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[Music]

Host: We’re here with the one and only Marcus Sheridan. Marcus was named one of 20 speakers you don’t want to miss by Forbes. He’s also been called a web marketing guru by the New York Times. His book, They Ask, You Answer, was rated the number one 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.

Host: Let’s just start with what you’re up to these days.

Marcus: Right now I speak full time around the world, it’s been really amazing. Actually this year roughly marks ten years — this November marks exactly ten years from the time I started a personal blog to where I am today. I started my swimming pool company’s blog in March of 2009, and I started a personal blog called The Sales Lion because I was having success. That’s really what took me on this path, because the first couple of years nobody listened, for the most part, and then all of a sudden a couple of people said, “Hey, can you teach my company how to do what you did with your swimming pool company?” It just took off from there. So I’ve got the agency now that’s thriving, I still have a swimming pool company that’s doing very well, and it’s really been a crazy ten years.

Host: Just before we started recording, we were looking at the poster behind you that talks about a brief history of content marketing, which reflects the fact that content marketing has been around for ages, and yet it appears people don’t really understand how to utilize it well. You’ve sort of tapped into something starting with your pool company — tell us a little about that.

Marcus: A lot of people originally got annoyed with the phrase “content marketing” because they’d say, “well that’s not new.” And they’re right — we’ve been using information to generate trust, and teaching to generate trust, for thousands of years. Fundamentally it’s not new, but we do have to look at it in a different light now because the internet, the digital age, has changed everything. A lot of it comes back to that study by Forrester which says roughly seventy percent of the buying decision is made before someone talks to a salesperson today, on average — a little higher or lower in some industries. If you went back twenty years, that number was probably twenty to thirty percent. So the question is where are we going to be over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years? This is happening because of the proliferation of information online, and the fact that people would much rather learn about something themselves before they talk to a salesperson. That wasn’t the case years ago — they just didn’t have the option. Before, a salesperson handled seventy, eighty, ninety percent of the actual sale. You wanted a car, you went to the dealership to learn about it, or you learned from commercials — you didn’t have anywhere else to go, you couldn’t look it up in an encyclopedia. For the most part, most learning happened through interaction with a salesperson. Those days are completely gone. What’s really scary is most companies still haven’t adjusted to this, because it essentially means marketing is handling the majority of the sale at this point — that’s a fact, it’s not really arguable. Anybody who doesn’t accept that is going to be left behind. It doesn’t mean salespeople don’t matter, or that fundamentals from the past aren’t still important, it just means marketing is handling the majority of the sale, and if that’s the case, two things need to happen: sales needs to say “I need to be involved with marketing,” which is absolutely true, and marketing needs to say “we need to be accountable for actual return on investment” — we can’t just be here to talk about rainbows and flowers, we need to show revenue for the company. And if a marketing team isn’t showing revenue, eventually their budget gets cut, they don’t prove their worth, they don’t get a raise. This is a huge problem right now. I’ve been writing about digital sales and marketing for ten years, and the number one email I’ve gotten over that time — probably over a thousand at this point — is from marketers who are frustrated, getting ready to leave their position, because they say, “I’m so sick and tired of knowing what we need to do, but I can’t get buy-in from leadership, I can’t get buy-in from sales, I can’t get them to catch the vision.”

Host: The CEO of a publicist once told me that he feels the difference right now is that once upon a time you’d give an advertisement to let the consumer know about your product, and there were maybe three TV spots, three options, and that’s how they’d find out. Now there are a thousand, fifteen hundred options, and the problem isn’t not knowing about something, it’s getting depth and detail, or a user journey, to actually sell that product. The tipping point has changed because you’re not trying to distribute the message anymore, it’s about the detail.

