5 Key Factors in Building Trust With Your Customers From Marcus Sheridan

And uh , you can't build your house on google today like you did for 25 years and you've got to do more and you've got to be more . And the thing about disruption is a lot of people know they should do it , but inherently they don't know how . So let me just give you some very clear ways that you can absolutely disrupt .

Number one you've got to be willing to talk about or say what others in your space aren't willing to say , and think about all the messaging that you do as a company . How much of that messaging is pretty much everybody else also saying in your space , versus how much of it is everyone saying , wow , I can't believe they said that . Okay , that's disruption .

That's number one . Number two you got to be willing to show what others aren't willing to show , specifically through video , because that's when you can really break out the secret sauce . A lot of companies think they got secret sauce when in reality , all they've got is thousand island dressing and everybody knows it right .

And so if they just let go of this idea that we have a secret sauce and they show it now , we've got magic . That's disruption when most people won't show the thing . Number three are you selling in a way that nobody is willing to sell in your space ? Lots of different examples of that .

And then , number four are you being more human in the way you present yourself than anyone in your space ? Four simple pillars of disruption Talk about or say , show , sell , be more human . You do those things right there . That's disruption . One-on-one Most aren't willing to do it .

Yeah , let's dive into the thought of number four being more human . Out there in the marketplace , it's kind of scary to do that sort of thing .

You're putting ourselves out there , we're taking the time to do it . We're making a potential connection with the audience . The whole idea is that they feel like they know us , yet we've never met them before . That's an example of being more human .

The problem that brands have , though , is tell me one brand that just gets you really jazzed up when it comes to social media . Most people can't name one because there's very few , but if I said to you , how many people that own brands do you follow ? Yeah , oh yeah , I follow Elon Musk . Oh , yeah , I follow Tim Cook . It's like these people .

They have millions of more followers than their massive company that everybody uses . Why is this ? Because people are attracted to people , and because we're attracted to people , we're drawn to that .

So you have all these companies that have all these like , let's say , social media pages but it's a company page and and they're wondering , like , why has it got no legs ? It gots no legs because it really isn't a human behind the brand .

And when he did that and there's a pattern that happens after disruptions the classic phrase you've probably heard it before . So when you disrupt , what happens at first ? Everyone ignores you , they don't pay attention , but once they notice you , they laugh at you . So that's the second thing they laugh at you . After they're done laughing at you , what happens ?

In the process of them laughing at you ? They start to look around and say , oh , my goodness , the market is responding and the market likes what this person has just done , or what they've suggested , or how they're doing their business . And so , after they've ignored you , and then after they've laughed at you , now they fight you .

And this is what's happened with every major industry where it's been flipped on its head . There's always this period of fight push back . Uber , every taxi company in every jurisdiction fought back Airbnb , everybody in the hospitality space was fighting back . But at first they were ignored , then they were laughed at and then they were fought .

All the automotive manufacturers fought Elon on this , but you know what's interesting is , the marketplace always wins .

Eventually , the marketplace wins , and then finally , they just repeat what we said okay , first they ignore you , then they laugh at you , they laugh at you , then they fight you and then , like Elon and so many others have done , you win , you win , and that's the pattern . Most people aren't willing to step up to that plate , though , brad , because you're right .

It means that if your brand wants to stay like , really stand out today , you have to be willing for people to not agree with you or to call you out or to say , oh , you look silly on camera or I don't like that guy , or whatever it is .

And so you can say to yourself am I more concerned with putting off a few people or am I more concerned with building a known , trusted brand with my ideal buyer and me ? I always , always , am going to choose . I want to be known and I want to be trusted , and I'm going to let go of those that are not a good fit , and I'm okay with that .

Happiest day in the life of a business is not when you figure out who you are and I think you very much know this but rather it's when you figure out what you're not , because the moment you know what you're not , you stop saying yes to those that you shouldn't have said yes to Everybody that started a company and you've done this , I've done this early on .

