Marcus Sheridan: We got to find ways to stand out, we got to be more human, and we got to engage better than anybody else.
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Patrick Baldwin: Paul, we had Simon Neville, one of our favorite Brits, say, “You've got to get Marcus Sheridan on The Buzz.” I’m like, “Who's this guy?” I did a little research, he wrote the book They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer. It was hard to contain Marcus, high energy, and lots of great content. Thank you, Simon, Marcus did not disappoint.
Paul Giannamore: Marcus went over and spoke to the guys in the British Pest Control Association. Did I remember that correctly, Patrick?
Patrick Baldwin: It might have been pest. Simon is also involved in some entrepreneurial organizations as well. In one of these trips, we'll figure it out.
Paul Giannamore: This, by the way, was an interesting discussion. I had never read Marcus's book. During the course of the discussion, we'll find out that he's written a second book, which has yet to be published. It’s an engaging discussion. I enjoyed spending some time with him and you had a lot of great questions.
Patrick Baldwin: Thanks, Paul, that's what I do.
Paul Giannamore: What do you say, Patrick?
Patrick Baldwin: What do you say, Paul? Let's step into The Boardroom with Marcus Sheridan.
Paul Giannamore: Let's do this.
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Paul Giannamore: Marcus, welcome to The Boardroom.
Marcus Sheridan: Happy to be here.
Paul Giannamore: You were referred to us by some of our colleagues at the British Pest Control Association. Patrick, what exactly did they say about that?
Patrick Baldwin: “Last year, we had Marcus Sheridan, the author of They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer. The Yanks scared the hell out of us reserve Brits, look at my face.” This face, if you could see it, you would know that he is definitely scared.
Paul Giannamore: What'd you do over there, Marcus?
Marcus Sheridan: It's funny. I posted about this on LinkedIn. I showed this photo of me walking into the audience and being almost nose-to-nose with somebody in the audience. It's interesting because since I started speaking full time years ago, I've had multiple organizers say, “Marcus, you tend to engage with the audience and you go into the audience but I'm not sure how my group is going to take that.” In fact, the first time I ever heard that, I was in Copenhagen, Denmark.
A guy had seen me speak in the States and he says to me, “Marcus, I'm not sure how Danish people are going to take your interaction with them because we tend to be pretty shy.” I smiled at him and said, “I got a feeling that Danish people are people too.” He looked at me like, “What?” I said, “Wait 20 minutes and then after 20 minutes, you'll see everything will change.” I've been back to Copenhagen 6 or 7 times to speak to that general group. People want to be engaged with but they just got to feel like it's safe and they got to feel like it's fun.
Once you make it safe and fun, all of a sudden, it's a different game. One thing that's helped me to stand out as a speaker is the fact that I do that. The reason why I share this, other than the fact that it came up just now, to me, this is what we have to do in business, we got to find ways to stand out, we got to be more human, and we got to engage better than anybody else. I don't think that's just online, it's offline too and that's how I live my life, and that's why I'm not afraid to go into the audience knowing that 1% is going to be turned off but the other 99% is going to say, “This guy isn’t everybody else. I want to play. This is going to be fun.”
Patrick Baldwin: That makes sense as far as being personable and authentic on a one-to-one interaction. I thrive in having a conversation in the flesh belly-to-belly with someone but running a business that I want to scale, whether it's a service business or what Paul and I do between finance or him doing M&A, can you do that at scale where you make that a personable and authentic approach?
Marcus Sheridan: I don't know if you have a choice at this point, Pat.
Patrick Baldwin: Fat Pat. Motivate me, it's Fat Pat.
Marcus Sheridan: I'm not used to calling people Fat.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm not used to people calling me Pat unless you're from the North.
Marcus Sheridan: I'm a Virginian boy. I don't think we have a choice when it comes to coming across as human. Take the pest control industry, for example. The very high majority of the websites feel like they're made by the exact same company. If they all look the same, what's the differentiator? Maybe it's the in-home sales process. Think about how flawed that is.
We know that the average buyer is 80% through the buyer's journey before they reach out to a company today and even have a conversation with the salesperson. We know that, this is what all the stats tell us. If that's the case, that means, roughly speaking, marketing is handling 80% of your success and sales is handling 20%, at least in the traditional light that we've always looked at it.
People are vetting you to death online before they reach out. In fact, they don't want to talk to you until they're good and ready. There are two stats that have changed the world of business and certainly when it comes to service businesses like pest control and home improvement, it's across the board. The first one is typical buyers, 80% through the buyer's journey before they talk to a salesperson because they're vetting us to death. That's number one.
Number two though is 35% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience. I don't think this means we hate salespeople, it just means we don't want to talk to a salesperson until we feel like we are ready, until we feel like we're informed, and until we feel like, “I'm not going to make a mistake.”
The question is, as a business, are you willing to allow your audience to feel that way? Part of that is the human touch that we talked about, Fat Pat, but there's a lot more than that too because we've got to make sure they feel every concern, every fear, and every issue has been addressed and preferably it's been addressed by you. They're saying, “Everything I ever learned about pest control or everything I ever learned about replacing my siding, whatever it is, I learned from you guys.” Because of that, they fill out that form or they call you and they're willing to have you sit in the confines of their home.
Patrick Baldwin: Take that into pricing on the website. Did I hit a hot button here? As a consumer, I want to do that. I do want to minimize interaction, “Tell me as much as you can.” I might even pay a premium price as a consumer to know that that's picking up the phone four less times to shop around.
Marcus Sheridan: Let's break this down. I've been talking about this subject for over twelve stinking years. It’s amazing how many people are still living in 1995, which is the year the internet started to take off.
Paul Giannamore: It was a great year though, Marcus, 1995?
Marcus Sheridan: That was the year I graduated high school. What about you, Paul?
Paul Giannamore: Me too, exactly.
Marcus Sheridan: Look at that, class of ‘95. Feeling it, brother. If you want to understand pricing, by the way, I don't think there's a subject that gets businesses more uncomfortable than talk about pricing, and that's part of the problem. I got to show you this quick story and I'm going to come back to the whole pricing subject in a second. There's a psychology of pricing. If you as a business want to be successful, you got to change the way you think about it.
I remember I was probably eight years in my speaking career and my friend, Phil Jones, and I were speaking at an event. Phil wrote Exactly What to Say, a well-known sales book. He says to me at this event, “Marcus, what are you charging these days to speak?” I'm like, “Usually, I'm somewhere around $15,000 or something like that.” He said, “When you can say that without hesitation, you're going to be worth a lot more than $15,000.” I thought, “Son of a gun, he's right.”
It's amazing to me how many companies I talk to about pricing in general and you can tell they're uncomfortable to talk about it, which means that's going to manifest over to the customer, that energy will transfer over to them. You don't realize it but it totally does. Until you become incredibly explicitly comfortable talking about pricing, your customers are not going to be comfortable with your pricing.