Marcus: The detail is huge. It’s funny, my agency has vetted over 50,000 articles for clients at this point — 50,000 pieces of textual content — and we’ve found the exact same thing Google has found: people want more, not less. There’s this whole myth that shorter content is better — that’s absolutely not true. Now, on social, that is the play, social is a shorter play, but there’s a reason why if you go into Google right now and search something, the average first-page result is more than a thousand words. So this idea that content should be short — no, it should be the right length for the application. A quick ad should be short, just enough to get somebody interested, or a video on Facebook is going to be short because that’s a shorter form of media. But anything to do with search — search is a long game, same with video. Go to YouTube right now, the average number-one-ranked video is about ten minutes long, yet you still hear these stats saying all videos should be under ninety seconds. That’s outrageously false — videos should be ninety seconds or less roughly on social media, but when it comes to people who are really getting into the weeds of research, they want meat and potatoes. The question is who’s willing to give it to them. The problem is the meat and potatoes in this case is the good, the bad, and the ugly — most companies aren’t willing to address the hard questions. That’s what made my story with River Pools, and ultimately this philosophy, “They Ask, You Answer” — that’s what made it, and the book, take off.

Host: It took off because it was pushing companies to talk about things they don’t ever really talk about. So let’s go back — you were fresh out of college, and this was your first job as an adult, right?

Marcus: Yeah, pretty much. I was out of college, looking for what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life, and my two buddies said, “Hey, we just started a swimming pool company and want to open this little store, will you help us sell pools?” I said, “Yeah, I can help you with that until I figure out what I’m doing with my life.” I got really into it, started learning everything about pools and hot tubs, and they saw my interest and asked if I’d be a partner. I wasn’t sure at first, but I became a partner and a pool guy, and we struggled to grow the business over the next seven or eight years. Then in 2008 the market collapsed, and over half the swimming pool companies in the US went out of business during that time — it was really brutal. We thought we were going to file bankruptcy, and if I had, I would have lost my home, my two business partners would have lost theirs, and our sixteen employees would have lost their jobs. So we had to figure out a way to bring it back, and that’s when I started reading about the internet, content marketing, social media, blogging, inbound. My simple takeaway was: Marcus, if you just obsess over your customers’ questions and are willing to address them on your website through text and video, you might save your business.

Host: How did you reach that conclusion? It seems obvious now, but this was at a time when you were completely on the verge of collapsing.

Marcus: I could see my own behavior — I could see how I was going online to learn everything, and I knew I wasn’t unusual, that’s what my customers, and potential customers, were doing too. I could communicate this stuff, I could teach it in a way people could understand. So I knew we needed a simple philosophy: if anybody ever asked us a question, we were going to address it. The funny thing is, when you really listen, a lot of the questions you get in business are negative ones, questions people don’t want to answer. I literally sat down and brainstormed all the questions I’d gotten over the previous eight years — I had well over a hundred — and I just went into it. Immediately I started seeing it make a difference, in two ways. First, when people called, they were just thanking me, because nobody in school or university ever taught you how to buy a swimming pool, what to look for, how much you’d spend, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Most people, if they’re lucky, buy one pool in their life, and nobody ever really bothered answering their questions. So we did, and they said thank you, and you could see the trust rise. From a search perspective, the traffic just started to explode — my traffic was doubling month over month. To make a long story short, it became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world, because we were willing to address stuff nobody else had addressed. That’s really the key to “They Ask, You Answer” — let me give you some examples.

One thing I discovered is that there are basically five subjects that move the needle in every single industry, regardless of what you sell — B2B, B2C, service or product, local or national. There are five fundamental questions people research before they talk to a salesperson, and I haven’t found an exception to this. People are always interested in cost — not just the price, but all the factors around that number, what drives it up or down. That’s number one. Number two, people want to know the negatives — what could go wrong, what could blow up in their face. That’s the problem category. Number three is comparisons — people are obsessed with comparing the thing they’re looking at against another option, one brand or product versus another, so they feel like they’ve done their due diligence. Number four, we’re obsessed with what other people are saying about something — reviews. And number five, we want to know what the best option is — doesn’t mean we’re going to buy the best one, we just want to know which one is considered best. We call those the big five: cost, problems, versus (comparisons), reviews, and best. Here’s what’s crazy — this is what buyers are obsessed with, and most businesses completely shy away from talking about them. When I poll audiences and ask what percentage of their content currently aligns with those five questions, guess what the answer is?

Host: Twenty?

