An Open Letter To Success Managers

[newsmike]

[danno1950]

This lack of response by the Fiverr SMs is pretty loud.

Edited April 14, 2023 by danno1950

[newsmike]

Yeah, they have spoken volumes by ignoring this thread. 

[leannelrivers]

 

4 hours ago, newsmike said:

Yeah, they have spoken volumes by ignoring this thread. 

Sellers when we finally get an official response. 

[mariashtelle1]

On 4/11/2023 at 11:18 PM, smashradio said:

We've been telling sellers for years that their performance affects their visibility.

Now that it's happening to us, it's suddenly the algorithm's fault?

This ☝️ 

 

though that’s not happening to me I agree that the advice from SMS should be better than just CS answers. There is a story here on the forum where someone’s account was banned for using stock photo (which is logical) but the problem is that SM couldn’t advice if seller needed to change it or not and never came back with an answer. (Which is TOS 101 that SM should’ve known). 
 

anyways, @newsmike maybe you’ll want to tag success managers here, because they are here on the forum. 
Just choose anyone with _success at the end in their nickname. 

[ran_success]

On 4/8/2023 at 7:55 PM, newsmike said:

Dear Success Managers,

 

Hey Mike

Thank you very much for your insights. We do take them seriously and do think about how such feedback can help us grow and improve. The Seller Plus team in general, and the CSM team in particular, is advocating internally many of the things we hear from our sellers, with hope that Fiverr can continuously serve your business aspirations of sustainability and growth. 

Your Success Manager will contact you later this week when back to office from her vacation to have a more intimate discussion about your profile and the situation you encounter. It is important to note that our Success Managers provide sellers with insights that might help them grow their business on Fiverr and this is our main goal. Eventually, your success is our success.

Kind regards,
Ran & The Seller Plus Team 

 

[newsmike]

20 minutes ago, ran_success said:

Hey Mike

Thank you very much for your insights. We do take them seriously and do think about how such feedback can help us grow and improve. The Seller Plus team in general, and the CSM team in particular, is advocating internally many of the things we hear from our sellers, with hope that Fiverr can continuously serve your business aspirations of sustainability and growth. 

Your Success Manager will contact you later this week when back to office from her vacation to have a more intimate discussion about your profile and the situation you encounter. It is important to note that our Success Managers provide sellers with insights that might help them grow their business on Fiverr and this is our main goal. Eventually, your success is our success.

Kind regards,
Ran & The Seller Plus Team 

 

Hi Ran,

I truly appreciate the response. May I suggest that there is a systemic issue which is greatly documented in this thread which is affecting a lot of successful sellers. Please read through to see what has occurred and how frustrated we all are in the responses we have received from SM's so far. 

I suggest a Zoom call for the folks in this thread with the SM team to discuss the issues at hand. I believe many in this thread have felt unheard by their SM's and perhaps a meeting of the minds can help.

Please advise.  Thanks

[ran_success]

1 hour ago, newsmike said:

suggest a Zoom call for the folks in this thread with the SM team to discuss the issues at hand.

Hey Mike

Thank you for your prompt response. Again, we do understand the frustration sellers may experience when they see lower impressions and low number of sales as a result. However, this can be a consequence of many factors and reasons.

Each seller in this thread have a Success Manager with close familiarity of the history of the account performance, the needs and goals of the seller, as well as the person behind the service. We welcome each and every one of you to schedule a meeting with your Success Managers and explore together those possible setbacks that may have caused this issue, and brainstorm about possible solutions that can help you overcome it.

Kind regards,
Ran

[arnukas]

44 minutes ago, ran_success said:

brainstorm about possible solutions that can help you overcome it.

Hey Ran,

Most Seller Plus members complain about receiving a template of "solutions" with help articles (which we can find ourselves for free) that we often don't ask for. We need deeper insights from Success Managers. We are unsure what settings Success Managers can access, but it seems like they have difficulty accessing more statistics and tools; therefore, we are limited to receiving specific answers.

Zoom meetings do not help. Success Managers will once again reply with the same templated answers over and over again without fixing actual issues.

 

44 minutes ago, ran_success said:

Again, we do understand the frustration sellers may experience when they see lower impressions and low number of sales as a result. However, this can be a consequence of many factors and reasons.

