Building Seller Communities as a Strategic Growth Engine

Paul Sonneveld
Now, today, we are joined by Ant Willis, or Anthony Willis, the Director of Amazon Innovation at Horison Marketing. Horison is one of the fastest-growing full-service Amazon agencies in the UK, offering everything from end-to-end account management to enhanced PPC solutions. They even build and sell custom tools that help sellers accelerate their growth. 

Anthony brings over 15 years of e-commerce experience spanning brand management, distribution, agency leadership, and logistics. And his specialties include SEO and international expansion. Day-to-day, though, and more importantly for today's topic, he shares his expertise with the Amazon seller community through Horisons free school platform that's spelled with a K, S-K-O-O-L, creating valuable content across video, podcasts, and webinars. Ant welcome to the show. It's absolutely great to have you today.

Anthony Willis
Hi, Paul. Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate having me on. Yeah, looking forward to getting into the conversation.

Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. This is a very interesting topic, because we're talking about, you know, commercially, how do you drive growth as an agency? And typically, these conversations go to, hey, let's get an appointment setter, or let's go to, you know, you and I were talking about conferences before. 

But at Horison, you've gone quite a different direction, and really gone through a community-led growth approach, and it might be a better way to define it, and we'll get onto that in a sec. But I want to maybe just ask you point-blank first, why community? Like, what triggered Horison's shift from, like, really, like, sales-led growth to a community-first model?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, it's a really good question. It's so it's such a difficult market, right? Because, you know, particularly in the Amazon agency world,  in the UK alone, there's just under 2000 agencies registered. So, that's not including consultants and other people that kind of work in that work in that industry. So it's a really, really tricky market. And, you know, there's lots of people kind of buying for the same business. 

So for me, it was about what can we do differently, was my kind of first port of thought. And then I think the next part for me really was actually putting myself in a seller's position and thinking about what would I be looking for if I were a seller. How would I be looking to choose the agency that I want to work with? And I think I came to the conclusion that it kind of comes down to trust. 

It's a big risk for a brand to engage in a contract with a business that they perhaps don't really know a lot about, bar a few sales calls. So for me, it's about building that trust and having something or somewhere where brands can kind of look to for information and you kind of build that trust. And then obviously the idea is eventually that when the brand are ready to engage in an account management kind of relationship, then hopefully we'd be the first person or the first agency that they come to.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, so you really, and you mentioned the word trust, building that relationship, really not just having that first interaction come across as the pitch, right, which makes absolute sense. I do wonder, though, with communities, it's all about, like, having some sort of critical mass, right? If I join a community, I notice, oh, there's only, there's a community of 10 Horison employees and two other sellers, then, you know, I'm going to feel a little odd, right? So how did you you know, get that initial traction, you know, how did you go about like, maybe just practice like the first 50 or 100 members of this community? Like, how did you get them to join?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, so I guess this is the, the downside, if you can, if you can call it that is that it's not a quick solution. Like this isn't something that you could build overnight. In an honest way, you could potentially go and buy people that can fill a community. But from our perspective, we want people that are going to engage, people that are going to add value. 

So the people that we want in our community are going to help each other. So they're all going to pull towards adding value. The way that we want to build this is that primarily we want to kind of target partnerships. So we want to partner with other service providers that are in the industry that may have, you know, sellers as their own clients. And the idea really is, is that we offer the community to our partner’s clients, and then we kind of build our partnerships out. 

What we then do is we can then offer access to the partners that we work with, So then you imagine if we've got, let's just keep the numbers low for a second. Let's say we've got 10 key partners that all have 100 clients that they work with that all wanted to join the community. That's then, each partner has then got access to approximately 900 clients that they wouldn't have had access to before. 

So it's kind of beneficial for all parties. And even the guys that are joining the community, they're getting to hear from experts in different fields in e-commerce. So, you know, we might, as an example, we've already kind of done a podcast with you guys and our community has learned, the arts and crafts of analytics and how they can really kind of pull that in together. That's something they may not have learned just from Horison marketing, for example.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that really talks, I was going to ask the next question around value delivery, right, or you know, how do you really deliver that day-to-day value? Obviously, you know, I think bringing in other experts, partners that can provide a perspective on certain topics obviously is one way of delivering value to your community, but what are the other ways that you look to deliver value to those sellers?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, so this is like the key to longevity of the plan, right? Because it's all very well filling your community up with Amazon sellers, but if you're offering zero to or very low value, then they're going to either just sort of lose engagement or they'll come out of the community. So we have got a really robust plan, and that's probably the most important thing. That is from a monthly plan. So we want to be given daily value. 

