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June 29, 2023

Helping DTC Brands Boost Conversions & Improve Customer Experience with Oren Harnevo — EP 031

Oren Harnevo
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Transcript

Adam Robinson: All right. We are on another episode of Leaky Funnels. It’s probably somewhere in the mid-20s. I should probably check that out. I have Oren Harnevo from Feel, and Ryan Pamplin, CEO of BlendJet, who we all know and love, set Oren my way because they have a very cool technology that is selling with video and humans actually, and well, some AI, I just heard. And the funny thing to me was I had Chris Hall from Bruce Bolton, and three-quarters of what we talked about was Maverick’s technology, which is like AI-generated videos, which personalizes the name that they were using an abandoned cart to now SMS.

So, I want to hear about sort of the other side of this. What exactly is Feel? And what is implementation for a typical sort of like– I mean, all of our customers for Shopify Plus so think 5 million to the really high end is like 150 or something, like that sort of just before mid-market or whatever, still small business growth, sort of DTC. So, what does the implementation look like? What’s the product too?

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, that’s actually perfect. Most of our customers fall under this exact market size. Yeah, so Feel, what we do, to say it simply, we add a buy with an expert experience to online businesses. We have the technology and the sales force to be able to very quickly help an online business build a sales team and help consumers complete more purchases.

So, as you can imagine, you go to a furniture site, you’re looking at different desks. You want to know how big it is, does it fit? What’s the wood made from? And you’ve got a little launcher limit just says, “Hey, I’m Jack, I’m a furniture expert. Do you need any help?” You click and then it opens up, and Jack and you would be able to browse the website together. You’d be able to start with chat just to kind of some people feel that video might be too much. So, you kind of start getting to know them with chat or text.

And then you could go into a video, you can browse together on the site, ask any questions. It’s kind of a high-end sales experience, the idea for Feel. I’ve met a CEO of a company called Ruti. She has a fashion business with a lot of stores and a big online site. And in-store, she told me when we first met, the experience is great. Her consumers love the sales associates. They talk, they have a coffee, and they talk about clothes.

And she found the website. It’s pretty self-service. It doesn’t have any personality to it. You can’t really talk about the clothes or the items. And she talked to us about how can she add her sales experts to the site. So, we build a technology that includes video and texting and chat. And what we saw pretty quickly is, especially the company size of that you’ve mentioned, they don’t have a sales force. So, they may have support, they might have a few people that they hire or offshore to answer questions as where’s my product then? But they don’t have salespeople.

So, after building the technology, we’ve also started building a sales team, and our sales expert, they all have at least five years’ experience. They all have already existing experience to sell these specific products. So, if it’s a golf website, we bring golf experts. If it’s a fashion website, we’ll bring fashion experts. And it’s a really easy plug-and-play. You just add a little widget, you have trailer sellers. And two or three weeks, you have live experts on your site. That’s the idea.

Adam Robinson: That’s also good to be true. Can I start asking you questions as though I am a DTC guy?

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, go ahead.

Adam Robinson: How much does this cost?

Oren Harnevo: Great question because we have a unique business model that makes it easier for DTC brands to get on board. So, we only charge a commission from the sales that we drive. So, if we add this experience and it doesn’t work or consumers don’t like it, then you don’t pay or you pay very little. But if our sellers are doing a great job, they’re generating incremental revenue and better conversion, then you pay a piece of what we’ve sold. So, that’s how a lot of retail businesses pay sales employees.

And it makes it really easy to start because DTC businesses, their margins are tight. They’re worried about adding new things because everything is a big project and you got to add things to the site. And so, a percentage, it depends what’s the AOV. So, if we’re selling $1,000 products, we’ll obviously charge a small percent. But if the product’s like 200 bucks, maybe we’ll charge a higher percent. But it fits their margin and it’s easy to test, it’s easy to scale as well.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. What’s the website that it’s on right now? Can we experience it?

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, you can go to Velotric Bike as an example.

Adam Robinson: How do you spell that?

Oren Harnevo: V-E-L-O-T-R-I-C Bike dot-com.

