I was thinking about killing my marketing agency for some time now.
Why? Well, my last big corporate client really ruined all the fun for me. But let´s start with a little bit of background about me, so you understand where this is coming from:
You need to know that I am into online marketing for more than 15 years now. I am specialized in advanced sales funnels and performance marketing. Working from my home office, sometimes I feel the need to connect with real-live human beings and so I am hosting a lot of marketing workshops that always attract a range of big corporate clients from the most renowned telecommunication biggies to some automotive, insurance, and banking powerhouses. They send over their marketing people to learn the latest tricks of the trade.
And that is O.K. It so happens that I am indirectly responsible for pushing a few boundaries here and there which led to a range of innovative new products that I was desperately missing in the market from a user’s perspective. Check. Done. Next.
So what happened? First off, I absolutely hate chasing after corporate leads as they always want fancy pitches. When they see critical feedback and a structured action plan most reconsider and fall back into default cash-burning mode. Some even go on and hand your deck over to their inept in-house team or worse, their old Tier 1 agency to feed them new ideas and actionable input. But that last client was worse. Much worse!
So what happened? First, it was pharma. A big one. A daughter of the one with that blue magic pill for men. An industry that I have no particular interest in at all. They lured me in with a fancy nutrition concept, that at first glance, had a price range so low that I just could not imagine generating a positive ROI with performance marketing alone. Somehow I was intrigued and saw it as a challenge to my particular skill set.
Second, they pitched me as a startup in trouble. So I didn´t even know their background story well until it was all too late.
Third, the thing that bugged me most was that they were desperately trying to cut off my consulting fees in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons but at the same time wanted to force me into accepting a full-time job, so they could get all the nice benefits without having to shell out the paycheck that comes with bringing in an external expert. I took this as the perfect excuse for finally reading “Never split the difference” from FBI counter-terrorist negotiator Chris Voss and used this incredible knowledge as an unfair advantage to talk myself out of it and still get an acceptable rate for an agreed-on limited period of time. I was even able to convince them of the benefit to only stay 2 weeks on location, and work the rest from my home office 700km away.
When I finally came around to meet the in-house team, a few things were super strange right away. The most obvious was, that they were no startup at all. They had a corporate history of more than 180 years and had already spent about 300K of ad spend and agency fees distributed amongst three different external agencies happily burning through the cash resources of this project in parallel. It then dawned on me that I was supposed to take over the whole project, collect all the broken pieces, and transform it into a full-blown ROI positive space rocket in a matter of only 8 weeks. O.K. I accepted that challenge. Done it before. I am often called when things have gone down the drain a long time ago. Not a big deal, really. Happens more often than you might think. But, REALLY?
But the strangest thing was, that they didn´t even have a clue what I was talking about. Which, when speaking with an in-house marketing team that is supposed to manage a budget of 300K Euro per year and lead three external agencies might be the worst situation ever.
So I did not only have to try to translate my advanced sales funnel plan into Kindergarten style baby steps but also had to puzzle out, which agency screwed up what and why they were using overcomplicated and super expensive tools for a tiny meany basic setup. That hunchback art piece of a screwed up gizmo only managed to force the in-house team to wait around for ages to get agency approvals and expensive custom-made workarounds for the most basic stuff like creating a simple landing page and connecting it to MailChimp. Really? Unbelievable!
Have you ever seen a Multisite WordPress configuration with a custom-developed template that does not even support any regular plugins? Used for the simplest possible shopping cart that needs to sell only five items in a single country? Wasting watts on a dedicated VPS hosting? Anyone? No, me neither!
Why not just jump on Shopify and set it all up before lunch?
So instead of getting right to business and setting up a bunch of highly targeted sales funnels, I had to do everything but my original job. Best of all was arguing with the agency responsible for the Google advertising proudly boasting that with all the testing of the last 12 months they were able to achieve a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of ONLY 42 Euro per new customer when the product they were supposed to sell only costs 9,95 Euro.
And they didn´t even understand why I immediately disabled all their Google display ads. Well, after spending two hours sifting through 24.000 keywords they had set up and active campaigns running for (This is NO JOKE!), I was finally able to zone in on the most promising 100 and saved the company a whopping 120k for the coming year. All while maxing out the ROI and minimizing the CAC to only 8 Euro (down from 42 Euro). Those two hours have been their single most effective effort in the last 12 months. The campaign was already about to break even (or at least stop losing a ton of money every day) just with a few clicks. And I hadn´t even changed any campaigns or set up any funnels yet.
