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Episode 164 Welcome to a special episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s podcast is all about our special guest, Marcus Sheridan, author of the incredible marketing book They Ask You Answer. He joins me to talk about how MSPs, through content marketing, can become THE trusted voice in their market. Marcus Sheridan is a highly sought-after international keynote speaker known for his unique ability to excite, engage, and motivate audiences. Forbes named Marcus “One of 20 Speakers You Don’t Want to Miss.” He has been dubbed a “Web Marketing Guru” by the New York Times and featured in Inc., The Globe and Mail, Forbes, and many more. As an owner of IMPACT, Marcus has established one of the most successful digital sales and marketing agencies in the country. Within his speaking company, Marcus Sheridan International, Inc., he gives over 70 global keynotes annually where he inspires audiences in the areas of sales, marketing, leadership, and communication. Mashable rated his book, They Ask, You Answer, the “#1 Marketing Book”, and Forbes listed it as one of “11 Marketing Books Every CMO Should Read”. Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcussheridan Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Got a question from the show? Email me directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Paul Green:She bought because she was researching one of our competitors. Think about that. That’s the power of producing this type of content. What scares you away is when they completely ignore the subject and they say, “Only call for a quote,” which in the world of the internet, that’s like the middle finger of the internet. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast special. Paul Green:So happy New Year to you, and welcome to another brand-new year of the podcast. We have got so many exciting things lined up for you this year. As we often do at the start of the year, we are starting with a special edition. And today, I am a bit of a fanboy, a bit overexcited today because we are interviewing one of my favorite authors of all time. He has written one of the best marketing books, in my opinion anyway. It’s a book I’ve read so many times and a book that we have implemented in our business and, in fact, I’ve been recommending to MSPs for a couple of years that they implemented in their business as well. And this interview today is kicking off the start of Authors Month. We have so many cool authors that we’re going to feature in this podcast throughout January. Let’s start today with Marcus Sheridan. Marcus, thank you very much for joining us. You are, of course, the author of They Ask You Answer. Do you want to just introduce yourself and start to tell us a little bit? It’s probably a story that you’ve had to tell a thousand times because it is the book. Your story is the book They Ask You Answer. Introduce yourself. Say hello, and tell us a little bit about your story. Marcus Sheridan:Yeah, Paul. Well, it’s great being here. And happy New Year’s everyone. We’re going to make 2023 a great year. And what a better way to start than discussing what is really how we can become the most trusted voice in our space? And that’s been my great obsession in so many ways. Certainly, I think that’s what we do as marketers and a salespeople. My quick background, the very quick 101, is I started a swimming pool company with two friends in 2001. Things were going okay up until the market crashed in 2008. Thought we were going to lose the business. That’s when I started to really learn about things like inbound marketing, content marketing. And what I heard in my simple pool guy mind was, Marcus, if you just obsess over your customer’s questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns and you’re willing to address those things on your website through text, through video, you just might save your business.And so I said, well, we can do that. And I sat down one evening, and this was in 2009, and brainstormed all the questions I’d ever received about, in my case, fiberglass swimming pools and ground pools. And came up with a couple hundred questions. And over the next couple of years, one by one, every single evening, I’d produce an article or a video that addressed each one. And we would go on to become the most traffic swimming pool website in the world. And then I started to talk about what I had done and teach this to other companies at other events and conferences. And suddenly, I had an agency where folks from around the world were saying, “Hey, could you show us how to do that?” And They Ask You Answer would become a book. And the book has now been purchased over a couple hundred thousand times around the world. And so many companies, actually a lot of MSPs, have embraced some of the principles of They Ask You Answer. And it’s pretty exciting to see that it’s just all over the world now. So many companies do this. I speak full-time, still have the agency, still have