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14th October, 2025 - Webinar replay

Introducing a new way to disclose fees online while creating leads for your business with Marcus Sheridan and Steve Auchettl

Phil Bray 

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the first of two Yardstick webinars in the space of 24 hours. Today, we’re going to be talking about the sometimes slightly thorny topic of online fee disclosure, but in a different context. Today, we’re going to reframe it, and we’re going to talk about the reasons to run and have fees on your website, but also in a way of creating leads and new inquiries for the business. So without further ado, I want to introduce our two very special guests, and we were just talking earlier on about who people are here to speak and hear from today. And really delighted to be joined by Marcus again. Marcus, your second webinar, you’ve come on for Yardstick. So thank you for making the time again.

Marcus Sheridan 

Man I love first of all, I love you, Phil and I love your people. So it’s going to be a great conversation, enlightening, like you said, maybe even a little bit of friction, because it’s a controversial topic, which means we’re growing if that’s the case.

Phil Bray 

That works for me. So if anybody needs an introduction to Marcus, bestselling author of They Ask You Answer. I would have had a copy here, but I’ve given them all away, so I don’t actually have a copy right now. I need to sort that out. Co-founder, PriceGuide with Steve. And the New York Times have said, “website marketing guru, web marketing guru”, so it will be tapping into Marcus’ grey matter during this webinar. And we got Steve also from PriceGuide. co-founder, CEO, entrepreneur, digital innovator, Steve, welcome. Your first time on a Yardstick webinar. Thanks for being here, mate.

Steve Auchettl 

Thank you. Phil, yes, very excited to be here as well, absolutely.

Phil Bray

So we don’t have Dan today. Dan’s not with us today. We thought six people on a webinar might be slightly overkill, so we’re giving Dan the afternoon off, but Abi’s going to do the housekeeping for us in Dan’s absence. So Abi, if you wouldn’t mind.

Abi Robinson 

If anyone was here solely to see Dan, then we apologise. The eagle eyed amongst you will know that I am not Dan, but yes, I’m going to fill his very big shoes and do the housekeeping today. There’s no scheduled fire drill, so you’ll be pleased to know that. But there’s only a few rules, and they are very simple. This is very much a safe space, as you know, if you’ve been here before, then you’ll know there are no such thing as silly questions. If you are thinking it, somebody else is thinking it, and you’ve chosen to be with us here for an hour, so you might as well get the most out of it. It’s a very rare treat that we’ve got Marcus with us again and Steve with us. So get out of this what you want to get out of it. It’s just as much your hour as it is ours. So the chat function is open, the Q&A is open. Please use them as much as you want. And when Phil needs a slurp of whatever beverage he’s got in front of him, then we will pause and take your questions. So please, please don’t be shy. And just to answer our most F of FAQs, yes, we are recording this, as you probably heard at the start of the session, and everybody who’s here will get sent a follow up email, probably tomorrow, maybe today, with a recording of the session, anything we think you’ll find useful. And just for anybody who doesn’t know, because we also get asked this a lot, all of our webinars are recorded, so they’re all on our website with transcripts, so if you miss anything about today, then you’ll be able to go back and have a listen. But Phil, I think there might be a poll impending.

Phil Bray 

Look at that. I think there is as well. It’s like it’s just thrown together, isn’t it? So for our webinar for today, from PriceGuide, what stops you from disclosing fees on your website? So there’s a bunch of answers here that you can pick from, “nothing we do it already”. Number two, “we don’t understand the benefits”. Nobody’s voted for that yet. And number three, “not sure how to do it effectively”. “Time, we haven’t got around to doing it”. This is really interesting. Only 3% of people have voted to say that they’re worried it’ll stop people from contacting them. That’s really quite interesting. I thought that might have been higher. And then something else. So what have we got? Let’s see 36, 37 people have voted. 39, let’s just finish this off right. Let’s go with the results that we’ve got here. So Marcus, Steve, what stops the people on this call from disclosing their fees on their website? 41% of people say they already do it. So maybe you guys are here looking for a different way of doing it. None of them, nobody here, don’t understand the benefits. So you might have an easy sell today. Steve and Marcus.

Marcus Sheridan 

I don’t know about that. We’re gonna find out here in a minute how well we’re doing.

Phil Bray 

“Not sure how to do it effectively” 28%, “Time, we haven’t got around to it” 13%, “Worried that you’ll stop people from contacting us”, that went up a little bit 5% two people said that, and then 13% said “Something else”. Marcus, Steve, just give us a bit of instant feedback, like on an exit poll after a general election, gives a bit of instant feedback on that poll.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting, what folks are saying, what I see across the board, certainly within financial services, is folks tend to say that “I can’t do it because of compliance”. And that’s more of an issue of not understanding how to do it. In most of those cases, “not sure how to do it effectively”, I think some of the ones that even believe they’re doing it effectively, could be doing it much better than they currently are. So I’m sure we’ll touch upon that in this conversation today, because it’s only growing in its importance. So it’s good to hear. I’m actually surprised so many are doing it already, at least to a degree, and proud, but I think that’s symbolic of you, Phil, being very forward thinking in terms of being very buyer, customer-centric. And obviously you’ve been a They Ask You Answer guy for a while, and you treat others as you would want them to treat you. So this is just a positive reflection of the community that you have. But I still think we’re going to have a lot of things that we need to do from this conversation.

Phil Bray 

Steve, any thoughts from you?

Steve Auchettl

Yeah, I second that as well. I think it’s fantastic to see 41% already doing it. I think that means basically you’re already halfway there. You’ve done the hard part, which is really putting it on the website in the first place can often be the big mental challenge and hard part, so you’ve already sort of overcome that obstacle. And now on to the next fun part, which is now converting that page and pricing. You can actually turn that into a really big asset, which we’ll talk more about during this webinar.

Phil Bray 

We absolutely will. So this actually, as Marcus pointed out, our research shows, and this is 500 financial adviser websites in the UK. Our research shows that only 14% of those disclosed fees, pound, shillings and pence, what somebody is going to pay. Only 14% of people and firms did it. So Marcus, let’s just reframe this. What are the benefits to both the business the financial advisers practice and consumers of the adviser disclosing fees?