When we're just desperate to get going and we need the cash , we say yes to a lot of things , a lot of things that are really outside of our zone of genius , outside of our scope , and because of that we end up waking up in the morning and hating the thing and like , well , why did I take that money right ?

And so when you really know I am not , that I say no to that .

Then you are such a happier entrepreneur and business owner because you're staying in that zone of genius or that strength area , and that's a beautiful place to be and it's replicatable and you know your price point and you can charge more for it and all those wonderful aspects of a great business .

Or really , what is a buyer's journey , especially because they're in control these days and you say what's every point in this journey where they could get frustrated , it could get slowed down ? So let me give you a perfect example .

If you talk to any buyer consumer in the world and you said to them would you prefer that a company would be willing to put a pricing estimator on their website so that you could at least get a price range , especially if you input some variables , and you said , okay , here's what I'm looking for , and then you got an estimate , would you prefer that or prefer

just to reach out and talk to a salesperson ? 100% of people are going to say I'd rather do a pricing estimator first . Now , if you look at almost 100% of businesses especially , let's say , b2b , service-based businesses or whatever you want to call yourself , how many of those folks have a pricing estimator on your website ?

You don't have one , and you don't have one because you're making all these reasons as to why I have a company I started . It's basically a it's called price guide and it's the simplest tool on the internet right now for you to immediately build , within 30 minutes , have a working pricing estimator on your website .

So I've got all this data now for people that have implemented this tool on their website . And what we see over and over again is that if you put a pricing estimator tool on your website , again , you're not giving the exact price , you're giving a price range Okay , it's very safe , it's very helpful to the person and they're inputting the variables .

They're saying , yes , I want this , no , I don't want that . So it's almost like you're building their price . What's crazy is we see a three to five X every time on lead flow SQLs , every single time . Yet most won't do it because they'll make up reasons as to

why you can't do it . I talked to an insurance company recently . Like man , I don't think I could ever have a pricing estimator . I said really interesting . So tell me , if I asked you right now , could you give me a sense for what my rate would be ? Could you do that ? He said well , I had to ask you some questions . I said what are those questions ?

He repeated five questions . I said those are the questions on your pricing estimator Now go , that's it . But we overcomplicate this stuff . That's one of the easiest ways to sell in ways that others don't sell . This brings me to a bigger point , which is in the market today .

There's a stat , a trend Gartner came out with , that said 75% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience . Now , what does this mean ? Well , I don't think it means we hate salespeople . It just means that we don't want to talk to a salesperson until we are good and ready .

And so if a company looks at that trend , they got two choices . You can say , ah , I hate the way we're headed into the future . There's going to be no salespeople . Or you can say is it possible to embrace this trend ? Is it possible to benefit from this seller-free economy ? 100% possible .

And the way you do this is through self-service , self-service tools that traditionally would have made a prospect talk to a human . What can you do today to allow someone to not be forced to talk to a human first , to eliminate the friction point ? Let me give you another killer example .

This is a test that I've been doing with a bunch of clients and now I've been talking about in business . They're like dude , dude . That's crazy . Did you know ? Did you know that if you allow a prospect to choose the salesperson they're working with ? Closing rates double every single time ?

So let me give you an example On the website I can pick from Bob Mary yes yes , so , and I've done this now with multiple companies . It's wild . So let me give an example . I've got a financial advisor that's in New Zealand , and what he's done I said this is going to work . He said , let's give it a try .

And so he has all of his financial advisors on one page . He has their image , he has their bio , et cetera , and so you have options . You can choose to be given whoever no-transcript . As soon as they implemented that , the closing rates went doubled . Boom , just like that . I've got a retailer in Boston , massachusetts .

He's got a self-scheduling , self-selection tool on his website . You can schedule when you come into the store and you schedule who you talk to . So you're scheduling your salesperson . Here's's what's wild , because he's such a data freak like me .

