By Ariella Brown
Today's Nigerian prince appears as the one who will teach you the secret to increasing your income.
I understand the need to pitch to try to make sales, and I get that people want to entice customers with concrete numbers. But I'm starting to think that like the classic Nigerian prince scams, they are deliberately aiming for low intelligence people who just swallow the promises of easy riches and hand over their money without question.
That's because I'm struck by how very unsophisticated they seem to assume their audience is. I got two pitches like that today -- one in my Linked Inbox after a person requested to connect to me and one in my actual email that the person obtained from my having attended one of his presentations.
Flattery only works on people whose egos exceed their intelligence
Don't send an invitation to connect with someone and give them a false compliment leading right into your sales pitch. You're following a playbook and showing that you're trying to manipulate your mark, especially when it is very obvious that you're being so general because you are not, in fact, familiar with the person's work and are just pulling off their current place of work as reference.
For example, I just responded to an inmail with "What do you think I do at NYC Data Science Academy?" in response to the pitch that said this:
Hello Ariella, thank you for accepting my invitation.
I love what you are doing at Nyc Data Science Academy
I recently helped Deekron, a client of mine,
make an extra $25k a month without spending anything on ads
And I am sharing the exact process on my upcoming linkeidn [sic] event
If this interests you, here is the registration link:
I'm not sharing her link. I seriously doubt she loves what I'm doing because she can't really see what I'm doing at the school. My name doesn't go on the work I edit. In other words, I'm most invisible there.
Anyone who is so obvious about throwing out flattery because she's too lazy to even try to make herself sound credible is not the type of person I want to work with. It makes me doubt her claims altogether.
Seeing is not believing
The email I opened was from Russ who charges $1500 a course that he hopes will attract up to 60 attendees at a time. He sent along this visualization with completely made-up numbers (notice no footnote for sources of info) to try to convince you that you can easily go from earning $25 an hour to $100 an hour and then to $250 and, ultimately, $500 an hour so long as you can sell yourself as a strategist.
Everyone who is a mechanic can also be a quarterback
That assertion is ridiculous isn't it? Yet that's what's implied by the labels Russ decided to use for his visualization that lies on very level, including deliberate vagueness and poor choice of words to represent the different roles.
Why call the one who implements the plan a mechanic? Mechanics are not mindless drones who just follow orders. They're highly skilled workers, and they tend to comman salaries way above $25 an hour.
And then why the shift from a job to a sport roles by choosing the term quarterback? It doesn't fit and again underestimates what real quarterbacks earn.
In point of fact, even the lowest tier indicated here for freelance marketers/content producers, there are the ones who earn $25 an hour and the ones who earn $100 an hour for the creation, whether that is writing the blogs and social media posts or posting them. There's no fixed demarcation in terms of earning potential, as people will often have to do both the creation/plan and implementation.
Now let's move to the top two tiers and the false demarcation between the consultant and strategist. Again, Russ is being very sloppy with terms, which really make me think that he is not just dishonest but not very good at what he claims brings him so much wealth.
False demarcations
What he calls a strategist could also be called a consultant. A consultant simply means someone who works in a consulting capacity, which can be for anything. Even what he calls a mechanic or a quarterback could be hired as a consultant. In fact, I do work at all these levels described here under the title of a consultant, and I don't typically get $500 an hour or even $250 an hour.
I'm not saying no one gets that. I'm sure some people do.
However, those rates are usually only offered for very brief stints, just to set up the plan that will be executed by others who are charging less. That's why most consultants will not limit themselves to just the upper tier of work and secure maybe 10 hours per client.
Instead, they would work on the range and accept some in-between range that may be around $200 an hour. Some senior writers end up earning that much, too, when they charge by the piece and work fairly quickly.
Bottom line: the visualization paints a very false picture about the actual earnings and demarcations associated with different aspects of work in marketing. Anyone who really falls for the implied promise that your earnings will skyrocket to $500 an hour with full time hours as a result of taking a course is so easily duped that he or she would make a very lousy strategist, indeed.
Remember, as I pointed in The secret to getting rich is selling other on the secret, if these people were really raking in as much as they claimed from their freelancing/consulting, they wouldn't have pivoted to the courses. They obviously make far more by taking in (pun intended) the freelancers seeking to improve their earnings than by hitting up the business managers with their claims of writing/marketing prowess.
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