Exploring the Impact of AI on Marketing W/ Marcus Sheridan

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. I have so much in store for you on this week's episode of the Big Success Podcast. Marcus Sheridan, my buddy, the author of They Ask, You Answer. Phenomenal book, ridiculous level. You know, when he's listed as one of the 20 speakers you don't want to miss, when it comes to web marketing strategies, he built a great pool company and he talks about that and how you use the strategies he learned in the big five questions during the podcast.

0:41But one of the things that when you take his perspective on success and how he's applied that to business, how he's made sure he keeps some form of semblance of life and business working together. You know, if we take a look at this book and you think about that 11 books CMOs must read, you've got to understand just how powerful this is. Marcus Sheridan is going to blow your mind for the next 30 minutes here on the Big Success Podcast. So stay tuned, buckle up, get a notepad, get a pen. Let's make some success happen. So Marcus, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you on the Big Success Podcast.

1:18First question, simple question, but not so simple. What is success to Marcus Sheridan? Well, I heard this probably early on in my career. Here's my simple answer for you, Mr. Sugars, which is success has been to say yes when you want to say yes and no when you want to say no. And you don't have to hesitate on either one of the two. Dang, that is actually a very simple answer. So when did you learn that? Like at what approximate age and how did it impact? Yeah, I was probably in my 30s. And what happens is the more, let's call it your brand grows, as you know, the more opportunities you have. People start to come to you with different opportunities and ideas.

2:10And you think early on, I got to say yes to these things. And then oftentimes those yeses become the biggest pitas of your life. Why did I say yes to that? Why am I even doing this? Why did I accept this invitation on my calendar? Why am I doing this right now? And so when we live a life that we can just say yes only to the things that we're incredibly passionate about. So it's either a hell yes or a hell no, nothing in between. You say to me, Marcus, you want to be on my podcast? You and I are friends. Hell yeah, dude. I'm all about that. I love some time with Brad. It's great. But where we get in trouble is if somebody reaches out to us and we're like, I just don't know about this.

2:58And then we're not looking forward to the appointment and it becomes, it sucks away our energy, right? And our thoughts. Because you can only do so many things. You can only put so many things on your calendar, only have so much focus. So that's why, you know, that's really become clear to me over the last 10 years or so. Yeah. So let's go back then. What was your definition and what were your thoughts on success before that? Did it change? How did that work? But the interesting thing about the success question, which I've always found interesting, is it is generally defined by society, right?

3:36Society defines oftentimes success, where I think what's really key is we have to, for ourselves, define what that means early on. and um i did have uh some sense for what success would look like for me financially early on this is going to sound really basic but i think oftentimes it's the basic like things that sound most simple tend to be the most effective especially from a communication standpoint the way i defined financial success early on was my wife could go to the grocery store and not look at any of the prices for the food. So that was a goal that we set as a couple early on. And of course, today, she doesn't have to look at the prices for the food.

4:29It doesn't mean that she doesn't look. It just means she doesn't have to look. And that's a big deal, Brad, as you know, with many children yourself. Yeah. So let's go back then. When do you think you chose success? Like when was there a specific incident in life or was there a gradual thing? When did you choose that success was your path? I think I fell in love with success and we'll call it personal development. When I picked up in college, a book at a garage sale for 75 cents, how to win friends and influence people and 75 cents is what it was and the the copy at the time because this has been over 20 years now for me the copy at the time uh was something like uh 40 years old right somebody was thrown away right it's one man's trash another man's treasure right and so i read that book and immediately fell in love with this idea that i could improve myself.

5:36I could make myself better. And so I read How to Win Friends and Influence People three or four times the first year. And then I started, I've pretty much probably read it once a year probably since that time and just many, many other books since then. And then shortly thereafter that, I discovered Jim Rohn. And Jim Rohn became the great mentor of my life even to this day. And I listened to Jim Rohn every single day almost probably. Probably every single day of my life, for the most part, over the last 25 years, I've listened to something from Jim Rohn. That's funny because Jim Rohn put me on to How to Win Friends and Influence People.