He found that the average sale was literally double in terms of if you just came into the showroom and they gave you a salesperson , or if you called and said , hey , I want to come into the showroom and once again they gave you a salesperson , versus if you set the salesperson yourself . Double the amount across the board an extraordinary number .

In every business almost there is the ability to customize , but most have never thought about it before because it's just next person up in the queue . All right , that's how you sell , as no one has ever sold before .

They really just want to know am I even in the game ? Yeah , is it even possible for me to consider this thing ? Whatever this thing is , we just assume that everybody knows , and so as soon as they're able to do that , they're able to say , ah well , now I understand .

That's when you remove all doubt and as you eliminate friction , it leads to dramatically more trust . But if there's any doubt , then suddenly let me give you the like silliest example of doubt in the history of the world . You ever been on a shopping cart page where you're getting ready to buy something online ?

You have your credit card out , but then on that page there's a little coupon code . You ever seen that ? In that moment , as soon as you see the coupon code and you don't have the coupon code , something crazy happens . And what happens for over 50% of all people is suddenly they start looking for the coupon code . And here's what gets really crazy .

The majority of those people , if they can't find the code , guess what happens ? They don't buy , they don't buy . And it's because the second , the majority of those people , if they can't find the code , guess what happens . They don't buy , they don't buy . And it's because the second they put that little coupon code there and the person didn't have it .

They planted a seed of doubt .

No , usually the highest rate of innovation occurs within sales and marketing , and if you find those opportunities , you can completely change the game . And if you look at so many of these industries that have just blown up , it's because they changed something about the sales process .

Amazon invented nothing , they've invented nothing , but they changed that buyer's journey and because of that they're an incredibly innovative company .

We've seen this over and over again . The data is empirical and in fact , if I said to you or anybody that's listening to this right now , what is one thing that you always research before you reach out to a company , most people would say price . Most people would say reviews . Okay , so those are two of these , what we call , what I call in my book .

They Ask , you Answer the big five , okay , there's three more

, so you've got cost . The second one is what we just call problems . Problems really means fears , issues , concerns , worries , and here's what's really interesting , brad when we get serious about buying something , we stop thinking about all the benefits and we start saying what could go wrong . That's the fear . How could this blow up in my face ?

And so a lot of companies are really afraid to address that because there is some type of drawback or drawbacks to pretty much every product and service in the world . Now , if you ignore those , you're not going to be very successful . But if you lean into them , you can actually turn them to your advantage by openly discussing them .

But again , the greatest way in life to resolve a concern is to address it before it becomes a concern . So you're removing the doubt before it gets there . So that's problems number two . So you've got costs , you've got problems . Number three is comparisons . We love to compare online . You love to compare online . We all compare online .

Most companies don't want to compare online because they don't want to talk about the other option . That's assuming that the person's ignorant , they're not dumb , because they have this thing called the internet and they have this thing called chat , gpt , and they can get the dang answer .

And the moment you start to approach your buyer as an intelligent human being that has all these incredible tools at their fingertips , maybe , just maybe , you'll say you know it's more important that they learn from me than that they get this information from somebody else , because it is just not acceptable in my book , as an entrepreneur and as a business owner ,

that somebody would get their answers from someone else . I know it's going to happen with AI , but even AI . I want AI learning from me as well . So that's the third one comparisons . The fourth one is reviews . The thing about reviews , Brad , is people don't just want the good reviews , they want the good , the bad and the ugly .

In fact , after you've seen a good couple of reviews , you always go to the one stars because you want to see how the stuff hit the fan and what went wrong . And so you've got to be as a company . You've got to talk about both sides of the coin .

And then finally , the fifth one , that you always research before you reach out to a company is best , best , most top . Think about how many times you've gone online . You search best , plus another phrase prolific . Those are the big five Cost problems , comparisons , reviews best . And what's wild is they run the economy of search .

This is what people want to know .

Businesses don't want to talk about them and this is why they lose the 80% and they don't win the trust and they don't become known because they're not willing to say what others in their space aren't willing to say and they say , well , I'm going to wait until they ask me the sales process , and by that point you've lost the majority .

