The Month End Podcast
The Month End Podcast
Episode 39: Sam Pantazopoulos • Vizer
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In episode thirty-nine, Accountfully's CEO and Partner, Brad Ebenhoeh, talks with Samantha Pantazopoulos of Vizer. Vizer, short for incentivize, allows brands selling in retail to track that channel and optimize their marketing by understanding their retail sales activities. She and Brad discuss the ins and outs of CPG trade spend, consumer habits and how in-person retail is still very much a thing. If you are intrigued by the possibility of unlocking in-store intelligence, check out this episode!
For more small business and CPG- focused resources, visit Accountfully's resources page, where you will find helpful articles, guides, eBooks and more.
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Welcome to the month end CPG community chat. The month end will provide emerging CPG brands real life knowledge into the accounting, finance and operational worlds. Our guests will be key stakeholders from those same brands as well as other key contributors industry. Welcome to Episode 39 of the month end Podcast. Today. We have Sam pantasopoulos from Pfizer, how you doing today? Sam,
Sam Pantazopoulos:Doing well, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Brad Ebenhoeh:I'm excited to chat a little bit kind of outside the normal topic of this podcast, related to kind of marketing and just what consumer brands and consumer packaged good brands should think about. So before we get started in getting into the details, why don't you give a little bit of a background of yourself and and why you're here today, and you know what what Vizer is?
Sam Pantazopoulos:Yeah, I didn't necessarily think I would find myself in CPG marketing, either. So we kind of both find ourselves at that table. I grew up in a small town in Maryland, went to school in San Diego and launched a consumer app right out of college, so jumped kind of head first into the entrepreneurship game. Vizer is short for incentivize. So it's all about helping consumer brands create incentives to market and share their products. Is the core of what we do. So to think of it simply, could be like $1 off of a product and a retailer, buy one, get one, any kind of freight initiative, but all incentives geared at, how do we help consumers get access to more products and help market grants?
Brad Ebenhoeh:Awesome, that'll make sense. Fascinating that you jumped right into a consumer brands app right at college. How
Sam Pantazopoulos:It was a really roundabout path. I went did that happen? to school for business. And I knew that I wanted to do something in the entrepreneurship space, but I wasn't quite sure what that was going to look like at the time I studied Business Administration, so it gives you a little bit of everything. I did take some accounting classes, so have two semesters of accounting under my belt, but I was really interested in the marketing side of things, more so, and kind of anything that had to do with like creative and brand building was really where my heart was at. I ended up doing an entrepreneurship challenge my junior year, however, where we were able to, kind of like, build out a business model and run it through this program. You ended up presenting it at the end of the semester and a pitch competition, and had the idea for this consumer app where I hated working out at the time, so it was all incentives that would motivate you to work out, but it was powered by consumer brands, so you would work out, and then you would see, kind of like a healthy offer from a Suja or an Olipop, somebody kind of in our network, that you could go redeem that product and try it.
Brad Ebenhoeh:It's fascinating, very cool, very cool stuff. So as we're chatting with you know, brands of various sizes, reviewing their financials monthly, clearly a huge, huge spend in line item is advertising, marketing. So clearly, a huge goal for a entrepreneur of a brand, or owner of a brand is efficiency and marketing right of marketing spend, how to kind of get my best ROI so related to that, like, how does Vizer help out? You know, brands in that, in that specific space?
Unknown:So what's cool about the incentives is that they can be attached to digital marketing channels. So I'm sure everybody listening in is fully familiar with this, but marketing is a huge, huge percentage of the budget for brands trying to figure out how to grow and how to either get more distribution in retail or meet new shoppers grow their household penetration. So huge percentage of the budget, but a lot of that isn't presently being tracked in a really meaningful way, the way that you see with DTC. So I know earlier saying that you work with some like Shopify and Amazon brands the digital world, it's really easy to track. Okay, where is this traffic coming from? They came to my checkout page. What does the conversion look like? Do I want to keep investing in these channels, or do I not in the retail world? It's a little bit more opaque. So we're doing digital marketing. But is it driving people in store? Are they purchasing the product? That's kind of disconnected? Our incentives allow people to connect those channels. So by attaching some kind of digital offer to maybe like a Facebook ad campaign or an influencer promotion you're running, you now have a shoppable, trackable asset to see. Is this converting in store? Are people checking out? Do I want to continue investing in this channel or not?