Adam Robinson: Okay, hold on, let me just share the screen. So, I did this. I had this guy yesterday. Let’s see.

Oren Harnevo: This is not it. This is Velotric Bike.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. Sorry. All right, so...

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, there you go.

Adam Robinson: Let’s shop now.

Oren Harnevo: So, you see, how can I help here?

Adam Robinson: Yeah. How can we help? This is you guys?

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, that’s us.

Adam Robinson: How can we help? Okay.

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, put your email.

Adam Robinson: This feels familiar for me. It’s like a lot of the web stuff I’m doing.

Oren Harnevo: Here we go. Isaac’s there.

Adam Robinson: I’m looking for an e-bike. Okay, cool. Well, that’s great. I just wanted to get the beginning of the experience. So, I had a guy on yesterday who has this company called TryNow.io, a pretty cool idea. So, like, not idea, they raised $25 million, and he’s got a bunch of customers. But it enables the brand to basically put a button in the site that says Try for $0. Somebody can have up to five items, and then he’s basically financing, paying the brand with some sort of discount for the items in advance. And then if they get shipped back to the brand, he gets refunded or whatever, through loop return, you know what I mean?

Oren Harnevo: Nice.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, this whole thing is like if you had to pay $175 to try an outfit on in a store, you’d never try it. So, it’s like he’s trying to bridge this gap, which is kind of, in a strange way, the essence of what, it’s like bringing the retail, what used to be the retail experience to the Internet in a different way, right?

Oren Harnevo: Exactly.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. So, anyway, I just want to see what that looks like. That’s super cool. So, one thing that I tried with my business at one point was just– so my last company was an email service provider, like Klaviyo. It was just like a smaller one and it didn’t serve e-commerce. And then they were trying to solve this 24-hour chat support dilemma and we had some, I don’t remember who used, but they were horrible, they were untrained. You mentioned if it’s a golf brand, then we bring in golf experts, if it’s like whatever. How does the brand get comfortable with the fact that these people are going to represent them well and have this product knowledge? I don’t doubt that they do if Ryan’s the one who’s recommending you to me because he doesn’t accept less than, like the best that there is. But yeah, that’s a question that I have.

Oren Harnevo: No, but it’s the number one objection that we get in the first meeting. So, it’s a really good question and it’s very relevant. So, the sale, once you have someone that understands the products that you’re selling or let’s say, someone who knows consumer electronics or someone who knows fashion, it’s already like 70% there. You need a good salesperson. The best way to sell is to really help. You got to talk to the customer. You’ve got to see what they want, understand their needs, and then try to fit the right product.

So, first of all, we hire good salespeople, then we encourage the brand to be as much involved as possible to do the training. We want them to feel that our team is an extension of their team. A lot of brands use outsourcing, so it’s not a really big difference. It is an outsourced sales team, but we have very small, if at all, people leaving. They stay for a long time with the brands. They get to know them.

So, we have trainings for the brand. We share a lot of knowledge-based templates. We ask the brand to fill out, how do you want to talk about the brand? What’s your style? What’s your feeling? List of all the products, if the SKUs are endless, then it’s more like, tell us about your brand. How do you want to talk? How do you want to drive a sale? There’s a lot of details, like let’s say someone had a conversation, do you want to do a follow-up? Do you call them? So, they go through a lot of our processes in order to build the first kind of knowledge base.

Then they do some training, and then we do a lot of the training. So, the sellers go through all the side, they understand all the policies. Before we launch, we do some testing back and forth with the head of service or the head of customer experience or the marketer, depending who’s the brand in charge. And when they feel comfortable, then we go live. But there’s always more training. It’s a big piece of it. And the more the brand is involved and we make sure that they put their most experienced people to explain the product, the better the sellers perform.

And after about a month, the sellers already know better than a lot of the people on the brand side because they talk to consumers, they see repeated questions. We start building Q&A. So, here’s a list of 50 questions and the best answer. I mentioned AI before. So, we’ve introduced AI about four months ago, not to talk to consumers but to help our sellers. So, every time a consumer asks a question, our AI goes through all our database and all the wrong in my questions.