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, if it’s okay with you. Let me start with why we don’t, alright? I mean, there’s just a myriad, so I just want to make sure we’re all just lockstep on this. The biggest reasons why businesses across the board say they can’t discuss this number one reason is, “it depends”, or “it’s bespoke”, or there’s variations. And the issue there is, if I came to anyone, let’s say that’s in the financial services space, and if I said, “can you help me understand what would drive the cost of your services up?” Most people would say, “well, of course I could explain that”. Could you help me understand what drives the cost of your services down? Could you explain that on an industry wide level, what drives it up? What drives it down? Could you explain why some advisers are more expensive than other advisers? Like these are all things that we could explain. In fact, for many people, these are things we have explained before. The problem is, if we wait to explain them until someone asks, what we know from the research is, oftentimes they’re already gone. We’ve lost many people, but we can’t measure those people. Phil, if we could measure them, we’d be actually much more aggressive about this conversation, because it would make us sick to our stomachs to realise just how much potential business we’ve lost over the course of time because someone couldn’t find what they want. I think we have to remember as part of this conversation that the buyer generally, is 80% through the buyer’s journey by the time they reach out to a company, to an adviser, they want to do as much research beforehand as possible. They want to feel confident, they want to feel comfortable, they want to feel like they’re not making a mistake. Another reason why we say we can’t list things like fees, or at least have the fee conversation, is, well, “we don’t want our competitors to see it”, which is really, really silly, because if you talk to most people that are experienced within an industry, and you say, “do you have a decent sense as to what your competitors charge?”, almost always they say, “yeah we’ve got a pretty decent sense”. So this is like a big secret, non secret. Everybody acts like nobody knows when, in reality, everybody has a pretty good sense, that’s what everybody’s charging. You also have this component of, “well, if I’m too honest, I’m going to scare people away”. What we know from the research is literally, if you take the buyer’s journey right, across, if we went just like starting from here, over the fee. First gateway of the journey. Let’s assume like you have to open up a gate to a journey when someone knows they need to hire someone or buy something. The gate is when they ask the question. “So roughly, what is this going to cost me?” “What are we looking at here?” You think about every major purchase you have made, every major buying decision you’ve made, your first question is roughly, “what are we looking at from a financial perspective here?” Once someone has that question addressed, the gate opens, and then they can continue to walk through that buyer’s journey. The key for everyone that’s on this call is that they make it so that the journey happens on their path, the path that they have created for the potential customer, for the client, not on someone else’s path. Because if they can’t open the gate and walk down this road with you, you can be assured they’re going to walk it with someone. The question is, who? That’s always the question. And so much of this idea of pricing and fees and etc, is just rooted in this understanding that “if I don’t address this, someone will, and am I okay with that?”, and if you’re not okay with that, if, if that bothers you to the core, like it bothers me, because  on a personal level, if it’s my industry, I want them to learn everything from me, full stop. Phil, that’s what I want. I want them to come to me and say, I feel like everything I learned about X, I learned from you. I think that should be everybody’s goal. That’s on this call right now. If that’s not your goal, I’m worried about you and your brand, because that is the essence of what constitutes a great brand, and a known and trusted brand, is to be able to do those things right there. So when you do that, you become a major, major outlier, you’ve opened the gate, you have started the conversation, and you have said “we’re not like everyone else”. But there’s another major reason why we need to do this now, all right, and I’m sure we’ll get into it, and we’re going to break down each one of the reasons why people say we can’t. We’re going to overcome them. But let me just say this, most advisers on this call right now probably don’t realise what’s happening with the way people find advisers, Phil. So there is a course what we know as search, an online search. I just did a tour for speaking. It was 18 straight days I was on the road. I spoke to 3000 different audience members live, I pulled every single audience that I was with, Phil. I said, “what percentage of you use ChatGPT to find stuff, to search for stuff, more than you use Google today, and 50% raise their hand saying, “I use ChatGPT more”. Okay, so 1500 out of 3000 alright, we already know, even on broader terms, studies have come out that says one in four people prefer ChatGPT. I’m seeing from my audiences, one in two people prefer ChatGPT. That number, do you think it’s going to go up or down? It’s going to go up and up and up. Now, as each one of these people converts over to using ChatGPT, or a similar AI based tool, because listen, the future of the way people find financial advisers. Yes, it’s always going to be referral based, to a degree, but there’s going to be a ton that is going to be online based, I mean, an absolute ton. Everybody knows this. And so is the future one where they’re looking at a bunch of blue links, okay, and they can click on a bunch of blue links, as you traditionally find in Google search results. Or is the future where the technology, the intelligence, understands them and then gives them a specific recommendation for their needs, an answer to the question the future is found in immediate answers, because as humans, we move away from friction and we move towards easy, faster, friction, free, remove the fear. This is how it works for us as humans. And so when we go in that direction, it takes us to AI based search. Well, if we’re using AI based search now, suddenly AI becomes other than your referrals that you’re getting from regular people, your most important conversion asset. If AI is not recommending you and your brand as a financial adviser, you will be in trouble. That’s a fact. That’s where we’re headed. Now it’s not incredibly like today, not nearly as important, but in a year, in two years. Now, here’s where the catch to it all, and then I’ll shut up, Phil, and that is this, AI what we’ve we’ve done a lot of studies on this, the way it judges websites and brands and who it recommends and who it doesn’t recommend, and we know for a fact that it’s becoming more and more like a human in who it recommends. Now, its goal is to give you such a seamless experience that you’re like, “this was exactly what I needed. This was the perfect answer for me”. In the future, what people are going to do is they’re going to go to their AI, they’re going to use the thing that we might call an agent. They’re going to say, “hey, I want you to find three financial advisers that I should be talking to. I want you to come back with recommendations, and I want you to come back with a full scope of why I would work with them”. That’s the future. That’s everybody’s future here. They might not realise it, but that’s what’s coming now. What is going to make AI recommend you as an adviser over someone else? One of the biggest components to that is going to be how transparent you are with respect to having the fee conversation on your website. Here’s my promise to you, and I don’t take promises lightly. Trust me, my promise to you is, if you’re not addressing this subject of pricing on your website fees and explaining it well, right, what’s going to happen is AI will penalise you. The way they’re going to penalise you is they’re not going to recommend you. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to be very honest with you about the future, your feelings will be your feelings, whatever they are, but that’s where we are headed, and so AI must recommend you, but for them to recommend you, you must give AI the trust signals that matter most, and fee transparency within the financial space is one of the foremost trust signals that people look for. We know this based on all the studies, and so that’s why this matters so much. Phil, I’ll shut up now.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, that’s cool, and I love that line. What was it? The future is found in immediate answers. I love that. So talking of immediate answers, this is a nice segway into our quick fire round. So whenever I talk about online fee disclosure on LinkedIn, in a blog, in a podcast or in a press article, the usual objections come out of the woodwork from a whole variety of people. So there’s nobody better to deal with these objections than you, Marcus, so I thought we’d introduce a quick fire round of objection handling, objection handling. So if you’re for that Marcus, we will make a start.

