’t dead. It’s reinventing itself & I'm so here for it. Calling it now - your favourite digital brand worlds will manifest in real life in the next 18 months whether through pop ups or permanent stores. Mark my words!

SEO - dead. Paid Marketing - dead. Engineering - dead too. (kidding!) But you know what’s never dead? Churn. Churn eats at your business, stalling your growth. Here are my 10 go-to churn reduction tactics I apply at every business. 1. Drive paid feature utilization. If users aren’t using what they paid for, they won’t stick around. 2. Don’t wait till churn happens: -> Get activation right. This means nailing setup, hitting the “aha!” moment quickly, and building habit loops. -> Ensure healthy ongoing engagement from paid users (your paid WAU). Monitor usage, depth, and frequency - not just logins. 3. Make reactivating auto-renew one click. Across every surface - app, web, email, everywhere. This is such an easy win - 10% of your cancels should be resubscribing before subscription end! 4. Be aggressive with payment failure comms. Prompt them to update their payment method via both email and in-product notifications. In product is a key word here, especially if they are still active. 5. When users cancel auto-renew, show them what they’ve used and what they’ll lose. Make the cost of leaving clear. Canva does this best. 6. Score users for churn risk. Offer discounts or even comped time for “high-risk” - this can save as much as 5% of your churn. 7. Offer a pause option. Especially helpful if you serve users with occasional or seasonal needs. 8. Make your pricing and packaging flexible. Let users move down the tiers during cancellation flow without friction - don’t lock them in. 9. Move your tenured monthly customers to annual subscriptions. After first-term churn, lead with something like: “Get your next X months free by switching to annual.” A good target is to move about 20% of your remaining monthly subscribers to annual by the end of their first year. 10. Human touch for high-value accounts: If you're B2B or high ARPU B2C, personal outreach from support or success teams can go a long way. This + My most tried and true churn benchmarks in my latest newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e3_aEWzZ This week's newsletter is sponsored by Churnkey - they help you reduce your involuntary churn. Do give them a try! #growth

Would you believe me if I told you that the marketing rollout for one of the most commercially successful, critically acclaimed independent albums of 2023 was bankrolled by a file-sharing company? It's true — and I gave a whole presentation about it. I'm excited to share below the FULL case study I developed for a workshop last year, on the groundbreaking brand partnership between Jungle and WeTransfer for the "Volcano" album campaign. As someone who typically focuses on tech industry trends, this case study was a rare opportunity for me to flex my muscles in marketing strategy. And there was truly no better subject for me than Jungle — who is one of my favorite live acts, and whose "Volcano" was my most-streamed album of last year. An independent release on AWAL, "Volcano" currently boasts over 500 million Spotify streams, a Brit Award, and stellar music video choreography that would make even professional dancers envious. What many might not realize is that WeTransfer is credited as a producer on all 14 music videos for the album, as well as the full-length Volcano Motion Picture released in December 2023. WeTransfer timed this partnership with their own rebranding as a company, making Jungle the face of their key feature launches. The campaign rolled out across multiple platforms over the course of 250+ days, with many exclusive content releases in Jungle's Medallion fan community, as well as on a bespoke, Jungle-branded WeTransfer landing page. In the deck below, I break down: 🌋 The shape of Volcano's 254-day "waterfall" content release strategy, and how WeTransfer's role as a brand partner evolved throughout 🌋 Why WeTransfer and Jungle's brand aesthetics and audiences align 🌋 How the campaign catapulted Jungle's streaming and social media growth 🌋 How the campaign did NOT move the needle on brand awareness for WeTransfer — but still may have succeeded for the company in other ways 🌋 How to use tools like Chartmetric, Semrush, and SocialBlade to benchmark performance of similar campaigns across streaming, social media, and web traffic metrics Disclaimer: This analysis only covers March–December 2023, so does not include Jungle's recent campaign with Gap, which had an even further impact on Jungle's streaming and social performance. I *love* doing these data-driven music marketing breakdowns — especially for artists and scenes close to my heart — and would love to help other people out with this work. There's so much insight to be gained, even just from publicly available data. If you're interested in collaborating on similar case studies or audits on social media campaigns for your artist or brand, please DM me to discuss! #musicmarketing #musicdata #musictech #dataanalysis #musicindustry #musicbiz #musicbusiness #marketingstrategy

