HOME BASED: Ecommerce Consultant

Founded in 2000, Moxie is a full-service interactive marketing agency located in Atlanta, GA. In 2006, Moxie was acquired by Zenith Media Services, a Publicis Groupe Company, and the expansion included adding offices in New York and Los Angeles. The firm’s clients include Coca-Cola, L’Oreal USA, Verizon Wireless, Cartoon Network, Turner Broadcasting System, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and 20th Century Fox.

With more than 600 employees, Moxie’s services include: digital media, media strategy buying/planning, online display advertising, search engine marketing (SEM), word of mouth (WOM) marketing, consumer generated media (CGM), research & analytics, social networking, mobile advertising, podcasts/mobile downloads, website design and development, ECRM programs, email marketing, digital signage/interactive merchandising, interactive demos, CD/DVD multi-media production, and video/audio production.

Moxie has grown its ecommerce consulting practice like a weed, and they’re looking to hire additional people.

While Moxie’s corporate culture is really that of a traditional agency, its ecommerce consulting service looks to be more of a technology integrator and strategy consulting arm within the agency. Currently, Moxie has one major ecommerce consulting client and a pressing need for staff to manage new ecommerce projects relating to that relationship. I know Moxie’s client very well, having placed their VP of Ecommerce with them last year. Their business is massive, and their ecommerce growth objectives for 2015 are epic in size, scope, cost, and challenge.

In comparison to other agencies, Moxie has a very long history with most of its clients. Most digital agencies market themselves as one-stop shops for interactive marketing, for example, and because of their myopic focus, they don’t have much repeat business. Moxie’s relationship with its ecommerce client has lasted more than 10 years, which gives Moxie a valuable historical perspective on their client’s business, culture, evolution, and ability to manage the changes that accompany the integration of omnichannel digital commerce into their business.

Truly, who better than Moxie to help this client manage this change in how they go to market?

Because of Moxie’s knowledge of the gritty nuts and bolts of direct to consumer ecommerce, it has a unique ability to help its clients understand how every aspect of their value proposition can be digitally enhanced throughout the value chain.

Moxie needs smart, can-do, low maintenance, business-oriented, highly experienced client-side ecommerce directors to work with its major client (and others it intends to acquire) to drive traction on their ecommerce initiatives. Obviously, a deep knowledge of ecommerce is essential, but so is a very broad knowledge of business. According to this role’s hiring manager, “We don’t need someone who is an analyst at a big-box retailer. We need strategically literate, financially educated professionals with a great bedside manner who can help our clients tease out the best ecommerce growth opportunities for their businesses.”

Candidates, the opportunities for both personal and professional growth in this role are astonishing. Initially, there are a number of ecommerce disciplines in which you will need solid experience. Among them, …

Personalization – Moxie sees this as a major hot button with its current ecommerce client and its future clients as well. With Moxie’s current client, the team is working to leverage data to provide a truly personalized experience. Meaning, you will need to understand the philosophy of analytics, data science, and personalization, and understand the importance of personalization on conversions.

It’s all about helping Moxie’s client build a learning relationship with its customers, where the client gets smarter about every customer’s needs and values (without being creepy) each time customer touches the client’s site, such that customers never have to tell the client the same thing twice.

Ecommerce platform integration – While the ideal candidate likely comes from an IR-250/500 sized firm (due to the importance of having succeeded in a lean environment), Moxie’s preference is that candidates have had experience with larger platforms such as ATG, Hybris, and possibly Websphere. Basically, we are looking for someone who understands through first-hand experience where the quicksand and wild animals are in an ecommerce integration. If you haven’t worked on the client side, that’s okay.

Candidates from blue-chip systems integrators will suffice as long as they understand how to manage a phased-in approach to systems integration. With Moxie’s major ecommerce client, it’s essential to bring a very pragmatic approach to managing the project. Moxie won’t be doing the backend work, but the front-end work it will be doing should plug and play with everything else the client is doing on the backend of its business. In short, it’s essential that you understand ecommerce platform integration well enough to teach it and drive results through others, most of whom won’t report to you directly.