Marcus Sheridan 

I was born, up for it.

Phil Bray 

“Clients will fixate on price, not value.” Give us your quick fire response to that.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, what we know is that potential clients, which, by the way has to be clarified they’re not clients until they’re clients right, until then they are researching and they’re deciding if they want to be a client. In the research process we know the thing that most scares someone away is not finding an answer. That is the most scary thing. So what they’re fixated on is having their concerns resolved, their fears removed. Whoever does that best can now define value. So giving a fee itself isn’t value, explaining industry which is what you should do, and really teaching the buyer all of this, helps define value. So they are much more fixated on a lack of an answer than they are an educational answer. I can promise you that.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Marcus. And by the way, if anybody here wants to put something in the chat or the Q&A where you’ve got your own specific objection.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, put it in there. You’re not gonna upset me if you say, “I think that was a dumb answer Marcus”, and then just tell me what you’re thinking, and then we can discuss it. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t do that. So just type it in and we’ll see it. Just make sure it says hosts and panelists, right? And then we’ll see the questions that you put in.

Phil Bray 

Don’t be shy. Number two, number two, “no one else is doing it. So why should we?” And we know only 14% in this space are actually doing it.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yes, I hear this one and I say, no one else is doing it. Whoo, yes, run into the storm. That’s where we want to go. That’s where we want to be. So much of what dictates trust today is when you’re willing to go against the grain and you go at the thing, it’s sad when I see an entire industry that’s following the rules they’ve been given. By those that were before them. It’s like, “Well, why do you follow those rules?” What’s to look at with this one two is what I would just call the golden rule, which is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Would you, if you were looking for a financial adviser, appreciate fee education and, ultimately, fee transparency? Would you appreciate that? Would it help you? Everyone is going to say yes. Now, those that are advisers would say, “but” no, no, no, no, you just got to start with the “yes”. Once it’s a yes, then you say, “okay, well how do I do it in a way that’s safe, that doesn’t back me in a corner, that allows me to discuss these things?” That’s, of course, why we’re here today. So that’s exactly why you should do it. You want to be different. Different is often better than better, okay? And just by you doing that is going to make you stand out in a very, very clouded market, which is, as you know, there’s a ton of advisers out there, and so anything you can do to stand out is a good thing, a great thing.

Phil Bray 

Different is better than better. Love that.

Marcus Sheridan

Sally Hogg said it, by the way, okay, that was her quote, not mine.

Phil Bray 

“Our compliance department won’t let us do it”.

Marcus Sheridan

Yeah, that’s because they’re uneducated. And the reason why they’re uneducated is because you haven’t taught your compliance department how you could do it within the rules of compliance. And see, this is the thing that people don’t understand. They hear a rule when it comes to compliance and they’re like, “can’t talk about it at all”. No, no. It doesn’t say that. It says “you can’t say this”, but it doesn’t say “you can’t address this”. There’s a difference between giving a very specific answer versus addressing a doubt, a subject, a question, etc. Our job here is to address it so that that gateway opens and they walk that journey with us. So we can do that within a compliance department. We just got to figure out the right way to do it within the rules, and we want you to do it within the rules always, yes.

Phil Bray

Perfect. What else have we got? “If we can’t be specific, giving a range of fees isn’t helpful”.

Marcus Sheridan 

I like this one. Let’s go back to the golden rule. Would you as a buyer, would you prefer if you went to a website for and you were vetting financial advisers, one of them gave you nothing but “call for quote” or “fill out this form and we’ll have a conversation”. So would you prefer that? Or would you prefer? Someone gave you a general sense for what you could expect and then said, “if you want the exacts, just fill out this form and we’ll have a conversation”. Which would you prefer? 99.9% of people would prefer the one that is willing to give them something over nothing, and something is what so many people need. Remember, they’re not looking for the exact numbers, at least at first, what they are looking for is a sense for it, a general understanding that’s your job to give them. If you do that, that’s like a little piece of the pie. I don’t know about you all, but if you get a little piece of the pie. I want to eat the whole dang pie, assuming it’s good. That’s the whole idea here too. That’s the psychology of the buyer. We give them a piece of it like, Okay, it’s good, and I prove I would like to have some more.

Phil Bray 

Next, “it’ll put people off contacting us”. It’ll put people off contacting us.

Marcus Sheridan 

Well, going back to what we said earlier, we know we’ve got data on this. That’s the thing. People speculate without data. In the case of Steve and I, we have mountains of data. We have almost 1000 customers using our pricing estimator tools. We know what the data tells us and what the data tells us, and we’ll talk about this more is that, in fact, what happens because you open the gateway and because so many people say, ah, that’s so helpful, you get 300 to 500% more leads on average when you’re willing to give a range. Think about that. What that means, Phil is that someone right now is getting three leads a week from their website. We’ll call them real leads, not fake, but real leads if they add an estimator, right? An estimator. Now all of a sudden, they’re probably going to be in the neighborhood of nine to up to 14, somewhere in that range, based on their existing traffic. Now, if you don’t get any traffic to your site now, it’s not suddenly going to magically produce more leads for you. But based on what you’re currently getting, you’re probably going to get three to 5x your normal if you show it the right way. And this is what’s so powerful about it. So that’s what all the data tells us. Once again, it goes back to the golden rule. What scares people to not contact you is ignorance, education drives trust, which drives contact.

Phil Bray 

You keep going with these, and then Becca, I’ll come to you in a second, and you can read out a couple of questions that have come in, if that’s okay, and see if we can stunt Marcus. “We don’t want our competitors to know what we charge”.

