Build Trust by Saying What Others Won’t

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ductate Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Marcus Sheridan. He's a renowned speaker, author, and entrepreneur known for They Ask, You Answer. He built the world's top pool website, helps brands foster trust, and has delivered 750-plus keynotes, including TEDx, featured in the New York Times and Forbes. His methods have driven over$1 billion in revenue. We're going to talk about his new book today, Endless Customers, A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader. It is out everywhere you buy fine books today, and even where you buy really crappy books.

0:50It's probably there too, right? Marcus, welcome to the show. Jens, it is so good to be with a friend, and your audience is my people, so this is going to be a good time, man. I have a question. Of course, your whole backstory, I'm sure many, many people have heard it of your pool business. But can you still work a backhoe and that kind of stuff? You know what's crazy is I actually, there was a period of time because I was, I could be considered the first influencer for what was like buying an in-ground swimming pool in the world. And there was a time when I was getting calls. I remember I got a call from the Virgin Islands one time.

1:30this lady was getting her fiberglass pool installed and she's like hey i'd like for you to come out and oversee the install because i i can't i can't like i just can't really trust these guys that are doing it would you be willing to do that and i had to turn her down and the reason is john because i can't install a pool now i can i can talk about it and at the time what i could do is i could you know i could i could talk to my business partners about it i could explain these things but in terms of like getting in the equipment, that was never my thing. But yeah, I was getting requests literally from around the world of, hey, you're like my pool guy.

2:05Could you come out and oversee this? Crazy, right? That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, let's talk about transparency. I think in your first book, I mean, that was really a lot of what you're saying is, hey, people have questions, don't hide the answers. Give it to them, right? Has your thinking evolved since that first book? Is there a new level of transparency we have to embrace? I'm curious your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think, well, I certainly think there is. If we look at the biggest change, what's happened is, because if I, look, I became the most traffic swing pool website in the world by becoming obsessive about the questions my customers were asking, fears they had, and being willing to address those on our website online through text through video.

2:45The big difference today, though, is the fact that we have this thing called AI. We've got ChatGPT and these other platforms. And the future of Google, frankly, is in doubt. I don't know where Google's headed. I do know that today, I'm sure you're using it way less than you've used it in the last 25 years. I'm using it less than I've used it in the last 25 years. I know I've talked to tons of businesses that are spending more on Google ads than they've spent in years and getting less results. They're getting frustrated with declining traffic and they're saying, where's all this headed? And the reality is, for 20 some years, most businesses, all we had to do was make sure that the customer was satisfied and get recommendations from them and make sure Google was happy and get recommendations from Google.

3:30And guess what? Now we've got to get recommendations from AI. So there's three. And that one called AI and their willingness to recommend you is going to be very, very difficult, much more so than it was in the past, which means, because you can't just throw money at it. Like in the past, throw money, get some ads, or play in ball, right? Or, hey, especially early, I could just play around some keywords. I could show up. It's not the way that it's going to work in the future. So what it means basically is we've got to build an extraordinarily known and trusted brand. And brand is everything today.

4:07And that means we've got to be, frankly, in more places than we've been in the past. You cannot build your house on Google alone. It's like building a house on sand. Not a good idea. We've known for thousands of years we shouldn't do that. And you certainly shouldn't do that. And so you've got to expand. If you look at what I did with river pools, I mainly just put written content on my website, some video, some video on YouTube. I could not do that today, and expect to get the same extraordinary results. And so how has it really changed in terms of transparency? Well, here's one thing I would say to you.

4:42We've got to be much more willing to be disruptive in our spaces and not play by the same dang rules that everybody has been playing by for a long time. And let me give an example if I could, if that's okay with you. So in Endless Customers, we discuss what we call the four pillars of a known and trusted brand. And on the surface, these sound pretty basic, but once you get into them, it's like, yep, we're not doing that very well. So here's the four pillars. Number one, you got to be willing to say online what others in your space aren't willing to say. So like, if you're listening to this right now, I would challenge you, what are you talking about online, social, website, et cetera, that the majority of your competitors are not willing to talk about, yet buyers want to know, okay?

5:27Number one. Number two, you got to be willing to show with video what others in your space aren't willing to show. I'd ask you again, what are you showing with video right now that others in your space aren't willing to show? Number three, you got to be willing to sell in a way others aren't willing to sell. And man, I'm telling you what, everybody thinks they got a special, like the special sauce when it comes to selling, John. And usually they're way more similar than they realize. And then finally, number four, you've got to be willing to be more human than others in your space are willing to be.

