Welcome to the bring on success program everybody I am Jim Klauck I have a great guest today he's an author he's a speaker he's an entrepreneur he's a business owner and last but not least besides a fisherman he is a husband and
father Marcus Sheridan welcome to the program it's real to be here Jim we're gonna have a good day we are going to have a great day a fantastic day I'm living the dream I know you are we had a chance to connect a few weeks ago in Orlando and it was a pleasure meeting you there yeah yeah great time in Orlando and you know it's that time of year getting around and speaking to a lot of different audiences and you know my favorites are the blue collar ones I've done a bunch
of those uh so far this year so it's great it's great to see some of the movements out there too it's crazy just last week I was with um um a group of blue collar folks and they said so let's talk about Ai and I was like I never thought in 2023 I was going to be talking about AI with blue collar but it's what's up that's what's happening man so a lot of things happen in this world right now actually when you spoke at the soft wash a palooza conference somebody had brought up chat GPT yeah and I'm like oh all right Marcus catch the ball and run with it and you did great I mean because that's the big thing now I mean everyone's trying this thing out right and you know I've heard that maybe Google's going to have to really catch up I've even heard rumors are going to go out of business but they probably won't well they've been working on something uh for a while and they've they actually have a system uh it's it's in some beta and they've got some testers out there already I mean you know what what happened though is is Google's trying to be a little bit more conservative in terms of launch Chat GPT comes out first to Market really with something aggressive like like well chat GPT and and then suddenly
you know there's more boardroom meetings happening at Google over the last 60 days than there have been over the last
like five years right but that's but that's what we see in the history of
businesses again and again and again oftentimes we don't move until we're forced to move
by our competition and the great ones and not that Google isn't great as a
business I mean whatever you want to say about them I mean they their their results speak for themselves right in
terms of the impact they've had on on the world and on our lives and you know their verb for Pete's sake right but
thing about it is that if you can be proactive as a business and not wait for
your competitors to do this that whatever the thing might be you know I was I was uh just and I know we're
jumping ahead here but I was had this uh a couple uh roofers come to me a roofing
conference the other day and they said Marcus we heard you like three years ago and we put a pricing calculator on our
website which they were one of the first in the entire Roofing industry to put a pricing calculator on their website uh
and most people listen to this right now would say there's no way a roofer could put a pricing calculator on the website and of course they did it and they're
killing it because of it now what happens though is they do it and then two others do it and then four others do
it and then it becomes the norm in the space and it gets to the point where if you don't have one well you're not in
the game just like there's a lot of people that resisted even a website right in 2000 and of course today you
you you would never think about a business without a website and we're getting that way with a lot of these other elements of let's call it the the
buyer's Journey like calculators for example yeah you know what's interesting is you brought up something right now
that I talk about all the time if you go back and I started my business check a
pro back into 2005. back in 05 there were home service companies that were just getting a website and if you go
back prior to that everyone had to get a fax machine at some point they had to get an email they had to get a website
social media and now podcasting and videos are huge and it's it's just
amazing and if someone doesn't do video if they're not doing podcasting and that
type of thing if they're not educating their customer then they are way behind and this is a
great segue to they ask you answer your book why don't you give us a little history of what
happened back in 2008-ish with your swimming pool company river pools yeah
so I started a swimming pool company in in 2001 out of college with a couple buddies and things were going okay for
us we were fighting to grow it but then 2008 2009 we've got the crash and we
legitimately were going out of business I talked to a few different Consultants they all said I should file bankruptcy
but the problem was as you know Jim and many of your listeners know business was tied to my houses and so my home or my
business partner's homes and so I lost my home if we would have lost the business and we said we've got to figure
out a way how to how to save our our company and that's when I started and by
the way that's the beauty of pain and suffering it forces us to do things that otherwise we wouldn't do right it's
always when we're in The Valleys of life right to that we find some of the greatest Innovations and ideas and we'd
pull it out of us sorry to interrupt you but yes yeah when I mean when you're down on the ground getting your teeth
kicked in you realize is that I am way greater than I thought I was and when
things were good and you're riding the great economy wave and you're like oh this is easy you really don't appreciate
what you can do when you've been beaten up like what happened to you guys in 08. yeah it's that ntl phenomena nothing to
lose right and so when you got nothing to lose suddenly the world is your oyster and so I started to read about
the internet and because I had recognized how I was changing how I was starting to use the internet for
everything and how I was starting to vet company so much more and become more and more informed as a buyer right so as I
was researching online and seeing all these fancy phrases like inbound marketing and content marketing and social media blogging whatnot what I
heard in my simple pool guy mine was you know Marcus if you just obsess over your customers questions worries
fears issues concerns and you're willing to address those on your website through
