The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan The revolutionary guide that challenged businesses around the world to stop selling to their buyers and start answering their questions to get results; revised and updated to address new technology, trends, the continuous evolution of the digital consumer, and much more In today’s digital age, the traditional sales funnel―marketing at the top, sales in the middle, customer service at the bottom―is no longer effective. To be successful, businesses must obsess over the questions, concerns, and problems their buyers have, and address them as honestly and as thoroughly as possible. Every day, buyers turn to search engines to ask billions of questions. Having the answers they need can attract thousands of potential buyers to your company―but only if your content strategy puts your answers at the top of those search results. It’s a simple and powerful equation that produces growth and success: They Ask, You Answer. Using these principles, author Marcus Sheridan led his struggling pool company from the bleak depths of the housing crash of 2008 to become one of the largest pool installers in the United States. Discover how his proven strategy can work for your business and master the principles of inbound and content marketing that have empowered thousands of companies to achieve exceptional growth. They Ask, You Answer is a straightforward guide filled with practical tactics and insights for transforming your marketing strategy. This new edition has been fully revised and updated to reflect the evolution of content marketing and the increasing demands of today’s internet-savvy buyers. New chapters explore the impact of technology, conversational marketing, the essential elements every business website should possess, the rise of video, and new stories from companies that have achieved remarkable results with They Ask, You Answer. Upon reading this book, you will know: How to build trust with buyers through content and video. How to turn your web presence into a magnet for qualified buyers. What works and what doesn’t through new case studies, featuring real-world results from companies that have embraced these principles. Why you need to think of your business as a media company, instead of relying on more traditional (and ineffective) ways of advertising and marketing. How to achieve buy-in at your company and truly embrace a culture of content and video. How to transform your current customer base into loyal brand advocates for your company. They Ask, You Answer is a must-have resource for companies that want a fresh approach to marketing and sales that is proven to generate more traffic, leads, and sales.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. My name is Chris Voss, and I was brain bleeding before I came on the show, but there's more of it to come. So welcome to the big show, the show that makes you sexier, better looking, healthier, and whatever,

as long as you do the things that these great authors come on and tell you that you should do. But don't listen to anything I say, because you'll end up like me. We've all seen that movie, haven't we? You've been with me for 13 up like me. We've all seen that movie, haven't we? You've been with me for 13 years, people. We love you. The family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law. Anyway, enough with that business going on.

Tell your friends. Just tell them outright. Shame them into subscribing to the Chris Voss Show on iTunes, goodreads.com, LinkedIn.com, and YouTube.com. And, that's Chris Voss, linkedin.com for us, that's Chris Voss, and youtube.com for us, that's Chris Voss, and I'm just kidding, lightly shame them, don't overly shame them, you know, don't like post pictures of them on TikTok and go, this person won't subscribe to the Chris Voss show, I'm not

encouraging that in any way by saying don't do it, wink wink, anyway guys, I'm just kidding around, these are just jokes people, that's what we do, we do info entertainment on the show. Some of it is questionable entertainment, whether it's actually funny or not, but the jokes are stupid. So if you laugh at them, that's on you, man. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author and brilliant business mind on the show.

He has several books that he has authored. He's a speaker. He does all sorts of stuff. We'll get into his bio here in a second. He's a speaker. He does all sorts of stuff. We'll get into his bio here in a second. He's the author of his latest book, They Ask, You Author. And it's been revised and updated recently. It's called A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer. Marcus Sheridan is on the show with us today.

He's going to be talking to us about his amazing experience, insight, brilliance. We're going to talk a little bit about marketing and the chat GPT 4.0, I think it is, that came out yesterday. Everyone's talking about it. It's the hottest thing. I feel like I should probably start a new podcast just on AI chatbots or something. I don't know. Anyway, Marcus Sheridan, he is called a web marketing guru by the New York Times. And the story of how Marcus Sheridan was able to save his swimming pool company, River Pools, from the economic crash of 2008 has been featured in multiple books, publications, and stories around the world.

Since his achievement, Sheridan has become a highly sought-after global speaker and consultant in the digital sales and marketing space, with hundreds of business and brands alike to become the most trusted voice in their industry. Welcome to the show, Marcus. How are you? Great to chat with you, Chris, as well as your audience. I'm sure we're going to have a good chat today. We're going to have a good chat today, because if it was have a good chat today because if it was bad, it would suck. And then no one would like it.

But that's not something you and I do, right? That's right. So give us a.com. Where do we want people to find you on the interwebs and stalk you? Well, you can stalk me at marcussheridan.com. But I also have an agency. It's a consulting coaching company that helps folks become the most trusted voice in their space. And that's at impactplus.com.

Let me lead off with what you just said. Why is it important to be the most trusted person in your space? Well, you know, a lot of things these days with the rate of change, Chris, they come and go, right? So if I said to you, is Facebook going to be fundamental to businesses in 20 years, you'd probably say, I doubt it, right? Because it's a platform.

But if I said, is trust going to be fundamental to business in 20 years, you'd say, of course, right? Of course. And that's because trust is a principle. It doesn't have a beginning, doesn't have an end. So we know long-term. So the businesses that build around, okay, how can we become the most trusted in our space?