Content strategy – Moxie is often challenged to develop and implement Voice of the Customer (“VoC”) strategies for their clients. It has been my personal experience that in large organizations, VoC programs can be “all listening and no action;” siloed and uninsightful; ad hoc and unresponsive; and costly and time-consuming. Moxie’s approach to VoC programs involves assisting their clients with VoC initiatives every step of the way including Listening; Interpreting; Reacting; and Monitoring in ways that drive easy alignment and governance throughout the client’s organization. Moxie’s really good at this.

Is absolutely essential that Moxie’s consultants be seen as Trusted Advisors, allowing consultants to provide actionable insights (not just data) to every member of the client’s organization as they use customer insight to inform employee training; inject VoC findings into the strategic planning process; and use executive sponsorship to facilitate change. Bedside manner counts for a lot here.

Web analytics – You will be working on-site with the client, who has a rigorously analytical corporate culture where “where’s nothing as devastating to an opinion as a number.” Every suggestion you make should be underpinned by a rigorous analysis of a problem’s leading and lagging indicators of causality. This is not an ecommerce analytics role, per se. Actually, it’s more of an ecommerce operations role. However, it’s essential that you understand the right metrics and KPI’s in order to find them quickly, make sense of them, and use them in your analysis an recommendation of specific issues. Mostly, this is a matter of being able to speak credibly to the client in their own language.

Self-service – Ideally, we would be very interested to speak with candidates with responsibility for self-service support sites. Such sites might not have “pure” transactional ecommerce functionality — experience with a simple account maintenance site for a subscription-based business will suffice.

This is a massive, multiphase project, so you can expect to be thrown right into the water. You’ll start with Moxie’s primary ecommerce client, getting your arms around their vernacular, culture, hot buttons, and political agendas. Again, I know this client very well and I can tell you that while their culture is not politically toxic, it’s exactly what you might expect of a large, layered, highly professional Fortune 50 corporation: Everyone has a job to do, and no one knows exactly how ecommerce will impact their own little world.

And it’s exactly why you must think holistically about the client’s business and help them understand how – with ecommerce – the company’s best days are ahead of it. Anyone who reads my job postings on a regular basis understands that ecommerce is basically a change management issue. That’s why it’s essential that you must have a pleasant bedside manner and be able to maintain your sense of humor and professionalism at all times.

Your job will be to work with both the client and Moxie’s internal resources to help everyone understand how to make the project successful. Again, many of these people won’t report to you personally. More than likely, you’ll be getting things accomplished less through carrots and sticks, and more through a kind word.

It is essential that you have led teams that have dealt with evolving customer relationships, requiring the team to constantly improve the site and integrated with things like personalization, content strategy, site search, and so forth. Moxie views such VoC expertise and platforms as extremely differentiating for itself and its clients.

This is a phenomenal career opportunity for a sophisticated, business-oriented ecommerce executive coming from the second tier of the Internet Retailer Top 500. Ideally, you should know how to work with world-class vendors, but you won’t necessarily have 10 direct reports had your beck and call. You’ll be required to roll up your sleeves and get things done yourself, or influence “dotted line” resources to take up your cause simply because they believe in you personally, Moxie’s future ecommerce business, or both.

The compensation for this position is fantastic, and the client’s ecommerce team includes some of the best and brightest people in the industry. (Again, I placed their VP, so take it from me.) You will get an opportunity to do reputation enhancing work: If you are successful, your fingerprints will be all over the project, and both Moxie and the client will know what a rock star you are. Obviously, this will set you up for bigger and better things in your career.

Beyond that, this role also provides a golden opportunity to build a massive business within a business. If you want to help a world-class organization metabolize some of the coolest changes ever seen in its industry, this is your chance. And it’s important to know that the client’s industry it is incredibly future oriented. The industry’s growth in the last 5 years has been explosive.

Bottom line: If you are excited by doing great work and being known for the great work you do, this is your role. If you are excited by driving high visibility results while building a network of some of the most marquee people in the industry, please apply below. You’ll be glad you did.