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23rd October, 2024 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Marcus Sheridan - harnessing the power of content and inbound marketing to win new clients

Phil Bray 

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to today’s Yardstick webinar. Delighted that you could join us. They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Today, I’m breaking this rule because we’re joined by one of my marketing heroes, Marcus Sheridan, author of They Ask You Answer. Marcus, thank you for being here and spending an hour with us to answer our questions.

Marcus Sheridan 

Happy to be here, and hopefully I’ll still be someone’s hero at the end of this. Maybe make new ones I guess.

Phil Bray 

Absolutely. Well, my 12-year-old daughter, Aimee, is on half term today, and she’s joining us on this webinar. So you may be her marketing hero by the end of this.

Marcus Sheridan 

Nice! I’d like to think she’s going to learn more in the next hour than she will in six months of public schooling. Let’s see what happens.

Phil Bray 

We will find out. So Dan, let’s do a bit of housekeeping first of all, and then we will dive straight into this.

Dan Campbell 

Sure thing, housekeeping. So, as always, I’m Dan, the Head of Branding and Design here at Yardstick. So a big welcome to the newbies and regulars among us. Newbies being Phil’s daughter, Aimee. Hi, Aimee. If you’ve ever been to one of our webinars before, you’ll know that we encourage lots of participation in the forms of questions and comments. Obviously, we’ve got a very special guest here with us today in the shape of Marcus Sheridan. So, Phil will lead with his own questions but we will pause at regular intervals to read yours out too. Which brings me to an important point: over the years, we’ve created a very safe space here in our webinars, there are no silly questions, so don’t hold back! Speaking to Marcus earlier, he’s happy to tackle tough questions, easy questions, you name it. So, make the most out of this hour; I think it’s clear Phil certainly is planning to. You can do this by using the Q&A box or the chat function and I’ll be monitoring both throughout the session. To assist that effort, we’ve got our Client Engagement Manager, Abi, here. She’ll be answering a few of the questions directly in the chat and providing links to any resources or things we mention during the next hour. Finally, no doubt you’ll want to re-watch this, I know I certainly will, so Abi will also be making sure that a recording of the session in any show notes will be arriving in your inbox later today. Right, shall we kick this off? Phil, Marcus, over to you.

Phil Bray 

Cheers Dan, thank you. Marcus, let’s talk about the book They Ask You Answer. It’s revolutionised how a lot of business owners think about marketing and content marketing. Can you talk a bit about the history and its core philosophy?

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, the the quick one-on-one on the history of the book is that I started a swimming pool company in 2001 with a couple of friends. We were trying to grow the business, and we were to a degree, but then in 2008 we had the the worldwide economic collapse and that was a really difficult time for pool companies, and we were almost out of business. It looked like we were going to file bankruptcy and it was during this time of of stress and worry that I started to really study how buyers had changed. Because I had changed myself, we had all started to change by that point, we were just leaning way more into the internet. So, I was thinking, “look, I know that I’m changing. My buyers are changing. The Internet is the future, it’s pretty obvious to me.” That’s when I discovered what was known as inbound marketing at the time, from HubSpot. What I heard, as I just really studied inbound and studied content marketing, was, “Marcus, if you just obsess over your customers, questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns, and I mean really obsess over them, and then if you’re willing to address those things online, well then you might save your business.” And so I said, “That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to become essentially the Wikipedia of fiberglass swimming pools.” and within six months of -actually, let me backtrack. In that moment, in that realisation, I said, “All right, I’m going to brainstorm all these questions that I’ve ever gotten, all these fears, all these concerns. I’m going to write them all down.” I wrote them all down, and I had a couple hundred that were written down, and then over the next couple of years, I addressed each one through text and video, put that content online, put it on our website, and we became the highest traffic swimming pool website in the world doing that and it saved the business. We eventually became a very large manufacturer. We became the first franchise of fiberglass pools in the world too. It was a crazy ride. Of course, I started writing about that, Phil. As I was writing about that journey, I started to have companies say, “Hey, could you teach us how to do that? Or could you speak about that?” that led to me becoming a full time speaker and I have a company that helps other companies do They Ask You Answer. So it has really been wild. I never dreamt that just just answering people’s questions, that’s what it boils down to, would lead to such an extraordinary adventure for me personally, and have such impact on businesses worldwide. Especially, so many small businesses that are willing to think and do differently. A lot of folks will ask me “Who does this work for?” It can work for anybody, but who it really works for is companies that are willing to do things differently than they’ve been done in their space, which is why you don’t see a lot of enterprises or corporation style businesses and big companies doing this, because they don’t generally think outside the box. Whereas you take a small business owner, he or she has got nothing to lose, they’re like, “I’m just going to send this.” They’ve got to pay their rent, and now all of a sudden, they’re willing to have conversations that haven’t been had in their space before. That’s what They Ask You Answer is.

Phil Bray 

It sounds as though the They Ask You Answer philosophy is going to be perfect for a lot of people on this call who are financial advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers who typically run smaller businesses.

Marcus Sheridan 

That’s right. If people say, “Who’s it perfect for?” Well, if people have a lot of questions about the product or service you sell, it does very well. The primary objective to this, though, if we just bullet it down to its most simple core, Phil, would be, for you as a business, is it important to you that you become the most known and trusted brand in your market? wherever you are. If you’re a mortgage broker, wherever you are, whether you’re  in Dundee, Scotland, do you want to become the most known and trusted brand in that market? If you follow the principles of They Ask You Answer, and I mean, really follow them, you’re going to achieve that. We see it over and over again, we almost never see exceptions. There are a few businesses in the world where there’s very few questions, maybe it’s the restaurant they’re going to on a whim, that’s not necessarily a big-time They Ask You Answer business, although there’s certainly things that that company should be doing that is found in the book. For the most part, anytime that there’s a lot of trust that’s needed and someone is asking questions, they don’t want to make a mistake, and they want to choose the right thing, that’s when it’s a home run.

