Episode #20: Marcus Sheridan (IMPACT, Bestselling Author Web Marketing Guru, Keynote Speaker)

In this episode of the RealLifeSuperPowers podcast, we speak with Marcus Sheridan. Named “1 of 20 speakers you don’t want to miss” by Forbes, he’s been called a “Web Marketing Guru” by the New York Times. His Book, “They Ask, You Answer” was rated the #1 Marketing Book to Read in 2017 by Mashable. Today, he gives over 70 Global Keynotes yearly on the subjects of sales, marketing and the future of business while also owning IMPACT, a leading inbound marketing agency.

Rather early in his career, Marcus figured out a somewhat intuitive methodology that can help businesses grow and retain their customer base. That sounds like a promise that would make any critical thinker raise an eyebrow. But the fact of the matter is, Marcus is calling out a truth that is such common sense that once listening to him, you can only be left to wonder how come it’s not a best practice. TLDR; be transparent and make sure you provide your prospects and customers with ALL the info they want to know. And that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. The reality is that most companies aren’t willing to address the hard questions.

When out of college, while still debating what he’d like to be when he grows up, two of his friends offered him to join a swimming pool company. He planned on doing it until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He started learning everything there is to know about pools and hot tubs, and ended up becoming a partner at the company. The three friends struggled growing the business, they were doing OK till 2008 when the markets collapsed. They thought they were going to have to file bankruptcy, and as a result, lose their homes. They were desperate to find a way to stabilize the business. Instead of freezing and letting the situation manage him, Marcus started learning about the internet and what content marketing, social media, blogging and inbound marketing is. He understood that the standard approach won’t work here and that in order to get new customers he needed to think differently. That lead him to try and think about his own behaviour as a consumer. One thing became clear to him: in order to save his business he needed to obsess about his customers’ questions and provide them answers. Just like as a consumer he was going online to learn everything, that’s what the pool company’s potential customers were doing. And so he sat down and brainstormed all the questions the company had gotten over the previous 8 years. Interestingly enough he found that most questions were negative and as such, questions companies don’t really want to answer. But “pain forces us to do things we never would have done”. And thus he started publishing the answers to those questions on the pool website – about 100 answers in total. He was determined. Over a period of two years he went from 8 to 6 hours of sleep a night and devoted himself to this. After a long day of work he’d sit down to write an article answering a consumer’s question, at length. The positive impact was evident very early in the process:

1. People were calling in and thanking him for providing them with the info they needed

2. From a search engine perspective the traffic started to explode – the site become the swimming pool site with the highest traffic in the world

The business was saved. Marcus attributes this success to the fact that they were willing to address questions nobody was willing to. He says there are 5 fundamental questions that people are researching before they talk to sales people and those questions essentially move the needle in every industry, regardless of what you sell:

1. Cost. What are all the factors that revolve around that number

2. Problems. If I’m going to buy this, what could go wrong? What are the issues? The negatives?

3. Comparisons. How does this compare to the alternatives?

4. Reviews – what are people saying about this?

5. What’s the best thing in the market? They won’t necessarily buy the best but they want to know.

Most businesses completely shy away from talking about all 5 subjects. That’s a mistake. In that sense, Marcus turned pain into an advantage and was willing to become radically transparent. “There’s a beauty in having nothing to lose”.

A lot of the time, marketing managers in companies advocate toward Marcus’s transparent philosophy but they don’t get buy-in from the rest of management. (That can be the case regarding this philosophy but it’s also a general issue that transcends beyond and is a general frustration that managers who want to lead change in an organization face). As someone who wants to drive change, what should you do? Instead of taking this personally, the change-leaders should bear in mind overcoming an inherent physiological obstacle reflected in this phrase: “You can be a prophet to the world but nobody will listen to you in your hometown”. Because of familiarity, if you work in a company and present ideas that are very against the norm, often times you’re going to have resistance and will struggle to get buy-in. The solution is through general education – not through you. There are 3 practical things you can do to drive education:

1. Instead of going to a conference about the topic you’re advancing, and naturally getting more fired up about the topic – send someone else from leadership and later ask to have a conversation with them about it.

2. Provide the rest of leadership with understandable reading materials on the topic. That should be content written for leadership teams not content written for professionals on the topic. Don’t pitch them. Educate and have a conversation after they read.

3. Bring someone in who is not ‘a prophet in your home town’.

Industries follow certain rules. There are certain norms. One day somebody will be in enough pain and frustration that they will break the rules and do something different. If they break the rules long enough, it will catch fire, become the norm and so the rule breaker will now become the rule-maker. And so everybody else will have to follow suit and do that as well.

Marcus is a rule breaker, for years nobody adopted his philosophy. Then gradually companies wanted to learn what he did and how he gained the tremendous success with his pool company. And that’s when he became a sales and marketing leader.

There’s so much more to be learned from Marcus. The second edition of Marcus’s book has been released. In the following link you can find the first several chapters available as a download for free: https://marcussheridan.com/they-ask-you-answer/

We strongly recommend reading it and, of course, listening to this interview.

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