6:00In a time with AI and with growing technology, you've got to use that to be more, not less human. So all of these things are really broken down in detail as to the examples of how we do that in the book. And I'm certainly happy to talk about some of those. You know, I have been a big advocate of brand. I think you're right. We've gotten lazy in the last 10 years because you could just buy ads. You could just game Google or figure out Google's game. And I think that made people lazy. I do think that we're going to see a time where people don't trust Google. People don't trust Facebook. So a lot of the places that I think we used to generate a lot of business, people are going to Reddit.

6:38They're going to other places now, like all over the place, right? YouTube even. And so how would you advise? Because I do think that's a real challenge. I mean, I do think people are going to make decisions based on trusted brands. So trust has always been important, more important than ever. But how do you advise businesses? Because I'm getting a lot of pushback. They're like, great. Now we got to be in like 27 places because that's where people actually not just find information, but they actually buy now. So how does a business who's pretty spread pretty thin, I mean, you know, most small businesses are very resource tapped.

7:12I mean, how do we spread out? Yeah. One thing's for sure, John. I don't think this is getting easier. No. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm not going to say, yeah, this is because it's definitely getting harder. That being said, that's what we signed up for as business owners. We said we don't want to be controlled and we want to dictate our own destinies. That's why we got into this thing called entrepreneurship. And so you can do that today. Now, one way to look at this though is how do we do compounding effects with our content? And one of the greatest ways that you can do that is by starting to think exactly like a media company.

7:52And I really mean this. I don't care how small you are. You need to start thinking like a media company. If you remember, the second pillar was show what others in your space are not willing to show. Well, what that means basically is Everything that you do in business could be video. It could be something that you're showing to the world. The question is, are you? Are you pulling out your phone and are you showing the thing? Now, I know that sounds basic, but the cool thing about video is I could create one solid video that in turn goes, that is transcribed, is an article and a video on my website.

8:29That video gets put on different pages of my website. Then that video gets put long form onto YouTube. that same video gets chopped up and is made into maybe a couple of shorts for YouTube. That same video with those same shorts that we just talked about can be put on TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels. So all of a sudden we're compounding one piece of content, right? And now that is dramatically more efficient. Can't really do that with text very much, right? You're not gonna take one article that you write and then suddenly like repurpose that across the major platforms. Not really, not like video.

9:04whereas with video you can do that you know quite effectively and you do want to be on the tiktoks of the world for most businesses at this point you do want to be on the facebooks and again it's not going to get any easier to because this is where this is where we're headed but i will say this as google becomes less prominent in terms of its impact on the world youtube and social are going to grow in prominence and so as you're placing your bets and you're putting your chips on the table, I would be putting chips on YouTube without question. I would be putting chips on social. And specifically, video on those places is going to carry the day for your brand.

9:42Now, then it becomes a question is, but are we willing to talk about what others aren't willing to talk about and show what others aren't willing to show? And that's the things you got to do. You know, I talked about this and they ask you answer. And it's still as prevalent today as it was then because buyers are not changing. The thing that's not changing is what we're researching before we buy, John. And what we want to know, we call it the big five and they ask you answer and the big five live on gloriously and they will live on long past Google, long past ChatGPT. And that is when we're interested in buying something, we want to know five things.

10:13How much is it? Number one. Number two, what are the problems or the negatives with it? Issues with it. So any fears, objections we have. Number three, we want to know how does that thing compare to the other things that we're looking at? So comparisons. Number four, reviews. We're obsessed with reviews. Thing is, we don't just want good reviews. We want the good, the bad, and the ugly. And then finally, number five, we want to know best. Best, most, top. I mean, think about how many times you've gone online and searched best, most, et cetera. And so if you think about those five things right there, cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, best.

10:44That's what buyers want to know. That's what runs the economy of search and businesses still to this day, 2025. We don't want to talk about these things. And if you want to become a known and trusted brand, you've got to be willing to talk about those things. I mean, and aggressively, not lightly, but aggressively. Ideally, a whole lot of it through video. And if you're listening to this right now, and if I said to you, are you aggressively discussing cost and price for your product or service in a multiplicity of ways online, especially through video, most people listening to this right now would say, no, no, I'm not.

11:18You know, what's really interesting too, a lot of people are turning to the AI tools and they're saying, write me a blog post about pools, 700 words, right? Which is like, throw it into the ocean of sameness. But what you're talking about, like what are other people not talking about? What are other people not willing to talk about? I mean, those are some amazing questions to ask AI. If you're sitting there thinking, well, I don't know what to write, that kind of counter conversation, I find that the AI tools are pretty darn good at turning up. Yeah, and one thing you could do, and this sounds self-serving, I promise it's not, is just go to AI and say, hey, listen, I want you to act as an expert in Marcus Sheridan's They Ask You Answer Philosophy.