Phil Bray 

There are very few sectors that need that trust between client and supplier as much as financial advice and financial planning.

Marcus Sheridan 

Well that’s one of the massive ones. The problem with that industry is so many financial advisers are so stuck on this idea of, “We have compliance issues”, “We’ve got regulation”, or “We’ve got this, we got that and so therefore we can’t talk about these things.” But the perfect description of the framework is they ask, in other words, they’re thinking it, searching it, or fearing it, you, not necessarily answer, but you address it as well as you can.This is incredibly important, because there are some questions especially for financial advisers where you might not be able to give an exact answer. That’s okay, it doesn’t mean you can’t address the question, the worry, the need, the fear. Oftentimes, it’s simply the ones that are willing to address it who are winning. They’re the ones that are becoming the most known and the most trusted. But those that say “I can’t go there. I can’t even talk about that.” That’s not true. I’ve done this enough times to know what compliance looks like and if you understand it and follow it, you can always address the thing in some way.

Phil Bray 

You can and this then leads to breaking down another barrier. Compliance is, for some advisers, a barrier in their heads. I agree with you. The barrier is more in here than it is in reality. We ran a LinkedIn poll a few weeks ago and 52% of advisers said that knowing what to create content about is a barrier. They don’t know what to create content about. Just talk, if you would, about how your philosophy helps to solve that problem.

Marcus Sheridan 

Well, I think we way over complicate this idea of “What should I produce content about?” If you have ears to hear and eyes to see, you are constantly addressing questions, worries, fears, issues, and concerns that your potential customers or clients have, you’re doing it all the time. All you have to do is take one sales call and pay attention to every single question you’re asked. When I started They Ask You Answer with my swimming pool company, I would sit in a home with the couple that were looking at a pool, and every time they would ask me a question, I would think to myself, “Oh, have I addressed that well on my website yet?” Because usually there’s a reason why they’re asking. They’re asking in that context there, because either they hadn’t found it or it wasn’t there, both of which, to me, were not acceptable. If I was getting the question or the fear all the time, the whole idea is that we have got to- I know we’re going to probably talk about this, but we know that our average customer today has gone through 80% of the buyer’s journey before they reach out to an adviser, salesperson, or company, whomever. So, what this means is, and this is all of us, you’ll all have experience with this, we’re more informed than we’ve ever been. We’re vetting companies to death. We want to make sure that we know enough so as to not make a mistake once we talk to the company, once we make the purchase, or whatever the thing you’re doing is. That’s what we know. So, as companies, we’ve got to win that initial 80%. When they’re vetting us online and we don’t even know they’re there, we’d better win that. How do you win that? Well, you’ve got to be willing to talk about what others in your space are not willing to talk about. You’ve got to be willing to show what others aren’t willing to show. You’ve got to be willing to sell in a way that others aren’t willing to sell, and you’d better be more human in the process of doing that. Those are just four, clear pillars. Now, in terms of talking about what others are not willing to talk about and showing what others aren’t willing to show, you want to start with the big five. We address the big five heavily in the book, and it’s what, in so many ways, They Ask You Answer has become known for. They are the five subjects that every single buyer or consumer are researching when they’re making an important decision. In fact, for any of your listeners right now, if I said to you, “What is something that you always research before you buy a product, service, or you reach out to a company? What’s a subject you always research?” Everybody’s going to say pricing and reviews. Those are the first two everybody thinks of. Then there’s a few more and so here are the big five. As buyers and consumers, we’re obsessed with researching these five things. Number one, you want to know cost, price, rates, etc. You want to get a sense of that and if you can’t, you don’t tend to move forward because you’re trying to figure out, am I in the game at all? And one thing about pricing is we don’t want to be embarrassed when it comes to a conversation about pricing from a vendor, and therefore we will not have conversations in fear of being embarrassed. So that’s number one, you want to understand cost, price, rates, etc. Number two is problems, fears, and worries. We’ll just call it problems. The problems are rooted in “If I make this decision, buy this thing, or if I work with this company, how could it go wrong? How could it blow up in my face?” In the context of a fiberglass swimming pool, it is “Could it crack? Could it pop out of the ground? Is it ugly? Does it look like a bathtub in my yard?” These are the questions and the fears that people had. So if I’m not a very intentional or intelligent pool guy, I am going to ignore those questions, not talk about them at all and just hope to never get asked about them. Or I can have a brain, use common sense, and address it head on. So, problems is the second one. Think about all the fears that people have, and oftentimes they start with “Somebody told me that”, or “Is it true that” or “I’ve heard that” and these are fear-based, problem-based, concern-based statements that they make when they’re getting serious about buying something. Alright, that’s the second one. We’ve got cost and problems, then you’ve got comparisons. We love to compare online. We love stacking stuff up against each other. We compare brands, products, services, methods, etc., we are constantly comparing stuff online. You want to feel like you’ve got a gauge on the whole line of options and where they stack up with each other. After comparisons, we love reviews. The thing about reviews, though, is we don’t just want the good reviews. We want the good, the bad, and the ugly. And this is important, if you’re talking reviews, we want to see both sides of the coin, we call it the law of the coin because we want to see both sides of it. Finally, you’ve got best, which is best, most, etc. for example somebody in your area might be searching “Top financial advisers for ______” some specific thing, it could be for retirees or something like that. This is what people are searching all the time, best, top, most. Think about how many times you’ve gone online and searched “best” plus another phrase; you’ve done it hundreds and hundreds of times. So, cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, best. Those are the big five. What’s so fascinating is buyers are obsessed with them. A whole 80% is consumed with those five things, and yet, businesses as a whole don’t like to talk about them. In fact, if we pulled your audience right now, Phil and I said, what percentage of the content you have on your website is related to those five things, and I mean very closely related to them, they would say “Less than 10%.” That is not okay and this is why we struggle to drive more trust or to become the most known brand in our market and we have to do better.