Marcus Sheridan 

If your competitors are any good, they’ve already vetted you anyway, and they have found out. And if you’re good, you have vetted, you’ve done your market research, and you have found out. Furthermore, most of these things can be got very quickly at this point in time, through basic search, through a ChatGPT, I had a situation recently where I was looking at a SaaS product, and I wanted to recommend the SaaS product to one of my audiences. This is how dumb some companies are. And I only saw “call for quote”. I couldn’t get actual pricing. I wasn’t going to recommend it because I was speaking to SMBs, and if the pricing was beyond SMB numbers, I wasn’t going to recommend the product. I send them a note, and I said, “I want to recommend this, and you’re forcing me to have a demo with you. This is potentially going to cost you millions of dollars, because I’m not going to be able to recommend this to my audience”. And they literally defended it, Phil, which is extraordinary to me, and didn’t move the line, and because they didn’t move, they will never get the recommendation from me, ever, ever. Because the fact that they couldn’t give me a simple sense for pricing, that’s extraordinary, right? And so your competitors know, let’s move past that, and let’s never base another decision on whether or not we earn someone’s trust, on if our competitor is doing the thing that’s not what drives us in business. That is not our moral compass. Our moral compass is the customer, the client, is the buyer. That’s the one that should be driving our decisions, not the competition. Please, for the love of all that’s pure and holy.

Phil Bray

Next, “it’s a race to the bottom. We’ll have to start competing on price”.

Marcus Sheridan 

Essentially what people are saying is this commoditises, okay? What commoditises a service or product is ignorance in the marketplace. Okay? Now, for example, if you’re talking to two different advisers and you feel they do the exact same thing, they’re the exact same outcome, then of course, you’re going to choose the cheapest price, or in this case, fees, whereas, if you understand how results vary and how techniques vary and how relationships vary, and what the depth of that relationship looks like, and how they’re going to advise you differently than others are going to advise you, now, all of a sudden, you’re like, “okay, so I understand really what defines value within this particular industry”. Ie choosing a financial adviser. And so it’s actually not a race to the bottom. A race to the bottom is when you allow ignorance to exist in the marketplace. And because of that, they choose the cheapest thing, or maybe they don’t even choose a financial adviser at all, maybe because the only one that was willing to educate them was some robo adviser, and they say, I’m just going to use that instead of you, because you were so worried about a race to the bottom.

Phil Bray 

“How can we disclose fees online when we don’t know the scope of work we’ll carry out?” And I get this. This is probably the most frequent objection I get.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, this is one of the reasons why an estimator is really, really powerful. Because if you look at it, if someone came to you right now as an adviser and they said, “hey, listen, I’m not going to hold you to it, but can you help me get a sense for fees?” You would say, “I need to ask you some questions”, at which point you would ask a series of questions, and after that series of questions, you’d say, “well, based on what you’ve told me, my sense is you somewhere in this range”, true or false. Phil, is that, would you say that’s accurate?

Phil Bray

Yes.

Marcus Sheridan

Okay, so if you’ve ever had that conversation before, guess what? We can replicate that. And that’s the beauty behind an estimator, is it replicates that experience sooner, which is exactly what the buyer wants. Because we know that 75% of all buyers today, they’ve done the studies, would prefer to have a seller free sales experience. And this doesn’t mean we hate sales people. It just means we don’t want to talk to one until we’re confident, comfortable, and we feel like we’re not going to make a mistake. And so that’s what this allows you to do, replicate that interactive question and answer experience, so that by the end, you’re able to say, “okay, based on what you just told me, here’s roughly where you’re going to fall”. Now they can move forward.

Phil Bray 

And then finally, and then we’ll come to you, Becca, if that’s okay with a couple that have come in, “our clients invest hundreds of thousands of pounds with us, of course they can afford our fees”.

Marcus Sheridan 

Well, actually, what we have found is the more money someone has, the more they tend to want to understand, the more they want to mitigate risk, the more advice they’re being given. And now, all of a sudden, what we’re saying here, this is not like, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”, you know what I mean? You’ve heard that before. That’s very 1980s, that is not where people are today. People understand they have options, and they’re hearing from their friends all the time about fees and wasting, and “you shouldn’t be spending that, no you don’t need that person for that”. And everybody listening to this call right now has experienced those things. And so instead of coming from that approach, the approach should be, if a client is going to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds with us, we should give them every reason to feel like we are the most trusted adviser in the world and the best to work with.

Phil Bray 

Becca. We’ve got two questions in the chat, and we’ve got one in the Q and A that as well, as well,

Becca Manganello

All right, we’ll hit the ones in the chat. So we have Dominic here asking, “Experienced clients may understand the answers given by AI, but clients who have never known or dealt with an adviser have no basis to discern if guidance from AI search results are realistic or not. How do you overcome this?”

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, well, there’s a few different ways that you can do it. A lot of it starts with, how did AI get its information? I see people in different arenas, different industries, complaining about AI answers, and that’s oftentimes because the training for the AI is poor. And do you know who does most of the training within the financial services space, the financial advisers themselves, or lack thereof training. So one thing that you could do and I talk about this in Endless Customers the book, is we have what’s called the perfect pricing page. And Becca, maybe you can grab that link off of ChatGPT, if you would be so kind. I have a custom GPT within ChatGPT, okay, and for those that aren’t familiar with custom GPT’s, it’s like a specialist tool that’s very good at one thing within ChatGPT. Now this custom GPT is called The Perfect Pricing Page by Marcus Sheridan. You can also find it by just going to GPT’s within ChatGPT and typing in Marcus Sheridan, and you’ll see a bunch of different GPT’s. The cool thing about this, is that if you currently have a pricing page on your website, let’s say a fee page on your website, what you can do is you can put the URL and you can analyse it in, the tool will analyse it for you, and it’ll talk about some of the potential things that you’re missing that help define value. By the way, everyone, there’s no opt in for this. It doesn’t cost you anything. I do believe you have to have a ChatGPT account, right? So you do have to have that, but then you can use this, and it’s very, very powerful. And that’s one thing that I would highly recommend that you do once you do create the perfect pricing page and you really explain fees within the financial space. Maybe show some charts and graphics, just like you’re going to see with these 16 points that it gives you. Well, now all of a sudden, you have trained AI at a world class level. I want AI if the person isn’t landing on your website. I want your website to be the one that trains AI, and I think you probably want that too. The way you do that is you follow the 16 point pricing or fee page that we have, starting with this custom GPT. You can read about endless customers. It’s going to give you the outline. If you do that, you’re going to see AI is sourcing you. The information is going to be much better, much more realistic, and you’re going to help dictate and control the conversation that’s happening with AI much better than anyone else. If anybody does this and does it the right way, as I’ve explained again in the book and in the GPT, you’re going to have the most robust fee page, pricing page in your industry. Full stop.

