This Sales Game Changers Podcast episode features a return to the show by Institute for Effective Professional past keynote speaker Marcus Sheridan.
Marcus was the keynote speaker at the 2015 IEPS Award Event.
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On today’s show, Marcus discusses his new book “Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader.”
Find Marcus on LinkedIn.
MARCUS’ TIP: “The fastest way to build trust and rise above the noise in B2B sales today is to show up on video—face-to-camera, one-to-one. Your prospects don’t need another email. They need to see you, hear you, and feel like they already know you before the first meeting.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m really excited, we got Marcus Sheridan. Marcus, your story is incredible. How you became such a proponent of using social media for business owners and selling professionals to take their business and their sales to the next level is remarkable, so much do, we had you speak on our stage a couple times, and at the award event. I was really excited to hear from you again with your new book. We’re going to be talking about your new book,
Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader. You’re calling it They Ask, You Answer 3.0. Of course, They Ask, You Answer was your classic. I’m excited to get into this.
Give us an update. For people who don’t know you, give us an update on how you got to this point and some of the remarkable things that you did, and we got a lot of great questions on how sales professionals can brand themselves to help them really take their sales to the next level.
Marcus Sheridan: I’ll give you the quick 101 for those that don’t know me. I started a pool company out of college in 2001. In 2008, the market crashed. We almost lost the business. The good thing about pain though is it forces us outside of our comfort zone. I ended up doing, along with my business partners, some really innovative things when it came to digital marketing, stuff that hadn’t been done before. Essentially, we said, “You know what? We’re going to become the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools,” in our case. We became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. It was pretty extraordinary. But we did that through being more honest and open and transparently talking about the things that buyers wanted to know more than anybody had ever done when it came to pools.
Because of that success, I started writing about it and I called the strategy They Ask, You Answer. They Ask, You Answer would go on to become a very known book in the digital marketing world. My pool company in 2020 got so big that we became a manufacturer and we sold the manufacturing side of it. I still own the original franchise, or I’m an original franchisee, the Virginia location is still ours, but now the national company I sold. It’s all because of this obsession that we had with the buyer and being willing to address the questions that they had, but most pool companies were not willing to address.
What’s cool too is They Ask, You Answer has been implemented by so many companies around the world, but times are changing. It’s very fitting, we’re on the Game Changers Podcast right now. You want to talk about the game changing. Ever since November 2022, AI comes out and then it starts to change the whole world. A lot of folks don’t even realize necessarily the changes that are happening, but business, marketing, and sales has been harder for many people. I think it’s very fitting that we have this conversation now.
Fred Diamond: Absolutely. You’re right. ChatGPT and the other GPTs that came out have completely changed the game. We’re going to get deep into this and we’re going to go into your four pillars of a known and trusted brand. One of the things that you just alluded to, and we talk about this all the time, the buyer’s journey has shifted. It actually shifted way before ChatGPT came out. It shifted when social media became strong. Sales and marketing, we’ve talked about this a number of times, their places through the buyer’s journey has shifted. Some companies, unfortunately, are still focused on their sales process, when in reality they need to be focusing on the buyer’s process and where the buyer is and what they need to bring them.
I got to ask you one quick question before we get deep into this. I’ve seen you speak a number of times over the last decade, and it’s been a while. Did you ever think in 2007 that you would’ve become this guy? That you would’ve become one of the true thought leaders, not to use that term lightly, in social selling?
Marcus Sheridan: I didn’t think of it at all. The only thing I was thinking about was how do I keep the bank from taking my house? Because that’s what I was concerned about at the time. What’s sad though is a lot of companies have to be forced by outside circumstances to do that, which they should have been doing a long time ago. To a degree we suffered from that, but I did get ahead of the game, and once we committed, boy, we just stayed years ahead of the market in terms of what we were willing to do.