text through video through audio right then you just might save your business so I said well shoot if there's one
thing I can do is I can obsess over those questions worries Furious issues concerns I can address those on our website that's what I'm going to do
we're going to become the best teachers in the world when it comes to in our case fiberglass swimming pools and so
over the next two years every single night literally every single night I'd sit there and write an article or
produce a video on my website after everybody in my house had gone to bed and uh addressing a question a worry a
fear and we became the most traffic swimming pool builder website in the world
and it saved the business and I saw that it was working so well that I started to write about what I and what we were
doing as a company and eventually that would become a book called they ask you answer and they ask you answer it's now been read a couple
hundred thousand times around the world and it's been embraced by a lot a lot of businesses a ton in the Home Services
space it does extremely well because if you look at it anything that involves
heavy decision making and research um
and especially works well when you sell in the home
they ask you answer it's just a home run for this and so they ask you answer has
been embraced by lots of people uh within different Home Improvement home services and uh it's very very
exciting it's very cool to see and I'm getting crazy case studies almost every day now from people around the world
I'll tell you what's really amazing about this and correct me if I'm wrong but you're the Pioneer in this so when
you were desperate back in 08 and I've I've read your book four times
I'm a big fan right I I mean I I'm telling you we have adopted your system
um and and we basically subscribe to it if you will for for our clients and it you know it just makes sense so back in
2008 here you are you're you're scratching and clawing at anything you
did not know your investment at three o'clock in the morning by writing articles and blogging and and recording
videos was going to pay off did you I didn't know but I knew that was the
only real in my mind option at that point we we didn't really have a plan B right it was like okay I can either lose
my home I could stay up late and I can start to do these things which is also why I don't always have a lot of empathy
for people that tell me you know we don't have the time to do any of this stuff Marcus because I can't really what it is is you don't you're not you're not
enough pain yet you start to feel that pain suddenly we find the time to do that which we value right I mean that's
just the way that that life works I didn't know but within about six months I knew I was on to something really
special and within a year I knew my life would never be the same what is inbound marketing for the people
who are watching and listening to this they hear about it my audience and my
clients are blue collar contractors for the most part so they're really trying
to get up to speed and stay on top of technology so they've heard about this
what does that mean inbound yeah in simplest terms it's the opposite of outbound which
was the traditional way old school way that we would get in front of people and
that's that's really the phrase of inba of outbound is you're jumping in front you're interrupting people and so in
that in this case outbound back in the day was radio and it was TV these were the commercials that you didn't really
want to hear but they just were part of the program it was the you know the placement in some type of publication
whatever that thing was so all those things were were outbound inbound is
when they're looking for you and they come to you you're not interrupting them
and so the best analogy that I could give you is the classic middle school
dance and at the middle school dance there's uh we'll just call it two types
of guys and girls too but it's two types of guys there's the guy that has the
girls around him and he can choose who he dances with or is there's the guy
that's tapping every girl on their shoulder and they're just really hoping they're not the one that he he's gonna
tap right now which one has a better experience at the dance well the one that can pick and choose has a better
experience at the dance and so the idea is we as businesses attract those that
we are aligned with so they don't feel interrupted by us because we've given them something and that something
generally is knowledge it's information it's Comfort it's understanding right because they're going through this thing
called a buyer's Journey which by the way it used to be called a a sales process but now it's clearly a buyer's
Journey because they're clearly in charge of how this game is played anybody that thinks otherwise is sorely
mistaken so they're going through this journey just like you and I we Vet companies all the time and whoever's
willing to feed us the most whoever's who is willing to be more honest more transparent than anybody else that's who
we're probably going to be most aligned with and then therefore that's who we're probably going to reach out to fill out that form on that website call them
directly that's an inbound lead and they're closing percentages of course are much higher one of which is because
they really want to have a conversation second of which is they're more informed than your traditional outbound lead
I love inbound so for everyone who needs a little clarification you much rather have
someone not be sold by you you rather have them buy from you you do not want
to sell people you want to inform educate be available yeah and spread those little seeds out
there and then when that buyer that prospective buyer decides that they've
sold themselves on your service and products they will then contact you after reading about you watching your
videos listening to podcasts and that's the beauty of it we all rather have someone buy from us
than us have to sell you are almost a hundred percent more able to close when
someone contacts you after they've spent a tremendous amount of time researching you as a matter of fact in your bookmark
as you talk about there's a couple of examples but you talk about people who spent hours researching your pool
company and it was like a slam dunk talk about that well it's interesting we have
found this in pretty much every industry that we've worked with um and because I've got an agency that
