INBOUND Bold Talks: Marcus Sheridan

All right. Haven't gotten off this stage yet, so I think I'll be the first guy. Right, Steve? All right, so we're going to have a good conversation today. Kathy, long time. It's good to see everybody. We're going to talk today about a subject that I really love about, really love. It's transparency. And I promise we'll end at 10 minutes after. So you have five minutes to get over to the final keynote. Tom Webster, my favorite statistician in the room. Okay, so I want to talk about first. One little email and a big problem, and it's a big problem that applies to you. Now, you might read this email and say it's about pools, and I would argue it's not. It's absolutely about your business. All right, so this email was turned into a blog post. We're going to read the middle part of it. And as we read this, I literally want you to pretend it was sent to you and put your thing in there. This is what it says. As you're no doubt well aware, it's a desert wasteland. When trying to find information on pools, sorting through the Internet for usable information is difficult in the extreme. Of the few forms I found most, most evolve into trolls, arguing gunite vs fiberglass vs vinyl liner over and over and over again. What would help a great deal is to find some kind of unbiased information that explains each pool in detail and then backs off, letting me or the customer make the final decision. The best email I ever received when I was still just a pool guy. So the question is, what was the problem? What was the problem, y'? All? Yes. Yes. It was outbound. Yes. But what was the problem that we see in this experience? Come on. What was the problem? Nobody was objective. And the searcher, the one that was just looking for an answer, could he get what he was looking for? No. At least in a way that made him happy. Is this problem occurring in your industry today? Yes or no? Yes. If you're not saying yes, you're not awake, because it is happening. It's happening in all industries today. My challenge, our challenge is to not allow this to happen within our industry, that you are that one source where they can receive that unbiased information. And I really mean it when I say unbiased. So let's talk about it. The game has changed. Raise your hand and I'm serious. You're all a part of this. This is social speaking. This is not social media. It's social speaking. Okay. Raise your hand if you have grown more Impatient online over the last two years, when you search for stuff. Yes. So the question is why? Go ahead and hold this. Make sure the mic is on somebody. Why? Too much stuff. Too much stuff. It'll be on in a second. Too much stuff. So. But what do you expect? It's okay. They'll come on. What do you expect to find? Others opinions. Others, opinions. But what else do you expect to find? There's one thing that you're looking for in that moment of truth. Answers. Answer. You want a daggone answer, don't you? And if you don't have that answer on that website within the first few seconds, what do you do? Go somewhere else. You go somewhere else. Are you an impatient man? Yes, I am. Yes, you are. At least. Yes. At least when he searches. Because we have all become impatient online. It's changed. What's interesting is we're more impatient than we've ever been, but at the same time, we're more loyal than we've ever been. If you can find that information, jackpot. What do you do, Steve Garfield. If you want to know about cool photos, you go to Steve's and you go back again and again and again because he's good, because he's the teacher. And that's what this is all about. So the game has changed. Still have their expectations. We're going to talk about three things when it comes to transparency today that can change your business, change your life. Number one, transparent content. Number two, the approach. And number three, the way you sell. I would challenge you to not just be the best teacher in the world, as we'll talk about, but to be the most transparent in your industry when it comes to these three things. What do I mean by that? Well, the problem is, and we talked about this last year at this same HubSpot event, the number one marketing methodology online today for most businesses is ostrich marketing. Right. Ostrich marketing. Peter. Next victim. Hold it and love it. So, Peter, social speaking, right? You were just voluntold. Okay, so. So an ostrich, when it has a problem, what does it do? Context, clue. Right there. Yeah, can't miss it. I got. It puts its head in the sand. It puts its head in the sand. That's exactly right, Pete. And why does it do that? It's afraid. It's afraid. That's right. And what does it think will happen with the problem? It'll go away. It'll go away. But does it ever go away? Never goes away. That's ostrich marketing. Almost everyone in here does that with their business. Have you ever said there's a conversation here that we shouldn't have on our website? We should just wait until