The great companies don’t need market conditions to motivate them to listen to buyers and to evolve. A lot of companies just really haven’t evolved very well in terms of the way that they sell and the way that they do their marketing. I think we really, really have to do that at this point in time. Otherwise, you’re going to see a huge disruption in industries all over the world in the coming years. A lot of the current leaders are going to be the followers with this next generation. But the ones that are going to be the leaders are going to be the rule-breakers, because the rule-breakers, they always become the rule-makers. Everyone else has to become that rule-follower.
As we’re talking today, hopefully the audience is going to hear ways that they can break the rules and do things differently in their space. Because you can’t do it like it’s always been done if you want to have extraordinary results moving forward.
Fred Diamond: You alluded to this a little bit, but let’s get started here. You’re right, businesses across almost every industry feel like customer acquisition is harder than ever right now. We agree with that a hundred percent. Give us some of your insights, why are so many companies struggling with this? What is it about today’s world and today’s buyer that is contributing to these struggles?
Marcus Sheridan: If you look at the buyer, and you mentioned this, buyers are obsessed with information. They’re obsessed with learning. They want to get as much information as they can before they reach out to a company. Let me give you two stats that are pretty wild. We know that the typical buyer is 80% through the buyer’s journey by the time they reach out to a salesperson, which means they have done a massive amount of vetting and they have tried to get their ducks in a row as much as possible. They demand information, they demand it now, they want it fast, and to your point, it needs to be a buyer’s journey and not a sales process. There’s a very big difference between the two.
Now, the other side to this is another stat that I think is incredible, and Gartner shared this with me, which is 75% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience. I’m going to repeat that and I’ll talk about it for a second. 75% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience. What does this mean? Well, it doesn’t mean we hate salespeople. It just means that as buyers, we don’t want to talk to a salesperson until we are good and ready. There’s this major need now for what’s called self-service and allowing people to do things that in the past they would’ve had to have done directly with a human or a salesperson. But now through maybe, let’s say some interactive tool or something like that on your website, they can get those answers, they can get their ducks in a row, and they can feel comfortable and they can feel like they can move forward.
The other thing that I have to mention is because of AI, there’s been companies over the course of the last 25 years that have built their entire business on Google Search and on Google Ads. Folks, that is not a business that is built to last if that is your core strategy today. If you are just saying, “I am going to go all in on making sure I show up on Google, or making sure that I’m spending enough money with Google Ads to get the leads that I need,” there’s a very good chance that you’re going to say, “I don’t understand. We’re spending this money, but we’re getting less leads than we’ve ever gotten before. What’s happening?”
I’m telling you, I was with a whole bunch of attorneys just yesterday alone, and they were telling me, “I’m spending what I used to spend on Google Ads and I’m getting half the results. Why is that?” Because we got major shifts and major headwinds. The answer to this, all these things that are happening right now, is that you, individually, let’s say as a salesperson if you’re listening to this, or two, collectively as a company, you have to build a known and trusted brand today. That is the key.
The whole model behind Endless Customers is system, it’s what it is, it’s to help businesses and individuals become the most known and trusted brand and their market. Because in 20 years, we don’t know if Facebook’s going to be here. We don’t know if Google’s going to be here. We don’t know what AI platform we’re going to be using. Those are platforms. They come and they go, but trust is a principle. Trust will not change. If I talk to any business, and if I say to you, is trust going to be fundamental to your business in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years? You’re going to say, yes, absolutely. That’s the battle you’re in. That battle won’t change. You got to say to yourself, how do I become the most known and trusted brand in my market?
Fred Diamond: Whenever sales professionals ask me, and I talk to junior sales professionals and those who are in the middle of their career as well, because like you said, a lot of these things have changed. They ask me, what do I recommend? I always say, you need to be truly the leader in the market that you serve. I’m not saying that just as a statement, but you need to become the expert on AI for energy companies, or you need to become the trusted cyber security expert for defense government contractors, whatever it might be. Maybe you’re working for Company X today or something, but you need to build that particular trust where you’re seen as that person. Otherwise, like you just said, customers don’t really need you.