Marcus: Yeah, usually somewhere between ten and twenty percent is what they say, and when we actually look at the content, it’s even lower than that. So what I tell everyone is that for at least your first year, a minimum of seventy-five percent of your content should revolve around those five questions, because that’s what the buyer is actually asking, and if someone’s asking, it means they’re serious — these are the questions that are going to help your sales team immediately. The problem is most content companies produce is very fluffy, and you can tell it’s fluffy by asking: how often does the salesperson or customer service actually get asked that question? If they’re not getting asked it, it’s probably not nearly as important. So we talked about things like, “how much does a fiberglass pool cost” — no swimming pool company in the world was addressing that simple question on their website. I tracked it in HubSpot, and that one article alone generated well over seven million dollars in sales — one single article. We also talked about the problems with fiberglass pools, something no pool guy was addressing — that one made well into the millions too. We openly compared all types of fiberglass, concrete, and vinyl-liner pools with each other, when nobody else was comparing pools, because fiberglass pool companies would say, “our biggest competitor is concrete, so let’s just not talk about them and pretend they don’t exist” — which is stupid logic.

Host: But what about objectivity — how do you factor that in?

Marcus: That’s a great question. In the book I call this “disarmament,” or disarming. It’s kind of an odd analogy, but in a hostage situation, the first thing a negotiator does is get the person to put their weapon down, because until they do, it’s hard to open a line of communication. When someone is reading or viewing a piece of content, we all have this inherent “what’s this person trying to sell me, can I believe them” — this BS meter. The question is how do you disarm people immediately with your content, and there’s a very specific way to do it. Companies really struggle with this — I’ll have clients I’ve worked with for a couple of years who still send me a piece of content and I’ll say, “you’re still coming across as biased.” So how do you come across as unbiased? That’s the disarming. Say you wanted to produce a video about the difference between concrete and fiberglass pools — take whatever you sell and whatever your competitor sells, and think about how it would sound if you said something like: “One of the questions we get all the time here at River Pools is, ‘Marcus, be honest, what’s the difference between a fiberglass and a concrete pool, and why should I choose fiberglass?’ Well, the truth is you shouldn’t always choose fiberglass — there are times when concrete is the better option. So this video is going to explain, honestly and transparently, the pros and cons of both types of pools, and by the end you’ll have a good sense of which is the best pool for you.” I go back to my question — how often does a brand talk to you like that?

Host: So what do you tell CMOs who are frustrated and can’t get that buy-in? How can people overcome that?

Marcus: People say bad content is their worst problem — no, no, no, all roads in digital lead back to buy-in. If you have bad content, it’s because you probably don’t have the right strategy, the right resources, the right people, the right budget, or the right tools — and all of those go back to buy-in. People resist what they don’t understand, so unless we’re extremely focused on buy-in, we’re not going to get anywhere. Here’s the problem though — you could be the smartest marketer in the world, but there’s a psychological obstacle every business and every marketer faces: the old phrase that a prophet is not accepted in his hometown. Because of familiarity, if you work at a company and present ideas that go against the norm, you’re often going to get resistance and they won’t buy it. So how do you get buy-in? It generally doesn’t happen through you — I know that stinks — so I’d say there are three things you can do. First, instead of marketers always being the ones who go to marketing conferences, go to your leadership and ask what your education budget is for the year — say it’s twenty thousand dollars — and say, “I want to give this to the sales manager and to you, my leadership team, and have you go in my place this year, and then let’s have a conversation afterward.” Do you think that gets a leader’s attention?

Host: Yeah, and how often does a marketer actually do that?