They're the ones that are going to be most equipped for whatever happens in the future. And the other thing about this too is, you know, we know this inherently, Chris, that we are vetting companies to death before we buy today. In fact, the average buyer, and this is B2B and B2C, the average buyer is roughly 80% through that sales or that buying journey before they reach out to a company today. And so, you know, 25 years ago when the internet's just getting started, that number is probably 20%. Today we're at 80%. So the question is, where is this number going to be over the next 5, 10, 15 years?

And so they're vetting us to death. And if we don't give them what they want on the front end while they're vetting us to death, before we've ever met them, before we've ever shook their hand, then we're going to lose them. We're not going to gain that trust. And that's what it's all about. There you go. Trust for consumer brands. You know, I love that concept because working with my clients, trust is an important factor.

And if I don't feel like they trust me, I won't do business with them. I tried to raise somebody the other day because I didn't feel like they respected our brand. And they really didn't feel like they respected our brand and they and they did they really didn't have a trust it was it was more like how how much can we can we scrape and and and uh renegotiate and steal from you and it just became apparent i'm like look you really don't respect what we do and you need to go down the highway but this is really true i mean i i was just on amazon this morning shopping for some new chili oil and they're out of my brand of chili oil and i look at the reviews and of course i'm with amazon there's a lot of fake reviews and bots reviews on

there and so i usually go through and look at them and actually look at you know what what some of the real reviews are um but to me the ratings are important because that's a level of trust that's a level of people validating uh the trust level of that product and going, hey, I love this product. I buy it all the time. I love this whatever, whatever. Same thing with movies. I usually only go see a lot of movies that have won awards and stuff like that. I'm looking for high-quality movies.

And you're right. I think a lot of people, I learned this a long time ago when I'm probably from Zig Ziglar. People do business with people they trust, right? That's right. The master Zig. You know, we know that if you want to become the voice of trust in your space, to your point there, Chris, you've got to be willing to talk. I'm going to give you three things. Three things that is overarching in terms of trust.

You've got to be willing to talk about that which others in your space are not willing to talk about. And I'll address that here in a second. You got to be willing to show, specifically through video, what others in your space are not willing to show. That's number two. Number three, you got to be willing to sell in a way that others aren't willing to sell.

So you got to talk about, you got to show, and you got to sell in a way that others in your space are not willing to do. Now let's just break down the talk about, and this applies a lot to video too. We know, and you just mentioned this, there's basically five subjects that we research, B2B, B2C, that we're obsessed with, that we want to know and understand before we reach out to a company, before we engage, before we watch that movie, or whatever that thing is, before we buy that thing on Amazon, before we hire that particular company. And those five things, those five subjects, what we call the

big five in the book, okay? And those five subjects are, we want to understand how much is it, cost. Even if we can afford it, we want to understand price variables, et cetera. So cost is number one. Number two, we want to understand what could go wrong with it. What are the negatives with it? What are the issues with it? How could this go wrong? This is also why we'll get to reviews in a second. We want to see not just positives, but negatives because we want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly. So cost is number one. Problems, we'll call it, is number two. Number three is comparisons. We love to compare stuff online. Think about how many times you've gone online and compared this thing versus that thing this for that and we constantly compare online

number four reviews we're obsessed with reviews but we don't want to know just who's it for we also want to know who's it not for very very important for a great review and finally number five best best most top think about how many times you've gone online and searched the phrase, the word best or a similar phrase to that. So to repeat, cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, best. Now, here's what's fascinating, Chris. Those are the big five. That's what buyers, consumers are obsessed with in terms of their research. And yet most companies do not want to talk about these things on their website.

Wow. So that creates a paradox at once. So many companies are like the ostrich with their head in the sand they're just refusing to talk about it and of course it's not going to go away the question's not going to go away the fear's not going to go away the problem's not going to go away and so we may as well address it head on there you go do people do people in business are they are they worried that if they try and develop a principle of trust or stand on certain morals or trustworthy sort of words

that I'm looking for is not coming to mind. But, you know, basically, you know, what if we put out what we think we're about and we don't live up to that standard or we fail at that? Like, a good example was Google saying that they had for so many years that was like do no evil

or something like that, I think it was. And they finally retracted using that because they were clearly up to evil. I don't know if that's true. Don't sue me, Google. Well, I think there is, what I most often see, Chris, is we tend to not want to break the, quote, rules of our industry. And so we see what everybody else is doing, and we say, that must be the way. And so what that leads to is most of us act almost as rule followers. But that's not a good place to be because it means you're reactive it means you're

always doing what others others are doing instead of that you want to become a rule breaker uh rule breaker does that which others in their space haven't done before right doesn't matter that your mommy or daddy didn't do it we're going to do it this way because that's what the marketplace is asking for and what's so fascinating is the rule breaker eventually becomes the rule maker. But what we've seen over the course of history too, Chris, is the rule breaker becomes the rule maker, but then they start to lead. And because they start to lead, they stop breaking the rules. And then eventually someone else comes in and becomes a rule breaker. And then the one that was the breaker and the maker becomes the follower. And that's the circle of life in business.