6:19It was one of the first two books I think I grabbed after him. So let's go to your formula for success and your methodology. How does success happen?

6:31Well, that is a loaded question, isn't it, right? Yeah, yeah. All these podcast questions have to be loaded. They have to be loaded. I think it's interesting to me that I find society, Brad, teaches us to not embrace our genius, which is a huge mistake. say things like be humble um we're almost afraid to say there's exceptions this but we're almost like we're afraid at this point to say you know i'm really gifted here this is this is my genius this is the thing that i'm supposed to do with my life right and if you look at the great ones they identify that thing they own it they make it part of their identity and then they continue to pursue that they're not embarrassed about the thing and so the earlier you can identify what that is and of course for me what i realized early on is i had the ability to explain complex things in a simple way so that they were easily understood.

7:49So early on, I could tell that was my gift right around 19, 20 years old. I have everything, like my entire career has been built around understanding that simple genius that I have been given. And because I know that, I also recognize that I'm not a bunch of other things. and I don't try to be those things, right? I'm not the guy that puts your IKEA desk together because it takes me twice as long as the next person. And I'm okay with that. I don't really care anymore. It used to bother me. I don't care anymore. It's just not my zone of genius. It's not where I'm really, really great. Really great is explaining a thing to an audience of one or many in a way that they can understand it.

8:37Love it. Love it. Find your genius. So let's flip it over then. How does failure teach success? How do we learn from our mistakes?

8:48Well, generally speaking, I think like 90 % of our learning comes from the failures. As you know, it's just like you have to do those things. I remember when I started off my career, my first journey into entrepreneurship was a swimming pool company out of college, out of university. I had two partners, and I was reading some books at the time, and they talked about writing your goals down. So I wrote all these goals down, wrote them down in the book because that's what you're supposed to do. I had a one-year goal and a two-year goal and a five-year goal, a 10-year goal. And I remember I had one of my goals was to have all these retail swimming pool and hot tub locations throughout Virginia.

9:41These were my goals. And I wanted to have all these retail buildings. And it didn't take me, well, I guess within seven years, I realized that retail was the thing that was the noose around my neck. It was these buildings that were destroying our cash flow. And I discovered I had what I would refer to today as an edifice complex. In other words, I thought that the more buildings I had, retail stores, the more successful I was and also appeared to the world. And of course, that was the thing that almost cost me the business. What's cool is I read a book and it might've been good to great or it might've been another one, but the phrase in the book was sell the mills, sell the mills.

10:40And so I got rid of the retail stores and I said, based on that hedgehog concept and good to great, what could we be the best in the world at? And we didn't start focusing on one thing. And I became less concerned with the perception of the world and way more concerned with what was on my actual P &L. That became how I derived my approval. It's like, what's the P &L say versus the fact that my friends are like, man, you got all these stores located. Marcus is great, right? You have to learn from - Go past one of your stores. You must be killing it. You must be killing it, right? It's killing me, but yeah.

11:22It's helpful to get your teeth kicked in a decent amount as an individual, as a business person, whatever you might want to call it. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're going to take a break. We're going to be back with Marcus Sheridan to dive into marketing, web traffic, communication, all that stuff. And we might even dive into a little bit about AI. Marketing is the lifeblood of a business. And when done right, it's a phenomenal investment. It's profitably buying lifetime customers. How you get prospects to identify themselves as needing you is what Raise Your Hand Marketing by Brad Sugars and Josh Bardsley is all about.