So whether that's a post just educational, it might be that we offer clients the chance for us to go in and give them a strategy. So they might fill in a form, and then we'd go away and create a strategy for the sellers. So we post into the community on a daily basis and that, like I said, that really ranges from news updates, it might be a podcast release, it might be a webinar, but every day there'll be something of value that goes into that community. 

The second part of it, is that we're building out some classroom sessions. So those classroom sessions are going to be from the ultimate kind of basic starting point. So how to create a seller central account, for example. And eventually, we'll be running sessions all the way through to kind of like deep analytics on SEO or Amazon advertising and even DSP. So yeah, we're building out a full suite of lessons that are within the within the community. So that sellers can go in and actually learn from the experts basically.

Paul Sonneveld
I forgot to ask one question at the start, which is are you using a particular platform to bring this community together?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, so it's Skool. We looked at several different options, but school's an incredible platform. It's got its own community itself, so you can benefit from people that are already using the platform. But it's a brilliant framework. It gives you ready-made community section where you can post almost like a social media feed. You've also got the classroom section where you can fill that with information. And the other thing that we do is we've got a kind of a resources section as well. So any tools that we create as a business, we tend to put into the school community under the resource section so that sellers have got the option to go in and use those tools and allow that to help them to grow.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And you've clarified something for me there, which is, I thought the Skool was the name of the program. But you're, you're saying it's actually the platform, the technical solution that sits underneath as well. Yeah, thank you. That's, that's very helpful. Yeah. I want to go back to, kind of the short-term versus the long-term game here. And particularly, there's always pressure, like, someone like yourself, or even the partners that you bring in, right? 

There's always the pressure to generate business from this. And, I've been so guilty of this myself, like, flip it, flip into pitch mode, right? I'm there to deliver value. I'm there to build trust. But actually, I'm feeling the pressure of meeting my, I don't know, monthly quota, or, or, you know, development targets. And I get into pitch mode. What sort of ground rules or how do you manage that tension, particularly with the partners in this community, right? How do you set the guardrails? How do you make sure it doesn't tip into that, pitching sessions as part of this community?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, so we're in control of all the content. So, you know, anybody that posts we're in complete control of. So, if it's something that doesn't sit within the guidelines, then we can remove it and we can kind of drop a message to the person that posted it and just remind them of the guidelines. But yeah, within our partnership agreements we've got really clear kind of guidelines on the perception that we want to give this community. 

We do not want it to be a place where sellers are just feeling like they're being sold to every five minutes. It has to be value first. So obviously, the whole reason that a partner wants to get involved is essentially because they're going to want to benefit from this as well. They're going to want to get their own clients from this. So there has to be an element of, kind of get in touch if you want to learn more, would be the kind of route that we would suggest. But yeah, there's certainly not going to be any kind of hard selling, if that makes sense. 

So everything comes with a value first kind of proposition. So whenever we do a webinar, or a podcast, or we might do a co-branded feature, a co-branded post, it's always value first. We kind of pre-check anything that gets posted to make sure the value is there before we post it. So yeah, it is difficult to find the balance because obviously everybody wants value from it. But, you know, we're very strict on the kind of, it has to be offering value.

Paul Sonneveld
Makes sense. Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a difficult tension to manage. But I think if you're really clear on the guidelines up front, that certainly helps. And there's this sort of funny thing, which is the less you talk about selling, or the less you pitch, the more people actually listen and trust you, right? It's sort of this inverse thing. 

Now, I want to talk about the other aspect of value. I mean, one is through the partners, but, but there is enormous value for sellers helping each other, right, and creating that peer community, peer advice, not just like, you know, oh, we're just looking for Ant to impart his wisdom or for some other part to impart wisdom, really sort of helping each other out, trying to maybe share their problems, share solutions. That's quite a hard thing to manufacture, right? I'm just wondering whether how you go about you know that peer learning piece you know and that content how do you sort of get keep sellers engaged uh around that sort of peer community aspects i mean this must be one of the hardest thing of of building community.

Anthony Willis
Yes, a 100%, it is probably one of the most tricky things is getting getting people to engage you know so we do we do a lot of active work inside the community ourselves to kind of promote engagement. So the way that the system is set up is that you can unlock new levels by building up a point system. So for example, we might have a tool that Horison Marketing sell for, let's say, 1,500 pounds. And you buy the tool, and then it's yours to keep. We could potentially put that tool into the community as, say, like a level four or level five. And then the way that the community build up enough points to then claim that tool is through engagement. 

