There is an extreme amount of value in producing this content for them. And because I’ve done this, I’ve earned the right to ask more of the prospect, which, in this case, is to review the video and e-book.
But I couldn’t, for example, say, “I found a book all about buying fiberglass swimming pools written by a guy in California, and I want you to read it before we meet.”
First, the book I would be asking the prospect to read would not be filled with my words, and I would not have therefore earned the right—nor authority—to ask the prospect to read the book (or do the homework).
Second, by producing content in the form of text or video and posting that content on your site and other platforms, you take on the role of teacher. And the moment your prospects see you more as a teacher versus a salesperson, the amount of respect given dramatically escalates.
Remember: The rights of a teacher are greater than those of the person who does not teach.
You may be asking yourself, What happens if they say, “You know, Marcus, it’s great that you put together this e-book, but I won’t have time to read it before Friday. Just come on out and give me a quote.”
How do you respond to that? Before you read the response, keep in mind here what I stated at the beginning of this section: The way we are able to sell at River Pools and Spas may be different than the way you sell. At River Pools, we can be a little pickier with our clients. Because we get a massive number of leads every day, we can qualify harder than other companies based on what we sell, who we sell to, and how much we have to sell in order to be successful.
That being said, we should all be looking for ways to help our prospects become more educated before we talk with them the first time, and then we continue to educate them throughout the sales process.
Here is our response at River Pools when someone says they don’t “have enough time”:
Mr./Mrs. Jones, I appreciate the fact that you don’t have the time to review this content, but here’s the thing: Over the years, we have found that when our customers are very informed and take the time to review these things I am sending over to you, we have a wonderful experience when we meet with them in their homes. In other words, it makes for a much more productive meeting, and seriously eliminates buying mistakes on their part. This way, the customer is happy, and we are happy. But when they don’t do these things, the experience is not nearly as good nor productive. So, Mr./Mrs. Jones, if you don’t have time to become informed and educated about these things, then we are probably not the best fit for you.
As you read this, you may be thinking, Really Marcus, do you actually tell them they’re probably not the best fit for you?
Yes, we do. And I can tell you exactly how they’re going to react because I’ve heard such a response many times. In fact, everything you’re reading about assignment selling and using content as a sales tool has been vetted and experimented with hundreds of times at River Pools and Spas.
Not only that, but this is exactly how we do things at the Sales Lion with our clients, giving us the opportunity to apply these exact same principles to large and small businesses and brands all over the world.
Remember, the principle of making sure we are dealing with educated prospects and customers essentially does not change from business to business, regardless of what you sell.
Now back to Mr./Mrs. Jones’s reaction upon me telling them that if they don’t want to become a bit more educated, then they’re probably not the best fit for my business. I can tell you almost all prospects have responded in one of two ways:
Response #1 sounds like this: “Okay, Marcus, fine. I will read your e-book and watch your video.” And at that point I would say, “Well, that’s wonderful! Friday morning, I will call you just to confirm you’ve done those things.”
Response #2 sounds like this: “Forget you! I don’t need you to come out to my house and I don’t need you to sell me a swimming pool. I’ll go somewhere else!”
When this happens, your response as a business should be one of gratitude, because you now know they’re clearly not a good fit.
Here is the core principle we are really discussing:
If becoming educated with respect to your products and services is not a variable in a prospect’s buying decision, it almost always means they are basing their decision on what to buy solely on price. So unless your business model is one of being the lowest-priced guy every time, the prospect is very likely not a good fit for you.
What Homework Can Tell Us about the Prospect
By this point, you may be thinking, But, Marcus, what happens if you call the prospect on Friday morning to ask if they did their homework and they say, “Well, no, I haven’t done it, but I still want you to come out and give me a quote.” What do you do then?
That’s a very good question, and that situation has happened many times as well.
When I first started this process, and a prospect would tell me, “I am so sorry, I got busy. But I still want you to come out and give me a quote,” the salesman in me would think, Well, they didn’t take the time to do it, but I guess I can still go out there.
I tracked those sales appointments over the course of six months, and I was shocked at the results. Guess how many of the prospects who failed to do their homework but said “Come out anyway and give me a quote” turned into customers?
If you guessed fewer than 5 percent, you are correct. This goes back to my point:
Homework (education) can tell us a lot about the prospect.
When people don’t take the time to become well educated, they are most likely making their decision based solely on price, which generally means they’re not the best fit.
When it comes to success in business, the difference between happiness and frustration comes down to knowing who is, and who is not, a good fit for your organization.