And that's how you lose .

Like for us in our franchise business . We allow someone to just fill in a five tick box form rather than a questionnaire or a big survey , a full application . We start them with a smaller steps . What are you seeing in that trend of making it smaller ?

So there's four major fears that people have when they're filling out a form online . Number one is are you going to call me to death ? Number two are you going to spam me to death ? Number three is what are you going to do with my information ? And number four is so if I fill out this form , what's going to happen exactly ?

Okay , so those are the four major fears . So let me give you an example of how you can overcome that very easily . You can put a video next to the form that's on that get a quote or contact us page or whatever that is for you , and that video has a title above it . It says see exactly what's going to happen if you fill out this form .

So that's the title of the video you put on the page and then in the video , you literally explain to them . Hey , I know you're sitting there right now and you're debating should I fill out this form ? What are you going to do with my information ?

Well , we're going to explain that to you right now , and what we've seen is , if people do this , they get , on average , an 80% or more lift of people that will fill out their forms simply because they address this . But that's a very little thing . But what you're focused in on is , once again , it's like friction , doubt , fear .

How do we remove these things from the process ? You've got to become obsessed with it as a business owner . The business owners that are not innovative when it comes to sales and marketing , they just don't think like their buyer . But the ones that do , they are doing extraordinary things when it comes to innovation .

You know , just really , really tapped into exactly what they would want . And the one thing , too , I would say about this is you know people say , like how do you keep up with marketing trends and just general sales trends ? The easiest way to do this is to become very self-aware . How are you changing online ?

Are you starting to use AI when you search something ? How do you search ? What are the words that you use ? What makes you click on something ? What makes you watch something ? What are the words that you use , what makes you click on something , what makes you watch something , what are the signals that are moving you to action ?

Most people just like , without even thinking about it . They move through their day digitally speaking and they never question why did I do that ? But if you question why you did what you did , why'd you take that action ? Suddenly you can say , son of a gun , we're not doing that as an organization , and you can really start to get innovative that way .

Now we have three algorithm releases . How is AI first of all going to impact the search , that whole side of marketing ?

You got to do more , and so the pendulum is swinging . You have to put less weight on Google search to carry you and even , potentially , google ads , because what I know is that Google is a platform and if there's one thing that's certain about platforms is platforms come and then they go . That's how it works , so it's not a forever thing .

We had it for a couple of decades , but in four or five years you're gonna be like where did it all go ? And we're already seeing a lot right now .

If you think about the goal for Google since day one and now , the goal for these AI platforms is I , the platform , want to give to the customer the best , most specific , relevant answer to their question , to their query , as quickly as possible , and so , if you continue on that trend , it allows you to see okay , is the way Google works today ?

Is that going to be the best , most specific or relevant answer as quickly as possible ? No , it's not . No , it's not . And so it's not a long-term , viable business model Doesn't mean it wasn't great , it just means it's not the future and the companies that accept this are going to be much more successful .

And so you have to say all right , I today am in a battle of signals to two parties . The first party is to my buyer , to my consumer . I need to send enough signals and I need to be on enough platforms to where they find me . The average buyer HubSpot has said this needs five to seven touches or signals with your organization .

So maybe they saw you on this short that we're doing right now , or maybe they saw you on a long form video , maybe they saw you in the podcast , whatever the thing was . These are all different signals and so you've got to make sure that you're sending out enough signals to the marketplace .

But there's another major group where you have to send signals and that's AI . Because when AI really started to come out and it's been out for a long time , but in terms of in earnest , you know , november 2022 , we used it mainly as a creation tool , but now it's becoming faster even than I thought a recommendation tool .

That's when it really starts to hurt your traffic and that's when you're not getting as much recommendation from something like Google and you're getting more recommendation from AI . So AI is determining your destiny . So what does that mean ? You have to send enough signals to AI that says this is a company worthy of recommending .

