Stop telling your prospects their jobs are stupid

And the nearly-million-dollar marketing manager...that could be you!

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? Before we jump in…

If you’re interested in having your company sponsor the newsletter, let me know (jared@sagelett.com) — I mean, who wouldn’t want to reach a few thousand marketers? Plus, this is a great (and affordable!) way to do it. Gr’affodable (tm). Plus, I really like writing the sponsorship copy so it fits in with the rest of Gobbledy.

Onward…

Today:

• Spy vs Spy, HR doofus edition

• Don’t tell people their jobs are stupid, homepage edition

• You’re worth more than you think, lawsuit edition

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A Little More on the Stupidest Story of the Year (So Far…)

You may remember that HR platform companies Deel and Rippling have been involved in a lawsuit whereby Rippling accuses Deel of having a Deel employee get a job at Rippling and spy on the company.

You also might not remember that - in that case, we wrote about it here a couple of months ago when we were talking about how suing a company and destroying the CEO’s reputation can be a good marketing tactic:

Deel has now countersued Rippling (specifics not important), but I wanted to share a wonderful part of that lawsuit, which is clearly designed to personally destroy Rippling’s CEO Parker Conrad, and remind people that Conrad was embroiled in a controversy at his previous company. And I assume this is all a way to get prospects to question whether they can trust a company like Rippling with their HR & payroll needs (and instead buy Deel):

Haunted by his previous failures, and now fueled by suffocating jealousy at his inability to fairly compete with Deel in the marketplace, Rippling’s co-founder and CEO, Parker Conrad—who was investigated and penalized by the SEC, and exiled from his own former company, Zenefits, for flouting the law—has fallen back on his old playbook: cheating.

If you don’t remember that you may remember that the alleged spy tried to smash his phone with an ax and then flush it down the toilet. A photo from the scene:

X.ai announced they were blowing through $1 billion in cash a month. It is completely worth it because AI can create this image in 20 seconds.

Anyway, that’s where we left it - this was a mini-scandal involving besmirching your competitor’s CEO and also flushing electronics down the crapper.

Now, Bloomberg has published a more in-depth look into this story, and if you like details about a couple of doofuses (possibly 3 doofuses), this story is for you.

But even if you can’t possibly read another story about Silicon Valley dickwads*, there are a couple of lessons worth sharing for marketers.

(*technical term)

For those of us in the software marketing world, we’re living in a challenging time. On the one hand, MY MARKETING TEAM IS NOW 523 AGENTS, COMMENT ‘FIRED’ AND I’LL SHARE MY PLAYBOOK! On the other hand, if you used to have 7 competitors, now you have 117.

So you’re going to want to take advantage of every possible advantage. And what’s more of an advantage than having one of your employees go work for your competitor and then tell you what’s going on?

But, sheesh, that’s going to be challenging. For starters, you’ve got to find a person who’s willing to go work for the other company. Then you’ve got to figure out how to pay that person - you can’t just write them a check (can you? No, no you can’t. Or, well, you shouldn’t.)

It’s challenging, but - allegedly! just allegedly! - the CEO at Deel figured out some of the details of how to make this work, and, just in case you’re intrigued and are considering hiring yourself a spy to go work at a competitor, I wanted to share 3 keys to running this playbook. As with so many things, the devil is in the details.

1. Founder must constantly be out promoting the company while also sharing trite advice (“try harder”) and sharing little sayings about the company (“We work at Deel speed!”). 5 bonus points for Forbes 30 Under 30 List inclusion:
   

   Bouaziz’s prominence skyrocketed along with Deel’s valuation. He made frequent appearances on tech podcasts and conference stages, offering clichéd advice to fellow founders in a smooth French accent. “Try and try harder and don’t stop,” he said in a social media video in 2021 while promoting his inclusion on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
   

2. Call the guy who is spying for you, “boss.” There are two times when I am called boss: “I can give you a great price on this carpet, boss” or when I’m buying fruit from the fruit guy on the corner of 97th and Broadway (“Strawberries very good today, boss.”) If you are not haggling for a carpet or purchasing fruit on the street, you should be very wary of anyone calling you “boss.”

   
   [The CEO] messaged [the spy] multiple times a day on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, often opening with “hi boss!” or “hey boss, can you search for…” and texting repeatedly if he didn’t respond…If the information was helpful, the CEO would reply “this channel is beast.”
   
   Beast, indeed.
   

3. Come up with a clever way to invoice the company for your spying activities.
   
   When the ($5700/month) fee (payable in cryptocurrency) came due each month, [the spy] would send a picture of a watch to a Telegram channel, and [the CEO] would respond with: “send that watch to London”—code for “the money is on its way,” according to the affidavit.

So those are the keys to making it work - have a CEO who thinks he’s a celebrity find an employee he can make feel like he’s the fancy one, while speaking in code to make both of them feel special.

How’d they get caught? Good question.

Rippling figured out that something was up because the company noticed someone was searching the company Slack for the word “Deel” multiple times a day. So they set up a fake Slack channel (called #d-fectors) that was allegedly filled with people who used to work at Deel and now work at Rippling sharing gossip about Deel. Except it was fake employees and fake gossip. And when Rippling’s lawyers - trying to tempt the spy into going to the Slack channel - sent a note to Deel executives alerting them that some former Deel employees were sharing gossip in the company’s Slack, Deel’s CEO wrote to the spy and said he needed to find that Slack channel.

