Edition 29: Cussing like a sailor

Jan 30, 2020

Thank you to those who signed up after my LinkedIn humor yesterday.

This newsletter is a bit different then my typical ones. You can read previous ones here if you haven’t.

This was likely the best one I’ve written (said Geoffery)

Marketers suffer from FOMO. Its that feeling that someone is doing something that you aren’t doing. We are idiots and don’t realize good marketing is an output of a good product, team & the market itself and the overnight success that you see today is likely 5 - 7 years in the making. Still - we fucking fall for it every time.

Not sure what I am talking about? Go to LinkedIn & you’ll see those long posts that wind around the point eventually ending in - “if you want to get a copy just comment - ‘I want one’ below & I’ll inbox it to you. It’s so fucking rampant that it bothers me. The kicker is, I just for kicks, I did get one or two of those & guess what - it was marketing 101 shit - from VP’s/CMOs at well known B2B SaaS brands.

This reminds me of another trend I saw in the early LinkedIn days (Yep I am a child of the internet). A little detour before we get into it.

I was born in raised in Pakistan. It’s a wonderful country with wonderful people in South Asia (India/Pak/Bangladesh) but it’s riddled with economic, socio-religious & other challenges. Many opportunities aren’t forthcoming & hence every decently educated person is mostly in a constant race to leave the country to find a better life elsewhere. Me being one of those.

One of the most popular places Pakistani workers eye is the middle east - I have my few hypotheses on why this is:

It’s close to home (2 hours by plane)
It’s a majority of Muslim countries so you don’t have to worry about the whole halal dilemma.
There’s a big community of workers who moved there in the 70s & 80s so you’ll have community.

In the early days on LinkedIn I’d always see these so-called ‘Recruiting Agencies’ from Dubai post on LinkedIn - ‘Hiring XYZ position in Dubai, Comment ‘Interested’' below to have your profile considered for the role’.

Who the fuck believes that you ask? EVERYONE. Those posts would end up with thousands and thousands of comments of hopeful workers seeking to land the job in Dubai and be able to provide for their families. I am not holding the folks who comment at fault (though landing a job just off an LI comment is some next level Jedi Mind Trick) - it’s those recruiting agencies that exploit the naive just to rack up some views on LinkedIn.

Can you see where I am going with this? The current marketing ‘thought leader’ trend of comment below has been run through the grinder by folks below. It’s not new, the shit you get from commenting is meh & fuck - the internet has a ton of learning opportunities. Everyone is probably making this up as they go. So next time - for the love of God, don’t encourage this behavior.

Kyle is a smart marketer - but I think his definition of influence is different then what I tend to use.

Yes, absolutely marketing should influence everything in the company (product, CS, sales, recruitment) but when we look at pipeline/demand gen, etc - marketing doesn’t generate 100% of the revenue. Some prospects might be from sales prospecting, others might come via referrals, yet others might come from tradeshows, etc & that’s where marketing influences % of revenue.

This is a pandoras box of attribution that’s been beaten to death about how you measure, what you measure & if you should measure at all.

There are tools/methods out there. I wrote about it for CXL a while back.

This was something I came across this morning & left me scratching my head. Are the PLG folks changing their tune or have I misunderstood the PLG bandwagon? For a long time, all they talked about was how your product will replace sales & potentially marketing <?> and now it’s ‘hey you should still hire sales because you need sales eventually & remember Atlassian & Slack that we held up on a pedestal as the holy grail of product that sells themselves? Guess what - they have sales team too and did previously in some shape or form.

From the Zendesk Story (Startup Land): (thanks Wes for the reco)

“ … We were really committed. Michael Hansen gave his personal phone number to at least ten thousand trial customers. Matthew proactively called customers” - sounds like selling to me?

Who’s this guy? Bad take. School & education teaches you much more than how to write or read - it teaches you critical thinking. My mother never had formal education & she sure as hell made sure my 4 siblings all got good education and we are better for it. Will traditional education service as we know it? Perhaps not. Is college worth the debt structure that North America has? Probably not. Can everyone afford school? No. But does formal education have value? Fuck Yes.