11:58Getting your suspects to become prospects and raise their hand to say, I'm ready to engage with you. And you're back on the Big Success Podcast. He's the author of They Ask, You Answer. This was the book that was told that every CMO needs to read. It's the number one marketing book in 2017. and here we are in 2023 and it's still like you've revised it, you've updated it, all that. Marcus, how do we succeed in this day and age with marketing? Well, I think we have to understand that ultimately marketing is a battle for trust. And so you've got to have like this center point of your marketing philosophy, strategy, framework, trust, and ask yourself, okay, what do we need to do to become the most trusted voice in the world?

12:45Okay. Now the beautiful thing, Brad, is if you start there, it doesn't really matter what happens next. It doesn't matter what new platform pops up because you have a guiding strategy that will not change. Many companies don't have that compass set. So because of that, they're constantly changing the brand and who they are and just what they're trying to do. Because it's not clear. So I try to help companies say, okay, with your marketing, let's become the most trusted voice in our space. Now, in order to do that, especially in 2023, I would argue there's three fundamental things that we have to do, just in a nutshell.

13:34Three things. Number one, you've got to be willing to talk about what others in your space are not willing to talk about. This is especially true with your website, social media, etc. Number two, you've got to be willing to show, specifically through video, what others in your space aren't willing to show. So finally, number three, you got to be willing to sell in a way that others in your space aren't willing to sell. So again, you got to be willing to talk about, tell what others in your space aren't willing to tell, show what others aren't willing to show, and sell what others aren't willing to sell in a way that they're not willing to sell.

14:06Now, if you do that quickly, you're going to become the voice of trust in your space. And generally speaking, when I ask any audience, Brad, so how many of you in this audience right now could honestly say that we show, tell, and sell in a way that the majority of our competition does not? No one can raise their hand. So we've got this incredible sea of sameness in most industries. And then people wonder, why am I not standing out? Let's dive over then to blogs. If we're going to show and tell and do that, how do we succeed at creating great blogs out there that help us make sales, not just put up content?

14:47Yeah. So when it comes to your blog strategy, your content strategy, you want to focus with what we teach and they ask you answer the framework. Very simply is the big five is where you start. The big five are the five subjects that drive the needle in pretty much every buyer's journey. the things that they want to know, that they want to understand, that they want to research before they reach out to you. So what are those five subjects? Well, buyers are obsessed with understanding cost. They have all these cost, budget, pricing questions. So you got to be willing to talk about in a way that at least gives them enough to say, I feel like I have a sense for things.

15:24They don't need to know exact, but they've got to have a strong sense for things. Otherwise, they won't trust you. Number two, buyers want to know the problems or the negatives or the issues. How could this go wrong? How could this blow up in my face? See, when we get very serious about buying something, that's also when we get very serious about how could this go wrong. So number one is cost. Number two is problems. Number three, comparisons. We love to compare stuff online. Think about how many times you compared something online. We're constantly comparing. People are asking you, okay, if you're me, which would you choose?

15:54Constant comparison-based questions. So make sure you address comparison-based questions online. Your product versus your product, their product versus your product, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on and on. Number four, reviews. People are obsessed with reviews. They want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly, though, not just the good. And then finally, number five, best. Best, most, top. Think about how many times you've gone online and searched best such and such. So cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, and best. That should be driving certainly any type of business blogging strategy in 2023.

16:25This is what buyers want to know. This is what they're researching. And unfortunately, this is what most companies are not willing to talk about. So if you do, you're going to become that voice of trust. So web traffic then overall, the blog is one part of it. What else do we need to do then to succeed at creating great traffic to our site? Well, the cool thing about this they ask you answer type of mindset and addressing their questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns, that is a beautiful SEO strategy in and of itself. Because that is Google's obsession. They're trying to give you the best, most specific, relevant answer to your question as quickly as possible.

17:03And so when you do this, it forces you to think like your buyer, their questions, their worries, their fears, their concerns, their issues, and address those questions through text, through video on your website. So that is, from a traffic perspective, that's one of the best ways you can do it. Now, in 2023, if you said to me, Brad, what's the quickest way to get awareness? What's one of the things that's easily working the best? It's short form vertical style video. It's just incredible in terms of how effective it is if you do it the right way. We're talking YouTube shorts, Facebook and Instagram, Reels and TikTok.