Brad Ebenhoeh:Gotcha, that makes 100% sense from my perspective. So in terms of the size of the companies or brands that you can support, I mean clearly $0 annual revenue. Companies, brand new startups, they need some sort of advertising marketing, whether it's handshaking, Guerilla marketing, whatever it is, I'm assuming. It's all different levels of business sizes. But can you kind of expand on that from from your position?
Unknown:So it's a platform. It's very nimble. We like to say, can support startups same way it can support, you know, really legacy large brands. It does depend on their retail distribution. So we're very focused on supporting in-store transactions. How do we help people grow their footprint in retail? We don't have a D2C side of the business, so having a presence in retail is really important. And then we mainly have our offers redeemed at like conventional grocery so places like Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, are places where you could use our offers.
Brad Ebenhoeh:So when you say real-time, like as soon as the offer is redeemed and paid for and scanned at the cash register, basically, like it goes to the their portal, and they can track and say, "Wow, that that's turning" right. So that's what you mean by real time. Basically, you're able to kind of see the ROI you're getting on that campaign.
Unknown:Yep, yeah. So it's all platform based. You could log into your portal and then you see this offer was claimed, which is pretty rare for any kind of like trade incentive promotion. A lot of this can have, you know, 2, 3, 6, months before you're figuring out how did that perform, versus it is
Brad Ebenhoeh:So from an aspect of just, you know, like, Let's real time. boil this down to cash, right? Like, small businesses, any business, cash is king. How can I again, get back to the best ROI or efficiency on my cash spend, no matter whatever. It's labor, marketing, inventory, whatever. Basically, this is helping you be more efficient with your cash, because you're able to in real time to see incentives. Yet, you're offering your customers in order to drive more sales, higher velocities, etc.
Sam Pantazopoulos:Absolutely. Yeah. So it's a sales tool, and that we're driving people in store to purchase product, ideally, say you're doing some kind of discount, like $1 off, that's going to move more units, and if there was no incentive associated with it, so you kind of have that, like revenue driving cash focus. But I think the cash savings is a really big piece of the business and opportunity as well, where, if you're investing in a channel and you don't have any visibility and to if that channel is converting, you may continue to spend money after it really makes sense to so I'm always looking at, "hey, how much of the budget can we save" and then reallocate into channels that we know are performing well? And if we do that, we're kind of supporting cash on both sides, right. We're not wasting it on inefficient channels, and then, because we're doubling down on efficient channels. We're seeing more sales at the register.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Makes 100% sense. So just stepping back from your from the actual the product, or, you know, Vizer, like, what are some best practices that you see from just a marketing lens for a small business or any business, to kind of attack, attack their, you know, marketing and PR kind of needs.
Sam Pantazopoulos:It's evolving so quickly, I think, especially in the retail space, which was kind of standardized for a long time, but now you're seeing so many new tools coming out. And I even say, if you went back in time and describe something like Tiktok without knowing it was Tiktok saying you could create a video for free. You're going to upload it to the internet. It's going to go search millions and millions of people to find exactly who your customer is and present it to them on their smartphone, in their on their couch. Like, how much do you think that would cost? And 20 years ago, you would have thought it'd be a fortune, like such an expensive tool, and right now, that's totally free. So I think if you are an emerging brand, especially, telling your story is really important, and having people know who you are, what showing the expansion as it's happening, and then kind of engaging your community and that as well, like what UGC or user generated content is being created. How can you weave that into your content and then have this like top of funnel storm brewing, almost of just people talking about you in a meaningful, authentic way?