Phil Bray 

Let’s drill down into one of those, and that’s about pricing. We’ve done plenty of research around this, and about 5% of financial advisers and planners disclose their pricing online at the website stage on that digital journey. It sounds as though you feel more people should do more on that.

Marcus Sheridan 

Let’s analyse this for a second. The only way that you will be able to understand how your customers feel is if you analyse your own behaviour first. The best marketers and the best business people, are extremely self-aware as to how they behave online. As you’re listening to this, I just want you to be very honest and answer these questions. You don’t have to do it out loud. You don’t have to tell Phil, Dan or me, but generally speaking. If I said to anybody that’s listening to this, “Have you researched how much something cost online in the last year?” They’d say, “Yes.” And then if I said, “Okay, so when you’re researching how much something costs online and you cannot find that information on the website, what’s the emotion you experience?” You’d say, “Frustrated.” I’d say, “Why?” You’d say, “Because I can’t get what I want.” And so I’d say to you “When you’re in that moment, you’re feeling really frustrated. Do you say to yourself,  “I’m sure it’s on this website somewhere. It’s got to be I’m just going to keep on looking until I find it.”?” No, that’s ridiculous, because we know if the average person looking for cost and price information can’t find it within 10 seconds, they’re going to leave. We see that over and over again. The second thing I would ask you is, “In that moment of frustration when you’re on that website you can’t find cost and price do you ever say to yourself, “well, of course, they’re not discussing cost, price or rates, they’re a value-based business. I’m going to call them on the phone instead.”?” The answer, once again, is no. You don’t do that because as the buyer and the searcher, keep doing what? You keep searching. You search until what happens? You search until you find what you’re looking for. And whoever gives you what you’re looking for, in most cases, you’re going to give them your business, and if not your business, at least you’re going to give the give them first contact. The reality is, the reason we get so upset as buyers or consumers is because we know that they know, as the business, the answer, or at least a semblance of the answer. Because we know they know the answer and they’re not giving it to us, we feel like they’re hiding something from us and the moment you feel like someone is hiding anything from you online, the trust is gone. That is the business we’re all in and this is why everything in They Ask You Answer is about how you can become that most trusted brand, will it induce more trust? Instead of arguing with what has been proven by data, I want you to hear it and think “I know he’s a pool guy, but hypothetically would it induce more trust?” If the answer is “Yes” then the next question becomes “How do we do that?” There are three reasons why companies say “We can’t talk about cost and price.” The first reason is that every job is different, it depends, it’s a bespoke solution, etc, etc. And to that point, I say to you, “Okay, that’s fine, every job is different. Can you help me understand the factors that would drive the cost of your service up? Could you do that? Yes or no.” And they’d say, “Well yes, of course I could.” You could name them off. If I said to you, “Can you help me understand the factors that would keep costs down? Could you address that?” Yes, you could. If I said to you,”You gave me a quote for a product or service and your competitor gave me a quote for their product or service, and there seems like there’s a delta between you. Can you help me understand why there’s a delta in the industry, why some are more expensive, some are less expensive?” You would say “Yes, of course, I could do that.” And of course, if I asked anybody’s listening to this, “Have you ever had to answer any of those questions before?” You’d say “Yes.” The problem is, if you’re saying yes to that, it means there’s a clear need in the market but most people don’t ever end up asking you because they can’t find it and that scares them away. So that’s the first reason, the old “it depends”, it’s not a good reason, because by explaining why it depends you build value. You explain this simple phenomenon called value proposition. The second reason why we don’t talk about cost and price is because we say things like, “I don’t want my competitors to find out”, which is utterly ridiculous because if I asked anybody that has any experience in the game, “Do you have a pretty decent sense as to what your competitors charge?” you would say, “Yes, I absolutely do.” And so if you’ve got a pretty good sense as to what your competitors charge, it therefore means they’ve likely got a sense as to what you charge. This is like a big secret, non secret. Everybody acts like nobody knows what everybody’s charging, when, in reality, everybody’s got a pretty decent sense as to what everybody else is charging. Besides that, when was the last time your competitors paid your bills? Never. So we need to let that one go too, it just doesn’t hold any weight. The third reason why people say they don’t like to talk about cost and price or can’t do it, is because if they see that I’m more expensive, or if they see my comp structure, we might scare them away. What we all just agreed with our own behaviour is a thing that actually scares us away when we’re researching a company, a product, a service, isn’t when a company educates us well, but rather when they don’t talk about the thing. It’s no different than the psychology of if you were thinking about going to a restaurant and before you went to the restaurant, you looked at their menu online, and there was no pricing, you wouldn’t go most of the time. Most people don’t go, and it’s not because they can’t afford the restaurant. You can afford any restaurant you want to go to, probably, if you’re listening to this, but the reason why you don’t go is because the moment they leave the menu blank, they plant a seed of doubt and when seeds of doubt exist, inertia occurs, and people stop and they don’t take action. It’s the same reason why if you’re listening to this right now, you’ve been on a shopping cart page before, and you were ready to make a purchase, you might have been pulling out your credit card, but suddenly you notice that there is a place for a coupon code, and you’re like, “Whoa, coupon code. I don’t have a coupon code.” And in that moment what did you do? Did you make the purchase? No, you probably looked for the stinking coupon code when a second ago, you were going to make the purchase. What’s really crazy is oftentimes when people can’t find the coupon code, they don’t end up buying, which is nuts, because they were just going to buy. Why did they not now buy? Because they planted a seed of doubt. Doubt is the business killer, my friends. Your job as an entrepreneur is to remove all doubt. That’s your job. The only way you do that is by addressing these fundamental fears head on.