And we use also OpenAI to formulate a really good answer. So, the sellers actually get a recommendation of what they should say. Sometimes they accepted, sometimes they don’t. If they don’t, maybe they say something else or write something else, and then our system learns. So, we try to be the best that we can at launch, but we keep constantly improving, and to a point where we really get the best answer for every question. So, it’s a process.

And if you want a good sales team, as a brand, you need to invest some time in training them. But again, different websites require different skills. We work with Jomashop as well. I don’t know if they know it’s a giant men’s exclusive wear, like watches and glasses. You really need superb watch sellers because people want to buy a $20,000 watch. They want to know exactly what metal is in there and what comes with the straps. So, we found people that had experience in selling watches and then they can have a million items in their SKUs. So, it’s not that the seller needs to remember each and everyone, but as soon as they go to some items, the seller can read a little bit, they can do some research, they can get back to them an hour or two later. So, that’s an example of a side that you really need an experienced seller. On the other hand, we work, for example, with Nanit who is a baby monitor company.

Adam Robinson: I have a Nanit.

Oren Harnevo: Oh, it’s a great product, great company. We love that. That is one of our first customers that we really scaled well with them. You learn the product. It’s not a very long learning curve. Anyone can learn it. And we brought in moms or people that had baby monitors. So, that was easier. And pretty much, every mom with some sales skills can do. So, it depends on the customer, but obviously, a big deal, the training.

Adam Robinson: Got it. What else? So...

Oren Harnevo: You talked before about the 24/7, which is also a big deal. And I’m happy to talk about that.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, yeah, jump on that one. I was just going to ask where these people are geographically in a very politically correct way.

Oren Harnevo: Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s also good. So, we started, I engaged with Ruti that I mentioned to build the company before COVID, but then COVID happened, and then her sellers were at home because the stores were closed. So, we started as a COVID-built company. So, everyone works from home. So, all the sales associates work from home across many states. They’re all in the US and they all work from home. They get a little nice background and a place that they can work. That makes it very easy for us to hire sales associate because your option is, am I going to drive an hour to the local Walmart or a retail store and find parking and pay for travel? Or do I want to work from home? Most of these sales associates, they don’t have an option to work from home. It’s not like tech employees.

Adam Robinson: Right.

Oren Harnevo: So, it’s very exciting for them. So, they all work from home. And with regards to the 24/7 piece, we offer like a 9 a.m. We started with 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We saw so many missed opportunities in evenings at nights. About 50% of traffic to our customers, I would assume that’s across all e-comm shop 9 to 5, and then another 30%, 35% shop at evenings, and then another 10%, 15% at night. So, now, we’ve built an evening night shift as well. So, we do 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern. And then 1 a.m. to 9 a.m., we’re not going to do video. We’re going to do just chat and just handle simple question, try to have sellers across many brands and just take the details, get back to them a day later just to make sure we don’t lose a lead. So, it is 24 hours.

Adam Robinson: That’s great. I mean, do you ever have any problems with people having kids running around at the back of the video? You know what I mean? So, one thing that I think happening, COVID is like, are you at home? Is that an office? Like, you appear to be working on a computer at home.

Oren Harnevo: Yeah.

Adam Robinson: I have been doing this since 2016. Not necessarily at home, but just wherever I wanted to be. I mean, I think one of the things that happened is people working in hospitality, going to these jobs or whatever, they saw people like you and me and they were like, whatever game that person is playing, I’m going to learn how to play that game, right? I don’t want to go to this place anymore. I don’t want to get my nuts kicked in by this guy or whatever. So, this is like an unlock. I mean, like you just said, for kind of society, right? So, people who have to schlep into wherever. It’s a really interesting thing for the employee as well. It’s like the whole thing is migrating this way, I guess.

Oren Harnevo: Exactly. We really see, we give retail sales associates an opportunity to work from home. We get a lot of moms or single moms that need to be home and have a really hard time finding specific jobs. So, our flexibility on time so you can take a night shift, an evening shift, morning shift, so you can manage your day however you’d like. As far as I know, I don’t watch each and every video but we didn’t get the kids running around. But it’s interesting, I think another thing that this work-from-home or work-from-wherever trend is, we kind of lost formality a little bit, the need to be formal because people are okay with seeing, I don’t know, whatever, my bedroom or my closet.