11:59Hey, here's my business. Here's what we sell. I want you to lean into the big five. The big five are cost problems, comparisons, reviews best. And I want you to create 10 to 15 article video titles for each of these big five for my product or service. And suddenly you're going to see 75 different pieces of content. And a lot of them, you're going to be like, holy cow, that's really, really good. It's like, yeah, it's really, really good. I mean, is trained on these things. And so you might as well rock and roll with it. And you can blow it out. It's read all my books, that's for sure. Yeah, that's what it is.

12:29Which by the way, I'd love to have a side conversation at some point about that. Get your feelings on that because there's quite a mix of feelings on that. One thing about the third one was the selling ways that others aren't willing to sell. I think this is a big one and a way that you can stand out. There's a couple of different ways you could do this, but one specifically, and I really talk about it in the book. there's a stat from Gartner. It says 75 % of all buyers would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience. And so think about that for a second. It's not that we hate salespeople.

12:59It's just, we don't want to talk as buyers to a salesperson until we are good and ready, until we're confident, until we're comfortable, until we feel like, I'm not going to screw this up. I'm not going to be taken advantage of. So what does this mean? I just want the logistics at that point. Yes. Yes. So what does this mean? It means we need to give, we're going to take advantage of the trend instead of just trying to complain about it, which we know never helps. We need to give buyers more control. Well, how do we give them more control? Through self-service. What is self-service? Self-service is generally some type of interactive tool that you would put on your website or online that would allow someone to get information or take an action that previously they would have had to have done through a human, but now they're able to do without having to do it with a human or a salesperson first.

13:46Now, let me give you two really quick examples of this, John, because I've got some great ones in the book. There's five specific self-service tools that we really talk about. One of them is self-scheduling tools. Now, this isn't novel until the second part of it that I'm going to explain. So imagine that you've got five sales people on your team and you sell whatever it is that you sell. Well, someone comes to your site and they want to schedule time with a salesperson and you have a tool that allows them to do that. Now that's fine. And Danny, it's not special, but here's where it gets really special.

14:16And we've done a bunch of experiments with this. And this is just stinking awesome. It's a future of selling, John. And that is this. Imagine though, that you, when you said, I want to meet with one of your salespeople, you got to see all the salespeople in the company. You got to see their image. You got to read their bio. You got to watch a video about each one of the salespeople and learn about them. And then you decided who you want to work with. Now, we've done this with multiple companies now, and the results are astounding. They're almost the same results every time, which is this. When you choose who your salesperson is versus not, closing rates double.

14:57That is double, 2X. that's powerful because it's on cost fallacy because you have now invested your time in choosing who you want to work with and you're looking for a way to make it work so that tool incredible almost no one's doing that and i bet you if the people that are listening to this right now less than one percent have a tool anything like that where someone could choose their salesperson so i imagine some sales people want to push back on that because like they like the round robin I get every fifth call or whatever. And if you're on a website with me, you're so much better looking, they're going to choose you every time.

15:36So how do I win that? Well, it's one of those things. We think that, but it's like, there's a reason why we want to take an Uber over taking a taxi. Because when you call a taxi, you have no idea. How is it going to look? How old is it going to be? How bad is it going to smell? What's the person going to be like? Are they going to be friendly or not? An Uber, much greater chances. See, we don't like risk today. Anytime we can mitigate risk, we lean into that. Let me give you one more example of self-service that's changing the world. And that is self-pricing tools. Now, self-pricing, of course, is misunderstood by many because when we talk about showing and saying and selling in ways that others are not, self-pricing tools, man, this is it.

16:18So imagine that Now, you are looking to hire some type of contractor for your yard, for your lawn, maybe a plumber, an electrician. It could be any service. It doesn't matter. Well, in a perfect world, you go to their website, and they allow you, through a series of questions that they ask you interactively, to get an estimate for the service that you're looking for. Now, just over a year ago, I started a software company called PriceGuy.ai. I'm such a huge believer in this that I said, I want people to be able to build a pricing estimator that they can put on their website, that they could immediately start generating leads by giving someone an estimate.

17:04Keyword is estimate, not a quote. There's a difference between the two. A quote is closer to what it's going to cost you. An estimate is a range that's a rough range based on what they have told you. No different than if someone said, hey, John, roughly, how much would it cost to work with you as a consultant for me? It's like you'd give them a rough range depending on a few different factors. Well, here's what we have found. If someone puts a pricing estimator on their homepage and they include the call to action, the phrase, get immediate, excuse me, get instant estimate. That's the phrase. Get instant estimate.

17:41The leads increase by 300 to 500%. almost every single time. All because now you're allowing people to answer the first question that everybody has when they get on the buyer's journey. The first question everybody has when they get on the buyer's journey, once they know they have a problem, a need, first question is roughly, how much is this going to cost? So the future of service-based businesses especially is that I bet you within five years, 90 % and almost 100 % of home improvement, I mean, that's a deadlock, is going to have some type of estimate tool on their website that allows you to get a sense for pricing.

