How do these companies hire dumb people and make millions?

eliquid

eliquid

Digital Strategist
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I gotta rant.

I just gotta.

Everyday I seem to run into people that breathe through their mouth that run agencies and companies doing multiple millions that have no clue how to do their job. I'm not talking about the sales people that end up selling the customer, I'm talking about the people that do the "grunt" work of what the customer bought or the people that manage those people.

I feel sorry for their clients and customers.

I'm not sure who has it worse.. the customer that bought from them and believed the hype, or the other people in the agency that depend on their salary to feed their families that have to rely on these people to do their job correctly ( but they dont ) so they can eat next month.

Just goes to show that fleecing is much more powerful ( not in all, but many aspects ) then being honest. What a sad world it is sometimes.

Anyone else run across this daily and get sick of it?
 
eliquid said:
I gotta rant.

I just gotta.

Everyday I seem to run into people that breathe through their mouth that run agencies and companies doing multiple millions that have no clue how to do their job. I'm not talking about the sales people that end up selling the customer, I'm talking about the people that do the "grunt" work of what the customer bought or the people that manage those people.

I feel sorry for their clients and customers.

I'm not sure who has it worse.. the customer that bought from them and believed the hype, or the other people in the agency that depend on their salary to feed their families that have to rely on these people to do their job correctly ( but they dont ) so they can eat next month.

Just goes to show that fleecing is much more powerful ( not in all, but many aspects ) then being honest. What a sad world it is sometimes.

Anyone else run across this daily and get sick of it?
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I have gotten the sense that the large agencies don't actually know what they're doing. My impression is that it's easy enough to do "SEO" for a massively known brand because (tell me if I'm wrong) the brand does the SEO for you, with nominal leg work on the part of the SEO. My thought is and has been that large agencies don't need to know a damn thing or do anything all that well, particularly since they are handling large brands with massive appeal. Admittedly, I have not encountered every large agency and I could just as easily be wrong.
 
Totally, but then again, Warren Buffet has a famous quote about building a company so well, so great, that idiots can run it.

That may not be exactly what you're talking about, so I'll just say - it's more often that I find those who can do, do, those who cannot sell consulting or teach.
 
I think it all boils down to the same thing that allows "gurus" to earn a living.

You have an exponentially higher number of gullible, naive, desperate, hopeful, customers out there looking for push button, magic bullet solutions and will cough up the money in order to not do the work. And that includes falling for slick talk and low barriers rather than even researching which agency might be worth working with. And that number is low.

Even when you get past SEO and get into real marketing, like @becool said, the brand recognition does half the work for you, and traditional marketing methods and campaigns are so blurred together you can't tell which got the results. So a marketing agency might score Pepsi, put out a completely absurd campaign, and Pepsi is still reaping the benefits from the past 10 campaigns plus name recognition. And now they get to say "hey, we did a successful campaign for Pepsi, now all you retards start paying us."

Then you get into contracts where companies get locked in for 12 months or more, and that's just to roll out the campaigns and get initial data, then they get convinced to sign on for another 12 months now that they can optimize. It's foot-in-the-door phenomena plus once they're hooked it's easy to retain them by dangling better bait in front of them. Years can go by before someone sours and bails, and by then they have 3 more clients to replace you for the next 3 years.
 
This is also proof that the demand is much higher than the supply at the moment. All this tells me is that it'll take a modicum of effort to "outdo" the competition in regards to quality and service. So...let 'em keep sucking. I'm more than happy to step in and clean up their mess.

And, that's not to say that "good" agencies won't make mistakes. They all do. But, again, how you recover from those mistakes and make them right by your clients is all the more telling.
 
I do a lot of white label work with agencies. I have a specific set of internal tools that they can lean on to get meaningful shit for their clients. So anyway, I have seen this from an interesting optic.

Success in agency life is normally defined as utilization ratio, recurring billable hours, churn, etc..

And the agencies I have seen that have been successful over a long period of time had the best and most frequent communication with their clients. They were embedded teams.

This is counter to the idea that results trump all. In my experience, they do not. Mercenaries are great at results, but partners get the trust. And the reality of making stacks of money is.. its not who you know, its not what you know, its who trusts you to solve problems.
 
Kanye has similar questions:


This is what happens when a company makes so much money they start to waste it. Then you wonder how they managed to accrue or at least not lose the money they already made. I guess it helps to make a world changing device like Polaroid, but come on.

Someone mentioned the time Will.i.am was made the Director of Creative Innovations at Intel and gave a bomb of a speech at one of their events.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Kanye has similar questions:

This is what happens when a company makes so much money they start to waste it. Then you wonder how they managed to accrue or at least not lose the money they already made. I guess it helps to make a world changing device like Polaroid, but come on.