And I find it when I pitched Dick’s Sporting Goods two years ago, and they were too big for us. But all of their question was like, but what about the background, the background of the store? And we have a full training, six months training process. So, all that old school mentality kind of, they said like, we can’t do it because we need everyone with a background, with the logo, and with the shirt. And they didn’t like that, like this.

But consumers don’t care. They don’t care. They want some help. And actually, it makes it a bit more, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s like, more real. When I try to put on a front, like it’s just a person helping you by. So, I think that’s changing to the need of formality or like, but that’s my example.

But I know, I also talked to Best Buy when we were young, and they, during COVID, were just scrambling to– because they just lost all the foot traffic. So, they had to go to this online solution quickly and they built massive warehouses, and sometimes in some of their stores, like area that’s still in the store that has the background of the store, that someone can go pick an item and then kind of show you, so they doubled down on the need, like, no, no, it has to be in the store. We have to show the store. And maybe it works well for them.

But all the brands that we talk to, it’s a huge amount of money to spend. You got to build infrastructure and like just get someone to work from home and just help. And you don’t even need to show the product. Let’s just go to the site and see it together. So, I think this trend of just getting a normal person work from home gives you some advice, I think it’s good enough, but it’ll take time for the big corporates to maybe buy into that.

Adam Robinson: Is there a type of company that it doesn’t work for? Is there anybody that you see, like I get a CBD company with our products and I’m like, yeah, like, I’m just not excited, right? There’s like a 25% shot they’re going to be happy. I don’t know why, something with email and CBD, it just doesn’t work. Is there anybody that you’re just like not excited about this?

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, yeah. Well, there’s a few reasons why someone would not be a good customer for Feel or this wouldn’t work first. There’s people involved. They get paid. And an average sales associate can make, I don’t know, $15 to $30-plus an hour. So, they need to sell the item. Let’s say they say two or three items an hour or more or whatever, two or three baskets an hour, they need to get paid.

So, if I’m on a website that sells underwear and socks and $20 earrings, there’s just not going to be enough margin to justify a seller. You can see it in retail stores. So, you go to the Gap. You’re not going to see sales associates because there’s just no margin on it. They don’t buy expensive items, but the company that I show you, the e-bike company, Velotric, they’re great. A bike can cost $1,300. So, there’s a lot of margins if you really make a sale. So, one is you need decent margins and high AOV, not that high.

Adam Robinson: What’s the level?

Oren Harnevo: I would say under $100, it gets tougher. If there’s a lot of scale, so if you’re selling let’s say 70 bucks products, but you can sell two or three, that’s fine. But generally, I would say $100, $150 is the minimum. That’s one. It also has to be items that people have questions about. I’m not sure that’s the perfect example, but I always give TVs. I mean, when I buy a TV, it’s such a commodity product. I just want to see the dimension, the size, the company, and I’m buying.

And although the AOV is high, the margins are low. So, I don’t have a lot of questions. So, we get about, I would say, between 1% to 5% people that engages with us from total traffic on the site. And we see it clearly, if the company, for example, Nanit who sells a baby monitor, people get question is their kids, they get sensitive new parents, so we get very high click rate. But then, if we work with a company that sells clothes, just general fashion, most people don’t need much help. Maybe they need help with sizing.

So, you need to have a product that people have questions about. Maybe it has some technical features. Maybe there’s a problem with sizing. So, I would say those are the two major ones. And we’re focusing right now on e-commerce. This could be very relevant also for finance loans or auto or travel. If you want to book an expensive hotel, totally right to. But we are now focusing on e-comm higher AOV just to grow. We’re a startup, so.

Adam Robinson: And how important is the video component to it? Did you A/B test that at all? Or did you just go right in? By the way, I’m a huge video guy. I just think I’m way overdoing it on LinkedIn in nine different ways. I just think it’s like the power of the human face, especially if you can get somebody, which is different. Somebody listening to you over and over and over again is just so hypnotic, but like was it a gut feel in the beginning? Or do you have dated the video components?