Then a couple of minutes later the CEO realized this might be a trap (oops!) and wrote to the spy not to go to the Slack channel. But because the spy was a good employee and worked at “Deel speed” he was already in there and had searched multiple times.

Oops again!

“Oh shit,” the CEO told the spy, according to the affidavit.

The lesson? Sometimes you shouldn’t move at Deel speed.

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People Don’t Think Their Jobs Are Stupid

One other note about Rippling. This is their homepage:

I really (really) dislike “automate busywork.” If a salesperson came into your office and said, “Hi there, great to meet you. I think a lot of how you spend your time in your job is stupid and could be done mindlessly by idiots. Buy my software.” You would likely not say, “Oh yes, I was just questioning whether I’m wasting my life on stupid work that a $79 tool could do instead of me, thank you for pointing that out.”

Your website should not do that either.

(I don’t love “make better decisions” either, because who is thinking to themselves, “I’ve been questioning whether I’m making good decisions at work?”)

People want to know how life will be better, not be told their current life sucks.

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Your LLC Name Is Also Marketing

I think we can all agree that the FTX-Sam Bankman-Fried story is the gift that keeps on giving (unless you’re Sam Bankman-Fried).

I wrote about the brilliance of SBF’s public relations strategy, whereby he had the press write stories about how he would play video games during board meetings (etc etc etc), which showed he didn’t give a rat’s ass about what people thought of him, except that those stories were planted because he cared very deeply about what people thought of him, and what he wanted people to think of him was that he was an enigma, and his enigmaness (enigmacity?) intrigued the venture capital firms (who were his real customers, since he was taking their funding and then keeping a significant percentage of it for his own use), such that they were basically begging him to take their cash.

As you might imagine, when you have lots of cash sloshing around, it sometimes sloshes into places you wouldn’t expect - like into the pocket of a marketer.

The folks who currently own whatever is left of FTX have sued brilliant-self-promoter-and-marketing-guy Neil Patel to recover tens of millions of dollars that FTX paid Patel’s firm for marketing help (full text of lawsuit here and fun overview of the lawsuit here).

There are 2 delightful takeaways from this lawsuit (one bit of clarification - Blockfolio, an FTX-owned company, hired Patel as an individual to work at Blockfolio, and then later FTX hired Patel-owned agencies to do marketing work for them).

The takeaways from the lawsuit:

1. Patel’s LLC is called “I’m Kind of a Big Deal, LLC.” That is awesome.

2. (From the lawsuit): Bankman-Fried caused Blockfolio Inc. (“Blockfolio”) to hire Patel as Marketing Manager and agreed to compensate him $75,000 per month.

Do you have a marketing manager at your company? Do you pay that marketing manager $900,000 a year? No? That’s why you’re not kind of a big deal.

Here’s the sad part - I don’t know how you get someone to pay you $900,000 to be their marketing manager. But it does not surprise me that someone who owns “I’m Kind of a Big Deal, LLC” would also be the kind of person who can also convince someone to pay them nearly a million dollars for that job.

(After typing that I now realize that I actually DO know how you get someone to pay you a ridiculous sum of money, and that’s to convince them that you’re a big deal, and you do that by marketing the bejeezus out of yourself. Which, very very funny enough, marketers tend to be bad at.)

Now, I also understand that this is a lawsuit, and nothing has been proven, so, y’know, take this with a grain of salt, but I enjoyed this tidbit about the work that the marketing agency (“Big Deal”) did for FTX:

”FTX Trading paid $14.8 million for Big Deal to spend four months merely attempting to find another consultant, which it never actually did.”

Also - if you ever thought your SEO agency may have been charging you a bit more than you thought was the market rate, here’s a final tidbit: FTX was charged “a one-time set-up fee of $1 million and an annual management fee of $6 million” for SEO services.

Why am I talking about this? (Besides that something has to go in this newsletter every week, and it can’t always be 1,000 words about Carpenters songs.) Because marketers are bad at two things:

1. Charging what they’re worth.

2. Marketing themselves.

Just about everyone I’ve ever chatted with in the consultant/fractional world undercharges for what they do. Just about every one of them. We marketing folks have roughly as much self-confidence as I did walking into a school dance in 7th grade.

It turns out - and I really, really hope you’ve already figured this out if you are a consultant/fractional type person - that you can charge as much as you can ask for.

I think those things go hand-in-hand - if you don’t think you’re worth charging a significant rate for your expertise, then you also don’t think you’re worth trying to market yourself.

I’m not going to pretend it’s easy - I always say that if marketing people were good at sales, they’d be salespeople and earn three times as much.

What I’m saying is that you should start by naming your LLC something empowering (My Fees Are Worth It, LLC) because then people will assume you’re worth whatever you’re charging.

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As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

P.S. - Author William Langewiesche passed away this week. I love great magazine stories, and Langewiesche wrote more than his share of gripping longform journalism. His dispatches from the rubble of 9/11 were detailed and harrowing. He wrote quite a bit about plane crashes (he was, himself, a pilot). If you’ve never read his work (and be prepared to go down a rabbit hole once you’ve started), his article on the crash of Egyptair 1990, and whether one of the pilots crashed the plane on purpose, is a masterful piece of writing and a great place to start.