Let's talk about the psychology of this. If I said to anybody who’s reading this right now, have you researched how much something costs online? Everybody would say, “Yeah.” Let's say you're on a website looking for cost and price information and you cannot find it, what's the emotion you experience? You're going to say, “I feel frustrated.” I say, “Why do you feel frustrated?” You're like, “I feel frustrated because I'm the customer and I'm trying to make a buying decision.”
I would ask you, in that moment of frustration, do you, as the buyer, searcher, or customer, say to yourself, “I'm sure it's on this website somewhere, this pricing information. I'm going to keep on looking until I find it.” No, you do not because we've done the studies on this and the average person will look for cost and price information for ten seconds before they leave the website.
If I asked you in that moment of frustration, do you say to yourself, “Of course, they're not talking about cost and price. They're a value-based business. Every job is different. I'm going to call them on the phone.” You don't do that either because you, as the buyer or searcher, keep searching. You search until you find what you were looking for. Generally speaking, whoever gives you what you were looking for, they're going to get your business.
The real reason we get so upset as buyers is because we know that they know, as the business, the answer, or at least a semblance of the answer. Because we know they know the answer and they're not giving it to us, we now feel like they're hiding something from us. The moment we feel like anyone is hiding anything from us online, the trust is gone. Of course, that's the real business we're in. We might call it home services but, let's be honest, we're in the business of trust.
In the home services industry, we're talking 80% to 90% still don't talk about pricing on their website, which is a crime against humanity, by the way. A lot of people reading this right now are already saying, “You don't understand my business.” I do understand your business. I have a swimming pool company. I've been selling in the home, at least my company has now for over 23 years. We built one of the largest swimming pool companies in the world. I've trained home service businesses all over the world at this point. I can tell you that I do understand.
There are three reasons why this industry and almost every industry pushes back. The first reason is they say, “Every job is different. It's a customized solution.” If I came to you and I said, “Can you explain the factors that drive the cost of your service up? Could you explain that? Yes or no?” You'd say, “Yes, I could, Marcus.” If I said, “Can you explain the factors that would drive it down?” You'd say, “Yeah, I could, Marcus.” If I said, “You gave me a quote for your service. Thank you for that, Fat Pat. I got a quote from a few of your other competitors as well too. Can you help me understand why some of you are higher and some of you are lower?” You'd be like, “Of course.”
Every single person who’s reading this that's in sales has answered those questions over the course of time. The sad tragedy is, oftentimes, we don't answer those questions until they're asked of us in-person. By that point, you've already lost the high majority of the potential customers that you would've had. That's the first reason why I want to talk about cost and price, we say, “It depends.” The second reason why we don’t talk about cost and price on a website is we say,” I don’t want my competitors to find it out,” which is dumb.
If I said to any salesperson who’s reading this, “Do you have a pretty decent sense as to what your competitors charge?” You say, “Of course, I do. I’m not dumb. If you have a good sense as to what your competitors charge, they have a good sense as to what you charge. This is a big secret. Non-secret is everybody acts like nobody knows what everybody's charging when, in reality, everybody's got at least a decent sense, maybe not exact, but a decent sense as to what everybody is charging.
The third reason why we don't like to talk about costs and prices is we say to ourselves, “If I talk about it and I show it and they see we're more expensive, we might scare them away.” That one's also dumb because the thing that we agreed a few seconds ago was the thing that scares us away during the research process isn't when a company educates you as well and isn't when a company talks about but rather when they don't talk about it. That's when they plant a seed of doubt.
Great education, great teaching, and the explanation of what defines value in the marketplace, that’s what is endearing, and that's what makes someone say, “Now I understand,” to the point where, by the end, they could say, “I see that you're probably 10% more based on what you're explaining to me. It sounds like you do 30% more or you include 30% more than anybody else. Of course, I'd be dumb not to go with you,” which is what everybody should be saying.
We were the first swimming pool company in the world to talk about cost and price on our website. I'm not exaggerating. When we embrace the philosophies of what my book is entitled, They Ask You Answer, when we embrace that in 2009 and I brainstormed every single question I'd ever received about buying fiberglass pool, etc., that was the first question that I thought about. Every single person that called me was like, “I'm not going to hold you to it but give me a feel here, Marcus. What are we looking at?” I was like, “This is driving me crazy.” I finally addressed the question and addressed it well.
That one single article that we wrote for our company in Virginia alone has generated over $35 million in sales since the day it was written for leads that we would not have had that we ended up getting and we ended up selling that started with that little article on our website, How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost? That article saved my business because I almost lost it with the crash of 2008 and 2009.
When someone says to me, “We can't talk about cost and price.” I'm like, “You have no idea what you can talk about.” You can talk about anything you want. You just can't necessarily be as specific as you may want to be or need to be at the end but you can address any question you want and cost is the foremost that you should be addressing.
Patrick Baldwin: When I see pricing tab on a website and I click on pricing and then it's like, “Call us for pricing.”
Marcus Sheridan: It pisses you off.
Patrick Baldwin: When it's not there, it teased me onto another page. It sounds like if you are preemptively asking and answering these questions, you’re taking a lot off the salesperson, and you're moving it up stream earlier in the marketing. The other thing you touched on was also not commoditizing service. If you're giving out pricing, you have to distinguish how you're different from your competition.
Marcus Sheridan: Let's define what commoditizes any service. What commoditizes a service is when the marketplace is ignorant, about the service, what distinguishes good from bad and great, whatever the different tiers of service are. When the marketplace isn't informed enough, in other words, they're ignorant of the differences between the different value sets, what do they end up doing? They end up saying, “They're all the same, all these companies. This one is way cheaper than everybody else. I'm going to go with them.” That's what commoditizes a service.
What de-commoditizes a service? The explanation and understanding of value, it's cut and dry. The problem is you get these service businesses that complain that their competitor is cheap and is taking their business from them but they've done nothing to educate the market. I don't understand why you're getting upset. You can't get upset about that. With my swimming pool company, we're 10% to 20% more than anybody else. We’re not embarrassed about it. We talk about it.
River Pools, I started this company in 2001, I was straight out of college with two buddies, I had a beat-up pickup truck. It was rough sledding for the first few years and we finally started to get a little bit of traction. In 2008, the market crashed. By the beginning of 2009, I'm like, “We are going out of business.” I had three consultants say, “You should file bankruptcy.” That's when I started to say, “I'm either going to lose it all, including my house, my two business partners are going to lose their houses, or I’m going to save the business.”
That's when I started reading about the internet and the changing buyer. I said, “What you're telling me is if I obsess over my customer's questions and I'm willing to address them on my website, their questions, worries, fears, issues, and concerns, and I do it through text and video, I might save my company.” That's how I interpreted what I was reading, these things like inbound marketing, content marketing, et cetera. I said, “That's one thing I can do, I can address these questions.”