And what we've seen time and time again already , because so many of the companies I work with have been doing following they ask you answer , like you producing content , producing the video , producing the podcast , answering all these questions those are all signals to AI that says that's a company that is out there . That's a company that's teaching the world .

That's a company that even I AI am learning from , and that's a company that I'm going to recommend . Companies with prolific content strategies get recommended much more than companies by AI , than companies that do not .

You know a simple example for us going into chat GPT and asking why is Action Coach the world's number one business coaching firm and so it makes the AI say what you want it to learn , type thing . You know why is Brad Sugars the number one business coach in the world ? And they seem stupid to do it , but you've got to do it , type thing .

You've got to spend some time . It seems stupid to do it but you've got to do it , type thing . You've got to spend some time helping the AI learn who you are , what you do and how you do it , and the only way it does that is by asking it questions , type thing .

And that's where I think people don't put a lot of thought into the questions of that AI is learning every time you ask it a question . Like I was playing with it the other day and writing some questionnaires and surveys , I said to ChatGPT hey , take Brad Sugar's five ways to multiply your business formula .

And it came back and said hang on , that's not Brad Sugar's formula . Brad Sugar's formula is this , this , this , this and this , and it doesn't say thank you for teaching me , but essentially it's learning what we do , and so it's important for us to all make sure that we teach those platforms about us .

And again , the content , the articles , the blogs , all of that sort of stuff helps it learn because it crawls . All that stuff , it's an accumulation of the knowledge base out there .

If you support us , we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together . Us , we're going to support your success and help you achieve big success together .

Marketing , sales , customer experience communication is like the central hub of all of that . Technology , platforms , all these things . Is communication changing ? Is it staying more the same ? How is communication today relative to getting the result we want in business ?

The easy one that people immediately think about is we're spending a lot more time having these simple , like textual back and forth , but we're not having deep conversations . So the art of deep conversation is less and less a part of society today , which is pretty sad . Also , people tend to be a lot more distracted because of that .

Now , the other component to this is , if we look at the way communication was before , let's say with sales teams , compared to today , sales teams are a train wreck .

Why , over 90% of the sales teams that I meet with and I meet with a lot do not have more than one training a year where they do role plays one a year at most , which , as you know , brad sugars is a is a recipe for disaster . Because what does that lead to ? It leads to you practicing on your customers and not practicing on yourself .

Looking at pipeline and they're really great at playing with the CRM and looking at the pipeline and talking about , okay , what deals we got coming up , but what they're not good at is learning how to communicate in such a way that you make a connection with that deal and it leads to them wanting to do business with you because they trust you more than anyone

else they've talked to . And so we've got an incredible dearth of sales training today . Most sales kickoffs I see and I do a lot myself are ineffective . They're once a year and we've lost it .

One of the reasons why we've lost this edge as a society is because managers don't want to put themselves in the line of fire and receive the feedback themselves in front of their team , and so because we're more thin-skinned , less ready to receive feedback as a gift , then we don't want to fail in front of our team , and so because of that , or we don't want

to show our team how to do it the right way . Again , there's this fear of failure within organizations everywhere , and really it starts with leadership . It starts from the top .

If the CEO is the leadership team , if they're willing to fail and they're willing to screw up and they're willing to show their team hey , I'm imperfect too , and here's how I messed up .

Now you create this trickle down effect where everybody's like okay , so , in other words , we can fail forward , we're going to celebrate our failures and we're going to work with this , but instead you just don't see it , and so this is why we've seen that sales training as a whole is dead . Very sad . There's a very small percentage that are doing this .

All you have to do is you want to know the culture of a sales team , the true culture of a sales team . I ask one question how often do you do sales role play trainings ? And if they don't say at a minimum once a month and they should be saying once a week , but if they don't say at a minimum once a month , I know that they're grossly underperforming .

I mean , I guess , Marcus , I do enjoy the fact that there's a fear of failure in business , because otherwise people wouldn't turn to business coaches . You are true .