Brad Ebenhoeh:That's fascinating. We we're an accounting firm. It's been around for over a decade, and we have a really good brand, good marketing. Social to me, we've never like done Tiktok, but literally recently, we're like, you know what? There's a lot of our target clients are on Tiktok, so we probably should start making the move in that direction in some capacity. But, you know, Instagram reels and all that type of stuff. But all of that makes sense, and it is fascinating from a kid in the Born in the 80s and living in the 90s, like this concept, or how much would this cost would be? Like, mind blowing up, like, I don't know you're talking about so millions and millions of dollars. But it is fascinating that it's so easy and and free today to, you know, launch a product basically, or launch a marketing campaign for a product which is awesome, exactly,
Sam Pantazopoulos:and you're making the content already right, like it's. On YouTube. It's on Instagram. Let's just give it somewhere else to kind of socialize. And who knows, it could blow up in a really powerful way. LinkedIn, too. I think the algorithm is wild right now. It's like, really, really pushing out content. So if you're a founder building in public, there is, like, a great place to to be as well.
Brad Ebenhoeh:What's like, one of the success story or two, or something kind of a crazy story or a crazy experience from either a client or something that you've seen, and you clearly don't even tell us their names, but just something you've seen, of like something that maybe the craziest or not crazy, but just a little wild experience.
Sam Pantazopoulos:Yeah, I think one thing that I've seen do really well that was interesting was people, and I'm thinking of a brand in particular, Mid-day squares, who I really like. I don't know if you're familiar with them. They're based out of Canada. They make a chocolate square, and the first time I saw one of their videos, I thought this is going to do so well, because it was so authentic, it was so different, and it wasn't what you were seeing in the content ecosystem at that time, they were just very, very raw about what they were building and what the struggles were, and very forthcoming about it. And I think it was kind of polarizing, and we work with them, so these are chats about the team, but it was kind of polarizing in the beginning, where some people really didn't like how different it was, but because it was so authentic, they were able to build this really powerful community over the last several years, and the brand is growing like crazy. So I think just like being comfortable doing something that's really non traditional and non conventional for your industry, if it is authentic to you and your brand and that you believe in and be willing to be different versus hopping on every single trend that's happening and trying to be timely and relevant. I think being authentic is what I've seen do really well for brands, and it's like different than what you're seeing the bulk of brands do.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you on that from an actual, like campaign perspective. How broad should you be, how targeted should be? You know, per SKU, per channel, like, can you kind of walk through what you've seen, the best practices in that space there?
Sam Pantazopoulos:We kind of have a matrix where we look at the campaign goal, the channel, and the discount value, and
Brad Ebenhoeh:Gotcha, in the kind of traditional distribution those three things will determine where you should be promoting, and the frequency and all of these things. So if your goal, for example, is to get new customers, then you probably want to be in some kind of acquisition channel, so like a paid media campaign, and you want to offer a higher value discount, because you're trying to motivate somebody to try your product who may have never had it before, or it's a new flavor, so you would offer a higher discount, maybe a BOGO. But if it's our community, it's people that already are following us on social media, or they're already involved in our email list, you could probably offer a lower value discount and still motivate that same behavior, so you're not investing as much in trade spend. So every campaign is kind of a case by case basis. What is the product I'm trying to support? What retailer Am I trying to support? What channels Am I using? What's my budget? And then that will help determine the strategy. But what's kind of nice about the tool is you can use similar incentives of the same offer in multiple campaigns. So what you're running on Instagram could be totally different than what you're running via email, but they could be the same offers. customers within CPG, the big ones that a lot of folks using, they have a lot of, you know, when they're selling, they're they're doing deductions, chargebacks, ton of trade spend, or maybe a lot or little, depending upon where they're at. So when you sign up to those contracts with those distributors, in the retailers, agreeing to various trade spend and coupons and different strategies that you're talking about, you're, you're agreeing to those types of relationships for, like, an, you know, a period of time, and then deductions and blah, blah, blah, with you, like, you can kind of help compound or create or oversee that or overlay that to essentially just a much better, higher, efficient, hopefully, like, incentivize For somebody to buy it at the retail store, right? Like, so, like, the way that the traditional couponing and that way that's always exists, that's basically replacing and directly competing with what's going on, right?