As we were talking here before, the only reason why customers are going to be talking to you is if you add significant value. It’s interesting, we talk about the word value all the time, and the way you just described it gave a really good example here. Yes, 57%, 80% down the road, we’ve heard those stats many times, but we also have spoken to many, many sales professionals who are getting called in early because the customer trusts them. They know that they’re the experts, they’re looking out for their interests. They’re even thinking three to four steps down the road.
What should some companies, or even if you can speak to this, sales professionals, who are seeing the impacts of these changes and are struggling. Everybody’s struggling to win new customers because of it, especially those that have traditionally relied on inbound sales and maybe Google Search like you referred to.
Marcus Sheridan: In the book, we talk a lot about what we refer to as the four pillars of a known and trusted brand. The whole premise behind these pillars is that you don’t do what everyone else is doing. I’ll tell you what the four are real quick, and then we can maybe talk about some of them. First pillar is you have to be willing to say online what other companies or salespeople in your space aren’t willing to say. Now, there’s a lot of topics about this. Number two, you got to be willing to show, with video, what others in your space aren’t willing to show. You got to think like a media company and you got to show the thing. You got to show up better than everybody else.
Number three, you got to be willing to sell in a way others aren’t willing to sell. We can talk about some examples of that big time. Salespeople love to say, “I sell differently.” Most of them sell very similarly. We got to talk about real differences. Finally, fourth pillar, you got to be more human than others in your space are willing to be. There’s got to be a face behind the brand that people recognize. Can’t just be a name. It’s got to be a person, again, individually or collectively. We got to talk about or say, we got to show, we got to sell, and we got to be more human than others are willing to be. That’s going to be the key.
Now, you hear that and you’re going to say, “What do you mean I got to be willing to say what others aren’t willing to say?” Let me just give you an example real quick here. I was meeting with these personal injury attorneys yesterday, Mastermind in Miami. Most of them thought that they talked about most things on their website and online, they were very open. I said, “Oh no, I’ve done my legwork here on each one of you. You’re not.”
They said, “Well, I feel like we are.”
I said, “Okay. How many of you on your website right now address the question of what happens if I lose my case?” Nobody in the room addressed that question. Guess how many people when they are looking at potentially litigation for let’s say a personal injury, are asking themselves, “What happens if I lose?” You see, everybody is thinking that, but these attorneys aren’t coming close to talking about it. That’s an example of saying what others aren’t willing to say online.
In the book, we specifically mentioned five subjects, and this was found in They Ask, You Answer. But there’s five subjects that people research generally before they reach out to a salesperson. Then when they talk to a salesperson, they want to know these five things. Here’s the five, we call them the big five.
Number one, we want to understand everything to do with costs and price and all the stuff to do with money, which is wild because they’re still stinking SaaS companies that force you into a demo before they’ll give you any information about cost and price whatsoever. The first question someone has when they know they have a problem and they have to buy something is roughly how much does it cost? I want to know if I’m in the game. The amount of companies and organizations that don’t address this singular subject online is ridiculous. It’s crazy. It doesn’t make sense.
If you think about the buyer’s journey, the first part of the journey is roughly what does it cost? Am I in the game? Should I continue? The end of the journey is now exactly what does it cost, and that’s when the salesperson is giving them the exact price. Yes, you shouldn’t be talking a bunch about price in the middle or at the beginning of the sales side, but the point that so many miss is folks will not even enter the fray, the arena, unless they can address the question, can I even afford this? What are we looking at here? Roughly, what is this going to cost?
You see, that’s the fiduciary of every company to teach early on. Most don’t. That’s an example of say, so you got to be willing to talk about cost. You got to be willing to talk about problems or negatives or fears, or we’ll call them problems. You got to be willing to make comparisons because people love to compare stuff online, comparing brands, comparing companies, comparing products, comparing methodologies. People love to compare. Most companies that won’t compare, though.
Number four, reviews. The thing about reviews is people love reviews, but they want the good, the bad, and the ugly reviews. They don’t just want to hear the positive reviews, because if it’s just positive, they probably won’t believe it. They want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then finally, best, most, top, we love researching best. Think about how many times you’ve gone online and researched the word best, plus a phrase. Cost, problems, comparison, reviews, best. That’s the big five.