Becca Manganello

All right, we have another one here, and I’m going to apologise ahead of time if I say the name wrong, but I think it’s Kypros. So please feel free to correct me in chat. But, “Do you believe in a world of AI and free information that no matter what fee they see, it is still too expensive, and professional services are almost automatically not valued”.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, this is one of those elephants in the room that if you’re doing a good job, and if you do it properly with an estimator, what happens is, a lot of times people think, “I’m just going to see a range”. The whole purpose of an estimator is to further educate them with the user experience that happens within the estimator. And I know we’re going to look at that here in a minute, but I think you think you’re going to find this is more than just numbers. There’s education that’s involved with this, and we want them to say “okay, so now I understand all the options that I have within the industry itself, and this company here actually was willing to explain value with their perfect pricing page. And on that page, I was able to see their estimator, and on the estimator, I was able to get a general estimate of fees. And they’ve given me more than anyone else”. They’re going to naturally equate a lot of value to that because of that journey that you’ve taken them on. And that’s why I’m suggesting that you have content around this, because if you’ve got the page, and on that page, you’ve got a video that explains it well, and you’ve got the tool, and within the tool there’s further explanation of value, and all of a sudden they all come together, and the person says, “okay, I feel like I have a full sense for this. Whereas before I didn’t understand why I would pay an adviser, whereas before I did not, I was just reading one side of the equation. And so now I feel like it’s worthy of my time and investment.

Phil Bray 

Becca, I think we just got one question from Paul, haven’t we? I’m just popping the link to Marcus’s custom GPT in the chat, so everyone can get that now.

Becca Manganello

Darren: “Just launched our fees page on our website, no upfront fees, 100% capital allocation. You can model out the compounding effect of the cost of paying 3% versus zero costs. Our tools show that the true cost over the long term, I think it will win more business. And it was an idea that Phil mentioned to me on LinkedIn chat a while ago”.

Marcus Sheridan 

Let me just say this real quick Becca, about this, alright, and we don’t need to read any more on this, but I would challenge this person to put that link into the perfect pricing page to see what they’re missing. I’m always worried if it’s too company-centric, your fee page should be industry first, company second. 80% of your fee. Page should teach the industry and how it works. 20% teaches you and how you work, because now you’ve established a basis of value there. That’s that de-commoditisation process that we talked about earlier. So please make sure you do that. So what I’m seeing Darren describe there, is fine and good, as long as that was in the 20% I want to make sure we’ve got the 80% so that they understand, first and foremost, what all that stuff means, how it works in the industry, how others do it as well. Alright, thanks for that question Darren, thank you.

Phil Bray 

Marcus, right. So we’ve busted some myths. We’ve dealt with some objections. Steve, what I want to go on to talk about now mate is just talk about how this, I think, has changed from being a one-way street to a two-way street. What I mean by a one-way street is financial advisers typically, at Yardstick we’ve helped firms build lots of fees pages, but it was very much broadcasting information. Now, though, with what you guys have created and what we’re doing together, it can now be a two-way street where consumers getting information about the profession and how it charges, and also the individual firm and the advice firm are getting new inquiries. Marcus, you’ve given some of the results which are compelling. Steve, just talk about how this has changed from a one way street to a two way street.

Steve Auchettl

So what we’ve done now. This started a few years ago, working with a number of companies in different industries, trying to come up with pricing calculators, and starting, as Marcus said earlier, that journey of figuring out what is that data saying as a big overarching beam around it, what’s that data saying in terms of conversions and. And turning a pricing page into a way for you to actually attract a lead, get their details. They get all the information they want as well. And it becomes a massive win-win situation. So with a pricing estimator, as Marcus has already alluded to, and obviously we’ll show the actual demo in a second. It’s really trying to change it from just reading a page and reading through different things to allowing somebody to become much more interactive with you, with your website, and almost like a choose your own story, type of adventure, like choose your path, and basically start to build up your own version of how you want to be taken, or what sort of services you need, what priorities you have, what goals do you have, and they can all start to fit into what your final estimate is. So it’s going back into those same questions like Marcus said earlier, in terms of if you were to ask somebody a prospect or a lead or a potential client, a number of questions in order to come up with a rough estimate. It’s turning that into an interactive version of doing exactly the same thing, but doing it in real time. So it can work 24/7, while you’re asleep. And it’s doing it in a really, really slick, but also just a really nice, beautiful way that makes you come across really professional at the same time and at the same time, there’s a lot of little subtle psychology bits of trying to learn more. There’s a lot of value being given. So you’re constantly seeing whoever’s presented that estimator as the trusted adviser in your space, because they’re the ones presenting it. Trust levels go up and we know from like a percentage and data point of view, if you change the whole mindset and you go for an estimator versus just having a contact form, we know contact forms on a website tend to convert around sort of 2% to 3% at best, whereas having a price estimator on your website where someone can get an instant estimate convert generally across our 50,000 plus leads that we’ve generated for companies so far at an average of 41% so it’s a huge, huge spectrum and huge difference. So that’s really it there Phil, anything to add there Marcus?

Marcus Sheridan 

No, I think, I think we’ve hit it pretty well. And I say, let’s look at the tool, because I’m excited. I’m excited to see it y’all.

Phil Bray 

So let’s have a look at this. Then this is the most dangerous part of this webinar, Steve, when I have to move from the PowerPoint to the live demo. So what have we got? So Steve and I have been working together, and what we’ve done is taken the Priceguide technology and sprinkled a bit of Yardstick magic dust on it, and made it a financial services or financial adviser, financial planner tool, and we’ve taught called it the explain and game tool, trying to show that two way street, the explaining game show that two way street and the anatomy of the explaining game tool. We have some questions which are customisable, Steve, we have a lead form which is customisable. And then we have a results page which is customisable. At the moment, this would sit as a link out from your website, prominently place the fees page link on your website in the navigation, and then scatter it around the website as well. We see too many firms, I don’t know what you think about this, Steve and Marcus, but we see too many firms put a fees page on and then go and hide it away somewhere.