we talk to that person face to face? You ever had that before? We all have it. But yet, when you search online, when my man right here, Bart, searches Mr. Impatient, when he searches online, if he can't find what he's looking for, he's gone. We have a problem. We have a problem. Okay, so let's talk about this transparent content thing. When River Pools, as many of you already know, the story was in huge trouble. And this is, by the way, today I'm just a silent partner with river pools. But we were in such big trouble after that market crash. We didn't know what to do. And we embraced one simple philosophy. We took every question we'd ever been asked over seven years in business, and we said, whether it was a positive or a negative question, we're going to answer it on our website. The question became the title of a blog post. The most simple thing that we ever did became what has in many ways changed an entire industry of people following that very same philosophy. Because that is what the teacher does. The teacher listens. Here's the question, and then answers the question. That's how it works. So that's what we did. In fact, I believe firmly that the ultimate philosophy for content, for teaching, for you really telling the world about what it is that you do, but more importantly, how to solve their problems, is simple. Comes down to four words. It's they ask, you answer. That's what it is. If you've ever been asked a question, it merits an answer. It should be answered on your website right now. The average industry right in here, Raise your hand. You got to participate. Raise your hand. If you have been asked over 100 unique questions about that thing you do or sell over the course of the years, raise your hand. Okay, if you're not raising your hand, you sell popsicle sticks. Okay? So everybody's raising their hand. Has anybody been asked more than a thousand questions? Probably over the years, Actually, probably everybody in this room. If we broke it out. The next question is how many of those questions are answered right now on your website? And that's always the part that stings because the average is about 20. That's the average, because I counted. I've done great studies with Tom Webster. Okay, so the stuff that we got to talk about, the first thing, I'm not going to talk about these a lot today, but these are the big five. I wish I had, like I did last year. A whole hour to talk about them. The Big Five will change your life. They will change your business. Just as they did with Yale Appliance, just as they did with Block Imaging. My friends at Block Image, these are the things that people want to know. This is what they care about, and this is what moves the needle. How many of you have ever shopped online before for something? Raise your hand if you've ever shopped online again. If you're not raising your hand, you're dead. Okay, good. So you've shopped online before. And when you can't find an answer to roughly how much something costs, how do you feel? Go ahead and say the word. Go ahead and say it. Angry. Angry. That's the word. Irritated. Yes. The impatient couple just said angry. But you're all just like that. You feel angry. Now, everybody just raise their hand because we can all agree that we feel angry, correct? Yes. Now, everybody in here with your business, how many of you right now, talk extensively about cost and price on your website? Raise your hand. Raise your hand. I'm asking everybody here that talks about cost and price on the website to raise their hand. Look around the room. Look around the room right now. And I've been beating this drum for four years, okay? This is why I keep talking about the same stuff. Dagum. What does this make us, y'? All? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid is as marketing does, right? No. If you really break it out, this makes us digital hypocrites. We want to be treated one way. I want my answer fast. I want it easy. I want to be able to navigate. I want to be intuitive. Just get me there, please. But when it comes to our business. Oh, yes, let's change the rules. Because we're different. Because we're B2B. We're B2C. We're big, we're small, we're national. No. Everybody wants to know how much it costs. You have a chance to address it. And I don't care if you say it depends, but you can do it. Everybody wants to know the problems of your stuff. Has anybody asked you over the years, has anybody asked anybody in here? So tell me about the potential drawbacks and issues of your product or service. Raise your hand. Again. If you're not raising your hand right now, you haven't been listening, because everybody in here has. Now raise your hand still. If you have talked extensively on your website right now about the potential drawbacks and problems with your product or service. 