Sam Pantazopoulos:Yeah, so it's kind of this idea that you can, like how you were describing, you could layer it, because it's retail agnostic. So your ability to kind of turn on and turn off the tool has the flexibility to flex it up, flex it down. So as you're looking at your different strategies for different retailers, is it a compliment? Is it your primary focus? We always like to say you don't need to reinvent the wheel to be using these. You don't need to make a whole new strategy. Let's look at the campaigns that you're already running, because 90% of the marketing is happening online, at least digitally, but 90% of the sales are happening in store. So what's happening on the rest of your digital media outside of your traditional couponing solutions or incentive solutions? I don't think they need to be replaced. I think they could be complemented and still drive a ton of incremental value for the business.
Brad Ebenhoeh:What are you seeing? Kind of, just of consumer habits these days? What three to four years post covid, just from in store versus digital?
Sam Pantazopoulos:So there's a trend with shoppers increasing buying grocery items and these kind of, like fast moving consumer goods. Digitally, but probably not as much as you would imagine. Like 80 to 90% of sales are still happening in store. You still have to win the in store cart. I think all of this narrative that everybody's going to shop online and have everything delivered just haven't manifested yet. And if it does, I think we're quite a while away from it, just because consumer behavior to move that meaningfully is more of a generational shift. Then obviously, covid was a different ecosystem. There was a requirement there, but I think to really shift consumer behavior to everybody buying everything online will take a bit longer.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Yeah, is 100% agree with you. It's decades and generations of habits and lifestyles. From just the aspect of being like a business owner, entrepreneur, like, what's been a like a really tough challenge for you, just in general, not even marketing?
Sam Pantazopoulos:Oh, so many, I think we we started. So I work with my cousin and my co founder and one of my best friends. My COO is one of my childhood best friends. Grew up across the street from me. We were making businesses together, and we were really young, so we have this very kind of like family core to our business, but also trying to remember, like, Hey, we're running this as a performance organization. Like, when people talk about your team as a sports team, not family, that's very true. So like, how do you separate out, kind of the personal and still work together? Fortunately, like, we all have a great working relationship, so it's been an awesome Foundation, and we've been able to kind of like, recruit people in from our network, and the team has maintained that as it's grown, but with that, like, as the company is growing and evolving, your skill set as a leader is required to evolve at that same rate to match whatever challenges are arising for the business. So I think trying to, like, navigate the ups and downs of the startup journey, while also navigating, how am I evolving as a leader to be able to kind of shepherd through these challenges? Has been an interesting, fun and educational journey and personal development and self reflection.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Yeah. I'm assuming a big part of the success of you and your cousin and one of your best friends is having a good boundaries of this is my function department. That's yours. That's yours. We have to trust each other, but let's keep that separate. Is that true?
Sam Pantazopoulos:Very much so. So in the beginning, we were 22 and 23 and sat and wrote out this is who's responsible for what like if these things happen, this is what we'll do in those instances, which I think is so important for any business partnership, just having hard conversations at the beginning. But one thing that we do that's been incredible, and I recommend it for any like founding team or business partnership. Is Dylan and I will go to lunch once a month, and it's like a therapy, kind of check in lunch, and it's, what am I doing that's driving you crazy? What are you doing that's driving me crazy? And how are we going to fix that before we leave this lunch? And it just created the space to have really productive conversations. And since we started implementing that like it's been such a transformational thing.
Brad Ebenhoeh:That's awesome. Yeah, my my wife and I own this company, so we've been doing it for over 12 years. So it's boundaries. Don't impede me over here, you stay away off my plate. It's just and then you have to have trust of just like, that's taken care of, and let it be. But I love the therapy sessions. That's, that's a great idea. And then the growth, the leadership aspect of it, yeah, it's like, that imposter syndrome. It's like, why am I here? Like, I never signed up to lead a team of X number of people or a revenue of this much. Can I really do this? Do I have the confidence to do this? Do people believe in me in this? It's like, everything's great. And also, one day, it just kind of like the the questions start going in the brain, is that kind of what you're talking about? I just continually involved. And making sure that I'm staying ahead of the curve of my team and the good leader that I need to be for them.