Phil Bray 

That’s fabulous. Marcus said at the start of this webinar to the audience while we were preparing, that he was happy to take difficult questions. So, from the 95% of people who don’t publish their fees online, if anybody wants to put a comment in the chat and maybe challenge what Marcus has said, and then Marcus if you can knock it down, I think that would be fabulous. Dan, we’ve got a question or comment in from Jonathan that I think talks to some of the stuff Marcus was talking about earlier, about addressing people’s problems through content.

Dan Campbell 

Absolutely. Around 10 or 15 minutes ago, Marcus, you were talking about, “Why wouldn’t you give answers?” And Jonathan says, “You don’t want to give the answer away for free sometimes”, and obviously, financial advisers andfinancial planners are paid to give answers. So I think Jonathan’s question is, where does that line sit between giving too much away and giving just the right amount away?

Marcus Sheridan 

Jonathan, I’ll be frank with you because I love you, even though I don’t know you personally, I can tell you that I love you and I want you to be successful. Oftentimes, we believe that the information we have is dramatically more proprietary than it actually is. Let me give you an example, here in the US, and I don’t know an equivalent you all have for this, but here in the US, there’s this company called the Geek Squad. The Geek Squad is a really big brand, and they fix people’s home computer problems. They’re tied to some of the big retailers and whatnot, that’s what they do. So they’re a tech service company. They’ve got quite a prolific They Ask You Answer style approach to how they do their online presence. They really teach people how to do the things that they do. And somebody once asked the CEO, “You’re teaching people how to do the thing you do. Aren’t you cutting off your nose to spite your face?” He said, “Don’t you realise my number one customer is the person that tries to do it themselves?” It’s no different than when I started with my swimming pool company. I was one of the first to show people how to winterize open and close swimming pools. All the service companies said, “We don’t want to show people how to winterize their pools, because then they’ll start winterizing their own pools, and we won’t get that business from a service perspective.” I’m like, “Whatever” and I produced this video and then what’s the main comment people made? It was “Man, I don’t want anything to do with that. That looks way too hard. That looks way too difficult.” If you look at They Ask You Answer the book, it’s pretty clear as to what the framework is and yet, I have a company that generates millions of dollars a year, and all it does is guide people with They Ask You Answer. That’s all it does. That’s the whole business. The whole business is based on a book and I will tell people when they reach out, “I’m going to make sure you do what you already know you should do. That’s what you’re going to pay me for.” That’s what most consultants and most advisers actually do, they just remind you of that which you already know. So if you look at an adviser and look at the ones that we trust the most… if you have a choice to work with one of seven advisers, and you’re debating between all seven, six of them hold everything back, but one of the seven just tells you everything. What do you think you’re going to do? Do you think you’re going to try it yourself? No, what you’re going to do is you’re going to go with the one that gave you everything. Let’s say that person did try it themselves, when they fail, they’ll come to you anyway. This is just how it works. One other thought on this, buyers, they can get it, they can get the thing. I don’t ever assume buyers are dumb. I assume that eventually they’re going to find it from someone. My mindset is I want them to find it from me. I want them to get it from me every single time. If there’s any conversation that’s happening in my space, I want it to be from me. That’s the mindset of the champions. It actually goes back fundamentally to do you have a scarcity mentality or do you have an abundance mentality? Because if you’ve got an abundance of mentality, you’re thinking, “There’s plenty of room on top for everybody here. If we’re doing the [inaudible] I’m going to do great and that’s how it’s gonna work.” What’s wild about this is when you really do this well, and you become the most known and trusted brand in your market, and you become the thought leader of your space, you just start to see all these revenue streams and different ways that you can monetise your IP that you never imagined possible. This is just how it goes. There’s probably not a question a financial adviser gets, where they should hold back in terms of teaching the world, because inevitably, the person is going to say, “Now I want to talk to you about my situation”, because the customer, the buyer are hearing you, and they’re thinking “This guy, this girl, man, they just know their stuff so much, and I’d love to work with them. With my situation, I’ve got this going on, I’ve got this going on, and I’m worried about this.” That’s what they’re going to pay you for, the ability to take that another step further and to customise it based on their very specific needs. And so, I’m just not buying it Jonathan. Love you, buddy. I’m not picking it up. Nope.

Phil Bray 

Let’s knock another one down. Give you another go Marcus. Dan, what does Gareth have to say about fees pages?

Dan Campbell 

Gareth says “Financial planning can be bespoke, and the fees will depend on the complexity of what we need to advise on, and we don’t know until we know about the client. Isn’t it like asking a builder to give me a price for a building extension without telling them exactly what we need?”