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How One Remarkable Couple Changed My Perspective on the Power of Content to Sell
Now that we’ve established how to do assignment selling, let’s revisit one of the first questions we asked in this section:
On average, how many pages of your website would a potential client or customer be willing to read?
Well, the following story is an example of what is possible. It’s also, in many ways, going to sound unbelievable, but trust me when I say it’s absolutely true.
I’m giving you an example of a customer experience I had that really changed my perspective in terms of the way teaching can affect the sales process, as well as the willingness of shoppers to consume information in order to become comfortable with a buying decision.
About five years ago, when I was still a pool guy, I was up late one night using HubSpot to look over the leads that had come in to my swimming pool website that day, and one of the leads was from a man named “Mr. G.” I saw that he had come to the site because he was searching on Yahoo for the phrase “cost of a fiberglass swimming pool.”
But once he got to the website, something very interesting happened: He viewed 374 pages!
I know what was going through my mind when I saw this, and it’s probably the same thing that’s going through your mind. Right now you’re probably thinking, What in the world??!
There are a lot of assumptions you can make when you see that someone has viewed that amount of website content. You might be thinking to yourself, My goodness! This man has way too much time on his hands!
Or, Geez, he must be a competitor!
Or, Maybe he has some sort of rare OCD disorder where he can’t get enough information about swimming pools.
In any case, I was very perplexed—and almost stunned—to learn just how much of our website content this individual had read.
But this isn’t all. In fact, the story gets much more interesting. The same night that I discovered that Mr. G had read 374 pages of our site, I was continuing to look through the leads that came in when I noticed a lead from a lady named (Mrs.) G. It was easy to put two and two together and rea
lize that Mr. G had a wife, who was also researching swimming pools.
What made this even funnier was that she had found us because she had been searching on Yahoo and typed in “Richmond, Virginia, swimming pools.”
On top of that, she had read more than 140 pages of the website herself.
Now, if you take these two individuals combined, this couple had read more than five hundred pages of our site.
Five hundred-plus pages . . . about fiberglass swimming pools.
The next day, I called Mr. G on the phone. He, of course, acted like he had known me for years, and quickly agreed to have me out to his house for a sales appointment.
Now, what do you suppose that sales appointment was like?
I will tell you. I walked into the house, and Mr. G was standing in his living room with a spreadsheet in his hands. On one side of the sheet was a model of the swimming pool that he was planning to buy, and on the other side of the sheet he had listed every option and accessory he was buying to go with the pool. Of course, all he needed from me was one little thing: the price.
I walked out of that appointment forty-five minutes later with a $5,000 deposit and a signed contract in my hands. As I drove away from the home, I started to laugh, as a thought occurred to me:
How much selling had I actually done that day?
The answer, of course, is none. The Gs weren’t just 70 percent decided when I got there, they were more in the range of 99.9 percent decided that they were going to use our company.
Frankly, my only job on that day was “Don’t screw this one up, pool guy.”
Thus, I laughed.
It turns out that Mr. G was not a freak, not a competitor, and not retired. Rather, he was a surgeon. But he was also a consumer—a consumer who, along with his wife, wanted to feel comfortable with a buying decision.
In fact, if you think about how you buy things, and how much research you do when you’re serious about what you’re buying, you’ll see that you are likely grossly underestimating people’s willingness to become comfortable with their buying decisions through the power of great, helpful information.
My appointment with the Gs was one of the last ones I ever went on as a pool guy. It was also easily one of the most powerful and memorable, because it taught me a clear lesson, one that I’ve seen time and time again, in multiple industries and businesses, all over the world:
Content—assuming it is honest and transparent—is the greatest sales tool in the world today.
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Content Never Sleeps
You may think that saying “Content—assuming it is honest and transparent—is the greatest sales tool in the world today” is too bold of a statement. You may even think, especially if you’re clinging to the past, that it’s simply not true. But let’s look at it together for a moment.
I used to think I was really good at sales. In fact, I taught sales classes and achieved some very high performance numbers for years. But, as a human being, I am limited. Content, on the other hand, is not.
Here are some truths about content, especially the content on your website, assuming it’s done right:
Content can teach 1,000; 100,000; or even 1,000,000 people at a time. Its scope and reach have no limits. A salesperson, for the most part, can “teach” only those he or she is speaking in front of.
Content never sleeps. It can work for you 24/7/365. It doesn’t ask for holidays. It doesn’t get sick. It simply keeps going.
Content doesn’t need a commission and never asks for a raise. It won’t leave you for another company, and it will follow the rules and dictations you give it.
A single piece of content can continue to work for you long after you’ve even forgotten about it. (Heck, many of the articles we’ve discussed here for River Pools are several years old, yet they generate hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in revenue. Essentially, they are “evergreen.”)