swimming pool company. It’s been an amazing ride and all because we’re willing to answer our customer’s questions. Paul Green:They Ask You Answer has made a massive difference to my business. So obviously, I’m not an MSP. I do marketing and work with MSPs, but I discovered this. In fact, I actually bought this book a couple of years before I read it because anytime anyone says to me, oh, here’s a book you should buy, I get it. I’ve got this massive bookshelf, I’m looking at it here. There’s dozens and dozens of books that I’ve bought and haven’t read. And I pretty sure this was a lockdown book when we first went into lockdown in 2020. I was flicking through the shelves and thought, oh, They Ask You Answer, that’s an interesting title. And it was one of those that I was hooked three or four pages in. And I read it across two days. Then I got the Audible version. I think you, isn’t it? Do you do- Marcus Sheridan:That is me. Paul Green:Yeah, it is. So you narrate. So I’ve listened to you while I’ve been out running. I’ve read this. And unlike many people, we have actually implemented it. So directly off the back of this, we hired a new writer. We hired a video producer. We hired a content manager, pretty much- Marcus Sheridan:Wow, impressive. Paul Green:Well, thank you very much. And you know what? It has paid off massively. So we’ve grown enormously through inbound content. And I’m not going to go into the specific details, but if you go and look at our website, you’ll see a lot of the ingredients that you, Marcus, recommend on yours. And we didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. In fact, we have a saying. This is so embarrassing to admit to this, but we have a saying in the business. What does Marcus recommend? What would Marcus do? Because the answers are in this, what’s this, $25 book. Here’s a $25 book, and all of the answers are in here and particularly when you add in all of the videos and the huge amounts of content that your impact agency puts out because, obviously, we’re subscribed to that as well. So a personal thank you from me, Marcus. You’ve made a massive difference. Marcus Sheridan:Yeah. You’re so welcome. Paul Green:What I really want to talk about is how we get MSPs to do this because I’m going to hit you now with a bunch of objections, which I can guess my audience will throw out. Let’s start with the first one. But Paul or Marcus, you said this worked for a swimming pool company. So I don’t run a swimming pool company. I run a B2B business. We are looking for business owners with 30, 40 staff. How is this applicable? Now, I know you cover this off in the book, but talk to us how this is as applicable for B2B marketing as it is for B2C. Marcus Sheridan:When we start this conversation, we’ve got to recognise that we all have this belief that we’re very, very different. And in many ways, we are in terms of our customers and whatnot, and I understand that. If you’re listening to this right now, let’s focus on just for a minute what we have in common. And again, if you’re listening to this, just let’s pretend we’re talking with each other. If I said to you, “Is trust fundamental to your business,” my sense is you’d say, “Yes.” “Is it fundamental to MSPs?” You’d say, “Yeah, it really is.” If I said, “Is trust going to be fundamental in 20 years,” what would you say? You’d say, “Yeah, of course it is.” And so what They Ask You Answer is, it’s a blueprint. It’s a framework for you to become the most trusted voice in your space.And so instead of thinking, well, this guy as a pool company did it, please recognise that we’ve had thousands and thousands of companies, many of which are B2B service-based businesses, have embraced these principles. And if you’re open to it as Paul and I are having this discussion today, my sense is that you’ll say, “Okay, I could see how that could apply.” But you can’t put yourself in that corner of we’re different. You got to say, “Okay, if we did do this, what Marcus is suggesting or derivative of it, would it induce more trust?” And that’s really, again, where we have to start. If the answer is yes, then let’s not debate if we should do it. The debate should be, how do we do it? And of course I know we’re going to discuss that, Paul. We’re going to talk about how you apply these principles, and I think you’re going to quickly start to see, oh, you know what, I really can do that. I can talk about things like cost and price on my website, which assuredly is going to come up. Paul Green:Yes, yes. In fact, well, let’s move on to that because that’s the biggest objection that I come across from MSPs. In They Ask You Answer, you talk about the big five, and they’re the five biggest areas that make the difference. And the first of those is pricing and costs. So I run a Facebook group for any MSP to join to talk about marketing and business growth. And we recently put something on there about putting your pricing on your website or using a pricing calculator because, of course, the answer to… In