Someone mentioned the time Will.i.am was made the Director of Creative Innovations at Intel and gave a bomb of a speech at one of their events.
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This reminds me of the countless blogs touting SEO advice/tips that aren’t really actionable and/or are otherwise so general, abstract and uber-macro that I don’t even know how to act on the sage advice.
 
Discliamer: I worked at a large SEO agency that serviced local small/med biz clients in the "bulk" model -- I had 30 clients each paying $1k/month.

In my incredibly frustrating stint at an agency (started my AM career there) success was really boiled down to how smooth you sound over the phone + what kind of spin you have lined up if they don't like performance or have more questions. It was like a decision tree. It literally had nothing to do with the work you were actually doing.

Common Task|Spin

Copy/paste landing page template|Ya we made ya a custom landing page! Cool design right?
Nab a directory link| We built some links for ya! Oh these are gold!
Fart out some shitty social share nobody cares about| We did some social shares for ya! Its the latest and greatest!

Results|Spin

Traffic down?| Oh its seasonality. Everyone else is seeing it too.
Traffic up?|Oh yeah things are working out great. Look at this new page we made! (clients don't even think to ask "ya that's a new page, but how much traffic has it got?" -- they are just content with seeing a new page.)

More FUD & Brand Hijacking

"Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a day so you gotta have an SEO rep on top of it!"

"If you cancel SEO you might lose all your traffic!" (Nevermind that like 95% of your local traffic is branded anyways.)

"We're your SEO consultants - there's a lot of FUD out there about SEO - don't listen to anyone but us!" - lol

*internal meetings* "Moz said do this"

The real silent killer of our niche is that 95% of the traffic is branded or something I call pseudo-branded traffic. You could say whatever the hell you wanted about traffic stats, but the reality was about 95% of volume came off of the branded KWs. So you never really moved the needle at all.

All things told the job was insanely easy as clients didn't know or care all that much. Basically everyone who was smart realized what bullshit everything was and how the job was in general a big joke (while interviewing elsewhere). The idiots on the team actually thought they were really bringing home the bacon for the clients. They tended to get promoted and now feed the same lies to the team from a management role.

The company currently hires college grads with a pretty low bar to entry. $55k salary.
 
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Zach said:
Discliamer: I worked at a large SEO agency that serviced local small/med biz clients in the "bulk" model -- I had 30 clients each paying $1k/month.

In my incredibly frustrating stint at an agency (started my AM career there) success was really boiled down to how smooth you sound over the phone + what kind of spin you have lined up if they don't like performance or have more questions. It was like a decision tree. It literally had nothing to do with the work you were actually doing.

Common Task|Spin

Copy/paste landing page template|Ya we made ya a custom landing page! Cool design right?
Nab a directory link| We built some links for ya! Oh these are gold!
Fart out some shitty social share nobody cares about| We did some social shares for ya! Its the latest and greatest!

Results|Spin

Traffic down?| Oh its seasonality. Everyone else is seeing it too.
Traffic up?|Oh yeah things are working out great. Look at this new page we made! (clients don't even think to ask "ya that's a new page, but how much traffic has it got?" -- they are just content with seeing a new page.)

More FUD & Brand Hijacking

"Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a day so you gotta have an SEO rep on top of it!"

"If you cancel SEO you might lose all your traffic!" (Nevermind that like 95% of your local traffic is branded anyways.)

"We're your SEO consultants - there's a lot of FUD out there about SEO - don't listen to anyone but us!" - lol

*internal meetings* "Moz said do this"

The real silent killer of our niche is that 95% of the traffic is branded or something I call pseudo-branded traffic. You could say whatever the hell you wanted about traffic stats, but the reality was about 95% of volume came off of the branded KWs. So you never really moved the needle at all.

All things told the job was insanely easy as clients didn't know or care all that much. Basically everyone who was smart realized what bullshit everything was and how the job was in general a big joke (while interviewing elsewhere). The idiots on the team actually thought they were really bringing home the bacon for the clients. They tended to get promoted and now feed the same lies to the team from a management role.

The company currently hires college grads with a pretty low bar to entry. $55k salary.
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SO SO SO SO SO hitting the nail on the head in every way possible.

I've freelanced for agencies for years ( in PPC ) and that kinda how I came up with my rant to start this thread, but everything you said is 110% correct and has been the experience I've had as well.

Damn, I always thought it was me with the wrong people in the past.

Glad you brought all this up. Jeez!
 
I literally grabbed some popcorn while reading this thread.