Marcus: Almost never — so what happens is marketers go to the events themselves, get fired up, come back, present the ideas, and get told no again. The second thing you can do is go to your leader and ask, “will you read this book?” That’s actually why I wrote They Ask, You Answer — not for marketers, who are already eating the dog food, but for leadership teams. If you want to convert a leadership team or sales team, you cannot talk like a marketer. Most marketers struggle with buy-in because they talk like marketers — go look up the definition of “content marketing,” it’s the worst definition in history for actually getting buy-in, clearly written by marketers for marketers, not for sales or leadership. That’s why when people hear me speak, they say I sound different — I obsess over speaking the way sales and leadership speak, and that’s why the book won people over. So find a book, maybe not necessarily mine, written in a way people can understand, and ask your leadership team to read it — don’t even tell them what’s in it, just say, “I think this could change our business forever, would you read it and discuss it with me afterward?” You don’t pitch them, that’s the second thing. The third thing is you have to bring in somebody who isn’t a “prophet in your hometown.” I’ve done over 250 workshops around the world with the single purpose of aligning sales, marketing, and leadership around digital, because when an outsider who’s viewed as an expert comes in and says the same things, at the end of the workshop the leader turns to the CMO and says, “why aren’t we doing this?” — and the CMO says, “I’ve been saying we should do this for five years.” It’s not fair, but that’s how it works.

Host: Okay, so it’s about buy-in — but what about cases where there is buy-in, but at the end of the day they have to invest money and just don’t have it? How do they overcome that?

Marcus: It’s never really about the money, it’s more about the pain. When I did They Ask, You Answer in 2009, my credit cards were maxed out, I was broke — but I was still able to produce the content, because I went from eight hours of sleep a night to six for two straight years, and wrote an article every single night after a long day, when everybody else in the house was asleep. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, because that was the road I chose — I said I’m going to be a business owner. So when people tell me “we don’t have the money,” what they actually have is a lack of pain, because if you had enough pain, you’d find the time, because you’d value it enough. It starts with the value of the thing — if we value it, we either find the time, or we pay someone who has the time.

Host: And did you ever doubt it would work, when you were about to be flat broke?

Marcus: I didn’t have any other options, I didn’t have a plan B — that’s the beauty of not having one. A lot of entrepreneurs today feel okay because they’re using funding — I didn’t have funding, my own money was the funding, it was going to be my house that got taken away, my wife asking what we do next. That’s what’s beautiful about pain, it forces you to do things you never would have done otherwise. In 2009 I was actively comparing our company to the competition, which nobody was doing at the time, because I was going to get asked, “how does your company compare, who else would you recommend?” I addressed all those questions, which is why today, when you research my competitors online, you’ll often find that I rank for questions and reviews about them, not because of negative articles, but because I was willing to talk about it, and that was unheard of at the time. To me it was, “what do I have to lose?” There’s a beauty to having nothing to lose, and that’s what causes real change in industries. Industries follow certain rules and norms, and one day somebody will be in enough pain and frustration to break the rules and do something different. If they break the rules long enough, it catches fire, becomes the norm, and the rule-breaker becomes the rule-maker, because everyone else has to follow suit. For example, boat manufacturers are essentially B2B2C, since they sell through dealers — I’m big in the marine industry, I’ve spoken there dozens of times, and nobody was putting pricing on their website before I started speaking there. I said, “one of you is going to do this, let’s see who’s first, because as soon as somebody does, the rest will fall in line.” Now over half the manufacturers have a “build your boat” pricing tool on their website, even though people used to tell me it couldn’t be done. That’s happening in industries all over the world, in services and products, B2B and B2C — over half of my clients, and at least half the companies that have read They Ask, You Answer, are B2B companies.

Host: I agree — it’s the pain, but also the opportunity of diving deeper than the competitor. But how do you keep yourself on the edge now?

Marcus: The problem with entrepreneurs — take someone like Steve Jobs, who would set the next challenge just to somehow push himself to deliver something more innovative, almost promising more than he could deliver, putting himself back in a “pain” spot.

Host: I don’t think he was ever comfortable with that. A lot of entrepreneurs know the dream together, but the challenge itself of chasing that pain — you have to want to have something to lose, or nothing to lose. When you have nothing to lose, I totally agree with you — but once you have something to lose, it changes. I think a lot of companies stopped innovating once they were doing well.