3. Three of you and all my clients. Daggone. I mean, come On. But yet you keep getting asked. And do you answer, what's the golden rule? They ask, you answer. Four simple rules. You can't mess it up, you can't do it. But yet we refuse to treat our customer base as we want to be treated. I call this a tragedy. And you're thinking all the reasons in your head why you can't do it? No, because I've tested them all and they're not true. There is always a way to give an answer. Sometimes that answer is, it depends. But those are the things. How many times have you been asked to compare a product, a methodology, your versus theirs? How many times have people reviewed things in your industry? How many times have they said, so tell me, what would you say is the best choice here? Those move the needle. I wish I had time to talk about it. But yet we don't want to address them. Really quick story, you've all heard of this. Some of you have not. First question I always used to get was, when I was a pool guy, how much does the fiberglass pool cost? And of course, what is the answer, y'? All? Two words. It depends. So over the course of 700 words, I finally said, why it depends. And because I said, why it depends. Because, of course, there's no price that you can give. Because we said why, we started to get tons of traffic. This was from March of 2009 to 2012. The red is coming directly off of keywords that came directly off of that one single article. In other words, do those visits occur if the article is never written? The answer quickly is, no, of course not. The ostrich with his head in his hand does not get blessed. He gets no blessings, right? And so you look on the end, you hubspotters know this. All those leads, those leads you're seeing, those are appointments where pool guy goes out and gives price and hopefully gets business. Do those appointments occur if the ostrich still has his head in the sand? Of course they do not. Another example, we wrote an article about the problems with fiberglass pools. Yes, that's all we sell. And yes, we wrote an article about it, but because we wrote an article about it and we headed it off at the pass, right? And addressed it before it had a chance to become an even bigger issue. And we're honest in saying, you know what? Fiberglass pools might not be for you. Just like right now, if you search online, type HubSpot problems, guess who comes up one of their biggest resellers in the world? Because I talked about it on my Website HubSpot has some problems. So do I. That's okay. You can't ignore it. Why don't you talk about it? Are there any drawbacks to using HubSpot? Maybe. And maybe you should address them on the front end. Are there any potential problems with your product or service? Yes, I already know there is. I don't know what you sell, but you should address it on your website right now. Because we address that simple phrase. Of course, from a search standpoint. Last year the number one keywords that generated traffic for our website in appointments was river pools. That doesn't count because I already knew who we were. The rest are people trying to be educated. So. So the number one phrase last year that generated appointments and ultimately sales was problems with fiberglass pools. People searching for what was wrong with my stuff. Said that guy is different. That company is different. And because of that they trusted us. Nobody does this in your industry. If you are real and honest and transparent, things will change. Those two blog posts alone, because we can track with our HubSpot tools. I know that just those two have made over $2 million in sales that I wouldn't have had had we been the ostrich with our head in the sand. So let's talk about a transparent approach. I talked about this in my TED talk recently. This ad right here, it was a few months ago, softball season was getting ready to start and I have this amazing 12 year old daughter. And to spend time with her, I'm able to be your softball coach. But to be a softball coach, what do you got to have? Yes, you have to have a truck. You realize this if you make the dumb move of becoming a softball coach, okay, you can't do it in a little car because now all of a sudden you've got their equipment and 12 other girls equipment and it's crazy madhouse of young girls. So I had to get a truck. And when I got this truck, I decided it literally one morning. And then I went to one place, the same place I normally go to, which is CarMax. Who's heard of CarMax? Now when you hear the phrase used cars, how do you feel? Ew, Right? And why do you feel ew? Something happened over the last 20, 30 years that made you say ew. What was it? The dealers? Slimy. Are they transparent? No. Let's make a deal, right? Who wants to make a deal? Nobody wants a stinking deal. You just want to be happy. You just want to go through a process and feel like ain't buying a piece of junk. I'm getting a good value for it. I don't want to make a stupid deal. You don't like negotiating. Neither do I. I hate that stuff. Like 1% of people like that. The rest of us are normal. And so. So what did CarMax say? CarMax said this. Our industry