@Zach is on point with everything. I worked at an agency for a couple years too and it was a fuckin shit show.

It's ALL about the spin to clients.

Now that I freelance with a couple SEO clients I have to deal with these knobs every now and then. Most recently i did a technical audit for a client but we had to outsource the implementation. Went to a "reputable" local agency and the assholes had the audacity to say they didn't think the technical issues would help SEO but that posting fresh content monthly would.

BTW, this was a pharma client....

Oh and then they let their dev site (an exact replica of client's site) get indexed by Google, missed out on some deliverables and fucked up Analytics tracking for half a month.

And don't get me started on shit like Yellow Pages who also lock clients in for 12 months. Not exactly an agency but they're notoriously bad for lying to clients to make the sale and not knowing what the fuck a blog is.

The internet's mature as hell now, but this IM industry is still so fuckin under-developed.

These agencies hire kids who know nothing to do the grunt work, have crazy turnover/brain-drain and focus on sales people to keep the pipeline full.

If you think about it they're not really in IM/web-dev/etc, they're in sales.
 
Give me some great money building ideas lol ... My girlfriend has been dealing with a restaurant business who threw thousands at a local agency that did NOTHING, just ripped them off, didn't do the work, and no return on investment. I'm not helping her help them clear things up, but they've become that much more clued up now and seem to have a better idea of what they're doing.

The best lessons in life are learned HARD.
 
Hah! @Zach - so true. I deal with potential clients who have been ass raped by these agencies and hear the same thing over and over. "Well, our last SEO company didn't do anything, so we are really weary" or "We really don't want to spent a lot of money until you can prove yourself". I always tell them they have to kiss a lot of frogs until they find their prince, but ultimately, these clients are so jaded, it's easier to tell them to move on down the road. It's like they get stuck in the constant merry-go-round of fuckery, because they always end up going with the "cheaper" option, which almost always ends badly.
 
Some "digital marketer" is trying to sell services to my friend who owns a deli. I created the website for him and she sat down with him. She told his website is not "mobile-friendly"(trying to sucker him in) which it was and I even did a mobile friendly test. He told me this after.

She keeps calling him trying to sit down with him and have him pay something like 400 a month for FB ads and to create another website which they maintain for 100 bucks a month. And he asked her whats it going to do for my business.

She said it'll "grow your business but won't increase sales or get more traffic" . She said something like that. So i asked him, bro wtf does "grow your business" mean exactly? Get more likes? Get more brand recognition? increase sales? She was basically vague about it. He said he wanted me to sit down with her(if she comes in next time) and appeal to any questions or concerns. Told him he doesn't want that, because she will get embarrassed. Anyways, just taking a break from work seeing whats going on. Back to the grind
 
My experiences at my last place led me believe e-consulting in local marketing is needed. As consultants, we'd be the death reaper of the BS local marketing industry.

99/100 of these local-oriented sales guys are going to slang you some shit executed by some clueless college grad. The real problem is the spins are just too fuckin easy in marketing - biz owners buy in so easy! Just like @Amir is talking about above, business owners just don't know enough to properly assess value. Is there a business/place out there for a consultant to basically slap these guys in the face and say move along for a retainer fee?

We'd basically charge you $500/month and saving you more by saying "no" to all kinds of other shit you would've been sold on.

We'd be the clients bullshit filter so they don't gotta deal with it. Our first project is to analyze what they are currently spending on and cut the crap. Setting up simple shit like tracking too.

"You've been buying these social shares for a year? Let's take a look at traffic...."
"You've had this SEO guy at $1000/month for 2 years? Let's take a look at that...."
"Your web dudes charge you $300 just to have a site? Hmmm...."
"You paid all these extra upsells on your domain name....Why?"
 
Too often, that #AgencyLife is a race to the bottom. It's why I don't care to ever play that game again.

The way I see it, the problem is twofold:
  • Lack of accountability
  • Lack of ownership
Let me explain.

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When Grunts Lack Accountability
We could talk about a lot of reasons why they might lack it. Ultimately, they either:
  • Aren't held accountable at all
  • Aren't held accountable for the right things
I feel like it's a societal issue in general these days. Everyone gets a gold star, as it were. We've all seen managers who are so concerned what their workers think of them, that they let standards slip.

Systems of accountability are self-reinforcing.
For example, link building quotas. Say you have a legit brand client. Maybe the client or manager expects an unrealistic monthly link quota. Maybe that volume isn't possible for the spend. Maybe it'll hurt quality so much that you risk penalties.