I started doing it aggressively through text and video. By the way, we called this philosophy, they ask and you answer. It became the most traffic swimming pool website in the world. River Pools went on to become the fastest-growing manufacturer of fiberglass pools in the US. I had the first franchise company of fiberglass swimming pools in the US. It was a wild ride. In 2021, I sold the manufacturing but I still own the original River Pools franchise in Virginia. I'm still the owner of that.
We were the first manufacturer in the world of pools to put a pricing calculator on a website. Every manufacturer said, “You can't put a pricing calculator up.” I'm like, “Of course, you can.” “You don't set the end price.” I’m like, “Watch.” We have a pool design and build tool on our website to this day, RiverPoolsAndSpas.com. You can go there and you can build it out and you won't get an exact price but you're going to get a price range. That's how you can learn to answer a question or at least address it well without giving specific answers and putting yourself in a corner.
What everybody's thing is, “I don't want to put myself in a corner.” You don't have to put yourself in a corner but you got to explain the value, what drives costs up, and what drives costs down. You should give it at least a range so that the person reading it or watching it can say, “Now I understand. This makes so much sense. Thank you so much. This is great.”
The final thing I'll say about this is for the first 6 or 7 years of me being a pool guy, I'd go into homes, I'd give a quote, and, at the end, people would say, “This is so much more than I thought. Do you mean to tell me a pool's not $25,000? We budgeted $25,000. In a long time, I thought these people are so dumb. How do they not know that a pool doesn't cost $25,000?”
Who was the dummy? I was the dummy because I hadn't made sure that the marketplace understood value and once I did, those conversations stopped. Once we integrated content into the sales process, that was a real game-changer. Doing this was unbelievable. I haven't seen a single industry who are talking about cost and price the right way wasn't incredibly beneficial. It's that sometimes they do it the wrong way but most don't do it at all.
Patrick Baldwin: How much is a fiberglass pool?
Marcus Sheridan: Today, you're probably going to spend between $80,000 and $125,000. Once you figure the pool, the patio, and whatnot, you're probably going to spend that. Isn't that great? You see how I did that, Fat Pat? I didn't even blink. It's great. It's $80,000 to $125,000. That's awesome.
Patrick Baldwin: What's your speaking fee?
Marcus Sheridan: About $25,000.
Patrick Baldwin: About? Come on. I'm thankful. We're not done yet but that you've made time because I know your time is valuable. You've figure that out. Us having this conversation is opening my mind. Everything that you've said so far, the answers, and the questions that have trailed in my head as far as marketing and sales like pricing on the website, is there a range? How do I drill that in? There are so many variables in my business. I feel there's so much that I don't know, I don't even know where to start, and this is helping me.
Marcus Sheridan: If you think about it, if I called your company right now, Fat Pat, and I said to you, “Can you give me a sense for how much it is?” You would give me an answer, you'd say, “Marcus, it's going to depend on a bunch of factors. Let me ask you some questions and then I might be able to give you at least a range.” I'm sure you've done that before. All you have to do is take what you normally say to someone when they ask you and explain that out well. It's incredibly simple yet powerful to do.
When I started They Ask You Answer with my company, we realized there are five subjects that move the needle in every single industry, give subjects that if you're willing to talk about them, number one, you're going to become the voice of trust in your space. Number two, you're going to attract dramatically more trust traffic leads and sales.
Number three, they're going to lead you to financial peace and prosperity. There are five subjects that every buyer wants to know. This is all-home improvement and all-home services businesses. This is prolific. As buyers and consumers, we want to understand, number one, how much is it? Cost and price. We want to know what are the problems and the issues with it. We've got a lot of fears, problems, issues, and negatives. Number three, we want to know comparisons. We love to compare stuff online.
Number four, we want to know reviews. Number five, we want to know the best. Cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, and the best. That's the internet of search right there. That's the economy of search as well. This is what drives how people learn about stuff and this is what drives whether or not they say, “I love this company,” or, “They're just like everyone else.”
If you look at the pest control industry, almost every single pest control website looks the same. Why? It’s because they don't show their people nearly as well as they should, they don't understand how to tell story like they should, and they don't understand how to address the questions that their buyers have like they should. It's simple. It's cut and dry. If you want to become the voice of trust in your space, you got to be willing to do four things in 2024 and beyond.
Number one, you got to be willing to talk about what others in your space aren't willing to talk about on your website online. Number two, you got to be willing to show through video what others in your space aren't willing to show. Number three, you got to be willing to sell in a way that others in the space aren't willing to sell. Number four, you got to be more human than everybody else in your space and you got to show it.
If you're reading this right now, I want you to be super honest and super self-aware. Are you consistently talking about, showing, selling, and being more human online than 95% of your competitors right now? Are you doing it consistently? If we have, let's say, 5,000 people reading this right now, at most, 3 to 5 will raise their hand if they're being honest. What that means is there's tremendous opportunity for you to stand out, you just got to be willing to talk about what others aren't willing to talk about.
Let me give you another example. This is killer and funny for location-based businesses. One of the big five is reviews and one of them is best. Let's just combine the two and I'm going to tell you a story as a lead into this. Right at the end of my sales career, I was sitting in a home in Richmond, Virginia, and I gave this one couple a quote for a swimming pool and I sat with them for two and a half hours.
At the end of the two and a half hours, they said, “Marcus, we like you. We think we want to get this pool from you. If we don't get this pool from you, is there anybody else that you might recommend?” I thought, “I hate this question.” They asked because they trusted me but they also asked because they probably weren't going to buy that night and they didn't buy that night.
I was pretty frustrated, I was driving home, I had a two-hour drive home, and I thought to myself, “They asked the question, which means I need to answer it.” I went home that night and I wrote this article and the title of the article was Who Are the Best Pool Builders in Richmond, Virginia Reviews/Ratings. I came with a list of five of the best pool builders in Richmond, Virginia.
Here's what's crazy. Number one, I need to put myself on that list of five. Why? Because if I did and they knew I wrote it, I'd come across as biased. I didn't put myself on the list. One of the questions that we get all the time from our customers in Richmond, Virginia is, “We like you guys but if you were to recommend any other companies, who would you recommend?” We understand that most companies would never address this question but we want to be the most honest, transparent, and helpful company in the world when it comes to your pool buying decisions.
Here's a list of five of the best pool builders in Richmond, Virginia and we listed those five. What's significant about this story? The first thing is if you go online today and you search, “Best pool builders in Richmond, Virginia,” it’s one of the first articles that you're going to see and it's made us hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. One of the first competitor I mentioned on that list was a company called Pla-Mor Pools and they're in Richmond, Virginia to this day.