your book when someone says to you, “How much does a swimming pool cost,” your answer, of course, is it depends because it depends on a myriad of different factors. And it’s exactly the same for an MSP. The answer is always it depends. So we talked about pricing calculators and all these other tools, and there was a plethora of angry, negative comments. Marcus Sheridan:But, but, but, but. Paul Green:Exactly. Exactly. Paul, how can you? We would never do this. Blah, blah, blah. So let’s address that. I would say that’s biggest negative factor, is most MSPs are terrified of putting their pricing on their website. And I suspect you’re going to say to me that most business owners are terrified of putting their pricing on the website. Marcus Sheridan:Yeah, that’s right. Okay, so let’s start here. To your point earlier, there’s five subjects that you, me, all of us that are listening to this right now tend to research before we reach out to a company. We also know that in the B2B space that the average buyer’s 70% to 80% through the buyer’s journey before they reach out to a company. In other words, they’re vetting us online to death before they reach out. And while they’re vetting us, they want know five main things. And here’s the five things that you, me, we all research B2B, B2C. Here’s the five. We want to research cost. We want to research problems or negatives. We want to research comparisons. We want to research reviews, and we want to research best or most or top. So cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, best. Those are what we call the big five. Now, as buyers and consumers, we’re obsessed with learning these things before we reach out to a company, and as businesses, we don’t want to talk about these things. And so it creates a paradox of wants, and we call that ostrich marketing, as you read about in the book, the ostrich bearing its head in the sand saying, ah, I hope this problem goes away.Now, foremost, of course, is cost and price. Now, let’s first go back to what I said earlier. If you could talk about cost and price in a way that would help educate your buyers, would they appreciate it? Would it induce more trust? Of course, the answer is yes. And then if I said to anybody that’s listening to this, “If you’re on a website and if you’re looking for cost and price information, you cannot find it, what’s the emotion you experience,” they’re going to say, “Oh, I get frustrated.” And if I said, “Well, in that moment of frustration, do you say, ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s on this website somewhere. I’ll just keep looking,'” “No.” If I said to you, “So in that moment of frustration, do you say, ‘Well, of course they’re not talking about cost and price. They’re a value-based business. I’m going to call them on the phone instead,'” you’re like, “No,” because you as the buyer, you as the searcher, you keep doing what? Well, you keep searching, and you search until what happens? You find what you’re looking for. And generally speaking, whoever gives you what you are looking for, most of the time, they’re going to get your business. If not your business, they’re going to get first contact, first phone call.And so people say, “Well, okay, I get that, Marcus. Yeah, that’s true for me.” Again, “But, but, but.” Well, there’s three reasons why we tend not to talk about cost and price on our websites. First reason why we tend not to talk about cost and price is we say things like, well, every job is different, and therefore, it depends. And we have a very customised solution, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, that’s fine. So if I came to you, if you were an MSP and I said, “Can you help me understand what would drive the cost in this industry? In the IT space, what drives the cost of an MSP up? What are the factors,” anybody could say, “Oh yeah, I could explain those factors.” If I said to you, “Can you help me understand the factors that would keep the cost of an MSP down,” you could explain those as well. If I came to you and I said, “You know what, you gave me a quote, and your competitors gave me a quote too. Some of you are more expensive. Some of you are less expensive. Can you help me understand why there’s a delta in the industry in terms of MSPs,” you could do that too. And, of course, how many times have you had to do that? You’ve had to do it a bunch of times.And so really there’s four major questions on this whole it depends, we’re a customised solution spectrum. What drives cost up in an industry? What drives cost down? Why are some companies so expensive? Why are some companies so cheap? They’re not the same two things, by the way. They’re different things. And so that is how you teach what we would call value proposition in an industry. What makes one s P more valuable per se from a service deliverability standpoint than somebody else? And if I said to anybody that’s listening to this, “Do you think it’s important that yo…
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