Marcus Sheridan - The Story Behind They Ask, You Answer

This is one of the first episodes of Agency Breakthrough, the ZenPilot and ClickUp show hosted by Kuba Grajcar and Gray MacKenzie. Their guest is Marcus Sheridan, author of They Ask, You Answer, who turned a recession survival tactic at his pool company into a sales and marketing framework and a coaching business, IMPACT.

It’s dumb not to dumb it down

Kuba opened by praising how Marcus simplifies the complex. Marcus called that the highest compliment and credited a lesson from years ago.

Somebody told me it’s dumb not to dumb it down. And at first, I didn’t really understand what that meant. But I started to think about it, and it’s just so true. I think there’s a lot of people in the digital world that try to impress, and they try to sound smart… But all you do is you end up distancing yourself from your audience.

(Listen at 1:55)

The reaction he wants after a talk or the book is “this is so obvious, why are we not doing this?” If people walk away thinking he’s a genius, he’s the hero and they haven’t gained anything.

March 2009: every question a pool buyer ever asked

Marcus started River Pools and Spas in 2001. When the crash hit in 2008 and 2009, he started learning everything he could.

The inspiration came for, hey, I’m going to take every single question we’ve ever been asked. We’re going to start to address that on our website through text and video. And so within a few months of doing that, I’m like, holy cow, this works. And it was literally March 2009, I started They Ask You Answer for River Pools.

(Listen at 6:16)

He started a blog that November, and within three years River Pools had the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world and companies were asking him to teach them how he did it.

Teach a company to fish, and make them hire a writer

The blog became an agency, but Marcus didn’t want the standard model: six blog articles a month, and a debate about whether they’re good enough.

So by 2013, I am now teaching companies how to do this in-house… In fact, we told anybody, if you want to work with us, you have to have a full-time content writer… So I’m literally asking people, you got to hire someone and then you got to pay us too, which was unusual at the time, but it made a lot of sense to me.

(Listen at 10:52)

His three- or four-person shop later merged into Bob Ruffolo’s traditional inbound agency, IMPACT. A year or so in, Bob realized all of IMPACT’s great case studies were They Ask You Answer clients, not agency clients. Today IMPACT is 100 percent coaching and consulting. It trains the client’s videographer, content writer, and HubSpot owner, does none of the work for them, and won’t take a client whose CEO skips the 90-day planning sessions. Average engagements run 18 months or more against an industry average under a year. Gray asked for scale: about 70 employees and more than $10 million a year.

The phrase came out of a panel. The book waited until 2017

Kuba asked about the messy middle. The phrase itself showed up unplanned, on an Inbound panel, answering a question about blog articles.

I want you to brainstorm every single question you’ve ever received in a sales appointment. Just brainstorm every single one. If you come up with less than 50 or 100, you’re being pretty lazy… I want you to make those your first 100 blog articles… They’ve asked you the question, now answer it. It’s like, they ask, you answer… That’s all you have to do. And I saw a bunch of people writing it down.

(Listen at 22:22)

He waited four or five more years to write the book, on purpose, to collect case studies outside of pools, B2B included.

If I had written They Ask You Answer in 2013, it probably would have been a book about blogging for business. But because I wrote it in 2017, and I had time to really start to teach it, the more I’m able to teach something, the more I’m able to see exactly what it is that I’m trying to say. And what it became was a framework.

(Listen at 24:16)

The yeses that didn’t work

Kuba asked what Marcus would warn someone against: the yeses he said early on to close a sale. A prospect likes the idea but doesn’t want to hire a content writer, and asks whether the team could each write one article a week. You want to say yes, Marcus said, and it fails big time. Outsourced writer, doesn’t work. Outsourced video, doesn’t work. Someone already on staff doing it on the side, doesn’t work. A CEO who skips the initial conversations, doesn’t work. Neither does a marketer asking Marcus to convince their CEO.

I’m not here to convert your CEO. The book will do that for you.

(Listen at 32:59)

Sell with a question, and show 1% of the product

Gray asked how Marcus sold this before the book existed. With questions. If a CEO asked what he did, he’d offer two futures three years out: every article or video means calling an agency, or the team has the skills in-house. About 90 percent choose control, and then he asks why.

Show me one case study of someone that became the most trusted voice in their space by outsourcing all their content. Show me one. One. I’m still waiting for an answer.

(Listen at 38:52)

He sold HubSpot the same way.

For years when I was selling HubSpot, I’d isolate the one problem that they had to solve. And I literally would never show 99% of what HubSpot could do. 99% I wouldn’t show. The 1% is the only thing that matters.

(Listen at 41:24)