Marcus: You’re exactly right — comfort is the enemy of change, it always has been, it’s the enemy of evolution. That’s why companies say, “why aren’t more of us doing this,” because we’re fat and happy — the fat-and-happy syndrome. In the swimming pool industry, from about 2001 to 2007, everybody had money for a pool because you could borrow money for almost anything. All these pool companies were making great money, going on trips with vendors and suppliers, everyone was just partying — that happy syndrome. I remember telling one of the manufacturers, back when things were going great around 2005-2006, “why don’t we have an event that’s not about parties, just education, to prepare everybody for what’s ahead?” Somebody told me, “Marcus, pool guys don’t care about education.” I thought, what an idiot. And sure enough, when the market collapsed, pool companies weren’t prepared, hadn’t stored anything away for the winter. I went through that 2008-2009 recession, and I’m not going to forget it — another one will come around, could be next year, could be later — so I want to stay five years ahead at all times.

Host: So how do you challenge yourself to get better, now that you’re successful — New York Times, keynote speaking everywhere?

Marcus: I’m just obsessed with watching the marketplace. Let me give an example of what I think is the next step beyond what we currently call content marketing. Right now, everybody basically thinks content marketing just means giving information online through articles or videos. But that doesn’t really mimic the perfect sales experience we had for a hundred years — the “ignorant buyer” would talk to a salesperson, who, if they were good, would ask a series of questions and, based on the answers, make a recommendation the buyer would agree to. That’s the perfect sales cycle. The question is, can we mimic that online — a choose-your-own-adventure experience, where somebody comes to your site and answers a few questions to identify exactly the right product for their needs? For pools, that might be questions like whether the pool is mainly for fitness or fun, how many people will use it — and as they answer, an application lets them keep self-selecting until, at the end, it says, “based on everything you’ve told us, here’s the right pool for you.” That’s self-selection, the choose-your-own-adventure model, and I think it’s the future of combining digital sales and marketing into one place. A lot of people won’t do this because their sales team worries it’ll replace their job — but the alternative is getting left behind. If you do it, customers come to the salesperson already knowing what they want, and just need confirmation that it was the right choice.

Host: I agree it may make salespeople feel like they could become less essential in some sense, but it creates a new opportunity — more of a relationship-management role, retention, account management, loyalty, which is arguably more strategically important than a transactional sales role, because that’s what builds the brand. It’s a bigger, and honestly more talented, role, because it’s not opportunistic — it’s not incentivized purely by how much you sell in the moment, but by the long-term relationship, which isn’t purely ROI-driven but is still valuable and better for the brand.

Marcus: Exactly — it means the product has to be good, and the relationship has to be honest. It’s a new kind of sales opportunity. For years we’ve held things back during a buying process, hoping the buyer doesn’t ask a particular question — that’s the ostrich with its head in the sand. The whole premise behind They Ask, You Answer is that when you become obsessed with the way buyers think, you’re constantly challenging yourself. Self-selection is the future — it’ll evolve into video experiences, VR experiences, all kinds of forms — but it’s about getting a more honest, more complete answer without necessarily talking to a salesperson directly.

Host: And unless companies are willing to say who they’re not a good fit for, this doesn’t really work.

Marcus: Exactly, that goes back to disarming. One of the things I teach that you won’t find on a hundred other company websites is that it’s way more important for a company to say what they’re not than what they are. Most companies only say what they do and why they’re great, but not who they’re not a good fit for — and the moment you’re willing to say that, you become dramatically more attractive to the people you are a good fit for. If someone tells me they want a highly customized pool shaped a certain way with a huge deep end, I’ll say straight out, “we only sell fiberglass pools, and fiberglass doesn’t come in that shape or size, so we’re not a good fit for you.” Almost nobody is willing to say that.

Host: What percentage of companies have you seen that actually talk about who they’re not a good fit for?

Marcus: Very rare. Take something like Red Bull as an example — they came right out and said, essentially, “it tastes bad,” and were completely fine with that, because it gave them a uniqueness — it’s not for everybody, and that makes you feel special if you like it. There are certain vodkas that are famous partly because they taste terrible — it’s almost a rite of passage, a “we’re not for everybody” positioning. For a service business it’s easy too — if someone asks how this applies to my agency, I’ll say, if you’re looking for an agency to write your content and produce your social posts for you, we’re not a great fit, but if you want to learn how to do it yourself in-house, with someone holding your hand and teaching you to be world-class at it, we might be a great choice.

Host: That’s not what most companies do or say.