To this day, most companies won’t talk about those things online, even though salespeople are inundated with those questions all the time, that’s the type of stuff that when we say, what can you say and what can you show that others aren’t willing to say and show online, focus in on those five subjects and that’s where the game changes.
Fred Diamond: You mentioned, in the book, a couple places, you refer to some companies. Of course, you did this 15 years ago with the pool company. Can you give an example or two of a company that has adopted this strategy and how their business has transformed?
Marcus Sheridan: Just with my swimming pool company alone, we could track the number of leads we got from the first piece of content we wrote about cost and price. That page of our website has been read a couple million times now and it’s generated over $35 million in sales for a company in Virginia. But we’ve had lots of companies that have done this.
To continue with this cost conversation, earlier I mentioned that we’ve got this megatrend that’s self-service and that people want to feel like, “I’m getting as much as I possibly can before I reach out to a salesperson.” Well, part of that, it comes in the form of self-service. Now, self-service works like this. I’m going to give you a few examples of this, and it’s wild. When we talk about this is in a combination of like saying what others aren’t willing to say, showing what others aren’t willing to show, and selling in a way others aren’t willing to sell.
I can pretty much assure you that most companies in the future, especially service-based businesses, will have some type of pricing estimator or self-pricing tool on the website within the next five years. This is going to become table stakes for most organizations. I believe in this so much and it’s so obvious to me that I started a software company called PriceGuide.ai, which is an amazing tool that allows you to create very quickly a pricing estimator and put it on your website in less than 30 minutes.
Now, here’s what we’ve seen. When companies have a pricing estimator that they put very clearly on their homepage, let’s say you’re a landscaper, or let’s say that you’re a pool company, it doesn’t matter what you are. Even with these attorneys, I gave an example of how they could do it. What we see is you get a 300% lead increase whenever you have this type of tool very visibly shown on your website, which is pretty wild. That alone is a mega trend and a lot of salespeople push back on this because they’re like, “I don’t want them to have anything like this.” Again, everybody just wants in the beginning a sense, not an exact price. I’m not saying the exact quote, I’m saying an estimator so that everybody can say, “Okay, I can afford this,” or not.
Lemme give you another example of a self-service tool, which is wild, that we’ve been experimenting with, and that is scheduling tools. This is really fascinating. When someone can schedule time with a salesperson without talking to a human, we know that a lot of people like that, but that’s not the real catch. Here’s what’s wild. We’ve done experiments where, and imagine you have a choice to work let’s say with a real estate company. They’ve got 10 realtors that work for them. You go to their website, you see all 10 realtors, you see their images, you see a video about each one, you read their bios. Then let’s be hypothetical, let’s say you can choose which one of those realtors you want to work with.
Now, what type of user experience is that for you? That’s a phenomenal user experience, because you’ve chosen at that point. It’s no different than if you’re using an Uber, you might say, “I want the comfort, the larger version. I don’t want to be in some small car.” People like that, they like choice. This is the reason why people like Uber so much more than they like a taxi. People love choice and they love feeling like they’re in control. But here’s what we found.
If somebody is enabled to choose which salesperson they work with, closing rates double almost every single time. The reason is because now they were invested in the process. They chose who they wanted to work with. A lot of people listening to this right now are thinking, “I don’t think we could ever do that with my company.” Sure, by thinking like that, you won’t. I promise you. But I’m telling you, we’ve done this with financial advisors and we’ve done this with other companies, and it’s extraordinary the difference when they can choose who they work with from a sales perspective.
Fred Diamond: You’ve given us a lot of great ideas. Again, the book, Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader, They Ask, You Answer 3.0. Marcus, you’ve given us a lot of great ideas here. Before I ask you for your final action step, a lot of the companies that we work with at the Institute for Excellence in Sales are larger business to business, business to government enterprises. We like to say anywhere from 25 salespeople, and in some cases, they have thousands, companies like Amazon and Carahsoft.