Have we kind of seen that with Facebook? Facebook's probably a good example of that. They kind of led the market and seemed to break in or made a lot of the new rules, but they've broken a lot of trust over the years. And now we're seeing them on the decline and the rise of different platforms that seem to be trusted more like TikTok, which which is yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a that's a talk about trust um there's no question that they have a trust problem i think the most iconic example is it has to do with a famous quote that people say all the time which i think is actually one of the dumbest quotes in the history of earth but yet it's quoted all the time and it's the classic the classic Henry Ford quote of you can have any color you want as long as it's black. Now, that was, of course, referring to the Model T.

And that mindset is what got Ford from being the clear leader of the marketplace to being surpassed by their competitors because they said, you know, we're so cocky and arrogant. We're just going to give you one color. The marketplace wanted something different. Right. So originally they broke the rules because they were able to establish the assembly line and they did all these things different. And everybody said, oh, you can't do that.

They became Ford. But then they got cocky and that's the circle of life, right? And so that's the most famous one. I always, always laugh about how people celebrate that freaking quote by Henry Ford. I'm like, that's the worst quote of all time.

Yeah. I think there's a's the worst quote of all time. Yeah. I think there's a lot of examples of this in the business world. There was Kodak who made all the money on films, and I believe it was early on they developed digital photography, and everyone's like, this is going to eat our lunch. That's right. You've got Blockbuster with Netflix that could have bought them, and they said, this is never going to be a thing.

I mean, it just goes on and on and on. You see these people just refuse to replace themselves. When you get in this mindset of, you're not going to replace yourself, you are screwed as a business. Yeah. And that's the one thing I learned in my companies is, is I would constantly have to go relook it.

There's always a way to make things better. There's always a way, whatever you think you made it better. There's always a way to make it better. And going back and look at systems and applications and stuff and go who who made this and they'd be like well you made it and i'll be like well there's a better way to design the system and you know constantly innovating and re-innovating and putting that demand on yourself a good example of someone who uh avoided the pitfalls of what we mentioned henry

ford and stuff was like apple when they came out with the iPad, they knew it was going, and the iPhone, they knew it was going to eat their lunch when it came to Mac sales of computers. And they adopted it anyway and said, we're just going to have to go for it. And it's bigger sales than their Macs. Let's talk about some other aspects that you tease out in your book so we can get that teased out as well. Um, how to turn your web presence into a magnet for qualified buyers. Can you tease out some tips on how to pull that off? Yeah, I mean, it really, it does start, uh, with those big five subjects. And so the simple way that you could apply that to is, would you, if, if, if you have a business, you're in business, you've heard so many questions.

I want you to brainstorm every question you've ever received about your product or your service. And just literally just like brainstorm them, write them down. And then I want you to ask yourself a really honest question. How many of these have we truly addressed and address well on our website through text, through video, et cetera? What you're going to find if you're being very honest, if you worked very hard to do the brainstorm. By the way, you should come up with at least 100 questions. If you didn't come up with 100 questions, you're being very intellectually lazy or you just don't know your buyer.

What if the questions are like the ones I get on the show? Like, why are you such an idiot, Chris Voss? That's pretty much all of me. That's a tougher one to overcome there, Chris. That's a tougher one to overcome. But you're doing something right because you can't do it as long as you've been doing it, as many as you've been doing this, and be an idiot.

I didn't need that validated, Marcus, but thank you. With that being said, the brainstorm is powerful. Do an audit. How many of these have we really addressed well? You're going to find that at least 80 to 90%, you haven't addressed well. And some of them are the most common questions you get when you have that first conversation with the prospect. And so then that should give you, okay, here's a clear editorial calendar. Here's the content we should be producing on social, on our

website, on the YouTube, whatever the thing is, if we're going to earn that trust, if we're going to become that voice of trust. All right. So that's, I would say far and away, that's, that's one of the most fundamental. Nobody really does that very well. And no, I shouldn't say nobody, but 90 plus percent don't do it well at all. Wow. Wow. It's, you know, and so whether you're a big company or a small company, this is really important to do, to take a look at, at constantly reinventing yourself, remodeling your business. You know, I was just reading.

I was surprised by this. It came across my news feed. And it was a picture. You remember the old Mavericks that Ford made? There were these ugly little cars that were kind of designed to be little and gas better. But they were definitely ugly. uh i remember them coming out and i think it was the 80s or 70s um but i i remember seeing this thing came across my news i think it was yesterday and it was a picture of all these mavericks in a salt mine or a it was a

salt mine or an underground mine somewhere in detroit or uh, I think another place. Um, and I, and it was like, Hey man, no one's told the story. It was like a story that had kind of been buried. And I guess the Maverick was so bad and so poor for sales. Cause it was so ugly. Um, they actually had to store, uh, thousands of the cars for like two to three years just to be able to sell out their inventory of them. And they stored them underground in these like, you know, temperature controlled salt mines where they wouldn't,

I don't know if it was a salt mine, but it was, it was an underground sort of storage area that would keep them, you know, so they wouldn't rust and they wouldn't, you know, go through whatever. But it took them two to three years to sell that car because it was so awful.