Marcus Sheridan 

The way that you do pricing, and there’s a few different ways, and if you’re listening right now what I’m about to tell you could make a whole lot of revenue for your company if you just do it. The first two things that you can do is, number one, you create a fees or a pricing page. 80% of that page or video, and I want you to create both, 80% of it is teaching them how the industry works. So, take financial planners, somebody says, “What is it? How much does it cost to work with a financial planner? Are there fees? How does it go?” A lot of people don’t know, some people do know, and some people have had experience with only specific ways of working with a financial planner in terms of comp structures. So spend the majority of the article or the video on explaining how comp structures work within the financial planning space. As you know, there’s a multiplicity of styles or structures, so you want to explain them. Explain the pros and cons to each one. Keep in mind, a lot of people don’t even know what a fiduciary means, they don’t even know what the word stinking means. So it’s your job to make sure that they think “Light bulb on. I get the different options that I have.” This is before you say what you even do. Once you’ve done that, you’d say, “In terms of working with our agency, in terms of working with me…” or however you want to say it, “…in order to give you a price, here are the questions that I would need to ask you.” And you list all those questions out. Then you say how much the average person spends with you. For a swimming pool, I might say “The average person, when they work with river pools, spends between $90,000 and $130,000. We have a few that go less than that, not many, and we have some that go more than that, but the most consistent range is between $90,000 and $130,000.” People appreciate that to death. We want to give them a general feel but all of this happens after you’ve explained how the industry works. Once you’ve explained how the industry works, then you can explain what your comp structure is based on what you’ve just told them. You can say “Based on what I just told you, the way we do it here at Sheridan and Sons is is like this.” Okay? That’s the first thing you should do. Another thing you should do, and actually maybe this should be first because this means leads for your company tonight if you do this. I developed a software called price guide.ai, it is the simplest and fastest way for you to give a price estimate in real time to your customers on your website without them having to talk to you first. And you’re might be thinking “Geez, Marcus, I don’t even understand how that would work.” Well, what we know is that today, 75% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean they hate sales people, they just don’t want to talk to a salesperson until they feel like they’re ready and until they feel like they won’t make a mistake. Some of the biggest questions that people have, and I mentioned this earlier, are: Am I even in the game? Can I even afford this? Is this even worth a conversation? So a pricing estimator on your website is revolutionary in terms of generating leads that you’re not currently getting that you should be getting. How the tool works is this, you go to price guide and you can put in the industry that you’re involved with. You might put in financial planner, the AI will then say, “If you’re a financial planner, I’m going to assume that you need to ask the following questions in order to give them a general rate or pricing or comp structure.” So the AI produces for you some of the questions that you would probably want to ask. If you don’t like it, you can eliminate or modify the question, or add additional questions. Once you have those questions, I want you to think about your sales process as a financial planner. I’m just going to use that as the example right now. Someone says, “I need to know your comp structure.” First, you’re going to ask questions. Those exact questions, are the ones that you would build out your pricing estimator with. Then with each one of the questions, you would put a number or a range that would impact the estimate that you’re going to give to the person at the end. Once that is done the AI will help you produce copy that helps explain how your pricing works and then it gives you a snippet of code. You can put that snippet of code on your website, and immediately start generating leads that you wouldn’t have generated before. Let me give you an example. I’ll give you a UK example. And as you hear this, don’t say, “Well, that’s not what I sell.” Come on, think bigger than that. You get paid to think bigger. You’re a leader, so think like a leader. I’ve got a company in Scotland called Gillies and McKay sheds.  Gillies and McKay make custom sheds and send them around the UK. They were doing They Ask You Answer really well. They had a lot of pricing information on their website. They had price lists on their website for their sheds. They came to me and they said, “Marcus, we want to try a price guide.” And I said, “I’m not sure if it’s going to make it a big impact. You’ve got all the pricing information there.” Well, we put it on there, and immediately they have five extra leads every day since they put it out there; they’ve closed already, and they put it on there approximately six weeks ago. It’s a new product, I just developed it. They’ve already closed about £200,000 in business from this pricing estimator on their website. I thought, “How did this happen?” The reason why it was so effective even though they already had a price list on their website, which is more specific than any adviser is ever going to have. The reason it worked is because the moment somebody feels like they are designing their price, there’s this phenomenon in psychology called sunk costs, they’ve invested more in this particular company or in this plan, and they feel this pull to want to work with that company. It’s no different than if you’ve gone on 100 dates with someone versus one date with someone, there’s a good chance you’ll feel like, “I’ve invested so much in this relationship. I want to see if it’s going to work.” With these pricing estimators I’m having companies from all over the world, put them on their website, and we’re seeing phenomenal results. You can make the range as big as you want it to be. It’s just beautiful. And the way that I set it up, because I try to run a business exactly as I would want to be treated, you don’t even have to put in a credit card to start using the tool. It doesn’t ask you for a credit card. You use it for two weeks and if you start getting leads, you’re like, “This is awesome. I’m going to keep using it.” and then you’ll pay $20 a month. If it doesn’t work, you take it off. But guess what? It works. Especially if you highlight it on your homepage. The key to highlighting this on the homepage is saying something like, get an instimant, instimant, that’s a funny word “Get an instant estimate” Or “Get an instant quote”, or “Get an instant [insert whatever you want to call it]”, The prospect thinks, “I can get this right now and I don’t have to talk to a salesperson yet?” Everybody does it and in the process of doing that, you get their email. Now you’re building your database, and this is key for you as a business to be successful. You’re building your database, and now you can remarket and communicate to these people with your newsletter or whatever the thing is that you’re doing that’s helping you be in touch with them. That’s really powerful. So I suggest to anybody that’s on this call to use the price guide. You could put it on your website within 30 minutes and generate leads from it tonight. It’s that easy to use.

Phil Bray 

How do people get hold of it?

Marcus Sheridan 

Just search priceguide.ai

Phil Bray 

That works. Maybe Dan or Abi could look it up and put a link in here.