Marcus: Right, and that’s a short-term solution, because it comes back to bite you — that’s what generates bad reviews. It also comes from the seller’s own pain — being scared of losing a client because they need the money, so they sell to the wrong fit anyway, and it bites them later. Take a SaaS company like HubSpot, for example — their salespeople have two competing metrics: sales quota on one side, retention and churn on the other. Too much churn reflects badly on them, but they also need to hit their numbers, so how do you merge the two? I think radical, almost outrageous transparency is what makes you more attractive to the marketplace. People come to me all the time and say, “Marcus, I want to work with you, I want to do They Ask, You Answer,” and my response is often, “I’m not sure you’re ready for it — it takes a special company to think that way.” Until you’re willing to walk away because of your radical transparency, you won’t reach that level of attraction for your brand.

Host: In most cases, you’ll probably have to go through periods where you’re losing something.

Marcus: That’s correct — you’re filtering people out, and it’s a bit ironic, since “niche” essentially means saying no to people who shouldn’t be sold to.

Host: Right, you’re going to lose money in the process.

Marcus: But in the long term, you actually make more money, because people come to you trusting that you’re the right fit for them.

Host: That goes back to Jim Collins’ Good to Great and the hedgehog concept — what’s the one thing you do better than anyone else in the world.

Marcus: With my swimming pool company, the two greatest decisions I ever made — first, around 2006 or 2007, I said, “why are we selling hot tubs, pool tables, tanning beds, and running retail stores? Let’s just install fiberglass swimming pools.” So we got rid of everything else and focused only on fiberglass pool installation. The second decision was to become the best teachers in the world on fiberglass pools — that’s when we built out They Ask, You Answer. I didn’t try to do everything else, didn’t even do much social media, we just focused on being the best teachers in the world through text and video. And that’s how we ended up getting around three-quarters of a million visitors a month to a site about swimming pools.

Host: You could have stayed comfortable with River Pools once it was successful, but instead you set out to bring this message to as many people as possible. What’s your motivation?

Marcus: I’ve just always been the type that, if something is working, everybody should know about it — instead of a scarcity mentality of holding it close. That’s why I started the personal blog in 2009 — I knew it was working and would change other people’s lives. The biggest reason I started the agency was that people kept telling me, “that worked for your pool company, but it wouldn’t work for us.” Eventually I decided to prove them wrong, went out, and chose a bunch of different industries to work in, and I’ve got so many case studies now. There’s an appliance company in Boston, for example, that sells kitchen appliances — they embraced They Ask, You Answer and became the most-trafficked kitchen appliance company in the world, more than GE, Bosch, Miele, and the other big brands — about a million visitors a month. They write things nobody else would write — customers used to ask which appliances they fix the least, a classic question, so the owner, Steve Sheinkopf, wrote an article called “The Least Repaired Appliances,” tracking total unit sales against total service calls for every brand he sells, and publishes an updated chart every year. That one article alone gets read fifty thousand times a month. Most companies would never publish that, because they don’t want to upset their vendors — but Steve’s answer is, “who keeps my lights on? The customer.” That’s the beauty of They Ask, You Answer — you serve the buyer, not the vendor, and now vendors are scared of Steve, because they know they’ll be held accountable if they don’t perform. That’s real influence — you’re an influencer when you don’t need to call yourself one, when brands change their behavior because of you.

One more example — for years, fiberglass pools were installed by digging a hole, packing sand at the bottom, setting the pool on the sand, and pouring the concrete patio around it. That never made sense — you don’t build buildings or driveways on sand, and even the Bible says not to build your house on sand. We taught that pools should be installed on gravel instead, because gravel compacts and doesn’t shift. When we started, roughly ten percent of pools were installed on gravel; today it’s about ninety percent. That’s how you become an influencer — homeowners were doing the research, reading that it had to be gravel, and telling their pool builders. I’d get calls from installers around the country saying, “Marcus, you’re killing me, customers are making me install on gravel now” — and I’d say, that’s not my problem, you don’t build pools on sand. That’s what’s possible when you become the trusted voice.

Host: What would you say is your superpower?

Marcus: From an early age I realized I could explain things — often complicated things — in a way people could understand better than my peers could.