And that was, and they kind of used that to hide the cars, you know, they weren't sitting on lots. And it was, it was really interesting to me how, how, how bad that was and what example of that is. One thing you do talk about your book is of course, marketing and content marketing in today's digital world. Yesterday they released the new chat GPT 4.0. There'll probably be, next year, a robot explaining what that is

and taking over the show. And I won't be here. I'll be relegated to, I don't know, some sort of Terminator basement living under the urban community that you see in the movies. But until then, let's talk about chat GPT and what are some of your thoughts on that content marketing? Well, I mean, certainly for the content world, it is a game changer. It's going to affect a lot of people. Because I work with so many different marketing departments around the world, I've already had people telling me things like,

let me give an example of things I've heard, Chris. I had this one manager come to me and say, you know, Marcus, I've got this writer who is good at researching the facts and coming up with a decently written piece of content, but their content doesn't have much soul. It doesn't have really that tone that really represents our brand very well as a writer, and we got to edit it do you think i should fire the person and just use chat gbt instead now that was a really interesting question because the answer to that chris if i'm being honest is probably so because what chat gbt does well it answers questions well in the way that you do it especially if you're using 4.0 if you're using the paid service like i do like it will do a lot the way that you do it, especially if you're using 4.0, if you're using the paid service like I do.

It will do a lot of things. It will do that very well. Here's what it doesn't do well. It doesn't tell your customer experiences or stories well. And it doesn't necessarily do well, and you got to prompt it a lot, but it doesn't necessarily do well to humanize the way you sound. And let me give an example of that.

If I'm writing an article, if I ask ChatGPT, could you write an article on how much does an in-ground swimming pool cost? It could do that just fine. It could do it in 1,500 words. Now, what it's not going to do, it's not going to sound like this. And let's assume this is the first paragraph to the piece of content that we're writing. First paragraph might sound like this. So if you're looking for a pool right now, surely you're asking yourself, all right, be honest, how much is this thing really going to cost me? Like how much am I actually going to spend? Well, in this article here, what we're going to do is we're going to explain to you

all the factors that drive the cost of an in-ground swimming pool. We're going to talk about what drives it up, what drives it down, experiences we've had with customers in the past, what they spent, and by the end, hopefully, you'll have a great sense as to what it's going to cost you. Now, that is how you sound human online, and ChatGPT does not do that well yet. And so if you're going to be producing content and standing out, you better sound like that instead of sounding like I could have had a machine produce the thing. So let me ask you this because this is an important tie-in to what we've talked about on the show here so far and your book. Um, are, is trust going to be a big factor in the future between, you know, like when, when people see what I write, maybe on Facebook or, or, you know, wherever I write something on the chrisvossshow.com, we do reviews, things like that. Are people going to start, is there going to become a premium on, is this a human content

or is this not? And I'll give you a follow-up example. I know that I'm kind of lengthening this question but i'm gonna do it anyway because fuck it um like when i wrote my book like people trying to find somebody who could write in my voice or could edit in my voice and and keep my voice uh in in the book was important because i had a few editors that sent me what they edited and i'm like that doesn't sound anything like me yeah yeah and my audience knows how what an idiot i am

clearly as we mentioned before and so a certain aspect of people like that they like the human nature of it uh there's a human nature to when you call somebody now and talk to them they're like holy shit i'm talking to a human being instead of just texting uh this is really weird there's almost like a novelty to it. So is that really what we're going to become where maybe people are going to learn to decipher between chat GPT, AI bots, and real humans, and there's going to become a premium on that? No, I don't think so. Oh, wow. In fact, what I think is already happening is so right now, you take my book, They Ask, You Answer. I could take any

chapter. I could input it into ChatGPT, and I could say, I want you to start writing exactly to the voice and style of what I'm inputting right here. And it can match that quite decently. I mean, it's pretty dang good right now. And so i don't think we're going to be able to tell in the future i think for a short period of time chris we're probably going to be able to tell but there's already a whole lot of content and i'm not talking about just the written word here brother i'm talking about a lot of visual too i think there's going to be entire movies created with ai and we will not have known just like there's been a lot of things that have happened with movies that were ai that we didn't know i mean just let's look at it for a second

how many times have you watched a movie that had a green screen and the person had no idea it was green screen was being used yeah that happens all the time all the time and that's freaking just a green screen right and so the point is that we're going to constantly like it's going to it's all going to mesh together for the most part we're not going to be able to tell the difference especially if the person is good at using the ai is that going to be different let me play devil's advocate with that um is that going to be different let me play devil's advocate with that um is that going to be different though because like with movies we go we kind of go there for fantasy we go there to suspend animation reality for the most part we know it's acting um i mean there's i'm

there may be people that you know i did this but maybe younger generation you know i can tell a lot of times i know all time, the difference between green screen, but is the difference though, I mean, because we're seeing that as act as entertainment and we, we make it, we make a choice to suspend reality. When I look at Amazon reviews,

I can tell the bots. Like I've had, I've had people that have more reviews, the Chris Voss show, and they have like 30 episodes on their podcast. And I can go, clearly, it's really easy to figure out that they hired one of these bot companies that is always hitting you up on LinkedIn to go make fake comments on their podcast. I can tell the difference. But maybe most people aren't that savvy.