I know, I know. We will receive some of the following answers: bad private review; you need to update your gig description or reword a sentence; create more gigs; communicate faster, and so on. These are not the answers we are looking for. They are too basic, which we can figure out ourselves.

I wonder, how many Seller Plus members does EACH Success Manager have? Every response we receive seems to be rushed, and some questions are not clearly answered (because they use templated answers).

Please do an experiment. Let the Fiverr team create a seller profile, then tell everyone to figure out how to make sales by themselves. They will have their template Q&A, but that won't impact their sales at all. They will be clueless about how to operate Fiverr's business, and all the recommended adjustments won't have any impact. Do you see where I am coming from? Success Managers need practice, not theory.

Please create a private feedback form to review Success Managers, then evaluate answers and feedback given, then audit them. I would love to see the results. Publicly.

Edited April 17, 2023 by arnukas

[newsmike]

39 minutes ago, ran_success said:

Each seller in this thread have a Success Manager with close familiarity of the history of the account performance, the needs and goals of the seller, as well as the person behind the service. We welcome each and every one of you to schedule a meeting with your Success Managers and explore together those possible setbacks that may have caused this issue, and brainstorm about possible solutions that can help you overcome it.

I believe that if you would actually read the thread you would understand what I am saying. We have all done that and are frustrated by the lack of quality, actionable advice the SM's are giving us. There are at least a dozen people stating as much.  Have you actually read the comments? 

[visualstudios]

31 minutes ago, arnukas said:

Please create a private feedback form to review Success Managers, then evaluate answers and feedback given, then audit them. I would love to see the results. Publicly.

Yes. "Rules for thee, but not for me" gets stale fast. Why should sellers be subject to much higher scrutiny than Fiverr employees? We are independent workers. SM's are not, they actually do represent Fiverr. 

Edited April 17, 2023 by visualstudios

[leannelrivers]

2 hours ago, newsmike said:

I suggest a Zoom call for the folks in this thread with the SM team to discuss the issues at hand.

I think this could be productive, Mike. I agree that the advice to book in another call with our individual managers will only get us the same advice that the SM's can give us. 

Maybe it can be noted that my sales have been so bad that I have downgraded my SP membership. Not only because I think my SM, as much as I appreciate them, probably can't tell me anything new, but because $29 is too much in comparison to the awful 2-3 months here. That's bad! I wanted to keep my SM as a point of contact, but when business is so bad it's money I need to put towards investing in other areas of my business. 

The same advice isn't going to make any difference. 

And we do know there are many outside factors too, but we're struggling yet all paying for success managers. 

[danno1950]

13 minutes ago, newsmike said:

55 minutes ago, ran_success said:

Each seller in this thread have a Success Manager with close familiarity of the history of the account performance, the needs and goals of the seller, as well as the person behind the service. We welcome each and every one of you to schedule a meeting with your Success Managers and explore together those possible setbacks that may have caused this issue, and brainstorm about possible solutions that can help you overcome it.

I believe that if you would actually read the thread you would understand what I am saying. We have all done that and are frustrated by the lack of quality, actionable advice the SM's are giving us. There are at least a dozen people stating as much.  Have you actually read the comments? 

I think reading the post from the beginning will be very helpful in seeing that this issue has not been effectively addressed, and it needs to be addressed at a deeper level than "brainstorm about possible solutions" - which indicates that the problem is an individual issue for each seller.

2 hours ago, newsmike said:

May I suggest that there is a systemic issue which is greatly documented in this thread which is affecting a lot of successful sellers.

This is what we're frustrated about - we haven't been feeling heard about this larger issue, which is not isolated to individual sellers.

[visualstudios]

3 hours ago, ran_success said:

Hey Mike

Thank you very much for your insights. We do take them seriously and do think about how such feedback can help us grow and improve. The Seller Plus team in general, and the CSM team in particular, is advocating internally many of the things we hear from our sellers, with hope that Fiverr can continuously serve your business aspirations of sustainability and growth. 

Your Success Manager will contact you later this week when back to office from her vacation to have a more intimate discussion about your profile and the situation you encounter. It is important to note that our Success Managers provide sellers with insights that might help them grow their business on Fiverr and this is our main goal. Eventually, your success is our success.

Kind regards,
Ran & The Seller Plus Team 

Hey Ran,

Just read your response, and I'm not happy with it. I'd like a free revision on it, please. Thanks!