Today, if you go online and research, if you type in Google, “Reviews, Pla-Mor Pools, Richmond, Virginia,” you don't even know who River Pools is. Who are you going to see? Who are you going to learn about Pla-Mor from? You're going to learn about them from me. What's crazy is when you're researching my competitors, oftentimes, you're going to learn about my competitors on my website from me. I'm controlling the conversation.
I don't say anything negative about any competitors but I want to address all the questions that the marketplace has. I had a lady come to me years ago and she said, “The craziest thing happened, Marcus. I was this close to signing a contract with Pla-Mor Pools. Before I decided to sign that contract, I went online and I started researching their company. As I was researching their company, I stumbled across this article that you guys had written and I said, ‘These guys are so honest. I should probably call them too.’”
Of course, you know what happened, otherwise, I wouldn't be telling you the story. That lady bought. She would not have bought had she not read that article. Sometimes people still say to me, “Aren't you afraid you've now introduced them to your competitors?” I don't believe buyers are dumb. Sure, they might start off uninformed but eventually, they're going to become informed. If they're going to become informed, I'm not going to act like this thing called the internet doesn't exist. I'm going to give them what they could get somewhere else. The idea that they could get it somewhere else to me is repulsive. I'm not going to let that happen, not in good conscience.
I'm going to address all the questions, all the worries, all the fears, all the good, all the bad, and all the ugly. They're going to find it in my house and a whole bunch of them are going to fall in love. There's another group that's going to say, “Not a fit for me,” which is awesome too but that group that is into, like, “I want to make sure that I don't make a mistake,” we're going to slay it with those folks. Where do you live, by the way, Fat Pat?
Patrick Baldwin: Waco, Texas.
Marcus Sheridan: It probably doesn't exist there now but what's the name of the newspaper in Waco, Texas?
Patrick Baldwin: Waco Tribune.
Marcus Sheridan: Let's say that you wrote an article in the Waco Tribune and let's be hypothetical and let’s say you were a bachelor and let's say the title of the article was The 5 Most Available Bachelors in Waco, Texas. You put yourself on that and everybody found out that you wrote the article. What would be the impression of Fat Pat? The whole world would think, “This guy's ridiculous,” and they wouldn't trust you. It's the same psychology, it doesn't change.
I don't need to put myself on the list because by reading the article, you're like, “I love this company. I want to work with them. I can't believe they're willing to talk about this stuff.” This is why consumer ignorance is no longer a viable sales and marketing strategy. Everybody who’s reading this, you need to tell yourself that ten times a day, “Consumer ignorance is no longer a viable sales and marketing strategy.” If you tell yourself that enough times, all of a sudden, you're like, “I can talk about whatever I want.”
All of a sudden, that's how you become the trusted voice and the most trusted brand in your space. That's a fun place to be. That's why River Pools went from being a little company in Virginia to a national company all over the US. It's how it changed my life because I was talking about things that nobody was willing to talk about. The manufacturers hated me, other pool builders hated me, and I was busy talking about everything.
Patrick Baldwin: What are the non-negotiables, like, “These have to be on the site,” to inform your potential buyer?
Marcus Sheridan: Let me give you a few little tips on your website if you're reading this right now. First of all, I would argue that a non-negotiable is that the messaging has to be about your customer and not about you. Once again, about 80% to 90% of the folks that are reading this right now, if we analyze their website, we would see that their website is mainly about their company. I'm going to give everyone a simple litmus test that you can do in 30 seconds and it's going to make you smack your forehead and say, “He is right.”
This is what you need to do, I want you to go to your homepage or your website, and I want you to count the number of times you use the pronouns “we are” versus the number of times you use the pronouns “you” or “you’re”, it's that simple. How many times do you have the pronouns “we are” versus “you’re”? The majority of companies, over 80%, are going to have over 80% of the pronouns being “we are,” that means the hero of their story is them. It’s not good.
On the reverse of that, 80% of the pronouns on the homepage messaging should be “you” or “your” because that means the hero is the buyer or the customer. That's the first one, learn how to message the right way. Second is you should have what's called a learning center, knowledge center, or learning hub, I don't care what you call it on your website. This is where someone can go and learn whatever they want and how they want.
Some might want to watch videos. Some people might want to read your case study. Some people might want to listen to your podcast like with you guys. It's the learning hub. Where can I get all my questions answered? If you went to RiverPoolsAndSpas.com, scroll down the page a little bit, you’ll see our learning center, and you're like, “They got 250 videos and over 700 articles. They've been read over $50 million times,” or whatever it is. You're like, “I've reached the Mecca of swing pool information.” You should have some type of learning hub.
Somebody might say, “That sounds like a lot of work.” It's not a lot of work if you answer one question a day with an article or video for the rest of your business's life. That's simple to do and that's easy in 2024. That's nothing. If you don't do that, you don't get it. If you say, “I don't have the time,” you've built a terrible business. You have the time to do that. You could build an incredible learning center over the next twelve months that puts you in the top 1% of your industry.
The thing that I love about blue-collar industries is most folks are pretty lazy online so it gives those that aren't lazy the opportunity to dominate. It’s freaking awesome. You just got to have a framework. That's why They Ask You Answer is the definitive framework. It's been embraced by so many blue-collar companies, “Marcus, you should see what happened with my business because we did They Ask You Answer. It's crazy what's happening.” That's non-negotiable.
Within that learning center, you should be talking about those five subjects that make all the difference. You should have a lot of videos. Everything, you just need to show it, especially your sales process. I'm going to add a few more that I believe are non-negotiables, especially if you're in a home service. For one, you should have a pricing calculator. A pricing calculator should give them a sense for things. Don't bait and switch as you said earlier, Fat Pat.
Patrick Baldwin: I hate bait and switch.
Marcus Sheridan: It makes them want to punch you in the face. Give them a pricing calculator that allows them to at least get a range or a sense. Another one that I would recommend is what would be like an assessment or a recommendation tool. Let me give you an example of this. If I meet with somebody in a home back in the day, the last question I want to hear is, “Marcus, I'm still debating between fiberglass, concrete, vinyl, and ground pools. I know you sell fiberglass. Tell me, why should I go fiberglass?” That's not going to be a good sales call because they're not far enough along the journey. The closing rate plummeted for that particular deal.
People need to know what type of pool they want in a perfect world before we go into the home. They'll know that we're probably going to waste our time. We have, on the website, a pool recommendation tool and it gives you a very honest answer after asking you a series of questions as to what is the best type of in-ground swimming pool for you and your needs.
You can go to the website right now and be recommended a vinyl pool or a concrete pool, both of which we don't install. I will flat out recommend it to you because I'm going to be more honest than everybody else and you're going to appreciate that. Plus, I don't want to waste time. I don't want anybody wasting time. You don't want to waste time and I don't want to waste time.
Recommendation tools, what might that look like? Let's take pest control. Usually, in the pest control space, there's different tiers of service offerings. One simple one that you could do is, what type of service offering do you need? What type of service do you need? That's a simple one for people to say, “Based on this, I should probably get some type of monthly service,” or whatever the thing is. That's the same thing for landscape and it goes on and on. I would strongly recommend this.