Marcus Sheridan 

Eileen said, “instimant, I love the new word.” So do I, I think it’s awesome! We can claim it as our own. We founded it here today on the Yardstick.

Phil Bray 

Right, I want to talk about this digital journey, because one of the key data points, the standout data points in the book, is that 70-80% of a consumer’s buying decision is made before they meet the salesperson. So in 2024 moving into 2025 how does that stat impact marketing plans for financial advisers and planners?

Marcus Sheridan 

Well, it just means you can’t afford to think that you’re going to have a sustainable business without having a major focus on brand and on marketing. You can’t think that a few additional trips to the golf course and a few more handshakes is going to carry the day. That’s extremely rare for most entrepreneurs at this point in time. And so you’ve got to win the 80%. It’s getting harder to win the 80% and AI is going to make it harder. This is why though They Ask You Answer is perfect for anyone that says, “I want to be ready for the impact of AI, which is already affecting all of us”, because the future of search and the way people search, is based on signals. Every piece of content that’s in the universe right now that goes out there is a signal to two parties that are really important to each one of us. The first party is humans, and the second party is artificial intelligence. So as humans and artificial intelligence receive those signals, they get a perception about brand. Brand is very important for artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence cares about your brand. When we started with Chat GPT a couple years ago, people were using it purely for creation. They were just creating stuff with it, today, we’re already using Chat GPT as a recommendation tool, whereas we weren’t using it like that two years ago. You might be saying, “Hey, I live in Louth…”, which is a great small town in the UK, by the way, I’m just using my knowledge, my son used to live in Louth for a very short period of time. “I live in Louth, Who are the best financial advisers in Louth?” nowadays Chat GPT is going to come up with that information. People are using it for that info right now, and so we have to understand that these signals are going to be a huge deal. Your success as a business is going to rise and fall on your ability to send out brand signals, but to two parties: AI and humans.

Phil Bray 

How does social proof fit into this, that digital journey? How does social proof help the 80% pull someone to them rather than somebody else?

Marcus Sheridan 

Somebody asked, “What is social proof?” Social proof is basically what the world says about you and the signals they send out that say they support you. That could be a review, it could be a testimonial, It could be them going to Google and putting in that five star, they could go onto Yelp, or whatever that thing is. Reviews matter, and they matter a lot because we’re in the age of signals. With that being said, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to get more social proof. It’s very, very important. One thing for any locally-based business, one thing that still matters very much is Google my Business (now called Google Business Profile) and local search matters very much. They’re going to affect your ability to generate the leads that you want. I’ve worked with a bunch of location geocentric businesses, and the ones that do the best with this Phil are the ones that have a very intentional program to get more reviews. That’s it. It’s not lackadaisical at all, it’s intentional. They have it set up, it’s structured, and if you ask them, “How do you solicit reviews?” They have an answer. They have an answer because there’s a system and a structure in place. I you don’t have a system or structure in place, there’s a there’s a pretty solid chance that you’re missing out on a ton of potential visitors and leads that you could be having. So, put that system in place, figure out what it is, plan it, it matters. And I think it matters more and more going forward. Once again, it’s going to be a major signal to AI that this is a company it should recommend.

Phil Bray 

If I was a salesperson right now, I would be explaining that of the advisers we work with, they’ve got 178% more VouchedFor reviews and 286% more Google reviews than the average financial adviser, but I’m not.

Marcus Sheridan 

I know you don’t like to brag about yourself, but I can say when you’re essentially doubling the reviews your advisers get the value on that is 10 times whatever they’re spending with your agency. There’s no question about it. This is essential for their success and to have a company that’s willing to do that and that has a track record of doing it effectively, and obviously you’ve tracked it very seriously, I can see it’s one of your KPIs as a company, that is impressive and it should be well noted. So, good on you all for making sure your clients are getting found a lot more in diverse ways, reviews being one of them.

Phil Bray 

If a consumer gets past the reviews and through to the firm’s website. In the book, you talk about seven key priorities for websites. Just talk a bit more about those, if you would, Marcus?

Marcus Sheridan 

Gosh, It’s been so long I can’t remember what my priorities are. Rip them off really quick Phil? A few of them, because I might start naming things that are outside of the seven.

Phil Bray 

You name whatever you think, Marcus. You name whatever you think are important for a website.

Marcus Sheridan 

Well, when it comes to your website, there is one thing that I want everybody to do. The number one book that’s bought with, They Ask You Answer is Building a StoryBrand. It’s the number one book that’s bought with They Ask You Answer because when it comes to the content on your website and the messaging of said website, you can’t get two better books for that, they just don’t exist in the market. StoryBrand helps you frame the way you guide the visitor through that website experience. And one of the best tests that I do with companies, I just love this test. If you’re listening this, I want you to do this, you might freak out for a second but this is really powerful. When somebody comes to your site – I’ll give you the test in a second – are they more interested about you and what you do, or do they care more about them and their problems? Of course, we know the answer is, they care about themselves. As the great Toby Keith once said, “I want to talk about me, I want to talk about I, I want to talk about number one, my, me, my.” They care about themselves. So, I want you to go to your home page right now if you’re listening to this, and I want you to count the number of times you use the pronouns We/Our versus the number of times you use the pronouns You/Your. We/Our versus You/Your, it is going to be clear as day as to who is the hero of your message. Is the hero of your message you and what you do? It will be if you use the phrase “We” or “Our” all the time. Or, it’s going to be all about “You” and “Your”. Let’s say you’re a financial adviser and you want to have a headline statement. A headline statement on your homepage would be something like, “Plan your future without the stress”, immediately it’s all about your audience. All you have to do is count the pronouns, and you think, “Son of a gun, we’ve got a messaging problem.”So, that’s one thing that you want to do differently. Another thing that you want to do differently is you want to have what’s called a learning center on your website.  A learning center is a hub of information that anybody can get their questions answered by. Within that learning center could be your educational articles, your video library, it could have some of the tools that we discussed such as a pricing estimator, maybe you’ve got some type of self selection tool, which, by the way, is another great tool for self assessment. Self service is a huge movement right now and giving people more ability. A great tool that I love by one of my friends in the UK, Daniel Priestley, is ScoreApp. I don’t know if yourecommend ScoreApp to your clients, Phil? I’m a big fan, it is great for advisers. scoreapp.com, it’s tremendous, I really love them and I’m a big believer in Daniel and his company. So, you want to have a learning center, and you want to have a page that is specific to pricing. Ideally, it’s in your navigation bar. It says pricing. There are a bunch of others, but those are some of the major ones that are on my mind right now.