17:36The cool thing is, is you can take a vertical video, you can produce it for almost nothing. and you can upload it across all four of those particular platforms, which is very, very efficient. And what's interesting is the exact same video is going to do different most of the time on Instagram as it would on, let's say, YouTube short. So I would strongly suggest that you consider doing vertical style video. Now, if you're going to do that, though, three quick suggestions for you. This is the keys to vertical style video, short style videos. Number one, you have to take what you do within your business, within your world, which you think is normal, and you got to be willing to show it to everybody else and understand that it's not necessarily normal to them.

18:17So overcome the curse of knowledge, show that which you do. That's number one. Now that sounds obvious, but let's go to two and three. Now, number two is when you're creating those vertical style video, you want people to stay. And one of the best ways to make them stay is to follow what we call the three-second rule. And the three-second rule means you want to have a cut every three seconds in terms of the scene. So you want to show an entire story in 60 seconds or less generally, but you want it to have all these different looks about it so that it constantly feels like it's changing and it's evolving really, really quickly.

18:54Okay. So that's number two, the three second rule. And if you watch some of the best short style videos out there, it's like, oh, oh, oh, it's happening really, really fast that we're seeing the change in the scene. And then number three, you want to create what's called a curiosity gap. Curiosity gap at the beginning of the video makes the person say, how's this going to end? What's the payoff going to be? And so there's a curiosity that occurs. There's the gap there that holds them. And then they're able to watch the thing until the end. right? So that's the key to short video. Incredibly effective.

19:28The algorithms want you to do short video, and it's a quick way to get incredible awareness in 2023. You know, it's amazing when you talk about the three-second rule. I try to get my kids to watch movies that I loved when I was young, and it was definitely not a three-second rule back then. It didn't change every three seconds, but if you don't show them that, they get so bored. It's crazy. Even if you look at, let's say, Top Gun 1 versus Maverick, it's like the pacing of the movie was dramatically different. I mean, there was just a lot more action in Maverick. And this is why it could be argued that this is one of the first times we've seen an iconic movie have an iconic follow-up.

20:11That's very, very rare. But what they really understood was making sure that we're not allowing people's attention spans to dip, which is constantly keeping them interested from the start. I mean, you have this unbelievable Mach 10 scene all the way to the end of the movie. It never stops. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, the difference in speed. So that, OK, communications obviously shifted over the time. How do we succeed in communication in this day and age? this is one of the subjects for me brad that i'm just so utterly passionate about let me give you a couple suggestions across the board especially online somebody once said to me you know marcus it's dumb not to dumb it down and i thought about that for a minute i'm like it's like huh but this is the reason why there's many people that you and i have watched before on a video or we've even read or seen on a stage where immediately they turned us off.

21:12If you said to them, well, why'd they turn you off? If you're forced to answer, oftentimes the answer is, because that person thinks that he or she is smarter than me. When you release the need to appear smarter than your audience, and you're literally just looking for communion with the audience, the audience feels that very, very quickly. And so they lose that initial guard in that competition of this person elevates themselves above me. If you can eliminate that from the fray, you've disarmed the situation. And now you can speak from the same place and you can achieve that community. That's one of the biggest keys.

21:56And a lot of the folks that are producing social videos across the board, like friends that will come to me and say, hey, Marcus, can you watch this speaker reel of mine? I'm like, you're trying to sound smart. I can tell. They're like, but I didn't know I was. There's all these things we do subconsciously and consciously that give that away. If you release that, now you're going to really start to engender some trust. Love it. Love it. But how about one-to-one communication? Any keys to that one? Or is it the same thing, only in a different format? Yeah. I've got a book coming out probably later this year on what is transformative communication.