helps companies do they ask you answer so we've got incredible amounts of data and what I found with my pool companies
what we found again and again is that there's this Tipping Point number of let's call it content consumption that
if somebody consumes a certain amount of content on your website the the there's a hockey stick growth
when it comes to the closing rates and so in our case with the pool company what I found was if somebody read 30 or
more pages of our website before the initial sales appointment in the home they would buy 80 of the time
now if they didn't hit that magical number of 30 the closing rates were roughly 25 and 25 is the average closing
rate in the swimming pool industry one out of four homes you go into will turn into a closed deal and so we could go
from one out of four basically to four out of five simply by ensuring that they had
consumed in this case viewed watch listened to 30 pieces of our content and so that's when we said oh my goodness we
got to change the way we sell so we got very very intentional about the way we sell and of course we call that today
assignment selling and assignment selling is something that you can Google really easily and find a bunch if you're
listening to this right now on it but especially in the Home Services space it's it's stinking magical and the way
it works Jim is you know oftentimes Prospect reaches out to us
we might you know ask them a few questions and then we say okay I'm coming out to give you a quote but we
haven't really done what we need to do to make sure they are well informed well
educated they understand the basics because the mistake that we oftentimes make and this is in its prolific in Home
Services as you know is we spend way too much in the home way too much time teaching not enough time selling right
in the sense that ideally by the time you get to the home when I say selling what I'm referring to is
they they already know the basics because they had heard it from you they had seen it from you they've already
learned it from you so they're not asking you things so like so what is it what is the difference between a
fiberglass and a concrete pool what the heck if somebody's asking that question they're probably not buying that day because they should already know the
answer to that question that's my job as a salesperson to make sure they know that before I go to the home so every
person that's listening to this right now that's in sales if I said to them are there certain questions that when
someone asks you this question you know they're not ready to buy every single one that's been in the game for any
period of time would say oh absolutely there's just indicators that they're not ready to buy if somebody says to me well
how much does a fiberglass pool cost like I've got no sense for it like what what can I expect to spend they're
probably not ready to buy because they have no sense for things you know it and like I said if if somebody doesn't have
know the difference between the types of in-ground swimming pools they're probably not going to buy so they should
know these things and so assignment selling ensures that they know these things by if I'm having a conversation
with you Jim and let me just give you a quick example of how it sounds because anybody that's listening to this could do this and it's going to make a big
difference on you so let's say hypothetically Jim you call me up I'd say you'll Marcus I'm checking out your
website could you could you come out to my house this Friday and give me a quote for a swimming pool or whatever the thing is right and I say sure now it
used to be that I would just go out to the house but understanding the power of these 30 page views and what it does to
the closing rates I would now say something like this you say Marcus can you come out to my house this Friday give me a quote for a pool and I say Jim
I'd love to come out to your house but you're getting ready to spend a lot of money and if you're going to spend a lot of money I know you don't want to make
any mistakes and so as to make sure you don't make any mistakes I'm going to send you two things while we're talking on the phone right now so the first
thing I'm going to send you is a video that shows you in the entire install process of a fiberglass pool going in a
backyard so you're going to see what it looks like the excavation pool going in the ground patio going around to clean up the whole nine and this way when I
come out to your house on Friday you're not going to say to me so Marcus what does this process look like you're already going to know now time out that
just saved me 30 minutes on the sales appointment now the second thing I'm going to send you Jim is a buyer's guide this buyer's guide is great because it's
going to answer a lot of the questions that you have about fiberglass pools that nobody's been and willing or bothered to answer for you online like
should I get a heater with my pool what's the best type of feeder should be gas should it be electric should it heat
and cool my water should it be solar should I get a cover with my pool what's the best type of cover should we match should it be solid should it be solar so
this guide it's a little bit long Jim it's about 30 pages but I promise you it'll be well worth your time Jim will
you take the time to review these things before our appointment on Friday and 90
of the time Jim says yes sure I'd love to and if he does that I know he's going to buy 80 of the time the problem that
most um uh folks salespeople have when they have a sales appointment
they'll say something like hey I've got a couple videos on my website or I got this you know one article it'd be great
if you could give it a look that is a fail now it's nice that you have those but you need to learn to intentionally
integrate them into your sales process and this is the power of the teacher
this is the power of producing great content because the right of he or she who teaches is greater than the rights
of he or she who does not teach and so the fact that I have this Mecca of information on my website allows me to
say to you here's my expectations before I meet with you Jim I want you to read this and I want you to watch this and if
you do that it's going to save us a tremendous amount of time it's going to prevent these mistakes that's called assignment selling everybody should be
doing it very very few are it is so simple but it makes sense and I ...