Phil Bray 

The “We/I” versus “You/Your”, is fabulous and I think it works on imagery as well. Look on the imagery on your homepage. How much of it is your team, the guides, and how much is your clients, the heroes? And, how much is stock imagery of a husband and wife walking down a beach to signify retirement? I think it works both ways.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yes.

Phil Bray 

So someone goes through-

Marcus Sheridan 

I saw Claire said, “We’ve got an “Are you ready for a retirement?” quiz.” That’s really smart. That’s really smart because they have to assess their situation. That’s why we call it a self-assessment tool. I know at ScoreApp they call it scorecard marketing, but what we’re talking about is self-service tools on your website. There are five types of self-service tools, and each one of those has potential value to anybody that’s listening and they’re incredible for lead capture. There is self-assessment, which is like ScoreApp, which gives you a score, then you have self selection. This one’s really powerful. Self-selection is when somebody has a question and they think, “What should I choose? Is this plan or that plan the best fit for me?” Or another example is, “Should I use a financial adviser or go it alone?” That’s a legitimate question and so the tool would ask a series of questions without bias.You can’t be biased. They answer the series of questions and by the end, get a recommendation or a choice. That’s what self selection is; it’s essentially a recommendation. “Yes, I would recommend that you do use a financial adviser, and here’s why.” To give you an example, on my swimming pool website, I recommend other types of pools. We have a tool that essentially allows you to figure out whether a fiberglass, vinyl, or concrete pool is the best swimming pool for you. We ask you a series of questions, and at the end, we give you a recommendation. It’s really powerful and we get a ton of leads from that. So, that is self selection. Then you got self-scheduling. This does very well sometimes with advisers and whatnot. Self-scheduling is when they’re able to schedule time to talk to a human without being forced to talk to a human to schedule the time. That’s a self-scheduling tool and what works extremely well, let’s say that you have an actual firm; this is really powerful, It’s a game changer, so, let’s say you have an advisery firm with six financial advisers. If you had a tool on the site that allowed them to look at the six financial advisers, see their faces, read their bios, and then choose who they want to work with… Forget about it; awesome; crazy. I’ve had a bunch of experience with companies I’ve worked with where we did that; the person got to choose their salesperson and we got crazy results, and I mean, like doubling closing rates, just inarguable data. So, that’s another one. Then you’ve got the self-pricing tool, then you have self-configurators. A self-configurator is when somebody can build or design something on their own. Let me give you something that would be super progressive for a financial adviser. If you’re a financial adviser and you’re thinking, “There are three major types of plans that somebody might use.” All right, well, could you help them to design that plan themselves without having to use you first? Because in a perfect world, they come to you and they say, “I’ve already built the thing. I already have the thing built out because I did it on your site.” That’s incredibly powerful, that’s a self-configurator. So you’ve got self-pricing, self-assessment, self-configurators, (self-selection and self-scheduling). I’m losing them all in my head right now, but you’ve got the five self-tools. Those are the five, they work really well, and I hope everyone considers putting them on their websites.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Marcus. We’ve got five or six minutes left. If anybody has any more questions they want to ask Marcus, put them in the chat. I have two more that are very specific, Marcus. Every so often, a financial planner will come to us and say something along the lines of, “I only work with high net worth individuals.” Everyone defines high net worth differently, but I digress, “I only work with high net worth individuals, social proof doesn’t work with those.” They are dealing with clients of a certain value, and they feel that social proof doesn’t work above a certain value of investable assets. Do you buy into that? Or do you not buy into that?

Marcus Sheridan 

It’s BS. It’s just not true. What happens, though and the reason why people say that is because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the reason why it’s happening. So, they felt when they entered the game or the industry, that the way it worked was purely through referrals, purely through networking and word of mouth. So that’s how they’ve always gotten their business, and that’s how they’ll always get their business. And there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way, it’s fine. But to say that’s how it works in your industry and that alone, that is utter BS and you’re lying to yourself, because there’s too much empirical data in the world that says, “No, actually, you can build an incredible wealth firm by doing inbound marketing, by attracting them to you, by building an extraordinary brand where people come to you.” That’s how it works, and so, I can see why people would say that but if that’s your experience, it’s because A, you haven’t invested in it. B, your total focus has been the in-person, which is fine, and you can build a great life off of that but if you’re trying to scale and do something extraordinary beyond yourself, you’re going to have to go beyond basic word of mouth.

