Join host Matt Edmundson on the eCommerce Podcast as he discusses customer success roadmaps and monetising subscriber lists with Scott Overbeck from Seacoast Consulting Group. Discover how strategic alliances can boost your business growth and learn practical tips for leveraging your existing customer base.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Leverage Strategic Alliances: Scott emphasises the importance of forming strategic alliances between businesses with complementary resources. This involves creating mutually beneficial arrangements that can include products, services, operational assets, or customer databases. By doing so, businesses can tap into new revenue streams and enhance their offerings without the need for significant additional investment.

2. Understand the Customer Journey: Scott advises businesses to map out the customer journey to identify what customers want before, during, and after their purchase. By understanding this journey, businesses can offer additional products or services that align with their customers' needs, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and revenue through cross-selling and upselling.

3. Monetise Existing Assets: Scott highlights the value of a business's existing subscriber list as a significant asset. He suggests using this list to introduce complementary products and services through strategic alliances, thereby generating additional revenue. This approach capitalises on the trust already established with customers, making it a cost-effective way to increase profits.

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Matt Edmundson [0:05 - 3:13]: Welcome to the eCommerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. The eCommerce podcast is all about helping you deliver eCommerce. Wow. Oh, yes, it is. And to help us do just that, today I am chatting with my very special guest, Scott Overbeck from Seacoast Consulting group, and we are going to get into what a customer success roadmap looks like. We are going to get into monetizing subscriber lists. It's all going on today, so you're not going to want to go anywhere. You want to grab your pens, grab your bits of paper, because, you know, it's good to be old school every now and again to make your notes. Now, if you are new to the ecommerce podcast, a very warm welcome to you. Glad you're here. Hope you liked the show. I hope you enjoy what's going on. Of course, any questions you want to know more about the show, find out all the past episodes and all that sort of stuff, see who we've had on. You can find all kinds of weird and wonderful information on the website ecommerce podcast.net dot. That's all one word. It's all there. So go ahead, check it out. It'd be great to see you. Great to meet you. Reach out to me at Matt Edmundson on social media or on LinkedIn. Always love to hear from you. Always, always. And if you've got any thoughts, any comments about the show, let us know. Let us know those as well. Especially if you're a seasoned guest, a seasoned listener, rather, should I say, definitely want your feedback. I've said this before on a couple of shows. Just to reiterate, we are starting to add a new pillar of content to the podcast, which is where we interview ecommerce founders. So people that are in the trenches doing ecommerce businesses. So, as you know, if you've been a regular listener, all of the other hundreds of shows we've done, we've focused on the experts. Just like Scott, an expert in his field. We're going to dig into what he knows and see how it can help us grow our own online business. But we also want to interview you guys, you guys that are creating your own online businesses. And if you're willing to come onto the show, share your story, share your insights, your challenges, things you've learned, stuff that's going to help us, then we would love to hear from you. I'm not guaranteeing you'll be on the show, just want to caveat that. But we would genuinely love to hear from you as we're going to start featuring more and more founders. If you want to know more about that, if you want to just reach out to us, just go to the ecommercepodcast.net website. There's an apply page on there. You don't have to fill out every form field, but just get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. Would love to see what we can do. There you go. Right now, let's talk about today's guest. Scott has turbocharged businesses across not just one, not just two, but four continents, boosting growth, revenue and efficiency. After learning the secrets of the world's biggest companies. That sounds ominous, doesn't it? Learning the secrets of the world's biggest companies, he's now sharing the magic with us. Small to medium sized businesses ready for success. Well, let's take a leaf out of Scott's playbook, shall we? Scott, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. How are you doing?

Scott Overbeck [3:13 - 3:16]: Glad to be here. I'm doing well, thanks.

Matt Edmundson [3:16 - 3:20]: Good, man. Good. Now, whereabouts in the world are you? Because it's definitely brighter where you are than where I am.