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The grunt just cares about "hitting their number" for the month. Their manager fails by expecting unrealistic numbers and not questioning it. In turn, that reinforces the grunt to buckle down and hit the numbers. Someone should have stopped and asked:
  • Do these numbers make sense?
  • Do we need to educate the client?
The answers to those questions might be uncomfortable. Maybe it means needing to educate a client and try to convince them of a more realistic or optimal plan. In some cases, maybe it means turning down work. In others, maybe you can justify "going with the flow" and gladly soaking up their budgetary waste.

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When Grunts Don't Own Their Work Product
In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems in the agency world. As a consultant, it's hard to get near the same level of work product ownership versus working in-house.

Agencies and consultants have contracts. Those contracts usually have a lifespan. You only care to the extent of that lifespan, and then you're done.

So what do I mean about not having enough "ownership" of your work product?

Ownership is about understanding the consequences of one's actions.​

With short contracts, it's hard for most people to understand the long term effects of their efforts. Like maybe they've been so caught up in link quotas, they never even stopped to ask if their content was good enough. In some cases, maybe dropping the focus on links and focusing on maxing content quality and depth would have been the smart move.

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In other cases, maybe the grunt was able to demonstrate performance over a longer term. Let's say 6-12 months. They moved the needle, and things look great. What about that next, major algorithm update in 12 months though? Maybe they moved the needle for awhile, but at the expense of setting up a guaranteed failure for the future.

For an affiliate client, maybe that still works for their ROI, and they have their exit planned.

For a whitehat, legit brand maybe not so great.

The point I'm getting at is this. It's going to be difficult if not impossible for the monthly grunt to have long-term 12-24+ month plans. This is the heart of the issue. That's not to say that everyone in the agency game is wack. There are plenty that aren't. I simply mean, the nature of that type of work makes it easier for most to be stuck in a short term mindset.

There's enough ambiguity in digital marketing, that it's easy to play "hit the numbers" or "move the needle" on a monthly basis, without considering the long term effects. That will fool a lot of clients, sometimes for quite awhile.

Even worse, it'll fool a lot of grunts into thinking they know what's up.
 
A lot of SEO-ish type of examples up in here.

So on the PPC end of it, it's like a 3 ring circus going on non-stop.

It's been like this for every agency I have done business with.

Normally what happens is, someone that knows ZERO about PPC is assigned as their account manager, with maybe a couple of other people thrown in. If there isn't an account manager, it's someone similar to the role or a couple of people in the role that might be "analyst" or "specialist" titles. Point is, none of them know PPC ( know it well ).

Most times, these guys think they know something about PPC like, "uhm, I know what CTR is" mouth breathers and they talk to the client like they are some big shot, but in reality they have 0-2 years experience in general online marketing ( not PPC ) and received an "inbound marketing" certificate from HubSpot and use the Google Keyword Planner for estimations and budgets when planning their PPC account strategy.

So they end up with a plan like this for a B2B client in Adwords:
  1. $2000 monthly spend
  2. $3.50 CPC
  3. 571 clicks
  4. 114 leads
  5. Top 20 keywords used, from keyword research
They give the plan to the client and the client signs off on it.

THEN, they bring in the "PPC guy" which is generally someone they contracted with ( be it a person or agency ). Maybe it's someone full-time on their team as well.

The problem is, this is unrealistic as all get out.

114 leads from 571 clicks? Really? You're expecting a 19.9% conversion rate? lol. More laughable you expect this from the first 30 days?

Industry benchmarks for Adwords on Conversion Rate is 3.75%. For B2B specifically, it is 3.04% -> https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks

That's an average, yours could be less and probably will be the first 90 days until you get the data in you need to optimize.

But you promised them almost 20% Conversion Rate. I'm not making this up guys, I have seen this shit time and time again because the "account manager" read some CRO blog that said a good LP should convert at 20-50%. Problem is, no one told anyone what that 20-50% source traffic was ( Warm email leads, SEO, etc? )

At 571 clicks and 3% Conversion Rate, you're actually expected 12 leads.

But that assumes the 571clicks is obtainable at $3.50 a click from a $2000 monthly budget. HINT, it's not.

That is, not in the first 30 days. Maybe not ever.

B2B can be expensive. Some accounts I manage, the CPC is $17, some it's $8, some its $12. But your CPC is impacted by Quality Score and a few other things.

When you only deliver only 1 ad in the AdGroup ( which they did, it should be at least 3 ), you have a landing page that isn't split-tested it and has less than 20 words on it ( not kidding ), the LP is slow according to Pingdom and PSI, and keywords you picked ( from your own research ) have like 40% relevance to what the company actually does.. you're not going to get to $3.50 a click.

But these people don't get that.