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah, it’s dumb. That kills conversions. In fact, what you want to do, is you want to have on your home page above the fold. In other words, the top half, you want to have a call to action button that takes them to this page. But the button itself, with the phraseology is what matters so much. And that button should be, “get instant fee estimate” right. “Get instant fee estimate”, or something very similar to that key phrase being “instant”. And, of course, “fee”. And having that there makes them sense an immediate payoff. And versus clicking the fee or pricing tab in the navigation bar that has the contact form that just makes them angry, this does the opposite to that.

Phil Bray 

Cheers Marcus, so link out to the website with the CTA, get an instant fee estimate or something similar, the consumer fills it in. The consumer gets their fee estimate, and the adviser, the planner, gets the inquiry to follow up. Steve, have I missed anything there mate?

Steve Auchettl

No, I think you got it all. I think let’s just show the demo, and people can visually, sort of see more about how it works. So it starts off, just so you know Phil, the way we’ve done this for everyone is our tool does have a lot of conditional logic elements as well, that luckily, you guys, The Yardstick Agency, take care of on your behalf. You don’t need to worry about all the complexities behind it. But, yeah, it spheres in this case, in this demo, basically three different sub sects of either “young professionals”, “mid life and family”, “40 to 60 year olds or 60 plus”. So it can get an idea of and change all the different pricing according to what their goals are and things like that. But I’ll let you take it away, Phil and show it all works. Bear in mind that it, like Phil said earlier, it’s fully customisable to the way you do it, and the way you structure your fees.

Phil Bray 

And everything on this page, as you said, Steve and for the audience, everything on this page is customisable. So the text above the images, “welcome to our fee estimator, which stage of life describes you, etc”. But this drives the conditional formatting and the logic in here. The images are customisable, so we can go to Shutterstock and get some images. We could head to Midjourney, have a bit of fun and create some images. We could get some images from your business, but they’re all customisable, so consumers go on and select which is the most appropriate for them. So let’s select that one, because most advisers planners on this call, that will be one of their core target audiences, click next. I need to go back one again. We need to start talking about main financial goals. So again, this all can be customisable. Images, the different options, the text at the top, but this is, again, really useful information for the adviser when they’re following up, isn’t it? Steven, we’ve got some questions in here that will help advisers follow up.

Steve Auchettl

Yeah I think it’s worth noting that we’ve included a couple of different questions in here, one being those that are useful and sort of set the scene, which is kind of pre-educating, like Marcus said, about the industry and about some of the goals, so that they can, kind of in their own head, get to a sense of what they might want a financial adviser for. But of course, it helps you, when you’re following up with a lead, to understand a bit more what sort of angles are at. So not all the questions do affect the price. So we’ve got a combination in this example of both ones that do and don’t. This one doesn’t actually affect the price, which is why it says there this doesn’t affect the fees. So we’ve been, again, trustworthy and transparent. We’re telling them that it doesn’t and we’re telling them why we wanted to ask this. So if you go head there, Phil, and then we’ve got other questions that actually do affect the price in the biggest way. And this is the one here, Phil, if you want to explain about this one.

Phil Bray 

So again, there will be some financial advisers on this call where your price or the fee is set as a percentage of the amount someone invests, whether it’s your initial fee or ongoing fee. There will be some financial advisers where everything is fixed, and there’ll be some financial advisers where your initial fee is fixed and your ongoing as a percentage, whatever your mix is between the three key stages where you charge financial plan implementation and ongoing, and whether you charge an ad valorem or fixed fee, the calculator can cope with this. The backend that Steve and the team have built at Priceguide can cope with that. So be assured that however complex your charging structure is, we can provide an estimate. And again, it can be updated as well if at any point you move from one model to another. So let’s pick 500,000 to a million here. And again, the graphics are customisable, the text at the top, the numbers, the ranges, are absolutely customisable as well. It’s just what Steve and I picked when we were building this. And then this again, is a question that helps you understand the point at that journey. Marcus talked about the journey that people take to your door. This understands intent level, I guess Steve, and what people are looking for, and that’s going to help with the follow up, with the nurturing, etc Steve.

Steve Auchettl

Absolutely, because what we’ve found over the last year or so is roughly speaking about ⅓, so first up you’re going to get three to five times more leads. We know that we’ve seen it again and again based on how many leads you have right now on your website every single month, and what you’re going to find is about 1/3 of those leads are going to be hot and ready, and they’re the ones that probably previously would have filled out the contact form. So you probably get half of them, plus another half more that we’re never going to fill out your contact form because I didn’t want to call you so, they’ll fill out this as well. So you’re going to get a third really hot leads. You’re going to get another third that are kind of in that middle to between 6 to 12 months, who probably are not ready to buy tomorrow. But with a little bit of nurture, you can send them into your CRM. We have a Zapier zap to send it to literally any CRM out there, 1000s of different ones. So you can nurture them, put them in an automated sequence, and away you go. And then you got another third, or maybe less than that. It depends on the industry a little bit, but generally speaking, third, third, third, another third, who are kind of just researching, wanting to know a price up front, or they just say they are, and then actually they go, “look let’s go for it”. But generally speaking, third, third, and then you get to know that data. So you the ones that do say that they’re ASAP, they’re ready to go right away. They’re the ones that either you or someone in your team can call. Because, if we can call them within 24 hours, you’re going to get a really, really good chance of booking an appointment straight away. The call is going to be really hot. It is going to be really warm. They’re expecting you to call them, basically, because at this point on screen here, before they see the price, we do ask them for a few really basic details. You can ask for more, but we really want to ask for as little as possible. So in this case, just a name, email, postcode, so we know roughly in the country where they are, and then a phone number, which can be required. You can make it optional. It’s up to you, but either way, you know, if they fill this in the set of ASAP, they’re the ones you’re going to have to call focus on. They’re the hot leads and everyone else start to put into your nurture sequences.