I don't know. But that also assumes that the bots aren't going to get better at sounding very human with the reviews that they do because truth is there were probably some bot reviews that you have read that you weren't sure others that you read that were bot and you thought they were human and then a bunch of others that sucked right and you're like i mean it's a bot and so all these things are only going to get better now listen it's just not very exciting to me like i don't celebrate this stuff yeah like i think there's nothing better than like the human element you know what i'm saying but i'm also an extreme realist because i learned a long time ago that the marketplace doesn't really

care about my feelings they don't yeah it's just crazy how that works right they also don't really care about my personal opinions like i might say i don't really like that yeah but does it matter to the marketplace marketplace is going to do what the marketplace does right there's no different than somebody says well let's say there's a service-based business and they say i don't really want to talk about cost and price on my website because I just want to wait till I'm having a conversation with them. That's fine, but it just pisses people off if you don't do it and they end up leaving you. And oftentimes you're going to convert way more, like scientifically, way more if you are willing to at least address the subject to a degree on your website. We know that because

we have all the data. Yet people all the time say, that's just not the way that I want to do it. In my mindset, as somebody that's now in a business for 23 years, roughly, it's like, Marcus, you got to let your opinions go. And you got to focus on what is the marketplace? What does it want? What is it asking for? And the more we do that, the better off generally we are. All right. Well, I'm going to go have a good cry that the marketplace doesn't care about my feelings. And then I'll probably feel better tomorrow and I'll get on with it. That's right.

It's a healthy activity. In a world that we live in of emotionalism, I don't know. It seems like everything is trying to be about people's feelings and their feels. Feels over reals. That seems to be the nature of what we're doing now uh there's so much there that that's at least a three-hour podcast if not you know on the problem with feelings it's like i you know i get i get like this heart-centric leadership and other things that get thrown at me and i'm like whatever man i know i don know. I don't, I mean, yeah.

I mean, you care about people, but I mean, I'm not, I don't want to sit there and be a bleeding heart leader. Um, well, what's interesting about that, Chris, a lot of people that write those books have never actually had employees. Uh, that's, what's so interesting, uh, you know, about it, you know, it's like you say, you say this, but have you ever actually done it? And this is not a – let me give you an example. And it's not a knock on Simon Sinek, but let me just give you an example. He wrote the famous book Start With Why. Everybody knows it.

Let me tell you what. Let's say you go present to old school sales team a CRM and say, listen, I expect everybody to start using this CRM. Here's why you're going to use the CRM. Here's why it matters so much. Guess what? 90% still ain't going to do it, and you started with all the why. They won't do it until you say, and oh, by the way, you won't get paid unless you enter the data into the CRM.

Now, all of a sudden, they're going to do it. There's no start with why. The why is if I don't do this, I ain't going to get paid. So the point is, the point is the point is and i'm not again that's not a knock on the author okay the reality is it's like a lot of the subjects we talk about are are nice twos but they don't really live in reality of human psychology yeah and there's a lot of reverse you know i i'm a big fan of tom peters and and he shaped a lot of my business yeah yeah but about half of his stuff was great and the other half about bankrupt to me um and and there's a lot of reverse engineering that

authors do when they look at i mean even myself when they look at business and they try to deconstruct what made facebook successful or you know whatever the hell is uh you know one of his big principles was was uh if you trust people implicitly with very powerful stuff, they will do a really good job. So he used an example of nuclear physicists and people who work in nuclear plants, and if you trust them well enough, they'll do their job. No, they just probably don't want to die in a meltdown and see their families in the morning.

And it turns out giving people implicit trust probably doesn't always work. When you've had thousands of employees like you and I probably have, you can't just wear your heart out of sleep. Dude, if you go meet with a hundred small business owners and you say to them, how many of you have had an employee steal or embezzle from you

since you've been in business? You're going to see at least 25% of the room raise their hand at a bare minimum. I could write four books on that. That's exactly right. So when you actually live the life instead of writing about it,

it's a very, very different game. And it's like, no, you should not trust implicitly because then otherwise you're going to get burned. Now, the idea is to find people you can trust and yes, empower your people 100%, but trusting implicitly in business oftentimes is a road to disaster. Yeah, you're going to feel some pain there.

There was one time where I probably had about five books in me from all the employee stories I had. Let's talk about that, tuning into a business. You talk in the book about how to achieve a buy-in at your company uh with uh embracing content uh culture content and video let's touch on that a little bit well people like change they just don't like it and um yeah you know how it is and what's interesting too you know how it is. And what's interesting too, you know, about it is the way that I wrote, they ask you answer. It was a pure, it's meant to be a mirror that forces you to see how you've dealt with this chris let me speak and they'll say oh marcus i'm so excited about this i want to do they ask you answer and they run and they try to tell their team hey y'all we need to be addressing all these questions and we got to be more transparent we got to be more honest and everybody's like no i'm not really really feeling that that's because you can

be a prophet to the world but nobody's going to listen to you in your hometown it's the same reason why i can go into that company as an outside source and teach a workshop and they're like wow this was great we should do this the CMO, the marketing person was like, what the heck are you talking about? I've been saying this for five years. It's the same thing. I tell my kids something, they don't really care. But if their friends tell them, they're like, hey dad, I got this thing. I'm like, I told you that like seven times already. This is like as human as it gets. So you got to be really, really careful when you're trying to get buying from something. People tell me all the time, what should I do? And as an author, you could appreciate this