18:21Do not wait for this if you're listening to this because your industry is headed this way. The question is, are you going to be at the forefront of it or are you going to be the laggard that is following everybody else? Because remember, the rule breakers become the rule makers. Everybody else becomes the rule followers. And that's the history of the world right there in business. All right, let me explore that a little bit because I agree with you 100%, especially on ones where, hey, we've got the data, we can do an estimate, right? Why not? So, but what about like, you use me as an example. I mean, we sell marketing, we develop strategies for folks and we might charge 10 ,000, we might charge 50 ,000.

18:59Is that, do you see that type of business going the way of a, you know, get your instant estimate or you feel like it's really going to be more, that more defined, like replacing a garage door. There's different ways that you could do it. So you could do it for the industry. Okay. So you could literally just say, you could say, if you're looking to get this type of consulting in this industry, here's a rough estimate as what you're going to find in terms of price ranges. And you could build an estimator like that. Then if you wanted to, you could do it for you. Now, if I came to you and I did say, how much roughly is this going to cost?

19:36You would ask me a series of questions, then you would give me a range. Now, do I think it's going that way? Yeah, I actually do. I'm even building this out. It should be live on. I think I'll be the first professional speaker to have this on my website. And I'm super stoked about it because it's like, full sent, let's go. And I think I just want to be on the cutting edge. But yeah, I think everybody's going, I think home service is leading the way on this. But I do think a lot of professional services are going to follow, John. Do you, I know I've had some home service clients over the years that, especially like the remodeling business, you know, it's like they'll call three remodelers.

20:13And like my clients are always like, Hey, we're more expensive, but we're worth it. Whereas the other guys out there going, Oh, I think we could do this for$5 ,000. Of course, you know, it's 50 ,000 when they're done. I mean, is there any sort of, of like, Hey, you don't know what it's worth until you understand the value of what you're getting. I mean, good question. So first of all, every single company should have a pricing page on their website on that pricing page. And we talk about this in endless customers, which by the way, you can find endless customers.com. That's the place where you want to, where you want to go endless customers.com.

20:44So we talk specifically about what is the perfect pricing page look like for any product or service. And there's five fundamental sections of a great world-class pricing page. And this includes a world-class pricing video. Ideally you have both for every major product or service that you sell. Okay. So number one is what drives cost up. Number two, what drives cost down. So that really helps define value. Number three, why are some companies more expensive? Number four, why are some companies less expensive? So that covers your basis in terms of, okay, the home remodeler that doesn't have insurance that's working out of the pickup truck versus the one that has a crew, a service department, et cetera.

21:20Right. So it explains that. And then finally, number five section of your pricing page or your pricing video would be roughly, roughly, what do you charge? Now you can give big ranges here. You can give sample ranges here of different projects or different examples. But the whole idea is the person is just at least able to say, ah, okay, I feel like I have a sense. That's level. That's really level one and two. And then the next level up would be that you would have some type of pricing estimator on your site. You put the three together. Oh, by the way, a great estimator done right actually educates them as it's asking the questions too.

21:59Right, right, right. And so it makes them think about things. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Gee, I didn't. Should I get that? Right. So that's what it does. Like a great salesperson would. Yeah. As opposed to going, it's so much per square foot. Correct. Right. That does commoditize. Ignorance commoditizes. Education decommoditizes. And that's why you want to have conversations that decommoditize. And just remember, if you don't talk about it, somebody else will. And they're going to learn it from somebody else. You want the human learning from you. You want the AI learning from you. And this way you're helping control the conversation in the market.

22:32So endlesscustomers.com. And then what about the pricing tool? Priceguide.ai. Priceguide.ai. And the thing about it is pricing estimators, usually if you custom build them, there's like 20 ,000 bucks. This tool costs$200 for the entire year. So it's very inexpensive and you usually pay for it within your first couple of leads. So it's amazing to see it happen. But the future self-service, man, that's why I talk about it so much in the book. You have so many different examples of self-service in the book. Yeah, and you didn't mention this, but it might also somebody who's like, oh, I can get this done for$100, right?

23:06It might also drive them away so you're not spending your sales time on talking to somebody. Oh, there's no question. It is a great qualifier and it helps all parties. And what happens is lots of times companies will see that their sales team starts using it if the person hasn't done it, just to help prepare them to have a better meeting. It's very interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, Marcus, great seeing you. Hopefully, will I see you in Nashville again this year? You'll see me, brother. I will certainly be there. I can't wait to see you. It's gonna be a good time. Awesome. All right, well, we've already talked about where people can reach out to you, find the book, find the price tool.

23:41So again, I appreciate you stopping by the Ductate Marketing Podcast. Hopefully we'll see you soon out there on the road. Jance, you are the best, my friend. Thank you. you