Know what else they don't get? B2B budgets tend to need to be more than $2000 a month.

Why?

Because at $2000 a month, thats $67 a day.

Know what $67 a day gets you on a B2B account? It gets you enough clicks that you exhaust your budget at around 1pm EST.

Now you're ad isn't showing from 1-5pm, or 5-11pm when business folk go home but still look up stuff online ( business owners, account managers, etc ). It also means customers on the West Coast don't see your ad after 10am their time, wasting the whole business day for them. Lets not even get into International.

Whoooo-Hoooo, that inbound marketing certificate sure did a lot for you, your agency, and this client!

But it doesn't stop there.

Because this is a "big client" ( big to whom? ) and they are aggressive and was promised the moon, now the agency and client are breathing down your neck to ramp this up ONLY 4 days into the start of the campaign.

Yeah 4 days. Not making this up guys.

Emails like, "Why haven't we had more leads, we've spent $200 already" pour in from not the client, but the agency. Or, "The client says we need to bid on more long tail terms" even though we are barely cracking our first week running. Who's running the show here?

This is all compounded even more if someone on the client side, or agency side just happened to have received a "Google Certification" the last 30 days ( happens a lot ) or took a uDemy course for $9.99 over the weekend on Adwords.

After all of this, you find out 3 weeks in that "SURPRISE" no one bothered to ever place the Conversion Pixel, or Remarketing Pixel on the client website. Even though you have the client barking orders of "long tails" and the analyst at the agency screaming they know more because they took the Google certification, no one bothers to drop the pixels before giving the account to you to manage.

Gee, the agency plans it all out without you.. drops you in to manage the "expectations" they built up without you, and then hounds you 4 days in about performance. But they can't even drop the pixels even though they said everything is "good to go" and they don't need your advice?

And most of the times, if they do have someone on the team to handle PPC, 85% of the PPC terms/campaigns are all about the BRAND NAME.

Yeah, PPC bidding on the BRAND is what most agencies end up doing.

Really? Fuck yes.

Some will try to move the needle with some "shopping campaigns", but most shopping campaigns are almost entirely handled by Adwords anyways. Nothing of value offered there for the most part. There is some sauce here, but not like when you have to create a regular campaign ( non-shopping ) that isn't BRAND keywords.

Oh, and almost all of the agencies check in on the campaigns maybe 1-2x a month. When they do, they generally try to bid up or down keywords. Hardly none of them change ads, test LPs, do negative keywords, or try to find the best device/geo/schedule variables for you.

I have seen the above repeated time and time again with small and large agencies. Even with just "freelancers".

It's a shame.

I had one agency I worked with that only allowed me 1 hour max per client, per month. That's barely enough time to find out whats wrong, let alone implement a solution. They had over 60+ clients and at best, each client got 1 hour a month to check over and improve their account, but they were billing them a ton of money each month to "manage" the PPC for each.

.
 
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Wow, so ran across a little gem last night in the most unlikely place.

The Peter Principle
https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Princi...1475&sr=8-1&keywords=the+peter+principle+book

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Summary from wikipedia:
The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn promotion to a more senior position which requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for their new role, then they will be incompetent at their new level, and so they will not be promoted again. But if they are competent at their new role, then they will be promoted again, and they will continue to be promoted until they eventually reach a level at which they are incompetent. Being incompetent, they do not qualify to be promoted again, and so remain stuck at that final level for the rest of their career (termed "Final Placement" or "Peter's Plateau"). This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and assuming that there are enough positions in the hierarchy to promote competent employees to. The "Peter Principle" is therefore expressed as: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." This leads to Peter's Corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties." Hull calls the study of how hierarchies work "hierarchiology."

There is actually a lot more to this than the summary I posted above that explains so much of what I was complaining about in this thread.. a lot more.

Really good book about this subject, but it looks like I might have found 1 layer of the issue right here. I know there are more layers to this problem, but it is kind of refreshing to think of it in this way.

.
 
@eliquid

In my quest to shed some light on what was going on inside this particular agency it was a frustrating, uphill battle I eventually just got nowhere with.

I took comfort in this quote by Upton Sinclair:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
 
dealing with this again... so felt like bumping
 
My experience working in an agency fits what's been described already.

It was frequently very unclear what the actual success parameters were. More traffic (adjust seasonality)? Better rankings (which keywords)? More earnings (what about other channels)?

The problem of course is that the agency success is billing hours. Which is not what success looks like from the client side.

Then you have the thing about clients also frequently not having clear definitions of success. This is mostly with larger companies. Here success can mean being wined and dined, told you're smart, looking good to a boss, learning buzzwords etc.
 
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