Now, let me share some other telling statistics with you.
For years as a swimming pool salesman, my life was a total grind, consisting of incredible amounts of travel combined with sitting in front of home owners day in and day out. And considering the average sales appointment lasted two to three hours, combined with the fact that most appointments were more than two hours from my home, you can see why things were a little rough.
So as to add further perspective, in 2007, in order to sell 75 swimming pools, I had to go on roughly 250 sales appointments—a 30 percent closing ratio. That year, I worked well over sixty hours every week. Most nights I didn’t get home until after 10 or 11 P.M. Time with my family was, for the most part, nonexistent.
I don’t mention these things to give myself a pat on the back, I’m simply trying to set the stage to showcase the difference the principles in this book can make if you’re willing to apply them to your business. I don’t know about you, but having no life outside of driving and selling probably isn’t the healthiest way to make a living, nor develop a powerful sales culture that’s built to last within an organization.
Now, let’s fast-forward to the point at which I started the process of assignment selling and integrating content throughout the sales process. In 2013, we sold 95 swimming pools, and in order to sell those 95 pools, we went on 120 sales appointments—a closing rate of 79 percent.
When I share these statistics with other swimming pool companies, they do not believe we could ever sell that many swimming pools with that few appointments.
But here is the big key they are missing:
Guess how many pages, on average, those 95 customers in 2013 read?
No, the answer is not 30.
It’s not 50.
It’s not even 80.
The answer, if you can believe it, was 105.
That’s right, 95 customers, on average, were willing to read 105 pages of our website before they bought a swimming pool from our company.
And in 2016, the numbers are trending even higher.
To this day, despite having seen this same phenomenon in other industries with our clients, I’m still blown away with the results, as they’re truly an astounding look at consumer behavior in the digital age.
You may be saying to yourself, Marcus, how is that even possible?
Well, if you had come to me seven years ago and asked, “Marcus, do you realize that swimming pool customers would be willing to read more than a hundred pages of your website before they buy?,” I would have looked at you, called you a fool, and then proceeded to tell you that you were crazy and didn’t understand my buyer, my customer, or my industry.
And I would have been dead wrong.
The sad reality is that, as some of you are reading these pages, you may still be thinking your industry and your business are different, and these principles don’t apply to you. But I’m here to tell you that the principles are exactly the same.
Over the past few years, every client we have had at the Sales Lion who has initiated this process of They Ask, You Answer and become prolific teachers on their website has also discovered just how much content people (B2B and B2C) will view on their site before making a buying decision.
There are a few other points I’d like to make before closing this chapter.
I mentioned to you that we went on 120 sales calls to close 95 sales in 2013. I want you to think about that in terms of the impact on our salespeople. Instead of having to go on 250 sales appointments, our salespeople–who are arguably less skilled than I was all those years—now go on fewer than half that number; yet they have dramatically higher closing rates than I ever had.
In fact, let’s do the math. Each sales appointment involves at least two hours driving each way plus two to three hours at the actual appointment. That means that each sales appointment involves a time expenditure of six to seven hours on average. So, if we go on 130 fewer appointments to achieve even better results, we have just saved more than eight hundred person-hours in a year.
What can one salesperson do with eight hundr
ed additional hours in their year? The answers are obvious. They can:
Spend a lot more time with qualified prospects and buyers
Spend more time networking and focusing on business development
And, most important, spend more time doing that which they love—be it with their family, friends, loved ones, hobbies, and so on. Frankly, that’s what it’s all about.
The moral of the story:
When you look at the power of content, it is not just about leads, traffic, and sales.
It is not just about building your brand, either.
It is about giving your company, your staff, and your salespeople more time. For time is the one thing that can never be recovered. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and you will never be able to get it back. (I can personally attest to this, as I’m sure you can as well.)
If you can give this incredible gift (of time) to your employees, then not only do employee morale and overall culture improve, but you are making a serious impact on the world in the process.
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Using Assignment Selling to Avoid Common Sales Pitfalls
Before we finish with assignment selling, I want to show you how you can use this sales strategy to avoid common sales pitfalls and mistakes.
Here’s a very common sales scenario: A salesperson gives a prospect a proposal or a quote and a few days go by without hearing back from the prospect. As the days go by, the salesperson starts to get nervous, and they send the prospect an e-mail. That e-mail usually sounds something like this:
Hello, Mr./Mrs. Jones. We met a couple of days ago and I gave you a proposal. I’m just checking in to see if you have any questions. Don’t hesitate to let me know. Sincerely, Salesperson.
They Ask You Answer Page 12