is screwed up. The way cars have been sold is dumb. That's what they said. And because it's dumb, we're gonna do it differently. So what did they do? I love this ad right here. This is what I saw that morning number. Oh my goodness. Okay, so what they did is they say we have a no haggle price. Forget the negotiations. Here's the price. Yay. Yay me. I don't have to negotiate. Number two, five day money back guarantee with a used stinking car. I can return it four and a half days later, take a trip around the world in the process. This is awesome. I'm in, right? I'm in. And then what else can I do? I can see everything about the car. And I know because of this crazy checklist they have, it's not a lemon. It's impossible to buy a lemon. At least a wrecked car or anything like that from CarMax. And because of that, in a time period when, when used cars have been going down and all these shops have been closing, what is CarMax doing? They're opening a CarMax near you. Why? It's been based on one simple principle, which is transparency. Can you change the game in your industry? I would ask. I venture to say that you can. I venture to say that you can be the most transparent business in the world at what you do. I love them. Just because it's always been done that way doesn't make it right. Just because daddy did doesn't make it right either. And I love my dad, but there's a good chance he may have done it wrong. Let's go beyond that. Can you have the most transparent approach? So why are so many companies afraid of this? By the way, why are so many companies afraid of, for example, just discussing cost on their website? Go ahead and say it. What are they afraid of? Say it. I'm afraid of the competition because we know the competition has no idea what your prices are. Right? There's no way they can figure that out on their own. So they don't know. This is a great big secret you have in a little box, right? Okay, so we know that. Why else are we afraid to talk about cost and price on the website? Why are we afraid to talk about problems with fiberglass? Pools. Why are we afraid to say, you know, a fiberglass pool might be too small for you, it might be too skinny for you, it might not be deep enough for you. It can't get longer than 40ft. So if you want longer than 40ft, it's probably not a good fit. Why are we afraid to say that? That's exactly right. There's two reasons. Two reasons. But my competitors will steal my secrets because. Yes, we all have a secret sauce called Thousand Island Dressing. Yes. Yes. Okay, so we all have this crazy secret sauce, and we might scare customers away. Why is customers an asterisk? Because they ain't stinking customers, Courtney. Amen to you, sister. They ain't a customer until they give you money. And until that point, they ain't yours. And it's not necessarily your right to have them. It's your responsibility to be honest and allow them to choose. But yet we want to choose for them with our magical words, techniques, etc. We don't allow transparency and honesty to permeate through. This is crazy. I got to talk about this because it's a tragedy of great proportions. I want you to pay attention. If you have lost me up to this point, just listen as one thing, okay? This triangle represents the number one influencers in terms of the stuff that we teach and write about on our websites today. So the number one group that influences what we teach and write about on our websites or what we don't teach and write about is who? We just said it. The competition. That's number one. Oh, I can't do that because they might see it. Oh, I can't talk about what makes us different because they might see it. Oh, oh, oh, oh. So we allow the competitors number two. Who's number two? We just talked about them, too. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not the customer. No, no. It's the person that says, if my pools, back in the day when I still sold pools, were 40 to 80,000 on average, and I ain't got nothing less than that. And if I say to myself, if I say that on my website and I scare somebody off that only has a budget of 20,000, does that make any sense? Does that. Are they magically going to come up with 20 more thousand dollars? They ain't got the money. It ain't going to happen. That is not a customer. What are they called now? They are. No, they're a bad fit. That's what they are. And you have, you know, you ever taken on a bad fit before when you needed the money. How'd that one go for you? Working out, isn't it? Yeah. All the problems that we have in business come from two groups. Bad fit customers and bad fit employees. And usually we always know they're a bad fit beforehand, but yet we take them on because we're forced to. Dumb. It doesn't make sense. Those are the two most influential groups right now. When it comes to great content online, your website, the third most influential group is who? The customer. Let me ask you a really deep question. Which one of these three groups pays your