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, we went video day one. Zoom was feeling like it’s going to change the– this is COVID time, right? So, it’s like 2021. Everyone’s at home, and we’re like video, 100% video, let’s go. And conversion on video is incredible. We’ve seen 80% conversion. I would say anywhere between 40% to 80%. So, if someone talks with video with a person, they end up buying. You can say that they wanted to buy anyway because they actually opt into video. They had some interests, that’s true, but still, conversions are super high. Customers are very happy. The customer feedback was always phenomenal.

But what we saw about video is that a lot of people don’t want it. Maybe they will more, but a lot of people, like you’re sitting in your bed, it’s 1 a.m., you’re scrolling through some– you want to buy a new golf club and then someone’s video. They’re like, “I don’t want to share my video. I don’t need a video. I just want to know if I can get a discount or whatever. I want to know if I can hook my Bluetooth to it.”

So, what we’ve done is we give the consumer option. So, we start with text just to get to know, “Hi, how are you here? What do you look for?” And if they just want a question and go, maybe we wouldn’t even have time to offer a video. If we’re starting to engage and feels like a good customer, they want our help, we offer it. Do you want to join in a video? And then we automatically just show a button, then they can click in. Sometimes they say no, sometimes they say yes. Every time we get the customer into a video, conversion is super high, but we have to balance the consumer’s needs. So, the mixed experience is great.

And then we have another customer we work with, Dr. Comfort. They are a medical shoe for diabetes patients, a bit of a very unique niche market. And a lot of people are old, everyone is 60 and above. They don’t want video. And actually, they have a problem with chat, they want us to call them. So, we start talking and they’re like, “Can you call me?”

So, video is great. It works phenomenally. And we’re trying to get any of it as possible, but we want to give the consumer choice. So, we give all the options. But I would say video, I think, I would say now it’s maybe 20%. I think, with time, it can go a lot higher, and we can do things that can make it go higher. We’re also working on recording things. So, maybe you have a specific question we solved 500 times. We can just send a video. It’s just going to play, maybe have some AI on it. So, we don’t have to necessarily get you to agree to share your screen or get a seller to now stop everything and get on a video because there’s also the operational side of that. So, the mix is key and we’re constantly working on optimizing it.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, yeah, it’s really interesting. Are there any other major objections that, as a fake DTC owner, I did not come up with?

Oren Harnevo: There’s always objections. I think, yeah, definitely, but these are not our sellers. It’s definitely one, like how can we make sure your sellers would sell our brand well?

Adam Robinson: But that was interesting because it’s like, well, you weren’t going to do it, you know what I mean? But still, right?

Oren Harnevo: Exactly.

Adam Robinson: It’s like they’re not your sellers, but like, you weren’t going to do this.

Oren Harnevo: It’s so funny you say that. We get that a lot. And sometimes we get a complete no, it’s like no, no, no, no, we want our seller. You don’t have any. Why don’t you start with us? It didn’t work. Hire your own. That’s fine. Use our tech, no problem. But they’re like, no, no, no. Just sometimes, we do some video campaigns and we get an email, like an angry email. We had a few weeks ago, like, our people are our number one asset and we will never let them have external people.

But times are changing. You got to outsource what you can. So, that’s one of the objections. There’s always like, we’re moving between e-commerce platforms, we don’t have time, or maybe our margins are too small. We don’t think we can pay. But I think, or maybe we have a sales team which is bigger customers. Our support team does sales that sometimes comes up. And I think that’s actually an important point that you need to really make a distinction between sales and support because it’s just different people, it’s different character, it’s different replies.

So, when you say, “Hey, whatever, can I hook my Nanit into the Bluetooth?” So, if you’re a support person, you’re just like, “Yeah, no problem. You can connect it like this.” But if you’re a salesperson, you’re like, “Oh, tell me what are you looking for? Who is it? Is it for you? Or are you buying it as a gift?” And then you just start creating relationships.