Marcus Sheridan 

Hey, real quick. We’ve heard for a long time for businesses that you’re only as good as your list. This is your list. This is your list of the future. This is your database. This is the group of people that you’re going to have as your audience, that you’re going to be to remarket, that eventually, if they don’t buy today, and if they’re not ready this year, they’re going to be ready next year or in five years, whatever it is, the great ones are constantly planting seeds for the future, right? And that’s how a farmer thinks is they’ve got one field that has got the crops that they’re ready to plow, another field is planted and the seeds are just sprouting, another field that they’re getting ready to plant. And that’s how it works. That’s a circle of life. You need to live the law of the harvest too with your business. This is the key to this. Now, the other component to this gateway, if you will, this you’ve got now this, this form that they’re going to fill out. Most people today are hesitant to fill out forms unless they’re feeling like they’re getting something of equal value for their information that financial guide to investing or whatever that you had before in your website that might have produced a lot of leads in the 2010s. Guess what? That’s not producing a lot of leads in 2025, and beyond. Why? Because they can go to ChatGPT, and they could have ChatGPT make a 10,000 word ebook themselves very, very quickly. And so that’s a different game. It’s getting harder for companies like you to get what’s called first party data. That’s when they give you their information. So Priceguide now, this tool that Phil has built with our team is going to allow you as an adviser to get that first party data, to build that database back up, or to build it much bigger than it currently is. Now you can market and truly live the law of the harvest in a way you’ve never lived it before. That’s a proper business that’s built to last.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Marcus, so if anybody’s taken a note of my telephone number or postcode, feel free to put something in the post, and then you would click see estimate, and this will then take us through to the results page. So the results page, what have we got? A little bit of positioning text above at the top image that could be anything that we wanted. You have the answers to the questions that they’ve given and then explains the fee. Now in this the firm charges a fixed fee for the financial plan of £3000, and a range between £5000 and £10,000 because they charge 1% and going back to Marcus’s point earlier, about frankly, we know what all financial advice firms charge? Because there’s clustering around half and point seven five and 1% ongoing. So this shows the percentage based fee on an ongoing basis, and it gives the estimate three times, but then it starts positioning it. So for example, we have a video up here at the top of the page. Now that video could be a client testimonial video. It could be a video about your business, but actually, going back to what you said earlier, Marcus, that could be a video, an educational video about how financial advisers charge. So not about the firm, but an educational video about how financial advisers charge. Then scroll down and it starts talking about the fee for developing the plan, what people get. And we’re talking about outcomes here. And again, this text is completely, completely customisable, but what we’ve tried to talk about is outcomes and benefits. Rather than you get a 12 month review, you get your portfolio rebalanced, etc, etc. Then what else we got? So there’s links out there to read VouchedFor reviews again, talking about what you get in terms of the ongoing service, not just the initial, someone can retake it if they want. And in this case, I used a friend of mine’s practice, Steve at Britannic Place over in Worcester. And we’ve got some images. And the consumer, the potential client, can start looking at some of Steve’s lovely social proof, client testimonial videos, VouchedFor reviews. If they want to go back to Steve’s website and have another look around. They absolutely could. And again, they’re all customisable at the bottom. So not only have we got positioning around how the financial services professionals charges, we’ve also got some of that specifics, fees, benefits, social proof, and at the bottom we have the usual disclaimers, but everything on there, Steve, everything we see on that screen is customisable, isn’t it?

Steve Auchettl

Yeah, absolutely. And luckily, you guys at The Yardstick Agency can help to do all that for for the advisers, so you’re not left trying to figure out how to do it all as part of your really cool offering, which I’m excited for you to show everyone, because it’s something we’ve always found with estimators, is, yes, you can try and do some of it yourself, etc, but most of the time you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. And also it involves learning a new tool and going a whole range of different things. So with your offering, I think it’s absolutely spot on and very, very affordable for the outcome you’re going to get.

Phil Bray 

Well, let’s talk about that. Thank you for teeing me up. Steve. So standard pricing, we charge £495 Yardstick setup fee to build the estimator, making it specific to your firm, how you charge the social proof you’ve got, etc, and then £49 a month plus VAT, which currently is 20% see what Mrs. Reeves does with that next month and a one year minimum contract. So what do we get for that? We build the estimator, we link it to your website, and then unlimited changes, because some firms will change their pricing structure from time to time, and then any updates that Steve and the Priceguide team do will use to update your estimate. Today for 10 people, only 10 people, £295 setup fee, £29 a month for the life of you using this, not just a short period of time, but for the life of you using this, that’s a 40% discount. We’ll build the estimator, we’ll link it to your website. We’ll give you those unlimited changes. We will give you full access to the updates that Steve does, and every three months, we’ll do an online workshop for an hour where everybody in these 10 sign ups will get together and we’ll have a conversation. How’s it going? What new updates is Steve coming out within the team at Priceguide, what’s working? What’s not? What can we do to change it and try really and get you to maximise the benefits of this investment. Now we’ve only got 10 at this level. So if you want to be part of this group, and this is the only time we’re doing this, but if you want to be part of this group, there’s a QR code on the screen there, Abi can put a link in the chat.

Marcus Sheridan 

Hey Phil, real quick. Let me just say, for me, as someone who has worked with a bunch of agencies on this, this the pricing that you’re giving here. I’m not just saying this. This is not just me trying to get people to buy stuff. We’ve not had an agency come close to giving this type of pricing with this much additional stuff to anyone. It’s a classic case of this is a major loss leader for you. But the goal, especially with this 10 is that we get the social proof. Once we get the social proof, then we get the momentum in the industry, and everybody realises, “wow, this works great”. And then you can scale it much more at Yardstick, because this is where everyone’s headed. I think it’s important to say this. I got to say this. This will become standard in the industry within the next five years. Mark my words, this will be commonplace. So the question isn’t whether you’re going to do it, because you will be forced to do it at some point as an adviser. The question really is, are you going to lead this conversation and be one of the first that doesn’t or are you going to be reactive? And once all your competitors do it, then you’re like, “oh, I guess we should probably act on that at this point in time”. Just like many advisers in the early 2000s said, “we’re not going to have a website”. How did it work out for those people? They all got them eventually, every single one of them. That’s the same thing that is happening here. User. And so it’s my hope that people realise, A, the value that Phil is bringing is just it is the best I’ve seen for any agency we’ve ever worked with. That’s not an exaggeration. And B, this is inevitable, and I hope that you embrace the inevitability of all of this conversation, because it’s we’re putting you in, in a position to be recommended by AI, to be loved by humans and to get dramatically more leads. That’s what we want, right there. That’s the goal.