Sam Pantazopoulos:How have you been doing it? Like what are your your tips?
Brad Ebenhoeh:I have no idea. I know it's I think a big part of it is hiring great talent and then letting you know, letting them do what they do best, and not over micromanaging them. But additionally, it kind of goes back to the first point you mentioned. Like a very part, a big part, of the growth of a company has been my wife, Meredith, who's my business partner, who I talked about is, like, we're there to have support structures, so there's like a little therapy constantly in there. Like, what you're saying with your your co founders of, like, hey, like, I had a bad day. What's going on? How did this hurt? Okay, go, like, you're not alone. And I think after you kind of talk it out and go for you, like, Alright, let's move on to the next, the next step, right? And then it's just kind of moving forward a day, day after day after day, and and trying to make the good decisions, or best decisions you can. So I don't think there's like a, like easy answer to it. It's just, you know, you just have to figure it out. Basically,
Sam Pantazopoulos:yeah, no, I totally agree with that. One one day at a time, one step at a time.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Yeah, definitely. So. And how big is your team right now?
Sam Pantazopoulos:So we're up to 17.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Wow, cool maamand California or distributed.
Sam Pantazopoulos:So we're primarily in San Diego. We've had two team members that were in San Diego since move out, and one in LA, but overall, pretty much condensed, and we just got an office in the La Jolla area, if you ever in town.
Brad Ebenhoeh:All right. And then, before I move on to kind of the final two questions, I just wanted to know is Meredith? Is merit? Maryland really just about crab cakes and football.
Sam Pantazopoulos:It's heavily about crab cakes and football. And I love Maryland. It's like, such a beautiful place you haven't been I highly recommend it. But I grew up landlocked, like, three and a half hours from the ocean, and I just knew that wasn't my life path, like I belonged in California, so I was trying to get out for longest time. But now, when I go back, I really appreciate it. It was a great place to grow up.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Awesome. Yeah, I was born and raised in Michigan, landlocked, and then I'm live down here in Charleston, South Carolina, so I'm like three blocks from the beach right now. So only place to live I could never move away. So, but hey, this was a great chat. Sam, as we kind of go out, I have a couple kind of general questions here. So number one, what is like one do for a consumer brand founder?
Sam Pantazopoulos:I think one do is to really define your vision early on and make it as big as you want it to be. Like, don't kind of skimp on the vision. Like, really dream. Where can this go? What do I want this to look like? Because that kind of becomes your edge of possibility. So let that happen, because then all of your decisions are guided towards that, and if you shortchange it early on, then you're going to make decisions that can't reach its full potential.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Nice. And then what is one consumer brand, retail business, don't,
Sam Pantazopoulos:don't. This is kind of like a compliment to that, but don't get in your own way unnecessarily. I think just starting and continuing to push things out and learn like you can never make a perfect plan in a silo. You have to get it out there, and then that's where you find the holes. So push things out, figure out what's working and what's not. Use that data to inform your decisions. As time goes on and you'll end up somewhere better than if you kind of wait and keep it on a silo.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Yeah, that that rings true to me, of just go out, figure it out, make some mistakes, improve, go make some mistakes, improve, better and move forward in that direction. I think that's been a big part of accountfully growth and and success as well. So this was awesome. Thanks so much Sam for joining. Can you tell the listeners where they can find you, or find Vizer, find you? Just, you know, give us some of that. Yeah,
Sam Pantazopoulos:of course. So websites just joinvisor.com, V, I, Z, E, R, short for incentivize. And then for me, LinkedIn is probably the best place. Just Sam Pantazopoulos, my name, pretty active. There.
Brad Ebenhoeh:Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks again, Sam. Episode 39 of the Month End podcast. I hope you all enjoyed it, and I learned some things, which is awesome. So thanks, Sam. Take care.
Sam Pantazopoulos:Thank you. You.
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