Matt Edmundson [3:31 - 3:33]: Nice. Beautiful part of the world.

Scott Overbeck [3:33 - 3:38]: It is, it is. It's been quite hot lately, but we're enjoying it.

Matt Edmundson [3:38 - 4:01]: Well, at least it's been hot for somebody. Right at the time of recording, it's summertime here in the UK. Not that you would know. No one's told the weather yet that it's summer. The weather's got to catch up with itself a little bit. But then that's the joy of living in England. I feel the joy of living in England. So tell us, Scott, a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Scott Overbeck [4:02 - 4:20]: Yeah, so I am the founder and principal of cqos consulting group. As you mentioned, our big claim to fame is we work with small to medium sized businesses and we help them to grow their revenues and ultimately their profits.

Matt Edmundson [4:21 - 4:22]: How did you get into that?

Scott Overbeck [4:23 - 5:25]: Yeah, so you had mentioned that I worked for some very large companies. I traveled the world consulting with a lot of different companies and primarily in banking, finance and fintech financial technology. So I really had an opportunity to see how these big boys do business and the different strategies that they leverage. And what I've really learned is that they're a, quite successful and good at what they do, and b, that a lot of SMBs just don't leverage a lot of these tools the way they could and the way they should. So I saw an opportunity, and I decided to take the leap from corporate. I spent about 30 years in big corporate, traveling, doing all kinds of stuff, and decided to hang my own shingle and teach these small to medium sized businesses how the big boys do it.

Matt Edmundson [5:25 - 6:16]: Wow. Wow. Well, that's cool, man. I remember the first time I did my first ever consulting gig, and it scared the life out of me in so many ways because I know what I think works in my own companies because I don't know how many tens of millions of pounds worth of product we'd sold at this point, but a lot. But then when you're doing it for somebody else, there's always that sort of nerve wracking thing. And then once you've done it a couple of times, you sort of go, ah, yes, there seems to be some principles that do actually work across the different companies here. I might be on to something. So I'm kind of curious. What was some of the. What were some of those moments for you? What were some of those things that you've learned from the big businesses that we can apply to our e.com businesses?

Scott Overbeck [6:17 - 6:34]: Well, the area that I lean into, and I would say probably the biggest opportunity area that I've seen in the years that I spent with big corporate, is the way that businesses can leverage strategic alliances.

Matt Edmundson [6:34 - 6:35]: Okay.

Scott Overbeck [6:36 - 7:18]: And I'll just define what that is. I think a lot of people have probably heard of it. They think they might know what it is. They might be right, they might be wrong. But put simply, it's just an arrangement of mutual benefit between two or more businesses who have complimentary resources. And those resources can be a lot of different things. They can be products. They can be services. They can be operational assets. They can be customer databases. And it really takes somebody who's kind of worked with these things over time to be able to kind of go in and identify the opportunity areas and then leverage and ultimately monetize them.

Matt Edmundson [7:19 - 8:38]: Wow. Yeah. It's one of those things, isn't it, with strategic alliances that. It's a very fancy sounding phrase, but I was talking to a lady the other day. She owns an agency called Lime. Give them a bit of a shout out. I can't remember the rest of the name. It will come back to me in a second. Anyway, she was lovely. And they basically, I think they work with bigger companies, but they were behind, like, a well known movie, appearing on a well known brand of potato chips, and so, you know, 150 bags of, we would call them crisps. Scott. But 150 bags of these things would be, 150 million of these bags would be made, all promoting the movie. And these were those sort of strategic alliances. It worked well for the movie company because they got in front of 150 million people. It works well for the crisp company because, well, it just makes that Chris packet a little bit different and it'll appeal to the kids or whatever, because the Star wars character is on the front. So I can see that, you know, I can see it all the time. I suppose once I saw that, I thought, yeah, that's a strategic alliance. I can see the big companies doing this. How does it, how does that translate then for smaller businesses? What kind of ways would that work?