This all goes back to that 35% of all buyers prefer to have a seller free sales experience. When you do a pricing calculator, that helps you sell differently than everybody else in your space. When you do assessment tools, that helps you sell differently than everybody in your space as we talked about earlier. By allowing the buyer to do something they would have done previously by talking to a salesperson, now, they're doing that by engaging with you but through your website so the trust is going up and up.
One last one I'll say when it comes to self-service, we got the self-assessment, self-pricing with the calculators, and then we got self-scheduling. Self-scheduling, an example of that would be, they could go to your website and they could see your different salespeople, and they could see an image of the salesperson, read a bio of the salesperson, and choose what salesperson they want to work with. They could choose the date that they want them out to their house. They don't have to talk to a human.
Now, that's gutsy. I've done that. It's crazy effective. When people choose who they work with, it's like an Uber for salespeople within your company. It's wild. Now, you've given them complete control over the sales process. That's why it's not sales process anymore, it's a buyer's journey. It's not really sales process anymore. Once you say, “They're in charge. I'm going to enable them to feel like they're completely in charge,” all of a sudden, your ability to win trust and close more deals increase dramatically.
Paul Giannamore: I was wondering if we put Fat Pat's photo and bio on the website, how often he would get chosen? That's what was going through my mind.
Patrick Baldwin: Thanks, Paul.
Marcus Sheridan: He's got his tribe out there, you just got to find them.
Patrick Baldwin: A tribe of me.
Paul Giannamore: When you were talking about the five different points, the third one that you brought up was comparison. When you were talking about comparison, you were talking about, for example, the article that you wrote with the 4 or 5 other local competitors there. Is that what you're referencing when you say those five points?
Marcus Sheridan: Paul, think about any question you've ever been asked where the prospect might say, “If you were me, what would you choose?” Let's look at something to do with home improvement. In my case, I had all my siding redone. I had my shingles redone. I had a new deck built. There's a bunch of comparison-based questions that I was going through as I was doing that. I was comparing different types of shingles. I was comparing different types of decking materials. I was comparing different types of siding materials.
When I was a pool guy, our company will compare different types of covers, heaters, and filter systems because that's what you want, you want to compare. The human brain wants to do is they want to be able to see the spectrum and put them against each other and then say, “That's the thing that I want. That's the thing that fits me the best.” When we do comparisons and we do best in reviews even, they help us line up that spectrum so that we feel like, “I know how everything falls out here from a quality and value perspective. Now, I can make a decision. Now, I can make a choice.”
Patrick Baldwin: 1You mentioned you were in the home at the end of your sales career and they asked you a question, “If it wasn't you, who should I buy?” That sounds to me like that's an indecisive buyer. I don't know if that's too much information or too little information. What do you do in a case where you have someone who’s indecisive and on the fence?
Marcus Sheridan: If we're talking about in the moment, we're going to use our sales skills. That's a whole other game. Hopefully, they've already gotten to the point where it's completely leaning your way. I will tell you one thing. People talk about closing techniques or whatever. Opening techniques are so essential and I don't think we teach them very well in sales training.
Let me give you an example of something that we do at River Pools that's powerful and a game changer. I'm going to ask you a question here, Fat Pat, that you probably haven't asked before but this is important that you answer and you answer as well as you can. It might feel a little bit funny but let's go with it. I want you to close your eyes and I want you to envision what the perfect day at your swimming pool looks like two years from now, the perfect scene.
In other words, I want you to tell me what you see, and I want you to tell me who you see. What do you hear? What do you smell? What are the sounds that are being made. I want you to describe it well. You start answering that and I'm going to continue to prompt you until I have a clear vision and I'm going to write that vision out and then I'm going to repeat it to you. What you're telling me is what you see, Fat Pat, is you and your two teenage girls and your wife.
You're all sitting there and they've got two friends over and you hear a lot of laughter and you're at the grill and you got some of the fellas there with you and your wife got a few friends there too. You've got a water feature that's going and you can hear that water feature and you've got the music in the background. We hit all that. At the end, when they say, “This is pretty expensive.”
We go back to the beginning and we say, “Fat Pat, do you remember that vision that you gave me of what you want this to look like in two years?” You're going to say, “Yeah.” I'm going to say, “Do you remember what you said?” You're say, “Yeah.” I'm going to say, “Let me tell you what you said because I wrote it down. You said you wanted this and you said you wanted this. Is that still what you want?” You're going to say, “That's still what I want.”
Of course, you're debating, “Do I want that or do I want to save the money and not have that?” I'm not here to tell you which one, but that's the choice. Do you want the vision or do you want to save the money? I'm fine with either answer you give. Most of the time, the person is going to say an answer and usually, they're going to say, “I want the vision.” We don't say, “Great, let's write it up.” I don't like that. What I'm going to say is, “Great, why?”
You're going to tell me again all the reasons why it matters to you, “Because my girls aren't going to be here for long because they're going to be going to college. This is my last chance.” Once that's done, I'm going to say, “Great. We can start on such and such date.” You're going to say, “Sounds good.” That's how we close but we close based on our ability to open with the perfect vision. When I teach service companies how to sell, and you can do this with anything, including pest control, you're like, “Pest control, what type of vision are you going to have with that?”
A vision can be feelings too, no worries, and no stress. What's the perfect process and the perfect outcome looks like? You got to get them to verbalize it because there's a good chance that they haven't verbalized it. You're crystallizing their dreams and goals for them by being a strong therapist/psychologist. My next book is on how to ask the perfect question, it's what it teaches people how to do, how to ask the perfect question. It's a communications book, it's not a sales and marketing book.
Sales, marketing, and leadership are all the same thing. How well can you communicate to resonate with your audience? That's all it is. It's something I'm deeply passionate about. I love sales training. We suck when it comes to sales training across the board. Most companies that are reading this do not do role-play training in their organization. Certainly, the high majority don't do it once a month. You're not in the game from a sales culture perspective if you're not doing role-play training with your team once a week.
If you're not doing it once a week, you're not a top performer. You can tell me you are. You're not a top performer. You're leaving tons of money on the tables. “They make me uncomfortable.” It means you've got a bad culture within your company. It means you're doing them wrong. Our adage with my organization is we don't practice on our customers. We practice on ourselves. We've got a serious break in sales culture out there that we can fix and that we need to fix, especially when it comes to in-home selling.
There are so many nuances. How do you create a perfect energy the second you enter the home? How do you make those connections? How do you ask questions that nobody has ever asked before? How do you get them to open up in ways they’ve never opened up with anybody else? A great salesperson, if they understand their job, within a few minutes, the person is saying things like, “I don't know why I'm telling you this. I haven't told this to anybody before.” That's a sign of a great salesperson.