So the whole skool system is derived around promoting the engagement between the community. So a community member, the more the community member posts, comments, likes, and engages, essentially, the more points they rack up and the more things that will open up for them. So that is, you know, the way that we will build that community out is to kind of start to put in things that need to be unlocked in order for, you know, so you kind of promote that engagement to get the tool that you want.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, there's an element of gamification in there. I'm thinking Roblox for some reason. I don't know how popular it is in the UK, but this is what my kids seem to do these days but i'm thinking like it's that whole kind of um you know collect things earn things do something with it um very interesting very interesting

Anthony Willis
Yes it's kind of you know like the reward system isn't it but i think what people find is that you people are very nervous to engage and interact when they first join a community. But once you kind of, you know, if you're encouraged to engage, because if I engage, I can get more stuff. Once you start, you find that actually, it's really not that bad. And then you end up actually kind of leaning on the community for support advice, and it might be a little bit of motivation, you know, and it actually becomes a really useful tool. 

Paul Sonneveld
How do you measure from a Horison point of view? Obviously, you're investing a lot of effort and energy into that. You're producing a lot of content. How do you measure whether the community is kind of healthy or tracking where you want it to track? I don't know if there's any out-of-the-box metrics that school provides, but what do you look at to say, actually, we feel like the community is in a good space, or actually, we need to do some course correction over here, or how do you steer that ship?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, so yeah, there's metrics within school that really help. So they basically give you a leaderboard. So you can kind of go and look at which community members are really engaging and which ones aren't engaging at all. So I think you're always going to have a pool of people that just sit in the background taking information in. That's inevitable. So you're always going to have that pool of people. 

But I think as long as you've got the kind of 20 to 30% of community members that are highly engaged, that reply and help and like, and want to want to kind of be involved. And as long as you've got that kind of bucket of community members, then I think you're in a really good place. And then, you know, obviously, we measure the success of the community really by the community members, like how many members have we got? We will begin to encourage our community members to share the links with non-community members to get them on board as well. So really, that's the kind of metric that I'm looking at is the kind of number of community members.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I guess the ultimate test is if community members start inviting other people to join that community, you know, they're really putting their hand up and say, This is worth doing. This is worth investing your time in. And that's a really good, healthy indicator of the overall kind of community growth and health. 

Now, let's talk about kind of the piece around growth, right? I'm not talking about community growth, but you know, agency growth, right? This is not charity. You know, there is some business outcome. It's more medium to long term, I suspect. But are there any early signs that you've seen, like any maybe wins where you've managed to attract a client or sign a client from the community or have some really great conversations? Any proven results yet?

Anthony Willis
So the community is still really, really young. You know, we're still in the kind of infancy of building it out and, you know, getting enough people in there, but we've got really good engagement. We're having conversations with community members outside of the community now. So we've almost kind of taken them from being a community member into kind of being a warm lead, if you like. So, you know, we've introduced some of the community members into our sales department for them to have those conversations. So, the signs are really positive from that perspective. Where we have seen some real brilliant results is with the partnership engagement. 

Partners are really keen to be involved in the community. From a partner's perspective, We're opening the door to a bunch of highly engaged sellers. These are people that are prime clients for a lot of our partners. They're really keen to get in and show their expertise and become the expert of the community in their given field. And obviously, in order for us to give access to the partners, then there's a little bit of give and take. We want the partners to do some activity with their databases and introduce us to their databases. And that's where we've seen some really good wins.

We've had some great leads so far from the partners that we've got on board. The partners that we have, you know, on board and signed a really highly engaged, you know, we speak on a minimum weekly basis. There's lots of activity happening between us. I've been in partnership roles in the past, which has been really tricky because from an Amazon agency perspective, you don't really have an awful lot that you can offer apart from perhaps your limited client base. So having this community and having these people that are all kind of there ready and primed is really engaging for the partner. The partner really wants to be involved. And as such, they're then really highly motivated to help us as an agency.

Paul Sonneveld
That makes a lot of sense. And actually, on this topic, I mean, usually I get to this question at the end, but I think it's trouble to us now because there might be potential partners tuning into this, right? I've been, certainly we have a broad network of solution providers in the broader Amazon space. Are there particular gaps that you're looking to fill at the moment? I'm sure you've got a whole range of partners already signed up and you're, you've got certain topics very well covered, but are there any particular like areas of expertise or tools or domain knowledge or services that you're looking to plug at this point in time to round out that offer for your community.