one, Chris. I tell people, listen, do not give your boss your opinion on all the things you just heard from me. Go to your boss and say, would you be willing to read this book? As my manager, would you be willing to read this book and have a discussion with me about it? Any manager worth their salt, any boss worth their salt is going to say, yeah, because that's an unusual proposition. And then when they say yes, you say, great, can we have a discussion about it when you're done? That's it. That's it. That's how you get behind from leadership. Then you have to start to teach the team, okay, here's the impact. Here's what it's going to be, the what, the how, the when, the where, the why. Here's what your role is going to be, the impact on you individually,

the impact on you collectively. And even after all that, even after all that, leader still got to lead. Leader got to say, and this is how we're going to roll. So how do you buy in if you're the boss and you're the leader and you want your employees to do it? Do you have them read the book first too as well? Well, generally speaking, we want them to see the trends and analyze themselves. How are you, in this case, changing as a buyer? What do you expect? Are our customers really any different? The answer is no, they're not different. In terms of the way we've evolved online, the fact that we're more

impatient, the fact that we're vetting companies to death, the fact that we really demand to have things, we want to get those answers. We don't want to talk to a salesperson until we're good and ready. There's a recent stat that came out, Chris, really interesting. 33% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience, right? And for millennials, that number is 44%. And so this is one of those things, again, it's like all these trends that we're seeing, it's critical that the team knows, accepts them to be true. And once they accept them to be true, starting to live in the solution versus saying,

well, I'm not sure if we can deal with, no, no, no. We're going to live in the solution. How are we going to solve this problem? We can't ignore the thing. We can't be the ostrich with our head in the sand, right? We can't be left behind like happens with so many stinking companies in our space so those are just some of the ways we do it we always suggest some type of starting you know training workshop fireside whatever that thing is that that helps your team truly understand the

what the how the when the where the why the whole nine and then though you've got to actually do the thing without excuse there you go you know you bring up a good point and and uh let me i'm going to set aside the question i have for the audience and then uh i i want to touch on just what you said is how important is it for the uh team to understand the who are where and why instead of just barking commands like i do yeah i think you know this is where to me you know it's similar to what are so what we talked about earlier i am um i'm of the of the opinion that there needs to be a singular chef in the kitchen that's ultimately making the call that it should not be full democracy on the menu but yet input is uh celebrated right and and that's that's the that's the general feel if we for example don't have the hearts of the team in the initiative there's a good chance that they're

just not going to give it their all. They might just go through the numbers, go through the motions, but they're not going to really put their heart and soul into the thing and add to it, like ideate and come up with even greater ideas than the thing that you even presented them with. This is why also, though, I think part of a great leader is to induce self-discovery in their team anyway, that if you're really, really great at communicating, you don't have to tell your team exactly what to do. If you ask the right questions, they're going to say what needs to be done. The key is just making them think enough to say, you know, here's what we have to do.

The best leaders make the teams think, and by making them think and asking the hard questions, they start to live in the solution, and they start to come up with the ideas that the leader, him or herself, could have said, but instead wanted to make sure that the team owned it as well. So basically, the thing I've been doing where I just point out what's wrong with them, instead of letting themselves discover it and maybe that's bad yeah that that uh that sometimes has uh diminishing returns but we all have our own journey there chris right yeah well i'm on one but i'm gonna take your advice from your book and what you're teaching me here to go on my own self-discovery to learn what an idiot i am that seems to be a callback joke so far this this show uh that I'm an idiot. But I mean,

we've all been there, right? We've all been there making me aware that I'm, nevermind. It's all about me. I don't know what the idiot is talking about today. One thing you talked, you mentioned earlier that I want to come back to that I'd set aside. Well, my audience didn't know that I didn't forget it but you you talked about how people should approach the sales and marketing process for how would i personally want to be marketed to um referencing tom peters uh i guess he needs he owes me a check at this point um there was a there was an interesting story i think it came from him uh so my bad if it if it wasn't from him there's an old story of a it was, it was a TV dinner company.

I don't know, Banquet or one of those ones, but they made TV dinners. And they couldn't figure out why their sales suddenly started declining. And they're like, well, why are sales going to the tube? And the CEO made the decision that they were going to start serving at the board meetings of the company. They were going to start serving the tv dinners instead of you know whatever they were having buffet shipped in for the thing getting interesting and yeah within about five minutes of eating their own tv dinners they were wondering why the sales had dropped they realized why the sales dropped because they were awful they tasted

awful and they just they just looked bad and you know just the whole thing of a TV dinner, if you ever had one of those when you were in college. And so that was their awakening. And they realized that being forced to eat their own dog food every day, if you will, that they realized it wasn't as good. So they improved the quality of the food and sales improved. And so, you know, you can kind of feel that when you get on customer service calls where, you know, the cable company is probably a good famous one. We can kick around, you call the cable company and you can tell that that poor agent is kind of locked in and what they have to

deal with and what they have to serve. And if they had to serve you, they'd probably do it differently. And, and you can, you kind of get that feeling sometimes when I deal with people at lower levels of customer service, and you can tell there's some sort of tier there. You know, you have to ask for a manager sometimes to go full Karen on something. But, you know, that's something more people should ask. You know, like, are we marketing the way that we would want to be marketed to? Yeah, it's the golden rule of marketing, right?

It's do unto others, market unto others as you would want them to market unto you uh communicate with others as you would want them to communicate with you message others as you'd want them to message with you you know we want people to be honest we want people to be frank let me give you an example a classic one one that pretty much of those listening to this, maybe one out of thousands are going to say, yeah, I've already done that, Marcus. That is, everybody listening to this, you should have a section of your website, a page of your website that talks about who you're not a good fit for. It's very, very powerful.

And it has a very strong influence on a prospect. Because the moment you're willing to say what you're not is the moment you become dramatically more attractive to who you are a good fit for. But how many people do that? Almost everybody just says, this is why we're awesome. But that's not what's so attractive from a psychological basis. And so when we say, really message them, talk to them as you yourself would want to be treated. You want someone to tell you, listen, here's who this is for. But at the same time, if you're this, this, and this, this ain't a good fit for you.

There you go. I mean, we get hundreds of people that apply to the Chris Foss Show podcast. We appreciate that. But there's a lot that aren't a fit for the show. And a lot of times we just don't reply because it's too massive. But, you know, some people are insistent, and they tell us they love the show or they bought my book. And I'm like, well, I'll write it back, and I'll say, you know, if you send me a book, I'll autograph you.

But what you're pitching just doesn't fit the format of the show. And there's certain people we don't want on the show. You know, we have Simon Schuster and big deals with all the big publishers who send us the brilliant authors on the show. And every now and then, there's somebody who's really toxic in the public eye and they're very toxic people. Usually politicians that we, we just say no. And,

uh, but for the most part, we take a lot of people, but we, we like really high profile people on the show because it gives us good SEO and stuff. But you give me a good thing. I just wrote this down in my notes here,

uh, make a page on who's, uh, not good to have on the show, who shouldn't be on the show, or we don't like on the show. Yeah, who we're not a good fit for. It goes back to, sometimes I'm speaking to a particular industry and somebody will say to me, yeah, our internet leads aren't very good. I'm like, no, actually your leads are as good or as bad as the messaging that brought them there right and so if if leads have a quality problem it is purely a messaging problem that's root cause cause is always almost messaging they should have put

this in glenn gary glenn ross when don lemon who's the lemon anyway um yeah they should have put that in the movie. It's not the leads are bad. They have bad messaging. That's exactly right. Alex Baldwin pulls the brass balls out of the thing. ABC, always be closing as long as the leads have good messaging. But that brings a good point because you constantly have to dial in your messaging. I've had times with our advertising, just changing a line or two,

it's all of a sudden something will explode. And you're just like, it's crazy. Yeah. It's the psychology that split testing and all those things, you know, big deal. Speaking of books and all,

I think one of the best on website, general, just website messaging is story brand, Donald Miller, just a world, world-class book on, you know, just a world-class book. What's interesting, and this is a fun little test anybody can do with their website right now, is who's the hero of your homepage?

Quick activity. All you have to do is this. Count how many times you use the pronouns we, our, versus you, your on your homepage. Okay. And so what most companies have on their homepage is 80, 20, 80% of the pronouns they use are we are 20% are you, your. Whereas if you want to make the visitor, the prospect, your hero, it should be the other way around because it should all be should all be about you your so in other words you the visitor you have this problem you have this need

you have this question it ain't all about us they want to read all about you they go to your about page but generally speaking for most businesses around the world 99 it should be an 80 20 split and it should be you your as the 80 wow you know a lot of people do that the about page is a grandstanding page oh we've been in business for 40 years and blah blah blah and you know we we crap gold bricks and you know we're just whatever but you know um i want in fact i need to look at our you're giving me a lot of data here. I'm making a lot of notes here that I need to go look at my stuff. But, no, that's brilliant. Because, again, you know, are you customer-centric or are you self-ego-centric where you're, you know, you're lording around about your business?

100%. Who's the hero? That's why I'm brilliant. Who's the hero? Who's the hero? God's got to ask yourself, who's the hero? Who's the hero? Who's it's, it's no different than, you know, they have found in sales calls that, you know, Gong has done a bunch of studies because they've got this incredible call

recording software. And they have found that if you mention your company name more than six times on the sales call, closing rates go down by, I think it's roughly 20% because each additional time you mention your company name, it's all about us. It's all about us. It's all about us. And so, you know, this is amazing how literally you can take the same application from a marketing perspective with your website. You can apply it to what is a sales call. And it's, again, goes back to psychology and messaging.

Yeah. And it probably should be pointed out that if even though if your messaging is customer centric you've got to walk the walk and talk the talk like we've all we've all been on those cable company calls where they go we care about you we're playing the same 30 second music loop from the 80s over and over again and you'll listen to that for the next half an hour but we're going to tell you how much we care about your call and how important it is to us while you wait for 30 minutes to 60 so you know there's the other side of that too as well if they if people fall through about trying to be customer centric but no that makes sense i mean i read a lot of about

pages and uh you know usually when we interview somebody or we have a company interview or co interview we'll use like their about me page or something uh we'll probably use yours when for the book on the uh web page and so um you know i i've read a lot of them and yeah a lot of them are me me me me me no i'm not saying yours is and i would start like i said start with the home page that's the most critical one even just your your headline. The headline on a homepage, so fascinating, the majority of businesses, the headline has to do with the business itself versus the visitor. And so you want to have the headline about them. Sub-headline is about them again. It just keeps going in that direction. So the homepage is the most important. This is where you want to do that test. And you know, the lead-in for the Chris Voss show talks about, you know, the brilliant authors, the people we have on the show. It's always interesting to me because I'll be, you know, somebody will come and tell me about how they like the show, the podcast. And I'll be like, oh, that's great, man. What was an author you loved

or someone we had on the show? And they go, well, we like you. You're really funny. And I'm like, and to me, I really have a hard time with it because I love the guests we have on our show. I love the brilliance, the intelligence. I mean, I'm clearly out of it after 13 years of brilliance and intelligence. I mean, I know, I think I blew through it in the first episode and, uh, I'm just not that impressed with me or I like the funny every now and then. And, and we do good jokes, but to me, the juice for me is the, is sitting front row with brilliant people like yourself and talking about these issues and, and hopefully coming up with good questions.

But to me, the guest is really the feature of the show for me, but a lot of people say they like me and I have no idea why I'm sorry. I maybe i'm just sick of me but it's interesting um i don't know my my whole thing is bringing a great guest on the show and featuring them and and just loving the data and knowledge that they bring that i certainly couldn't sit here and do it for half an hour every day um but you know what's interesting about that i was thinking about when you were saying that chris is and i think every business this goes back to knowing who you are knowing what you're not i always say the happiest day in the life of the business isn't when they figure out who they are it's when they know who they're not because that's when they can say no to someone and um you you

know just like i do that you have a particular style. Now, your style really resonates with certain people. And other folks might not so much. So you had to make a choice early on. Am I going to water down my style and therefore not really attract those people that are naturally aligned with my vibe? Or am I just going to make it lukewarm across the board and hopefully everybody will like me and that would have served you terribly right if you've done that you made the decision i'm going to alienate a certain group of potential listeners so as to become dramatically more attractive to another group the group that aligns with my vibe that explains why five people listen to the show. Exactly. But those five freaking love you, dude.

They love you. And it's mostly my mom and my stepmom. But it's all the same. You got to be willing to let go of a certain percentage of your audience. That's true. You have to do the thing. It's interesting to me.

To me, I think what I'm trying to say is I approach the show as more customer-ric you know my audience hey here's somebody brilliant here's what they can learn oh yeah and that's where we try and develop the comedy and the and the uh questions and hopefully i come up with good questions but uh you know we have this discussion but but to me that's the real central form of it i mean i'm all about the guests on the show but and maybe that's i don know, whatever makes people fucking happy. Run with it, people. That's all I have to say about that.

Anything more we want to tease out? You and I could talk for hours about this, Marcus. This has been wonderful to have you on. Anything more you want to tease out of the book or what you do, speaking and consulting and all that good stuff? Yeah, well, I would just say, in terms of the book, make sure you get it against the Ask, You Answer. If you apply, it's going to change your life um and you probably find uh you'll have more action items

slash ideas slash takeaways than arguably any book you've ever read in that genre of of marketing website etc so check it out one little just last little tip that i would say is, you know, people oftentimes say, so where should, you know, tell me what platforms should I be focusing it on? And I've heard some really crappy advice out there. And one of the advices that I've heard that drives me insane, Chris, is be everywhere, which I think is just about the stupid advice, stupidest advice of all time, because who in the heck can be everywhere unless you've got a team that's like really big and allows you to be everywhere so it goes back to if you try to

be a jack of all trades you'll be a master of none so if you tried to be a jack of all social media trades you'll probably be a master of what if you're jackass of all trades? That's my venue. Then you've got something. You're cooking with gas, brother. Choose your lane and dominate that lane and then add more lanes, but don't try to be everywhere because that ain't going to work, y'all. You can't put freeways over everywhere.

That's a good analogy. Freeways over subdivisions. They've been really insightful, Marcus. It's been wonderful to have you on the show and learn more about what you've done. Thank you very much for coming on. Yeah, my pleasure. There you go. And give us your.com so we can round those out and get people to check out your, and order your book up too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just go to Amazon. You'll find they ask, you answer. Make sure you get the

revised version. That's me and that's my voice on Audible as well. marcussheridan.com, and my agency is impactplus.com. There you go. And it has a lot of trust factors as well, almost 700 four-and-a-half-star reviews up there on average. So very good. It's got the trust review factors we talked earlier about before. So order the book, folks, whatever fine books are sold. They ask, you answer.

A revolutionary approach to inbound sales, content marketing, and today's digital consumer. Great aspects we talked about today. Thanks for Marcus for coming on the show. Thanks, Madis, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss,

youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, the big LinkedIn newsletter, of course, and the Chris Voss show over on LinkedIn. We love LinkedIn. It's doing some great things these days. Check it out as well. Yeah, it's awesome. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys

next time.