So, we try to explain it. And it really does make a lot of sense and it does hit a point. So, when you click our little icon, we ask, “Are you interested in support for a product you already bought? Or do you want help buying a new product?” And if you want help, we’ll move you to the support team and we’ll just take people that haven’t bought. So, that sometimes comes in as an objection.

Adam Robinson: Cool. Anything else I didn’t hit?

Oren Harnevo: No, I think we hit all the main points. I think what’s interesting is how AI is going to affect this whole market of conversational e-commerce because there’s probably– sorry if I’m completely taking a number out of my head, but I don’t know, it’s probably million or millions customer support people handling simple questions in the Philippines and India and Dominican Republic or wherever. We implement an OpenAI with our unique models and we put some of our tech in it. And I got to tell you, like 40% or 50% of the time, it brings out a perfect answer. It’s still not good enough and we believe in the human connection, but I mean, five years from now, I don’t think you’re going to need, I think there’s going to be so much turmoil in the whole BPO business and in the technologies that just provide a platform for support. Especially support, if you have a problem with your device, I don’t know, three or four years, you really don’t need to talk to anyone. So, I think that...

Adam Robinson: One of my best friends, he’s the founder of a publicly traded company called TaskUs, and they have 55,000 employees in the Philippines doing support for Uber and Twitter and all this stuff, content moderation, like all that. And their stock is down 95% from the highs. I mean, all these tech stocks are down, not that they’re tech, but like– and on one hand, it’s like, okay, he’s like it’s trading at five times cash flow. So, we’re just buying back stock with the cash flow. But on the other hand, it’s like, I don’t know, I feel like you saw this happen in the shopping mall sector in 2017, 2018, it’s like they’re trading so cheap. It’s like these can’t be this cheap. The cash flow is incredible, but it’s like, dude, this guy, Jeff Bezos, he’s just going to eliminate all of them. It’s just a matter of time. Maybe you can catch the trade or whatever, but it is...

Oren Harnevo: Well, it’s so hard. This is my second company. My previous company was in media, had a video advertising company, and we would do personalized video for ads. So, if you go to a Home Depot, you buy a drill. The next day, you’ll get a video of Home Depot about drill bits and your local Home Depot close to you. So, we would personalize the video. And we did a lot of managed service. So, we would run the whole campaign. And then programmatic came and the trade desk came, I don’t know how much you know that space.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, I know about that stuff. We’re sort of in it, like we de-anonymized these hashes to do this identity stuff. So, I had to learn about all of that stuff.

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, exactly. So, they came in and they just sucked the revenue from so many companies that provided manual or managed service. So, I’m saying that because I manage a company where your numbers are going up, things look good, all the accounts are renewing, you’re growing, but you know five years out, you’re just not aligned with the world strategy. And it’s a really tough place to be in because companies sometimes are too big to what are they going to do, this company? They’re going to pivot to do AI support, like kind of instead of 50,000 employees, it ain’t going to happen, so.

Adam Robinson: I bet this is 1% of their business, but he’s literally talking about it in the headline. They do AI tagging. So, OpenAI is their customer and they have these people in the Philippines like, there is some human element to making these models work. And it is very...

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, I know, a lot of training.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. So, like, they’re doing that, and the story is probably better if that were all they were doing, you know what I mean?

Oren Harnevo: Okay, this is a good point. Now, people are worried that AI is going to get a lot of people out of work and what they’re going to do. I mean, I’m no futurist and I don’t know if I have the knowledge to really give a solid prediction, but there’s always another job. So, if you did customer support, now you can build, you can train models for AI, like some people it’s too hard to change profession, I get that. But there’s always another avenue where you need people. That sounds actually really interesting because we see it from our business training is just makes the models so much better and you need just people too. So, I think it’s an interesting direction.

Adam Robinson: Totally. You know, kind of the same idea like we have now driverless cars driving around Austin with people in Ubers. You see them all over the place now. I think you look over. You can call it on an Uber, you look next to you, and there’s this car with the little cruise thing on top or whatever, there’s people in the back and there’s no driver. It’s just a matter of time. Why would you need a driver to drive an Uber?

Oren Harnevo: Right.