A lot of our listeners are enterprise sales professionals. They’re an account executive covering a territory or a couple named accounts, if you will. The company is big, it’s well-known. It’s not a pool company with a couple people or a 10-person real estate or a 50-person law firm. What might be your one chunk of advice for let’s say a standard account executive sales professional at a B2B at a $10 billion business to business software tech firm where the guy is one out of a thousand salespeople. He or she, maybe they’re in their late 30s, they’ve come up the ranks, been taught sales process, et cetera. What will be your advice for them to, you mentioned before, sell different, distinguish themselves? Is this something that would work for people that are entrenched in a company? It’s been around for 50 years.
Marcus Sheridan: Absolutely. We talk about it in the book. One incredibly simple way to do it, and for some people, they’re going to laugh like, “I’ve been doing that for a while,” but most still don’t, which is stop sending text-based emails as a salesperson and start sending video-based emails. You want to humanize your brand and you want to be better understood. You want to explain things more clearly, start sending one-to-one video to your prospects. We’ve heard a million times, we buy from those we know, like, and trust. Well, what’s going to cause them to know, like, and trust you more? When they see your face, when they hear your voice, and they feel like they’ve learned something from you. That’s going to be key.
Regardless of the size of your organization, you can send out one-to-one video for that right prospect before the meeting to set the conditions for the first sales meeting, afterwards as a follow-up, when there’s a particular thing that you want to share with them about their order, whatever it is. These are things that you can do to stand out. If you’re not using one-to-one video as a salesperson, get on that train because it’s the easiest way that you can humanize your brand today.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer and as I tell people too, I said, “You’re the VP of your career.” You may be a sales executive or a company, mid markets, whatever it might be, you are not the VP, you’re the president of your career. Right now you’re at this particular company, you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing for them, you’re getting paid well most likely if you’re in a good sales role, but the only thing you can manage is how well you’ve grown in your career.
Marcus Sheridan, congratulations again to you for all the success. Best of luck on the new book. Is the book out or is it in process of coming out?
Marcus Sheridan: The book is coming out the second week of April, but I would suggest going to endlesscustomers.com and if you pre-order, you get a bunch of freebies and fun little things with it. Check it out. endlesscustomers.com.
Fred Diamond: We’ll have the link to that in the show notes. Give us one final action step. You’ve given us a lot of ideas. I particularly like your last idea about sales professionals using video. As a matter of fact, I sent some LinkedIn videos last week to some prospects, and they responded. Three out of five responded and they were blown away that someone would use video to get through to them.
Give us an action step, something people should do right now. You’ve given us 10, 15, 20 great ideas. What should people do right now after listening to the show or reading today’s transcript? We’ve already sent them to the website, so we know that, we’re going to tell them to buy the book, of course, from Marcus Sheridan, something specific they should do right now.
Marcus Sheridan: I’ll give you one on both fronts, the sales and the marketing front. If you put a pricing estimator on your website, you’re going to get 300% more leads and it’s a game changer. Just dramatically better sales conversations. From a sales perspective, the biggest challenge I see salespeople have today is they have lots of meetings, but little trainings, and sales training has to improve. One of the easiest ways you can sales train right now is to use your voice app with ChatGPT, have it be a prospect, tell it to push back on you, and learn to have great role play conversations with ChatGPT.
My son is 20 some years old right now and he’s learning to sell. He uses ChatGPT before he goes to work every morning to have conversations. A lot of people don’t realize just how good the voice app is on ChatGPT, how extraordinary it is for having great conversations. That is a simple hack that you can use to refine your skills to make sure you’re on top of your game as you have those important conversations. Stop practicing on your customers. Start practicing on things like ChatGPT.
Fred Diamond: Now, that’s a great bit of advice. We like to say, if you’re a sales professional, then be a professional. Of course, we have a lot of sales professionals listening today. Once again, Marcus Sheridan, congratulations on the book. Congratulations on all your success. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo