And boy has it worked for Sheinkopf. In early 2016, Steve opened a second retail location near Boston, and he did it without any additional advertising.
Simply by obsessing over customer questions, and being willing to answer them better than anyone else in their space, they’ve climbed to the top of their industry.
Once again, a Digital David beats Goliath.
23
The Competition
Now that we’ve discussed the power of the Big 5 in detail, the question, of course, is whether or not your company is willing to address this new way of thinking.
Sadly, despite the overwhelming evidence that has been shown herein, most people and organizations who read this book will not take such a transparent, consumer-centric approach to their sales and marketing efforts.
But the question is, Why?
Why won’t more organizations follow this incredibly simple model of They Ask, You Answer when it’s so very obvious buyers and consumers expect to have this information?
As I’ve consulted with businesses and brands around the world during the past five years, I’ve discovered there are three fundamental factors that dictate whether or not businesses are willing to be world-class listeners and teachers versus taking the opposite approach—a more traditional, closed-minded company-centric model—to growing their businesses.
I call these three factors “The Triangle of Influence”:
The competition
The bad fits
The customer
Imagine an upside-down triangle that has three distinct sections, as shown in Figure 23.1. Each section represents a group that affects whether or not a company is willing to address a particular subject in their sales and marketing process—especially their online one. The top section is the biggest and most influential factor influencing a company’s reluctance to address the major areas of questions, problems, and needs of prospective customers. The middle section is less influential than the top section, and the bottom section is the least influential of all.
Figure 23.1 The Triangle of Influence
Based on what we’ve discussed so far in this book, who do you think is the main group of people (the top section of the triangle) that affects whether or not a company is willing to address the questions—especially the Big 5—of their prospects and customers?
Before we discuss these three sections of the triangle, I am going to let you, the reader, guess where I am going with this. What would you guess is the most influential group of people determining what you will and will not talk about online and off?
Well, if you guessed the competition, you are right. In other words, in chapter 10 when we talked about addressing cost and price on your website, you may have thought to yourself, I can’t possibly do that because the competition will see what’s written and use it against me with buyers.
Then in chapter 13 we discussed problems and issues with your products and services and the importance of talking about these problems. Again, you likely said to yourself, If we openly talk about the pros and cons of our products and services, the competition will use it as a competitive advantage.
In chapter 17 we talked about the importance of comparing products and services (like fiberglass and concrete swimming pools), as well as the need to admit when you’re not the best fit for a prospect. Once again, you may be thinking, I can’t possibly introduce them to alternative solutions to my products and services that my competitors are selling.
And finally, in chapter 19 we talked about addressing the competition directly, as we did with our “Who Are the Best Pool Builders in Richmond, Virginia (Reviews/Ratings)” article With this one, the most controversial and unorthodox of all you may have been thinking, I can’t possibly talk about my competition on my site! If I do, the prospect will learn about the competition and instead of choosing me, they will choose them.
It is for these reasons that the competition is the most influential group affecting what most businesses will and will not address online today.
Think about that for a second.
The same group that has the greatest impact on a business’s willingness to discuss what their prospects and customers want to know is the very group they’re selling against, and the one that is already taking some of their business. In many ways, it’s a case of double jeopardy.
People ask me all the time, “Marcus, if I start doing this—being honest and transparent and answering all these questions—what will happen if the competition sees what I’m doing and they do it, too?
Well, let me give you an example of how this works. Before I started my digital marketing agency and before I started speaking to so many groups and conferences, I was speaking to the swimming pool industry on this subject. So, believe it or not, everything that you have read in this book up to this point I have taught to pool companies all over the country in workshops at annual industry conferences. Even more interesting, many of the attendees of these workshops were the very companies I was competing with on a daily basis at River Pool and Spas in Virginia.
I once did the math and concluded that I had taught the principles you’ve been reading in this book to well over a thousand swimming pool companies.
Based on this fact, how many of these companies do you suppose followed the principles of They Ask, You Answer even half as well as we did at River Pools and Spas?
The answer: One or two . . . maybe.
This is an example of the saying that you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.
And that’s the moral of the story. Well over 90 percent of the time, even though they’ve been taught or shown how to do it, businesses won’t embrace They Ask, You Answer. It makes me sad to say it, but it’s true. They have the knowledge, but they won’t do it for themselves.
Why not? The reason is twofold:
They’re thinking like business owners, not teachers. Teachers see the world differently. That’s just a fact.
They come from a scarcity mentality and don’t believe there’s room on top for everybody.
In my case, I wasn’t afraid my competitors would use the They Ask, You Answer principles; I was afraid they wouldn’t use them.
So I taught the entire swimming pool industry. I wanted to help these companies despite the fact that they were competing for some of my very own customers. As far as I was concerned, truth is truth, and it wasn’t mine to keep.
Furthermore, to me at least, it was just a matter of common sense. And in this case, common sense told me that giving people what they want, as honestly and transparently as possible, was the best way to do business, regardless of its supposed ramifications.
The Bad Fits
The second most influential group that dictates our communication and ability to teach as businesses online and off is more subtle. Oftentimes, we don’t even realize that they have a major impact on things.
Let me give you a specific example of this influential group. If I say to you, “You should address the subject of pricing and costs on your site,” a natural response, without knowing the benefits we’ve discussed would be, “Well, Marcus, if I address the subject of pricing and costs on my site, I will scare customers away.”
Let’s think about this statement.
“I will scare customers away.”
But are they even customers at all? The answer, of course, is no.
Look at it like this: If your products and services start at $50,000, and that person has a true budget of $20,000, do you think he is magically going to come up with an extra $30,000 for your products and/or services?
In most cases, the answer is no. Instead of scaring the person, you’re going to educate him, which brings relief and saves time for all parties involved.
What we are talking about here is being honest enough to allow—that’s right, allow—the prospective customer to discover on their own that they are a bad fit for you.
If you’ve been in business any length of time, you know as well as I do that no
t everybody is a good fit for you. In fact, the most successful companies have a very clear understanding of the fact they aren’t a good fit for everyone and therefore embrace this reality instead of resisting it.
The moment a business thinks it wants to do business with everyone is the moment that business starts to become very, very unhappy. Conversely, one of the happiest moments in the life of any business is the moment that business realizes what it is not, and who is not a good fit for it, and then lives by that awareness.
In fact, if you think about all the “bad customers” you’ve had during this time who were not good fits for you, there’s a very good chance that you realized, before they ever became customers, you were receiving impressions in your gut that told you, This person or company is not a good fit for us.
Notwithstanding that impression, you still did business with them. And the reason for this was that you needed the cash flow at the time.
Then, when things between you and the customer deteriorated and stress mounted, and you stopped enjoying working with them, you got out of bed grumpy and said to yourself, The money isn’t worth it!
This is why, even though it’s important for a business to know what they are, the happiest businesses in the world have a deep understanding of what they are not.
That’s right: the second most influential group that dictates what we do and don’t talk about is made up of the bad fits. We allow those people, who will never become our customers, to dictate our ability to listen, communicate, teach, and help. And it’s a tragedy.
The Customer
The only group that we should allow to dictate what we as businesses do and do not communicate to our customers (both online and off) is also the least influential group: the actual customer.
Yes, the person who is giving us their trust, money, and even referrals is the one we often overlook and ignore.
As you look at the triangle in Figure 23.1, tell me, what’s wrong with the diagram? The natural reaction would be to say, “Marcus, it should be flipped the other way around.”
When I first started teaching these principles, that’s what I thought as well. Then I realized I was completely wrong. There should only be one group inside the triangle: the actual customer, as represented in Figure 23.2
Figure 23.2 The Actual Customer
When all is said and done, they are the only ones who truly matter.
They are the ones who will keep your lights on.
They are the ones who will allow you to live in financial peace.
And no one else.
Until the day your competition is paying your mortgage, and those bad fits who will never become your customers are funding your payroll, I urge you to consider focusing on the only group that truly matters.
24
How They Ask, You Answer Saved River Pools and Spas
At this point, you may be wondering what the final impact of They Ask, You Answer was on River Pools and Spas.
As mentioned at the beginning of the book, in March 2009 we at River Pools and Spas were getting ready to lose our business. After learning about inbound and content marketing, we embraced what we called “They Ask, You Answer,” and brainstormed every single question we had ever been asked by a prospect or customer. Night after night, after having heard multiple questions during the day from prospects, I (along with the help of my business partners) would write articles and produce videos addressing these questions.
When we first started this process, we were getting about two thousand visitors a month, and most of that traffic was coming from pay-per-click traffic on Google. We were spending about $500 every two days, and the money had finally run out.
But within three months of beginning to generate content, our site’s organic (free) traffic began to double. Then, month after month, it just kept getting better.
Although 2009 was our toughest financial year as a company, we managed to survive. Our focus on content and great teaching was just enough to scratch and claw our way to at least keeping the lights on.
By 2010, I could see the work was starting to pay off. Our traffic and leads had exploded. The sales began to pour in.
Fast forward to today:
Today, River Pools and Spas has thousands and thousands of inbound links coming from other sites—even though we never attempted a “link-building” campaign to increase these numbers. This all happened simply because other sites and companies thought our content was useful and helpful enough to link to.
In 2014, our traffic peaked in the month of July with 350,000 visitors to our site.
In July 2015, it reached more than 500,000 visitors.
And in 2016, we crossed the 600,000 visitor threshold.
Today, River Pools and Spas is the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world.
Not only that, but in 2015, because of the tremendous growth, it was a natural progression for us to begin the manufacturing process as well.
Now, instead of just being a small installer of fiberglass swimming pools, we are in the process of developing a base of dealers throughout the United States. Based on where we are today, my guess is that, within the next five to seven years, we will become the largest manufacturer of fiberglass swimming pools in the world.
In conjunction with this, I share a couple of other statistics about River Pools and Spas that may astound you. In 2007, when home values were inflated and anybody could get credit to buy a swimming pool, we did about $4 million in business. In order to do $4 million in business, we had to spend about $250,000 on our advertising and marketing efforts.
In contrast, if you fast-forward to 2014—a time when most swimming pool builders were still dramatically down from the pre-recession time period—we did about $5.5 million in business, and spent roughly $20,000 on advertising and marketing.
So, when people ask me, “Marcus, what will be our return on investment if we follow the principles of They Ask, You Answer?,” I can only laugh. I am someone who has been there and done everything I’m sharing with you. And, everything you have read up to this point in the book saved our company and helped make it what it is today.
Today, when I look back at the crash of 2008, I do it with an incredible sense of gratitude. Those low moments forced me to look outside of myself and the industry, and forced us, as a company, to do things as they had never before been done in the swimming pool space.
What is crazy about all of this is that we are just a small swimming pool installation company in Virginia with about thirty employees, and yet we’re dictating the education of swimming pool shoppers all over the world.
Every day at River Pools and Spas, we receive e-mails from people all over the globe who want us to install their swimming pools.
Even though I am no longer in the swimming pool industry full time, I still receive these e-mails from places as far removed from Virginia as Australia, Europe, and the Virgin Islands. These e-mails often say something along these lines: “Marcus, we just don’t trust our swimming pool contractor. Would you come out and oversee our swimming pool installation?”
Long before I became Marcus the Sales and Marketing Guy, I was turning down these requests, even though people were willing to pay me lots of money just to go out and oversee their swimming pool installation.
Why would I say no if I was being offered so much money to simply be an overseer? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I can’t install a pool. I can’t even turn on our excavator at River Pools and Spas. I am probably the worst pool builder in the world, and believe me, I’m the last person you want to see installing a swimming pool in your backyard.
But what I can do is look at how things are done with our installers (the real experts), ask them about what they’re doing, and explain it in a way so that the average person understands how it is done. Because I am able to distill the facts into simple-to-understand words that pool shoppers find helpful, they naturally think I am one of the foremost authorities in the world.
Someon
e once told me, “It’s dumb not to dumb it down.”
At the time, I had no idea how right they were.
Since that moment, I’ve seen again and again how, when it comes to great marketing and communication, the moment a business or brand tries to sound smart is generally the moment they start to look stupid.
But when you don’t try to sound smart, and instead look to have communion with your listener, that’s when the magic happens. For me, this is my singular goal and obsession as a professional speaker, marketer, and communicator.
My point to you is this: Think like a teacher. Obsess not just over their questions, but the way you answer them. It will make all the difference.
PART II
The Impact of They Ask, You Answer on Sales Teams
Up to this point in the book, much of what we have discussed has to do with the marketing side of They Ask, You Answer. But when all is said and done, getting found on Google and increasing traffic, leads, and trust is just one of the many benefits of creating a company culture of obsessive listening and teaching.
In fact, the biggest benefit to this type of business philosophy has much more to do with selling than anything else.
But this only makes sense. When all is said and done, regardless of the increased traffic and leads great content produces, if you’re not generating new business, the end result is a failure.
As businesses, we must generate a profit. Having personally looked over the cliff called “Bankruptcy,” I can attest to the truthfulness of this statement.
They Ask You Answer Page 10