Adam Robinson: There’s only one way that can go, like you don’t need driver Ubers anymore. You just don’t.

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, I know, interesting time. I love being a part of that, AI revolution. It’s incredible what’s going on in the last six months. This is really exciting.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, it really is. Well, Oren, thank you. That was very, very interesting. I just love the approach. I love these businesses where it’s like such a major and obvious value-add. You make it easy to get started, like just cool. If anybody wants to learn more, where do they find out?

Oren Harnevo: They can go to our site where Feel.tech and they can email me, oren@feel.tech and would love to give folks demos, tell them more, and yeah, learn more about Feel. Thanks for the opportunity. I really appreciate to tell our story and give us time and great discussion, good questions.

Adam Robinson: I feel like I’m making content for two or three different types of people. One, it’s people who own these brands, and this is the kind of stuff they care about. It’s just like, what can I do to effectively just make more money? That’s always top of mind. And then, also like Shopify merchant success managers, they’re basically like CS reps at Shopify Plus, and I treat them as an audience too because they’re just like recommending ways to make Shopify Plus brands grow all day long and things like this are great. They’re just trying to sound smart. So, it’s wheelhouse for what people care about, that I perceive at least. So, it’s great.

Oren Harnevo: Yeah. Actually, what was the third? Oh, you said you had three.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, well, kind of Klaviyo customer success managers also. We like Klaviyo integrations like 98% of our revenue and they sort of hate us because one of the things we do is these non-opt-in email addresses that are against their terms of service. So, it’s like, I’m trying to kind of become an influencer to that audience, so they at least like me as a person. And I have a year plan to like not be doing that, but it’s just the place I found myself to, where I had like a way to– I didn’t know we were going to end up, like, we didn’t start with e-commerce. We just all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, this is the best customer by far as a result of only focusing on Shopify for a couple of years, like these Klaviyo problems are only going to get worse, but it’s something I’m dealing with. I have a plan to get out of it. Cool. Well, thanks very much. And that’s a wrap.

Oren Harnevo: Yeah, thank you.

Introduction

As AI dominates headlines, eCommerce brands are hard at work trying to figure out how to employ cutting-edge technology to improve their bottom line.

For Oren Harnevo’s Feel, however, human touch has been the secret to driving incremental revenue for eCommerce companies.

Feel builds 24/7 live sales teams for online businesses, allowing customers to connect with experts at all hours of the day. On average, Feel has increased AOVs by 50% and conversions by 35%, while decreasing product returns by 11x for its consumers.

Today, I’m sitting down with Oren to discuss how Feel is able to consistently build expert sales teams despite serving businesses across multiple niches. How do you find, hire and train great salespeople? And is it repeatable for other businesses?

You’ll also hear about how AI can help online eCommerce sales teams scale, how to implement video into online sales, and why brands must clearly distinguish the difference between sales messaging and support messaging.

Key Takeaways

  • 00:00 How does Feel help 7, 8 and 9-figure brands make more sales?
  • 04:07 Pricing a service in a way that attracts DTC brands.
  • 07:45 How to quickly train a sales team to be experts on a specific brand or niche.
  • 13:40 Building a 24/7 sales team to accommodate customers in all time zones.
  • 16:08 The effect work-from-home has had on formality in the workplace — and how it affects businesses of different sizes.
  • 20:21 Why would a company not be a good fit to work with Feel?
  • 24:05 Balancing the high conversion potential of video sales with customer engagement preferences.
  • 27:46 The importance of distinguishing between sales and support messaging when interacting with customers online.
  • 30:37 What impact with AI have on conversational eCommerce?

Tweetables

  • “We hire good salespeople, then we encourage the brand to be as involved as possible to do the training. We want them to feel that our team is an extension of their team.” – Oren Harnevo
  • “If you want a good sales team, as a brand, you need to invest some time in training them.” – Oren Harnevo
  • “The best way to sell is to really help.” – Oren Harnevo
  • “Times are changing. You’ve got to outsource what you can.” – Oren Harnevo
  • “You need to really make a distinction between sales and support because it's different people, it's a different character, it's different replies.” – Oren Harnevo

Resources

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