#payments rails across the globe and the models behind them have evolved in three major (but very different) patterns and yet they are converging in certain ways. Let’s take a look. About half a century ago, magnetic-striped cards triggered a payments revolution. Swiping plastic cards at POS merchant terminals conquered the west, with Visa and Mastercard managing the rails and becoming an almost mighty duopoly. Cards made a smooth transition into the digitized #economy by embedding in smartphones (and even turning them into processors) and becoming the springboard for the rise of the #ecommerce. While the west was transitioning from old cards to chips, China was driving its own local payments revolution that erupted at the beginning of the 2000s and transformed the country from a purely cash economy to a #digital frontrunner. Starting from high smartphone penetration and bank account ownership, China essentially leapfrogged the card-based (western) model moving directly to a digital set-up built on e-wallets and QR codes and driven by two private companies (Alibaba and Tencent) that managed to build vast (2-sided consumer and merchant) ecosystems that transformed them into ubiquitous SuperApps. In parallel, a third pole had been developing in other parts of the world: —     The payments revolution in Africa was led by telecoms (being the only infrastructure available) by means of an e-#money set-up based on mobile phones. Companies such as Kenya’s M-Pesa (launched in 2007) managed to provide long needed basic financial services (saving and transferring funds, making payments or accepting government subsidies) to large swaths of the population. —     Countries like India or Brazil developed over the past few years state-sponsored real-time payments infrastructures, powering multiple bank accounts into a single app under A2A and P2P models. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has over 300 mn monthly active users recording 60% y-o-y growth, whereas Brazil’s Pix, launched only in late 2020, has managed to become the most popular payments’ method with over 150 mn users. These parallel evolutionary developments could hardly have been more different: a robust decades-old, card-infrastructure in the west (monopolized by two private companies), against a digital, wallet-based closed-loop model in China (powered by 2 giant ecosystems), versus public, state-sponsored, open, real-time rails in India and Brazil. Despite their very different origins and set-up, digitization has been acting as a huge convergence driver lately: digital wallets, super-apps, real-time payments and CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are only some of the common underlying elements. As payments evolve to their next phase, a new digital infrastructure is in the making, fast bridging seemingly big structural gaps. Opinions: my own, Graphic sources: Credit Suisse, Alipay, Matthew Brenan, BCB, Bacancy, Alicriti

The great equalizer in business is not when you get one customer, but when you stop one from leaving. Way more businesses figure out acquisition and forget about retention. They spend tons of money and time on marketing, sales, and growth hacks, but neglect the most important asset: their existing customers. They don’t realize that retention is the key to sustainable and profitable growth. Why? Because retaining customers is cheaper, easier, and more rewarding than acquiring new ones. According to a study by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. Retaining customers also means creating loyal advocates who will spread the word about your brand and refer new customers to you. That’s how you build a flywheel effect that drives organic and exponential growth. But how do you retain customers? • By delivering value, delight, and trust at every stage of the customer journey. • By listening to their feedback, solving their problems, and exceeding their expectations. • By building relationships, not transactions. • By treating them like humans, not numbers. Focus on metrics that matter, you can’t fill a leaky bucket. Plug those holes and keep those customers from leaving. It will be the best investment you’ll ever make for your business.

Vietnam’s food delivery market just hit a massive $2.1$ billion dollars in GMV, growing at 19% year-on-year. While that makes it the second fastest-growing market in SEA, the market remains brutal. 🛵 In just 2 years, we’ve seen heavyweights like BAEMIN and Gojek pull out, alongside local player Loship. Today, a staggering 92% of the market is controlled by just two names: ShopeeFood and GrabFood. 🟠ShopeeFood has effectively "captured" the younger demographic. By leveraging the Shopee ecosystem, they’ve made bubble tea and low-value snacks a daily ritual. 🟢On the other side, GrabFood has moved "upmarket." They are the go-to for the high-income professional. Their focus is on full meals, group orders, and a smoother user interface. 📉The Loyalty Gap Despite the massive GMV, there is a growing tension in the air: Price Gap: Meals on apps are now significantly more expensive than eating on-site. The "Order Batching” Problem: Drivers often carry multiple orders at once to stay profitable. For the customer, this means watching your "cơm văn phòng" go on a city tour while it slowly turns cold. 🛵The New Challenger This is exactly where Xanh SM Ngon is trying to disrupt the duopoly. By using an all-electric fleet and a strict "no-batching" policy, they want to prove that speed and temperature are the new moats. Such intense competition in Food Delivery will only increase the pace of innovation. In such a hyper mobile society, blue prints for FMCG & new technologies are being developed that will have impact, far beyond Vietnam's borders. Source: Momentum Works, IPOS, NielsenIQ, Decision Lab, VnExpress, B-company, The Investor *While information from Asia Circles is publicly accessible and derived from third-party sources, its verification and validity are not guaranteed. #FoodTech #MarketInsights #ConsumerInsight #ShopeeFood #GrabFood