Phil Bray 

And I just want to flip my last question from marketing to sales. We all get ghosted from time-to-time. I certainly get ghosted from time-to-time, people on this call will get ghosted from time-to-time. And there are two emails that have worked a treat for getting ghosted or for waking prospects up. One is the Chris Voss magic email, which I’m sure you’ve come across. The other, is yours, Marcus. I assume you have found it, can you just talk a bit more about that and why it works?

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, I do a lot of training with sales teams, with selling in general, and understanding how psychology works. And we’ve all been ghosted before, and the reason why people don’t tell us why they’ve ghosted us is because they fear hurting our feelings, so understanding that, you have to say the fear and eliminate it. Let’s say I’m a pool contractor. I might send an email to someone after I’ve given them a quote and been ghosted, with a subject line that says, “Assuming you’ve found another pool contractor.” They open up the email and I might say, “Hey, Abi, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks, and I’m assuming this means that you have found another pool contracter, which, if you have that’s totally fine. I just wanted to know before I went ahead and took you off of our list.” Now what happens is suddenly a group of people say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, I’m so sorry. I’ve just been so busy” And that’s great because now you’re back in the game. There’s another group that’s that will say, “Yeah, we decided to go this route.” With that you learn and you don’t have false hope in your pipeline. Nobody wants false hope in their pipeline. If you’re a financial adviser, you can do the exact same thing and say, “I’m assuming you found another financial adviser for your needs”, but then you’ve got to come right back in the text of the content and I think you should do this by video, by the way, but you can do it by text. You say, “Hey, Phil, I know we’ve been talking over the last month about your financial health and your future. My sense is that, because I haven’t heard back from you, you’ve probably chosen another adviser, or this isn’t something you’re going to pursue at this time. Either way, I’m totally fine with whatever you choose, but I just wanted to confirm with you which one you’ve chosen before I went ahead and took you off of our list. So, if you could let me know, that would be wonderful.” Now you’re very likely to get a response. Every single time I have a sales team, I’ll teach them to do this. I’ll say, “I want you to all send this email right now.” Sometimes we’ll do it at the beginning of a call and by the end of the call, there’ve been multiple people that have received a response.

Phil Bray 

It works and it works beautifully. It’s uncanny how often it works.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yes, it does.

Phil Bray 

Right, does anybody has any final questions for Marcus? Today has been absolutely superb. I’m just going to pull up my screen again and Abi could I just get you to talk about the next webinar we’ve got coming up in November, if you would?

Abi Robinson 

Yes, of course. Thank you so much, Marcus. Every second of that hour has been absolutely brimming with value, not just for everybody on the call, but for us as well. Phil is probably going to block me on Outlook with all the ideas that I’ll be pinging across. From personal experience, I can absolutely speak to the “Assume you’ve found somebody else” email. It is incredible how many times that does shimmy somebody along when you haven’t got a response. So, if you aren’t using that, then please do give it a try. Onto our next session. Anybody who’s been on our webinars previously this year, will know we’ve had some amazing guests. Of course, Marcus, we’ve also had Rory Sutherland, Andy bounds, Phill Agnew, and we are continuing the trend. Next month, we’ll be sharing our stage with the very lovely Joe Glover, who is co-founder of the UK’s largest marketing community, The Marketing Meetup. He’ll be joining us to talk about all sorts from building engaged communities to running successful face-to-face events, using social media to engage with your ideal clients, AI, and as we’ve spoken about quite a bit today, the importance of reviews and how to get more of them. So we’re very, very excited for that one. As Joe is UK based, although I’m not sure if he’s in Dundee, Lauth, or otherwise, he will be coming to us at the usual time. So, 10am Wednesday the 20th of November. I will put the link in the chat, but it will also be in the follow-up that Dan mentioned earlier.

Phil Bray 

See you then. To stay in touch with Marcus. Here’s Marcus’s website and his socials, we’ve got the AI tool in the chat as well and we’ll put that in the follow-up notes. Dan, over to you for any final comments in the chat.

Dan Campbell 

We don’t have any more questions, but I’ve got one on my own actually, Marcus, if you wouldn’t mind satisfying my curiosity. You mentioned a short while ago that adding the ability to choose your salesperson doubled closing rates. What were some of the factors that led to some people’s profiles being chosen more frequently than others?

Dan Campbell 

Ask that one more time? I want to make sure I fully understand what you’re saying.

Dan Campbell 

You mentioned earlier you’d implemented a choose your salesperson tool in one of the businesses you’ve worked with.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yes.

Dan Campbell 

And it improved closing rates. So when people choose their salesperson, they’re more likely to close. When the audience was choosing a salesperson, what were some of the factors that led to some of the salespeople’s profiles being chosen more frequently than others?

Marcus Sheridan 

What’s interesting is that sometimes you do this with a sales group, and some will take it seriously, and some won’t. By the end, they all take it really seriously, because they realise the impact it has on them and their business. But what we know more than more than anything, is when we feel like we’re in control of our buying process, we are more invested in it, and we feel a duty to move forward, because we chose this person, and we feel like we already know them. So the key is, you want to see the person, you want to read about the person, and in a perfect world, there’s even a video where the person can talk to the potential prospect. Now it’s like this uber experience, if you will, like a dating app for salespeople, or whatever you want to call it. It’s incredibly, incredibly effective.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Marcus, there are some great comments coming in in the chat. Marcus, I just want to say thank you again for the last hour, it’s been absolutely fabulous. Everything I, Abi, Dan, and everybody else who attended the webinar and Aimee will have wanted. So, thank you again Marcus, I really appreciate it. Have a great day, because it’s still probably 9am where you are, Marcus. See you again soon, I hope. Cheers everybody. Bye, bye.

Dan Campbell 

Take care, guys. Bye.