Most will say no , I was just thrown into the fire . I mean that's crazy , but this is what we see , and so we're not training people how to communicate . How much communication training did you have in school ? You didn't have any . You had none . Yet this is the most important thing we do in society .

So you know now , as I go around , and you know I'd say 75% of the time I'm teaching sales and marketing , 25% of the time I'm teaching some type of leadership or sales communication . But the through line to all of it is how do you communicate in such a way so as to build more trust and connect deeper with your audience ? This is what we're trying to do .

It's what we're trying to do in marketing at scale . We're trying to do that in sales on a one-to-one . We're trying to do that in leadership , again one-to-team . That's what we're trying to do . We've got to connect .

Today the salesperson comes in at 70% through the sales process . Again depends on the age of the person . The older they are , the more chance they'll connect early . Younger they are , the less chance they'll ever connect . The salesperson's job is very different now . It's that last 20% , it's the objections and all these things .

How do we teach salespeople to be that different person today ?

If you ask a great question , the person feels like there's progress being made right . If they don't feel like there's progress being made , they'll say things like where's this question going ? Where are you going with this ? Yeah , because they're not feeling like we're moving forward .

I've already told you the answer they don't feel like we're moving forward If they don't feel like there's a purpose . So , like , what do you mean by that ? If they don't feel like there's a purpose to the question , okay . If they don't feel like there's a path , now a path . And they don't say in their mind there's no path , but a path .

When a question lacks path , the person gets confused and they say I'm not sure how to answer that . I'm confused . Like , what do you want me to say here ? Right , that means there's a lack of path , and so you have to teach progress , purpose , path and how to know when the question really consisted of those three things , versus when it didn't .

The other thing about it is you know , we tell salespeople all the time if you don't consistently hear your prospects say no one has ever asked me that question before , you're not doing the job you should be doing . You should be asking questions that they have never heard from other vendors , from other salespeople .

But in order to do that , it's not the first question , it's always the follow-ups and there's depth and depth and depth . And so what we want to achieve , we want to get to a place where the prospect is literally saying to themselves you know , I had no idea , I felt that way .

That's powerful , brad , because it means they just had a breakthrough , they just learned something about themselves . Because you are so good at discovery , you're so effective at questions , that literally , you're just stimulating these new paths inside of them that they were able to walk down and find something that they had never discovered before . That's really powerful .

The great ones induce self-discovery .

You're not giving them the answer , you're questioning and usually you teach it's got to be at least three questions . I know in coaching we say it's gonna be five to eight questions before they get to the answer yeah , to do things . Sales it can be a little less so . Uh , mug sure . Best-selling author doing all the things traveling the world , teaching .

What's one thing you need to learn from Brad Sugars what's the final question of the day I ?

It's one of those things that nobody , ever nobody , teaches you how to do this unless you find the right mentors that have gone through it and not

. A lot of people have sold a business . I mean , yes , in the scale of the world , yes , but , like you know , how many friends do I have that I know that have sold a business in my hometown ? Zero , I don't know a single one in my hometown . So I have to come and meet with people like you .

Like , we're going to have dinner tonight and that's when I'll be picking your brain about how to exit the right way and not screw it up .

They go and find someone that can build a website , and usually it's someone priced at like five grand and they wonder why it didn't work . You know , and that sort of thing . It's a professional thing and I think probably the ultimate answer to any question around getting results is find a professional , find someone who does this for a living .

It's like don't reinvent the freaking wheel . We talk about it in our marketing teams and it's like if it moves too fast , we need an agency . We can do referrals all day long . You know why ? Because referrals hasn't really changed a lot in the last 50 , 20 years type thing . Can we do SEO ? No , you know why not . It changes every week .

We go and find a professional SEO company that has 1,000 SEO customers . If they mess it up , they're losing 1,000 customers . Yeah , they got to keep up with the best of the best and all that sort of stuff .