bills? Why on earth would you allow anybody other than the customer to dictate what you write about, what you teach about, what you talk about? Here's my challenge to you. Don't ever, ever again allow anybody but the customer to dictate your content and your ability to be the best teacher in the world at what you do. Everything else, just let it go. The moment you let it go, you will start to have magic. I really mean that. Remember that little coffee card Seth Godin showed us on Tuesday? They had to punch through it, right? The baristas. They were the competitors because they weren't afraid. I'm asking you to stop fearing what doesn't exist in the first place. You can be the best teacher in the world or you can fret about your competition all day. But I promise you this. It is your choice. And I'm asking you to make the right choice. Transparent selling. Okay. Transparent selling. I got seven minutes. Quickly tell you about this number 30. In 2011, I looked at two groups of people in my HubSpot analytics. The first group of people had filled out a form on my site and not bought a pool. The second group of people had filled out a form and bought a pool. And then as I looked at these two groups, there was one number that popped out at me. Some of you heard me talk about this pool. It's so powerful. What do you think that number 30 represented? That's exactly right. Page views. We found that if somebody read 30 pages of our website before a sales appointment, they would buy 80% of the time. 80% of the time. So if you knew you had that magic number, what would you do? You would durn straight, get 30 pages, George, wouldn't you? Yes. Yes. But you would also do what? You would try to help them consume 30 pages. And that's when we started a process called assignment selling, because we'd been doing it wrong for years. Tom Webster would call me up and say, hey, Marcus, I'm ready for a pool. And My wife keeps bugging me about it, and I would say, tom, I'd love to come out. When he'd say Friday, I say, I'm there. How was that? Was that a teaching experience? No, it was just like me. I'm just there. I have no idea if he's educated. And so now, instead of doing that, we changed the way we played the game and we said, sure, Tom, we'd love to come out, but in order to come out to your house, I need you to do a couple things First, What I need you to do, I'm going to send you an email right now. It's got a couple videos that's going to show you this process of having this pool installed in your yard. So you're going to see exactly what it's going to look like. And I'm going to send you also this little e book. It's going to explain to you all the things about the options, accessories, et cetera, you might want. Now, it's a little bit long, about 30 pages, but I promise it'll be worth your time. Tom, will you make sure to read that before appointment on Thursday? Friday. Excuse me. I have an apartment. I'm a bad fit. Oh, listen to this guy in it. Yes. So he said, in another world, of course. Which is. Which is what people say to that. 90% of the time, 10% of the time, they say, I don't have the time. At which point we say, group number two, bad fit. That's okay. We're probably not a good fit. And you let them go because you're okay with letting them go, because we implemented this and I wish we had more time. And I do this also with the sales line. It's the exact same thing. Every client I have with my consulting company reads an ebook first. It's 250 pages. You think anybody ever tries to negotiate prices after 250 pages? No. Doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. Sorry. Doesn't happen. They either hate me or love me. They're either in or they're out. Just like some of you that are running out of this room probably right now. Okay, so I got to tell you this quick story before we close. Not four minutes about the Grizzards. They're awesome. Five. I'll take six, then. Lord. Thank you. So, got to tell you about Bill Grizzard. Bill Grizzard. This is a real lead sheet that came off of my HubSpot analytics. This was the old lead sheet. So there's this guy I'm looking At one night a couple years ago, Bill Grizzard, and he was doing, as you see here, an organic search. He was using Yahoo, which makes him a little bit odd. And he typed in the phrase cost of fiberglass pool. Now we know where he ended up, right? He. He read that one article, but what happened next? Swear it says, wow. What happened next? He read how many 375 pages of the website. What do we know about Bill Grizzard? He's going to buy a. He might be going. He might be a buyer. He might be a freak show. We don't know. This guy's plum crazy. He might be obsessed with compulsive sway. Pull this order. We don't know. We just know this guy is really, really serious. Okay, okay. That same night. That same night, I kid you not, I can't make this stuff up because this gets better. It's like a shamrock commercial. Because that same night, I see another lead sheet and