Monetizing Your Mental Capital, Season 3, Episode 12. Host: Will Christensen. Guest: Corey Brown. Recorded February 2026.
Stuck running Amazon with no budget and no support? Here's the exact pitch that gets you both.
In this episode of Monetizing Your Mental Capital, host Will Christensen sits down with returning guest Corey Brown of buffaBRAND Marketing to role-play one of the most common situations in e-commerce: an employee who gets handed "figure out Amazon" with no budget, no team, and no plan.
Corey walks through what to actually ask for when you have nothing to work with, starting with a request as small as $1,000 to bring in outside expertise, and why the CFO's first questions will always be about the plan, the budget, and the ROI timeline. He explains why most teams launch the wrong products on Amazon in the first place: instead of optimizing whatever happens to already be listed, he argues you should identify the true top sellers across your entire catalog, even ones sold only through traditional channels, and prioritize launching those first because they can outperform a much larger set of underperforming SKUs.
The conversation then moves into how to actually win the room: building a market-size case around a specific product (using an internal "$30 million backscratcher" example that isn't yet on Amazon), pulling competitor sales data from tools like Helium 10, SmartScout, and Data Dive to make leadership jealous of what competitors are already earning, and finding an internal ally to back-channel support before you ever present in the boardroom. Corey closes with advice on continuing to learn the language of leadership so your pitch lands as a business case, not a request.
In this episode
- 00:00 Intro
- 00:40 Why e-commerce leaders can't get support from the CEO
- 01:14 Ask for even the smallest budget, like $1,000
- 02:56 What the CFO wants to know: plan, budget, upside, timeline
- 05:00 Roleplay begins: the coffee shop scenario
- 07:26 The first questions to ask about the business and catalog
- 09:01 Who decides what goes on Amazon, and why it's random
- 11:48 Staying organized with a large catalog
- 14:03 Reprioritizing: sales rank the whole catalog, not just what's already listed
- 19:25 The "$30 million backscratcher" not yet on Amazon
- 24:41 Getting buy-in: finding allies and back-channeling the boardroom
- 29:45 Using competitor sales data (Helium 10, SmartScout, Data Dive) to build urgency
- 31:31 Final advice: keep learning and speak leadership's language
Connect with Corey
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-brown-buffabrand/
- Website: https://buffabrand.com/
Resources mentioned
- Helium 10: https://www.helium10.com/
- SmartScout: https://www.smartscout.com/
- Data Dive: https://datadive.tools/