Patrick Baldwin: What do you do on pest control? Is that like, “A vision of me buying pest control is my wife will stop nagging me?”
Marcus Sheridan: I would say something like this. This might sound like an odd question to you, Fat Pat, but let's say you work with a pest control company. What does that experience look like? I want you to be explicit with me. What do you want? What do you not want? What do you want to see? What do you want to feel? How do you want the communication to be and the engagement to look like? What do you want the outcomes to be?
I'm going to prompt you and then you're going to start to share and then I'm going to do some follow up questions. Oftentimes, the follow up question is, “Tell me more about that. What does that look like? Can you give me an example?” I know how to ask those three questions. You understand depth of conversation better than 99% of the world. That's what it's going to look like. The first answer they're going to say is, “I hadn't thought about that.”
By the way, oftentimes, most salespeople, when they get any resistance to a question, they answer it for the person. They'll start answering it. That's dumb. A great salesperson understands how to ask a question, get a non-answer, and immediately get an answer afterwards. The most powerful question you can learn when you start to learn the power of questions is not the first question, it's the follow-up, and the follow-up to the resistance. It's a simple phrase, which is this, “If you had to choose, what would it be? If you had to say it, what would it be?”
It's no different than if you're with your wife tonight and you say, “Where would you like to go tonight, honey?” She's like, “Wherever you want,” which is the worst answer because you know it's not wherever she wants. She wants something. Instead, you say, “If you had to choose one place, what would it be?” Now you're going to get your answer and you're going to have a much better date. You have to start learning that your employees come to you or your team comes to you and they say, “I got a problem, boss.”
Unfortunately, most bosses just give answers but the great ones know how to produce future leaders and ask great questions. They ask a question, like, “This is your problem, I appreciate you bringing it to me. If this is the problem and if you were the CEO, I know you're not but if you're the CEO, what would you do right now?” Most are going to say, “I don't know what I would do, that's why I came to you.” “I know you probably don't know but let's assume for a second you were the CEO. What would you say to do right now?”
Now they're going to give you the answer and there's a good chance that the answer is exactly what should be done. That's how you develop your team. That's how you develop loyalty. That's how you develop decision-makers. That's how you keep your inbox from being blown up by your team all day long because they can think for themselves.
Patrick Baldwin: What's the title of the new book you're working on?
Marcus Sheridan: There's some debate about this because the new book is written as a business fable but it looks like the title will be The Power of Pathfinder Leadership. The pathfinder is the type of leader I believe we should all be, which is helping those around us find the path to the answer. It's our job to prompt the right way so that they can get to the solution themselves. it's written like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I'm excited about it.
Maybe I can come back on and talk about it when it comes out but it's going to do 1 million copies. They Ask You Answer is a great book, it's done well, it's done well over 100,000, and I feel like it's made a big impact on the world but I want to make an even bigger impact. The power of communication and questions is it transcends professional and it goes into our personal lives. A lot of the trainings, I do talk to somebody six months later and they'll say, “Marcus, my relationship with my team is way better. My relationship with my wife has dramatically improved.” I'm like, “We're tracking.”
Paul Giannamore: How far along are you in drafting this current book?
Marcus Sheridan: I've already finished the draft. I'm in the process of getting an agent. One of the mistakes I made with They Ask You Answer is I didn't get an agent. It's a good idea to get an agent if you start to sell a lot of books. I was naïve so I didn't get a win-win deal with the publisher. I'm in the process of doing that and finding the publisher. The manuscript itself is pretty much done.
Paul Giannamore: How long did it take you to write this current book?
Marcus Sheridan: With They Ask You Answer, which is 95,000 words, I had been speaking for quite a few years before I wrote that book. It was one of those things where once I sat down and wrote it, it only took like 3 to 4 weeks. With Pathfinder, it's much shorter. I want it to be as short as possible, closer to Who Moved My Cheese? than a regular book. It landed around 22,000 words but it took me longer to write it because I had never written fiction before so there's a lot more to do with the storyline.
The other thing about it is it was a heavier book to write for me because I swear it feels like a calling that I'm supposed to deliver to the world. It's hard to describe this but when you feel like you have a calling within you that God is saying, “You need to get this out.” This one was harder to do. Plus, it wasn't like I didn't have incredible urgency. If I had grinded it out, I bet you I could have done it in a couple of weeks. This one took me months because I was playing a lot with it in my head. I'd come in and out of confidence of how I like the story. What I've got now, I feel like it's good.
Paul Giannamore: Do you read much fiction now?
Marcus Sheridan: I don't. It would have helped me. I know it's good and it stimulates the brain, I'm just so much more drawn to nonfiction. The problem is I want to feel like the ideas are flooding to me from a business standpoint and not from a creative standpoint. That's not good, by the way. I should have injected some in but I never have.
Paul Giannamore: I feel your pain. I've been trying to read more fiction in recent years. It is helpful from a creative perspective, it's just harder to do.
Marcus Sheridan: It was a great challenge. I like challenges. Speaking about communication and transformative leadership communication, if I could do it as a story, it was going to come across so much more effectively and it did because of it. I didn't want it to be a college lecture. I think a lot of business books are that. I do think we waste a lot of time and a lot of words with our business books these days that we don't have to. I'm going to do a third version of They Ask You Answer and I've already done the outline for that. It's going to be much shorter this time. I'm going to try to get anal about fluff and say, “If there's any chance that this is redundant or fluff, don't include it.”
Paul Giannamore: It is a painful process eliminating words from your writing but it's important. As you pointed out, not many authors do that well enough, myself included. I've written a 22,000-word email.
Marcus Sheridan: 100%. We could all do better. It's this journey of incisiveness that we're all on, especially with sales training. When people are asking questions, usually, he or she who asks longer questions with each word loses authority. The question why is much more powerful than the question, “Why exactly did you decide to do that?” It's night and day.
Paul Giannamore: By that argument, the blank stare is the most powerful question.
Marcus Sheridan: That can be effective, no doubt.
Paul Giannamore: Speaking of writing, what have you been spending your time reading as of late?
Marcus Sheridan: I read StoryBrand again, which is great for build out your website. I'm listening to 2 or 3 different books in my car.
Paul Giannamore: Are you more of an audiobook listener as opposed to a reader?
Marcus Sheridan: Reading a book is probably somewhere between 5 and 10x more effective for me. I do audio out of efficiency. Because I travel so much and I'm driving so much, I do listen to a lot of audiobooks. By no means do I feel like that's effective. Usually, when I listen to one book or podcast, whatever it is, I'll go back and listen immediately again. I don't think we can do that very well. The retention is poor.
Paul Giannamore: You and I graduated high school in 1995 and there were books on CDs back then, I'm sure. We didn't have Audible.
Marcus Sheridan: Jim Rome and Zig Ziglar.