22:38And we've all heard the phrase active listening before. And in fact, you talk to most salespeople and you say, are you good at asking questions? Most say yes. But then what we found, Brad, is that if you test them on this skill, most fail miserably. And the reason for that is we understand the basic questions that we're supposed to ask in our mind, let's say as a salesperson or even as a friend or peer, how was your weekend, right? Well, we don't really know what's supposed to come next. But what comes next changes every time based on what is actually said. And so learning how to go deeper in a way that you really get to the core of the matter, and if you get very skilled, you can get there quickly, that makes for a great communicator.

23:32And one other thing that I would say is you want to, ideally, the best communicators, essentially what they are is they're pathfinders. and what i mean by a pathfinder is and that's a military phrase and the pathfinders were the folks that went in early and figured out the routes that let's say the army could take or whomever would take in order to achieve the the mission so if you see yourself as a pathfinder you know it's not your job to give answers it's not your job as a leader it's not your job to give answers. I mean, sometimes it is yes, because, you know, bottom line is you got to make a call.

24:16But if you want to develop anybody around you, you have to become a pathfinder. And pathfinder understands how to ask questions in such a perfect way that the individual they're talking to, that singular person, or even their audience is able to come up with the answer themselves. And they're able to do it in such a way that they're, to make it really simple, and this is how you know that you do this well, Brad, how often does somebody say to you, and this could be a child, this could be a loved one, this could be a coworker, how often does somebody say to you, you're right, you're right, Brad, that's right, that's what I should do.

24:49Now, whose answer was that? That was Brad's, right? That was Brad's answer. If they're saying you're right, they're giving you the credit, they don't own the answer, it's not their thing, yeah, they might do it, but it ain't their thing. whereas if someone is saying in the midst of talking with them if you're the leader and and just asking questions and suddenly they say you know what i know what i should do that's magic that's what we call a light bulb moment well how many light bulb moments do you induce on a regular basis with your friends with your family with your peers if you can induce light bulb moments, you are changing the people's lives around you.

25:33Love it. Sales. Something you talked about when we did that tour of the UK was how using marketing to help sales these days, especially when you look at the stats that you teach around, you know, 40 odd percent of the market doesn't want to deal with a salesperson and people are 70 to 80 percent sold before they go in to buy. How do we succeed in sales today? Yeah. So a bunch of different fronts here that we could go on. Number one, you have to accept that buyers don't want to talk to a salesperson until they feel like they are ready, they're informed, and they're not going to make a mistake. So it means you got to give them more information than you did in the past on the front end.

26:16You've got to allow them to do things like maybe something like a pricing calculator or a product selection tool that has a series of questions that makes a recommendation to them. Those types of tools are incredibly powerful. They're incredibly effective. And that's what people want. So that starts the sales process. Now, once you have that one-to-one, a couple of things have to happen. You better be a stinking expert. Every single person that's listening to this right now, Brad, has had an experience in the last year where they said, yeah, I can tell that I know more than the salesperson knows about the thing that I'm asking them about.

26:50That's not a good feeling. I had one yesterday myself. I'm like, this person, And he's answering my questions, but he doesn't know. He doesn't know the answer. He's winging it right now. I can tell he's winging it. And so that's very, very hard for me to want to do business with somebody like that. So you better be an expert. And then you better understand how to ask, this goes back to our previous conversation, deeper, better discovery questions than your peers. You can't just be on a conveyor belt. We've got those five main questions you're going to ask. You're going to ask every single time.

27:20It's a tragedy. I see a lot of these sales call recordings. I watch them, especially with AI now. You can do a lot of that at scale. And most sales demos are just an utter train wreck. They're not a back and forth. There's just, hey, I'm going to show you this thing. And then at the end, you say, hey, you don't have any questions. And it's just like, it's a disaster. And that's because we don't understand how to ask better, deeper, more effective questions. We got to get back to that. Part of the reason for that is sales training is almost dead on arrival. Role plays are almost non-existent within organizations around the world.