Anthony Willis
Yeah, 100%. And we're open to all. We've got some amazing partners at the moment that cover some really strong areas. But when you think of the e-commerce landscape, there's so much to cover. We've got nobody in accounts, nobody in logistics, the SEO area. There's just so many areas that we haven't got covered with partners yet. 

Like I said, we're very much in the infancy of this scheme, so we're still building it out. So yeah, 100%, if there's anybody that's listening that would like to become involved and become a partner, then yeah, there's a process that we can go through and just get in touch with myself and we can get that started.

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Great. Well, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask you one last question, which is, I know it's early days for you guys, but I feel like you're really doing something new and innovative in this space, certainly from an Amazon agency point of view. I mean, we work with literally hundreds of agencies, and I can't name one other agency who's doing what you guys are doing, which is you know, part of my motivation for having you on and talking about this topic. 

But it's early days and I'd love to, I'm sure because you're one of the first people out there, you would have made mistakes, errors, things you do differently. Care to comment on any of that? You know, we always kind of, that's where all the learnings come from, right? Is there anything that you'd maybe do differently if you were to do this again?

Anthony Willis
Yes. So I think the tricky part about building a community is that you want the kind of vanity metrics, and the vanity metrics are the amount of members that you have, because everybody can see how many members you've got. So you kind of treat that as a little bit of a vanity metric, and then you go hell for leather to try and get as many community members as you can. 

The problem that you get with that is that you end up with a bunch of people that are either just not engaged whatsoever, or the kind of flip side to it, that are in there to kind of sell, and they're not bothered about the community guidelines, and they're just kind of in there for the hard sell. So that would probably be my biggest lesson, would be to be way more selective on who we offer this community to, because it's highly valuable, right? 

So we want it to kind of be an invite-only kind of approach. And to anybody that's not kind of invited, then there will be a process to go through, like an application process to go through before we kind of let people in. So I think that would be my main piece of advice, is it feels difficult at the start, because if you've only got four or five members, then you need community members to engage and to really start to kind of show the value to each other. I think that's really important. 

But I think patience and communication as well. Communicate with the early members and just say, look, you're benefiting from being here early. We're doing everything we can to build this out, so hold tight and we'll make sure that we get this into a great place in the near future. But yeah, patience and just making sure that you don't see that number as a kind of a vanity metric at the start. Obviously, now we've got a really good process. We're only going to allow members that we really, really want to be in there. So that can now be a vanity metric, if you like, because we know that we've got that process in place and we can, you know, the people that are going to be joining are going to be the people that we want in that community.

Paul Sonneveld
Great advice, sort of quality over quantity. Yeah, that's very, very helpful. Look, we are out of time, but thank you so much for just coming on and sharing what you guys are doing. You know, it's really early days. You guys are out on a limb there. You're on a limb, you know, going after this. Not many, as I mentioned. You guys are definitely turning left where everyone else is turning right. And I respect that. 

So thank you for not only coming to share that with us, but also talking about how it works, what's working, what are you struggling with, learnings, really, really appreciate that. And maybe just to finish up again, for those particular, I guess I'm talking specifically to any solution providers that are listening to this, or maybe potential sellers as well, actually, if they want to be part of this community, you did mention that you have a bit of a process there. What's the best way for them to put their name down for consideration?

Anthony Willis
Yeah, so we've got a form that you can fill out, but I think people that want to be involved, if you just drop me an email, my email address is anthony, A-N-T-H-O-N-Y at horisonmarketing.com. Horison with an S, not a Z. Just drop me an email and then I can kind of take you through that process. And if it's somebody that I'm familiar with or that I'm aware of the business and we or we've kind of crossed paths in the past, then there's a really simple solution. I can just send you an invite and then you're straight in. So yeah, that's probably the best route is just to drop me an email.

Paul Sonneveld
Perfect. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much, Ant. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to catching up, perhaps in a few months time, just to see how things are tracking.

Anthony Willis
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, thanks, Paul. I've loved having the conversation. And yeah, if anyone's got any other questions, then please let me know. But yeah, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. 

Paul Sonneveld
You're welcome. Thank you. All right, everyone, that is a wrap for today's episode of Marketplace Masters. If you are looking to elevate how your agency drives strategy from data and community building, today's conversation should give you plenty to run with. Maybe another arrow or bow in your arsenal. 

Of course, don't forget to subscribe, share this podcast with your team, whether it's on LinkedIn or on YouTube, and make sure to join us next time for more ideas on how we can master the marketplace in e-commerce together. My name is Paul Sonneveld. Thank you so much for listening. Take care.