Paul Giannamore: That was it. Books on tape, effectively. Do you think you would have been listening to audiobooks back in those days?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, I do think so. In high school, no. I fell in love with personal development in college. I started to have that desire to be more and achieve more. I found a copy of How to Win Friends & Influence People at a garage Sale in college for $0.75 and that's when it started. I was hooked. I've read that book probably five times. The best book that impacted me the most in business was Good to Great, though. I read and/or listened to Good to Great probably twelve times or maybe more, driving home this idea of focus, hedgehog concept, knowing who you are, and what you’re not. That was an amazing book.
Paul Giannamore: As you can see, I like paper books. Library of America has great American literature and they've got a noir crime series from the turn of the century like Dashiell Hammett, for example. I've picked that stuff up and I've been reading it on the plane lately. I've largely been doing it solely for the writing style. Those guys write economical sentences. There's not long flowery prose. It is economical, powerful, and punchy words.
As well as their character development, plotline moves along quite quickly and that's great for any writing. Their stories are short. In 45 minutes, you can get one done. I have been doing that as of late and I have enjoyed it. Marcus, you were a dynamite to chat with. I can see why our friends in Great Britain were thrilled to have you over there. When did you do that, by the way? When was that?
Marcus Sheridan: I've spoken quite a bit in the UK over the last couple of years. I'm sure, it's probably over the last 2 or 3 years. They Ask You Answer has done exceptionally well in the UK. Here in the US, we tend to have this abnormal worshiping of tech and startups. In the UK, their greatest respect is for small businesses. It's a different culture there and they appreciate the small business owner. I loved speaking in the UK. They have received me very well. I've done England probably 4 or 5 times and Scotland for 6 times and it's a great group.
Patrick Baldwin: I was thinking of National Entrepreneur's Convention.
Marcus Sheridan: I did Entrepreneur's Circle 2 or 3 times. The names of events, at this point, I'm at 800 in.
Patrick Baldwin: You scared them, whoever they were, thank you.
Marcus Sheridan: Happy to do it.
Patrick Baldwin: Marcus, thank you so much. I learned a lot and thank you for that.
Marcus Sheridan: My pleasure.
Paul Giannamore: We're definitely having you back on when the new book is out. I'd love to chat with you about it.
Marcus Sheridan: I'd like that a lot.
Paul Giannamore: Fantastic. You have a great afternoon over there, Marcus.
Marcus Sheridan: You, too.
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Paul Giannamore: Putting pricing on websites, what do you say about that?
Patrick Baldwin: Polarizing. That's the biggest thing I've walked away. I’m still not sure what to recommend. When it comes to home services, it's definitely possible. When it comes to Potomac or FRAXN, I'm not convinced yet. I remember a conversation I had with one of our El Paso franchisees, he told me the story, “I want to go rent a truck and the U-Haul online told me how much it would be to rent a box truck. I know I might be paying more but it's simple, I'm not having to call around or shop around. Sure, it's a premium experience. I'm going to pay the extra money just to get it done.”
That applies to services, pest control, and maybe lawn, where you can give, “Here's the price. Here's the level of service. Here's what we do. Some add-ons like package A does this and package B does this.” I'm personally a 2 or 3 option guy. If you give me too many options, it's analysis by paralysis and I can't get off the fence. Give me 2 or 3 options tops, what's different, build value, and I want to schedule as a consumer, put me on the schedule.
Paul Giannamore: You're probably right with a service like pest control, lawn care, or any sort of home service. It seems like it makes a lot of sense to put pricing. Let's face it, there's probably not a huge disparity in the market. Sure, you've got the one man in a truck charging next to nothing but most quality companies are probably going to be similar in pricing. How do you differentiate yourself? I wholeheartedly agree with him that if you look at these websites, almost everyone is the same. I have to dig up this article that I wrote years ago, it's been a long time, and it was entitled Why My Father Chose Orkin…. Do you remember that article?
Patrick Baldwin: I remember that one.
Paul Giannamore: I've been mowing the same things. I'm going to have to dig that out and publish it because it all still stands true. Why my father ended up choosing Orkin is because all of the local companies, all their websites were the exact, and he couldn't distinguish between the companies. He's like, “I can't tell the difference between these guys but I do know Orkin and they've been around for a long time and they're national so they're not going anywhere.” He's not a big box guy, so to speak. He would have preferred to spend his money with a quality local provider. They lost the opportunity to do business with him.
Patrick Baldwin: You've seen hundreds if not thousands of pest control websites. Are there certain faux pas that make you cringe when you see them knowing that it's driving away consumers and even acquirers alike? It’s like, “What is this train wreck that you've got on your website?”
Paul Giannamore: When I wrote that article, I analyzed some website copy in it. I don't know if you remember this happening but I wrote in there about how you might consider writing some sales copy for your website. There were about a dozen pest control companies out there that wholesale copied it. Even an Anticimex company, Viking, owned by Anticimex now, their marketing guy read it and copied it verbatim, word-for-word, and put it on their website.
Patrick Baldwin: You're a published author now.
Paul Giannamore: Clearly, I am. Fat Pat, I pulled up this article and I'll read a line from it here. I wrote, “To the uninformed customer, you're all the same. All of these websites say the exact same thing. Every one of these companies says, ‘Our technicians are well-trained and licensed.’ We have an expert entomologist on staff. We only use the safest and most effective treatment methods.”
The absurdity of these statements was not lost on my father, a former airline employee for almost half a century, who lamented, that's like American Airlines saying, ‘Fly with us, our pilots are licensed, and our airplanes are flight worthy. If things get messy, we have someone on staff who knows what he's doing.’ You tell me, isn't the definition of an exterminator somebody who is trained and licensed and using pesticides to kill bugs?
Effectively, I remember my dad looking at the websites and those were direct quotes from him. “Pest control companies are effectively defining what they do and using that as an example of why you should choose them. Our people are licensed and trained and they know how to kill bugs.” No shit, you're a pest control company.
Patrick Baldwin: That has stuck with me all these years. Going back and reading that a long time ago, why would we ever say that our technicians are licensed and trained? That doesn't differentiate. Everyone has to be as a standard. Why bother wasting your breath on it?
Paul Giannamore: Fat Pat, this article is no longer now online. It’s a 15-pager. If anyone wants it, you can send an email to TheBuzz@PotomacCompany.com and we’ll send it to you. Fat Pat, this article is no longer now online.
Patrick Baldwin: It's a good read. Nostalgic, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: I used to write well years ago. I wonder what happened.
Patrick Baldwin: Is it because you're licensed and trained to write? I don't know.
Paul Giannamore: I'm neither licensed nor trained to write.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, other than putting pricing on the website, anything else stand out to you from the conversation with Marcus?
Paul Giannamore: He's right about educating consumers. There are a lot of people who are effectively shopping for a commodity out there. The customers that you want are the ones that are going to study and try to get the best service for them. I do think there are ways to differentiate yourself. In my mind, in a service business, it starts with creating a workforce that's unique in their behaviors and how they interact with customers and the lexicon.