[danno1950]

This was posted as an Open Letter to Success Managers. Can we get some input from other Success Managers?

3 hours ago, ran_success said:

The Seller Plus team in general, and the CSM team in particular, is advocating internally many of the things we hear from our sellers,

So could we hear from the other Seller Managers about this internal advocacy - this is the first I've heard about it.

[uniquefivex]

On 4/8/2023 at 12:55 PM, newsmike said:

In late January or early February, impressions dropped to nearly nothing.

I thought I was the only one! I started up a Fiverr plus membership to hopefully remedy this, I can stick with it for a few months but if there is no improvement that will be a huge disappointment. I was doing so well last year, and then 2023 hit and sales dropped considerably. 

[newsmike]

1 hour ago, uniquefivex said:

I thought I was the only one! I started up a Fiverr plus membership to hopefully remedy this, I can stick with it for a few months but if there is no improvement that will be a huge disappointment. I was doing so well last year, and then 2023 hit and sales dropped considerably. 

This is a new experience for a bunch of successful sellers simultaneously. It was once we realized that it was a systemic issue and not related to seller performance, we turned to our respective SM's. I hope you get better results, but as you probably have already learned, they are either unable or unwilling to deep dive and resolve the issue. Many of us are cancelling SP. 

[kamranppc]

On 4/9/2023 at 4:01 PM, newsmike said:

Again, I don't blame the SM's, however, even an acknowledgement of this thread would be nice,. But I feel that we deserve some level of actual intervention since we are paying good money for someone to "manage our success." 

It's happening to many of us if not all as you mentioned, I did however got that acknowledgment from my SM, It seems that they are as confused as we are... well how we can fix something that is broken as a whole.

[catwriter]

2 minutes ago, kamranppc said:

I did however got that acknowledgment from my SM, It seems that they are as confused as we are.

So far it seems like you're the only one who got that acknowledgement from your SM.

[newsmike]

Just now, kamranppc said:

well how we can fix something that is broken as a whole.

Totally agree. Then the question is would you continue to pay a plumber who doesn't know how to fix your sink?  There are some systemic issues here.

1. The algorithm is band aided together for years and is probably not understood by anyone at Fiverr.

2. The algo is also flooded with millions of gigs that are deadwood and outright scams that jam up the works.

3. Support (SP) as evidenced in this thread don't even care enough to read and respond to the actual issue. They skim and send the same cut and paste responses that they always do.

4. Coders and academics make up the entire workforce. None of then seem to me to have ever been successful sellers or marketers. 

Systemic issues require massive interventions. Twiter's rebirth under Elon is the kind of change needed. In fact I am starting to suspect that Fiverr is shopping for a buyer.    

[kamranppc]

Just now, newsmike said:

Totally agree. Then the question is would you continue to pay a plumber who doesn't know how to fix your sink?  There are some systemic issues here.

1. The algorithm is band aided together for years and is probably not understood by anyone at Fiverr.

2. The algo is also flooded with millions of gigs that are deadwood and outright scams that jam up the works.

3. Support (SP) as evidenced in this thread don't even care enough to read and respond to the actual issue. They skim and send the same cut and paste responses that they always do.

4. Coders and academics make up the entire workforce. None of then seem to me to have ever been successful sellers or marketers. 

Systemic issues require massive interventions. Twiter's rebirth under Elon is the kind of change needed. In fact I am starting to suspect that Fiverr is shopping for a buyer.    

I guess I still have hope and I will pay the plumer for now.

 

I have a theory, I believe Fiverr has a concept issue, let me explain:

 

Back then Fiverr was a platform to find cheap, bit size services, then they tried to go for bigger fish by onboarding pro sellers, things where doing great until they have decided to add a lot more Pro sellers and that is when things went wrong.

''Luxury is good only when it's rare'' by onboarding Pro sellers who don't have the necessary qualifications the whole concept went wrong, every actual pro seller had to reduce prices and packages started to shrink to become more bite size and then actual pros kinda disappeared between everything else and overall the whole avg price of the platform went higher, now imagine how buyers feel after not being able to find top talents in the pro and low prices in the non pro, we lost it all. I believe now the whole concept don't make sense anymore, Fiverr is not cheap for those looking for cheap and It's also not sutable for bigger fish because top quality cannot be found anymore among all non qualified.