Oh, the funnels… what have I done, really? If I had known back then what I was getting into, I would have tucked my tail and beaten it the hell out of Dodge.
Actually, I believe that after all these years running workshops and teaching students how to write award-winning marketing plans in a private university, I can explain a basic sales funnel well enough. HA! Never underestimate the stupidity of your in-house marketing team. Ever! I had a more fun time explaining how to lace shoes to my screaming four-year-old. That was just unbelievable. I totally expected them to know what we would be doing in the next few weeks, but somehow after explaining the causalities and possibilities of your average funnel, I started a wildfire. The product managers ended up wanting 10 fully-fledged funnels each for their 2 products.
It was like a bare-knuckle fistfight with a professional octopus(sy) wrestler.
But that was far from enough. All while I was busy as hell trying to whip this up, they kept coming with more and more new (super urgent emergency rescue the cat) stuff every day, that micromanaging bullshit was totally unrelated to the funnels and bogged me down as well. So instead of just setting up the funnels, I needed to bring out all that other trash as well. And every day those people were wondering why was I not one step closer to finish the funnels yet?
And why did this technical SEO tracking that the other Tier 1 agency set up, suddenly stopped working exactly one day before I came on the team? Any ideas?
And on and on and on it went. It was like a freak show in a circus nightmare with entirely too many teeth. It even went so far, that they set up daily crisis meetings that blocked the whole team for a good two hours when it was only one product manager that didn´t understand what we were doing at all and kept repeating the same questions over and over again. After like the fifth time in a row and repeating myself over and over again, I dared to asked if she was kidding me. Did I mention before it was a nightmare?
I could probably go on and write a whole book about clients from hell, but to cut this one short, we ended up two months over time with only six of 20 funnels completed with all the viral competition tools and ad campaigns and email campaigns and automation set up. They still spend the same amount on advertising but now have a working sales funnel that actually generates money and was predicted to cash in 250K Euro in the next 12 months, instead of burning through another 300k.
Job done. Insanability scores way through the roof. Sleep next to none. Everlasting nightmares, check. Payment at least acceptable, but the actual cost of doing this was WAY TOO HIGH! I will never ever do anything like this again!
My Top Key Takeaways
Here are my top learnings and critical giveaways that you need to spot in order to avoid being stuck with a similar experience:
Never sell yourself out for less than what you are worth! If people don´t see the monetary value in what you are doing for them, then they will never respect what you are doing. Period.
Never work for people that don´t understand what you are doing! There is a big difference between explaining a cool new feature to a fellow marketer and educating people working in a similar role. That is not part of your job!
Never send in a full strategy pitch! Keep it vague and talk about it so they know what you are doing but never hand over a step by step written blueprint.
Never ignore your gut feeling! If you are having second thoughts about a job, then don´t do it. Simple as that. Stay away and look for something that is actually fun to do.
Never work with Nay-Sayers! Some people just don´t get it. And if they are in a position of power, it will be so much worse! Keep clear of anyone that openly displays an aura of ignorance about your preferred expertise and save yourself the headache!
Never accept budget cuts on essential tools! Cash gets burned for all manner of reasons. You know there is no budget for this and that and it´s all Bullshit! If you need a subscription tool to boost your sales, then you need that tool. If you need a project management tool to save hours each day micromanaging your headless chicken team, then you need that tool! There is no relation to saving a mere handful of bucks when you are spending thousands per month on paid ads that don´t convert because you don´t have the right tool to nurture all those leads.
AXE THE TRASH! Always challenge the status quo. There are new tools and startups jumping on the scene every day. What cost 100K only ten years ago can be done with a 10 Dollar subscription tool today. Only because you have always done something that way and used this manual process and calculated everything in good old Excel, doesn´t mean that there isn´t a much better and much more effective way of doing things today!
Bonus Tip: Go No-Code and do your own thing. I have been involved in a few no-code projects lately and realized that this new technology enables you to cut about 90% of software development costs right away. My last SaaS MVP cost 30.000 Euro and was 24 months in the making. I was feeling like sitting in a Ferrari with no wheels at a red traffic sign with a radar trap pointed straight at me all of the time. Then just last week I duct-taped a No-Code MVP for another SaaS idea that cost me only 27 Euro ( I couldn’t believe it either) and it is up and running already. Check out Bubble.io to see what´s possible today, and save those bucks and 24 months!
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