Phil Bray 

Absolutely right. So everyone’s seen that. We’re going to take 20 seconds. Abi’s going to talk about tomorrow’s webinar, and then back to you. Marcus, Abi’s got a couple more questions. Becca, there might be some other thing in the chat, and then we’ll finish.

Abi Robinson

Yes, and we don’t just throw this webinar schedule together, because you’ll have heard the phrase social proof mentioned quite a lot today. So given that we have squeezed every inch of value out of Marcus and Steve, we didn’t think that we could quite make them stay and talk about social proof. So you’ve just got us tomorrow, but we will be talking about why we know that social proof has always been important for humans. We’ve talked about it a hell of a lot today, and we’ve also talked about why we now need to consider AI. So tomorrow will be a deep dive into the fact that potential clients are using AI to find you, hopefully, to find you, maybe to find a competitor, but hopefully after this webinar, they’ll be finding you and not somebody else. So why social proof is important, a plan to build up your social proof for next year, and why you need to start thinking about it now. Scan the QR code 10am tomorrow, and I will also put the link in the follow up if it goes out before 10am

Phil Bray 

Thank you. Abi, right. Let’s just finish. If Marcus and Steve are happy and Becca, let’s just finish on a couple of questions shall we. Abi, what have you got? There was a couple that came in before the webinar.

Abi Robinson 

Yes, absolutely. Do you want me to cherry pick? Or have we got time?

Phil Bray

Just cherry pick a couple.

Abi Robinson

Okay, I’ll pick some juicier ones then. Hannah asked, “what plans do you have for future enhancements to Priceguide and the fee estimator?”

Marcus Sheridan

You’re muted, Steve.

Steve Auchettl

My bad. We’ve got an endless list of plans for the future with Priceguide. The thing is with Priceguide is that, and the pricing estimator and this tool combined with Yardstick is that we are continually growing it with you. So ever since we started launching price estimators just over a year ago in a bigger way, it’s always been kind of growing from our customer base and working with you to figure out, okay what actually is needed. But we do have a big list of different things, mostly around a big one, being around the analytics side of the estimators, so that we can utilise all that data that we have as a community of estimators, and take yours specifically as well, and then throw that all through AI and go, “hey, we can see that somebody is dropping off on this question. Or we can see as a community, you should probably include this extra question about X and basically using our AI analytics engine to continually improve your estimator so that it becomes super, super powerful. And that’s going to happen the more financial advisers we get on board, particularly within the Yardstick, we’ll be able to do more benchmarking. We’ll be able to do more best practices that way, and everyone will be helping each other, lift it up and be those, be those leaders in the space. So that’s the big place.

Phil Bray 

I think that’s why that user group is so important,  Steve.

Steve Auchettl

Yeah, absolutely.

Phil Bray

Abi, what else we got?

Abi Robinson 

Oh, let’s go for this one from Priya. “Should advisers promote the estimator on their social media accounts? And if the answer is yes, then how should they do it?”

Marcus Sheridan 

Yeah 1,000%. I would say too. For those advisers that are doing paid ads, which I know there’s a group that are doing paid ads, this is the strongest way to immediately improve the conversion rate optimisation of your paid ads. I mean, you want to talk about something powerful, imagine this, somebody sees an ad online somewhere, and it says, “Get instant fee estimate for your financial adviser”. And then it takes them directly to that landing page, and people go through it. Now all of a sudden, you’re just getting way more out of a campaign. And you know, I’ve talked to a lot of companies this year, lots, 1000s, every single one is saying the same thing about paid advertising. We’re spending more than we’ve ever spent. We’re seeing less results than we’ve ever seen. So you can turn back the clock on that, reverse the tide, if you will, by getting much more. You should absolutely do this on social media. And let me just say really quickly, I am the first professional speaker in the world to have a pricing estimator on my website. And we now get information from potential events that we never would have gotten before, and start conversations that we never would have had had we not done this. People think I’m crazy for doing it, and I know it’s going to become table stakes. I don’t really care about table stakes, though. For me, it’s just common sense. I love generating more leads, and I love having more conversations, and I love closing more deals. That’s what I do, and we’re crushing it on our end as a professional speaker, and again, I’m the only one in the world currently that has that on my website. So I know that it works in a very unique industry,

Phil Bray

Nice one, but just on the social point I would be adding it, don’t know how Marcus feels about this, but I will be adding it to your profile, so on your LinkedIn contact details. Never seen a financial adviser do that. Becca, have we got anything else that we need to follow up on?

Becca Manganello

Connor did ask a question, but I’m going to type it. It’s based off of the ability to download a PDF for a client file. And the answer is, Steve, you can answer that is a yes and no. There is a unique link that you can use. Steve, I don’t know if you want to add to that, though.

Steve Auchettl

So basically, when somebody completes your estimator, you will get an email instantly with all their details. So not only can you connect the estimator to any CRM you currently use, you’ll be instantly notified, and there’ll be their main details, contact details, plus a link that goes straight to their estimate so that same results page that we saw earlier with their breakdown of all their answers and what their range was, you’ll be able to see that, and that will be the latest version. So if they go back and edit it and change it, and they normally do that within the first sort of five minutes, and then they’ll sort of, that’s it done. You’ll be able to see what their latest version is. On that estimate page, I know you asked about PDF, we don’t have PDF “Save as PDF” button, but you can, just because it’s in a browser you can literally just go “File”, “Save as PDF” or “Print as PDF”, which is the same thing, but you’ll see all of your leads also in your dashboard, so you’ll be able to access all them and see all the entries and and see them over time as well.

Phil Bray 

Thanks Steve. Right guys, we’ve gone over, but that’s an indication the value that everyone has offered today in this call particularly,

Marcus Sheridan

Yeah, if you got value, let us know in the chat. Let me know so I don’t feel like we failed you. “This was worth my time. Marcus, thank you guys”.

Phil Bray 

Becca, Abi, thank you for keeping on track with questions in the chat. Steve, thank you for your insights into the tool and Marcus, thank you for the value that you’ve offered over the past hour and eight minutes. Thank you so much for joining us. I know it’s at the start of the day with you guys over in the US. Becca and Marcus, so enjoy the rest of your day. Everybody else will send the recording out. Becca, Marcus, Steve, thanks, guys.