We always talk about on The Buzz, when you go to Chick-Fil-A, “My pleasure.” The way that colleagues and team members at the company communicate with customers and getting them to communicate in a unique manner that's unique to the company, so many smaller firms don't do that. You call over there and Dolores, the chain-smoking stenographer from Long Island answers the phone. You can figure out a way to communicate effectively and appropriately with your own lexicon with the customers. Employee behaviors.
There's a lot of things that you can do to differentiate yourself. I do think that thinking about website copy and marketing copy in general, in my mind, it's not always about, “How do I write copy that differentiates us?” In the process of writing this copy, how can I think about key things about the business that I can change that will differentiate us? It can become an exercise in terms of differentiation in and of itself. That can be laid out for the team members. That whole process of how are we going to differentiate ourselves is an important one.
Patrick Baldwin: I hear you loud and clear. Thanks, Paul. Video media has come a long-ways. One thing you can do a lot highlighting your team but even what Marcus says on building a story brand, Donald Miller, that shifts the narrative, and I don't think we've talked much about that on The Buzz. We went through that and had a story brand guide back at 855-BUGS and that changed. We had a tagline, “No one likes bugs. We provide year-round pest control so you're always protected.” That's on the side of all the trucks and then that's the phrase just like you talked about the lexicon.
That's the phrasing that everyone can come back to and memorize and repeat over and over. That was based on the recurring business and the subscription model, getting a subscription model. Year-round pest control is something that you should expect, that's just the standard. The media though, I think about Darin Huffaker and his scorpions pouring out of a house. Other than that rare occasional viral moment, I don't want to see bugs.
The consumer doesn't want to see pictures of rats, roaches, and bedbugs on your website. As long as I've been in pest control, they still disgust me. That's money crawling around. I don't mean to say I don't want to see it but when I put my consumer hat on, it can be repulsive. The high growth companies, we think about the door-to-door that have spent a lot of money on branding and their image, they're not out there blasting pictures of dead bugs on their websites or their social.
Paul Giannamore: That's probably because a lot of people are probably not even looking at their website if they're selling them on the doors.
Patrick Baldwin: Good point.
Paul Giannamore: I do agree with you, though, that there's certainly no benefit of putting pictures of rodents and bugs on your website. If you think about it, years ago, that's all those websites had. People would use stock images of all sorts of bugs. It's gone away. To Marcus's point, trying to emphasize the team member to the extent that you're even emphasizing individual team members and allowing people to choose, it's a potentially great idea. I have to wonder, at some point, you're trying to run a repeatable business that's streamlined and systematized. How much customization can you have without impacting your organization? If you're letting customers choose which inspector they want, that could be complicated.
Patrick Baldwin: We've talked about that in terms of a technician. It’s different than sales process. When it came to picking a technician, when they said, “I only want this technician.” We would choose and send anyone but that technician. In a business where we're building route density for profitability, it's hard to allow the consumer to drive that part of the business. That's cutting into the bottom line. There are two ways of thinking about this. There are areas in which we had technicians overlapping in certain zip codes.
Maybe it was a certain zip code and we have two technicians, maybe the consumer could pick A or B because it's not going to change the routing because their services do overlap between residential, commercial, and they just share a territory. The other, on a salesperson, I wonder if there's places in which salespeople overlap. Maybe they just associate with one or the other. I don't know but it almost feels judgmental. I'm quick to look at the picture and think, “Do I look like you?”
Paul Giannamore: I don't know if I would allow the customer with that much control, myself personally.
Patrick Baldwin: Back to the bug pictures. I thought about this, I am okay with like icons, a little cute picture representing an ant is fine. I want to clarify that.
Paul Giannamore: You've set it for the record, Patrick. It's been clarified.
Patrick Baldwin: Thank you. That's my disclaimer. I don't know.
Paul Giannamore: Overall, I enjoyed the conversation with Marcus. I would encourage you to go out and pick up a copy of his book if you haven't already.
Patrick Baldwin: I do have a question about the conversation we had with Marcus about reading fiction. You mentioned reading noir books. Do you feel like that's helped you as far as creativity or language? I'm guilty, no fiction back here behind me. Do you feel guilty for reading fiction?
Paul Giannamore: No, I do not feel guilty for reading fiction.
Patrick Baldwin: I need to. You're going to make me read fiction books. Tell me what to read.
Paul Giannamore: My thoughts on books and literature in general is that the majority of business books, the majority of popular books are not written by great writers. We, as a society, are coming in contact now with a lot of poorly written materials. Almost everything that you read now is effectively trash from a grammar and syntax perspective. Back in the day, when you were a great novelist, you not only were a great novelist coming up with interesting ideas but you were also a good writer. You had the ability to express yourself very well. You had to go to a publisher and get published and so on and so forth.
Certain things and certain great books have survived over time, whereas others have died off. When you think about it from that perspective, you're probably reading quality. I don't know how many books are self-published, but there's a lot. If you get on Amazon and you buy a book, there's a lot of them that are self-published. The author is probably not a great writer to begin with. It probably hasn't been edited very well. It certainly hasn't been vetted by a publishing house.
Why I like to read older books, particularly fiction books, is it keeps me in constant contact with things that are well-written. It's not just about creativity from a story perspective, narration, plot development, development of story, the expression of sentiment in the written word, and it's been refined. It's of a higher quality.
Patrick Baldwin: Marcus, thank you for joining us on The Buzz. Simon, thank you for the recommendation. It challenges us to thinking as far as pressing on the website, marketing in general, and it's super helpful. Thank you.
Paul Giannamore: Thank you, Marcus. Thank you, Fat Pat.
Patrick Baldwin: Thanks Paul. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving and we'll chat more about it.
Paul Giannamore: Sounds good. Talk to you soon.
Patrick Baldwin: Awesome. See you, Paul.
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Dylan Seals: Thank you so much as always for supporting us at The Boardroom Buzz. We know your time is valuable and the fact that you spend 45 minutes or an hour with us means the world. All the media that we put out from Potomac is meant to honor and celebrate you, the service industry owner. As Paul would say, “Yee who toil in the pest control vineyards.”
As part of giving back, we have this podcast, but more than that, Paul and I have been working our tails off over at POTOMAC TV. We've spent a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources to build out that platform to bring you market updates, to bring you visual breakdowns of the merger acquisition process, and to tell stories and present information in ways that, frankly, it's not possible for us to do on The Boardroom Buzz.
Adding the visual element takes it to the next level. I want to invite you to go to YouTube and find us, it's POTOMAC TV. Potomac.tv will get you there. Go there and subscribe. Check out some videos and leave some comments. Let us know what you like and let us know what you don't like. Let us know what you want to see more of and we'll see you over there.