it's from a girl named Joni Grizzard. This is the tangent to Tom. This is his life. And she does an organic search, too, and she's using Yahoo. Weird family. And then they typed in the phrase Richmond, Virginia Pools. And what did she do next? 149 stinking pages. How many pages on the website has this couple read? Come on, rain man. About 525. About 525. What do we know about this couple? What do you think that sales appointment was like? You know, you pull up and the kids are against the window. Yeah. I get there, Bill Grizzard has a spreadsheet in his hand, and the spreadsheet has the pool. It has all the options, accessories. And old Grizzard needed one thing. And what was that? He needed the price. And so 45 minutes later, walked out with a $5,000 check. It used to be that the average sales appointment for River Pools was three hours long. Think about that. Today the average appointment is usually between 60 and 90 minutes. We have an 80% closing rate. It's so far and away the highest in the world. It's not even close because I know the industry so well. Two more hours a night are salespeople have. What can you do with two hours a day? You can either write blog posts, which is one thing I did, or you can get back home to your family. But that's what you can do with two hours a day. She's like, oh, yeah, I guess that too. Yeah, yeah, that. The fact is, this content is the greatest sales and trust building tool in the world. But it Must be transparent. It must be honest. You cannot be a hack. Last year we had 85 sales with river pools. The average number of pages, because we can track this for last year for those 85 people. What do you think it was? 105 pages. If you had told me four years ago when we started this magical process called Inbound, that the average customer would read 105 pages, I would have said, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know my customer. You don't know my industry. Yes, but we're. But were. But were. I'm asking you to let that go because you also don't know how much content people will consume, how much great teaching they will consume until you offer it to them. But it is in their language with their needs and their problems. You know, I talked about this not too long ago and I shared this in Dallas one long ago. It was at the National Vistas Conference. Such an honor to be there. It was really great. And after I was done with the presentation, this reporter from the New York Times came up to me and he said, marcus, this was really fascinating, this whole, like, really be honest thing. And so I would love to do a story on this. Now, I've talked to newspaper people before about Inbound, and I didn't think they were really serious. But a few days later talked to a reporter for 90 minutes from the Times. And then a few days after that, a photographer came down from the Times to our little pool store. And I don't know how that photo came out where my stomach looked so big. I just know that it did a week later and I still didn't know. I still didn't know at the time if it was going to be just in the dot com or in the other section. But this came out, and here's the irony, it came out in Times in the dot com, and the title was the Revolutionary Marketing Strategy Answer Customer Questions. Wow, that's revolutionary. This was the number one shared and emailed store in the New York Times for three straight days. They reran the story. I got hundreds of emails from it. That very same day this came out in the paper. I signed a contract with Seth Godin's agent that morning because she said, I love this and I want to represent you here. For it changed my life, this idea of transparency. Final thing, final point. Because I know we all got to go. We've heard of Simon Sinek's why Many understand what they do, Some understand how they do it. Very few companies understand why they do what they do. And I ask, do you understand why you do inbound? Why do you do inbound? I tell you what. Before I did inbound, my life was different. I might have stayed home in my bed, got slept in my bed every night, but I wasn't home. And my kids barely knew who I was because I was that guy working 75 hours a week. I had no life. And it was the most stressful time period of my life as well, Especially when we were three weeks overdrawn in our bank account. So why am I so passionate about this? It's a very simple reason. She. He is my oldest. I'm her softball coach. He is my one son. I fished with him more this year than I've ever fished in my life. In fact, because of inbound, I'm able, after this conference is over, to drive to Maine with these five people. Stand up. How about my son's shirt? My point to you. Thank you. I know they're embarrassed. For the rest of the week, My point to you. Be the best teacher in the world. But be transparent. Be a great listener. Put it out there. Push the envelope. Believe in the possibilities. Don't limit yourself. And if you do that, everything will change. Thank you very, very.