Host: I was going to say, brutal simplicity of thought.

Marcus: Thank you, that’s exactly it — brutal, because it’s not even a conscious effort to simplify, it just comes out that way. If somebody hears me speak and says “he’s a genius,” I feel like I’ve failed them, because what I want them to say is, “this is so obvious, why aren’t we doing this already.” There’s a difference — when someone thinks you’re a genius, it can make the idea feel unattainable.

Host: Right, we’ve talked about that a lot between us and with other guests — sometimes the more insecure someone is, the more they try to complicate things to sound like an authority, but they lose people along the way.

Marcus: The simpler you make things, the more rapport you create, and the more people trust you and want to be around you and buy from you. It’s almost a disease, complicating things in order to be told you’re a genius — when you hear that, a red light should go on, because it means people didn’t fully understand what you said, even if it sounds like they did. Authority is a strange thing — you won’t walk up to a police officer just to chat, but you’ll go to them for help. You don’t want to be an untouchable authority, you want to be an accessible one — a teacher who happens to be an authority. The problem is when a teacher becomes someone you can’t understand — that’s not a healthy kind of authority.

Host: There’s a great phrase for that — “it’s dumb not to dumb it down.” The goal is never to sound smart, because the moment you try to sound smart is the moment you start to look stupid. So, on the flip side — what would you say is your kryptonite?

Marcus: I’d probably say I don’t always say no when I should, because like everyone, I want to help people, or want to participate — but to be really successful you have to be a little selfish about your time, because giving too much takes away from your own mission. There’s a well-known blogger who, before anybody else, turned off comments on his blog, and people said that was so unsocial — but he did it because he realized comments were influencing where his thoughts went, and he didn’t want to spend his time answering them, he wanted to spend it thinking about what he actually needed to say. A lot of bloggers have since stopped taking comments for the same reason — that was his way of saying no. I’ve had to learn to say no to certain things too, especially the more known and “successful” you become, the more opportunities come your way — they all sound nice because everyone has a good pitch, but the truth is you shouldn’t be doing most of them. As Derek Sivers put it, “if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.”

Host: Yeah, that’s a good one. One more thing — I really liked a point you made earlier that I think listeners should write down. You gave us the “big five” — let’s go over it slowly so everyone can note it down.

Marcus: The big five are fundamental to your content marketing success and to your sales team using that content in their process, because they’re based on the five questions everybody asks before engaging a company, and they’re aligned with the bottom of the funnel, so they’re highly sales-relevant. Number one is cost — anything about price, rates, fees. Number two is problems, or negatives — questions that usually start with “is it true that…” Number three is comparisons — what people are weighing your product or service against, or which of two options you’d personally choose and why. Number four is reviews — you should be creating the most thorough reviews of your own products, not just relying on the marketplace. And number five is “best” — people are always searching for what’s best, so create content that openly discusses the competition and the marketplace to help buyers understand that. If you build out the big five for every product or service you sell, you’ll find there’s a year’s worth of content there — at least a hundred pieces, at minimum, regardless of what you sell.

Host: Brilliant. I really recommend listeners read the book — or should they wait for the new edition? When does that come out?

Marcus: The new edition is out now, on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com. The new audio version is coming out in about two months, but the book itself is out now.

Host: Brilliant — we’ll put a link in the show notes.

Marcus: And if anybody has a question, they can email me directly — Marcus at MarcusSheridan.com. If you’re listening to this and thinking, “I don’t fully agree with what you said about X,” email me, I love personal interaction and I’m happy to have that conversation.

Host: You did say that not saying no enough was your kryptonite, so he’s going to have to answer all of those emails.

Marcus: Yeah, I’m coming for you — now that I know that about myself, I might just drive myself nuts with this email address.

Host: We really appreciate you doing this, I think our listeners are definitely going to get a lot of value out of it, and we hope to have you back sometime, since it seems like you keep having new insights — it would be interesting to hear how you see things down the road.

Marcus: There’s plenty more we could talk about, so — thanks for having me, you guys are awesome, your audience is awesome, let’s do this again sometime.

Host: Perfect, alright, bye for now.

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