They Ask You Answer

by Marcus Sheridan

  We just finished our second healthcare analytics summit. We widely expanded it. We had a capacity of 1,000 people, and we sold out six weeks ahead of time. We had to get approval to host any more people, so we ended up having 1,040 people there with 180 on the waiting list. And that was our second year.

  Success and Plans for the Future

  Health Catalyst’s efforts have not only put them on the map, but they’ve also made them an industry thought leader. They built a marketing strategy based on education, teaching, and transparency that transformed into a culture. And others in their field have taken notice. Says Horstmeier:

  We’ve had several analysts give us an overall market review of our company, and they always put us at the top of the list. We had another analyst tell us that Health Catalyst’s marketing was the most brilliant marketing campaign she’d ever seen in the industry. Our own president said, “In my twenty-five years in the health care field, I’ve never seen anything like this.” Our clients are coming and they’re already educated. We walk into a meeting and they already know what we’re doing. They’ve read our stuff. They’ve already asked questions. Many of them are ready to buy by the time we have our first meeting.

  In just a little over two years, traffic to Health Catalyst’s website has grown exponentially from a few thousand monthly visitors in August 2013 to more than 115,000 in October 2015, with most of the increase coming organically from solid search engine optimization (SEO) practices.

  Right now it’s hard to measure the ROI [return on investment] of our marketing efforts as we average a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. Our average sale is probably 2½ to 3 million dollars and our company has a total of 30 clients. The other thing that makes it difficult to measure is that there isn’t always one thing that creates a lead. It’s always a combination of things. We have content, webinars, events, and people coming to our website saying “Tell me more.” So depending on what you’d consider a lead, we’re getting about 200 inquiries per quarter. When we tracked the percentage of leads that came through the marketing engine it was 60 to 70 percent of all leads coming through.

  The Health Catalyst story is the ultimate example of a B2B industry where, instead of saying, “Hospitals don’t find vendors on the Internet,” the organization embraced the idea that an obsession with education and transparency—in all its forms—could have a dramatic impact on the brand and business.

  And boy did it have an impact.

  PART III

  Implementation and Making It a Culture

  Many companies have tried content marketing and failed.

  Having spoken to so many companies on this subject, I’ve heard just about all the reasons why such failures occur. And not only that, but my consulting company has worked with dozens and dozens of businesses and brands to help them achieve greatness within their space.

  Some have reached incredible heights of success.

  Others have been a total bust.

  As we’ve taken the time to separate the success stories from the busts, we’ve discovered there are four essential keys to making this work within any organization: ultimately building the business, brand, and bottom line while becoming a true culture in the process. And in this part of the book, we break down these four keys, which are as follows:

  Buy-in from top to bottom: This is achieved through truly educating subject matter experts and key departments on the what, how, and why of content marketing.

  Insourcing: The process of utilizing company employees to produce content as part of their job descriptions.

  The content manager: Someone in the organization must own the effort and be fully dedicated to it (without distractions) to make it work.

  Using the right tools: Unless the right tools are used, it is extremely hard to calculate true ROI (return on investment) of the company’s content marketing efforts.

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  The Power of Insourcing and Using Your Team to Create Incredible Content

  Truth be told, many, many organizations have tried embracing inbound and content marketing. And one of the most common ways they do this is by engaging some type of digital marketing agency that produces their content for them. Although this concept of “outsourcing” your company’s content production is by no means a bad thing, it can absolutely come with drawbacks. Here’s why:

  For the most part, unless the content producer (for the agency) is embedded in the company, it is very difficult for them to accurately reflect you, your brand, your brand story, and the subject matter expertise your company has. In many ways, your company’s content and story represent the soul of your business. This being the case, it can be quite difficult for someone else to accurately reflect this “soul.”

  Agencies have a set “deliverable.” For example, many may include something like “six blog articles a month” as part of the scope of work. On one hand, this is a very good thing because you know, as the client, that you’re going to get six blog articles that month to publish to the site. But on the other hand, the companies that have had the greatest success following the principles of They Ask, You Answer and content marketing generally aren’t restricted by deliverables. In other words: If they want to produce ten blog articles in a month, they do it.

  If they want to create twelve videos in a month, they do it.

  If they want to write just one, epically long and valuable blog post, they do it.

  If they want to revamp a portion of their website to better address buyer needs and concerns, they do it.

  I hope you’re seeing the point here. The creative flexibility to simply produce great content, in all its forms, without the limitations of a contract or deliverable, is a powerful, powerful thing.

  Finally, when a company is not dependent on an agency to “do the work for it,” and therefore learn it for itself, although the learning curve can mean slower results at first, the end results are often dramatically greater.

  It’s critical that your company’s story and content are a true reflection of your sales messaging. This means, in a perfect world, that your sales team is very much involved in the selection and production of all of your company and brand content (more on this later). Done right, when a prospect or customer contacts you, their first thought is Yes, this is exactly who I thought they were. What they are saying is exactly what I read and saw.

  Ultimately, the question of producing your own content versus having someone else do it for you is much like the principle of the artist: Not until the artist is holding her own paintbrush can she truly produce her own masterpiece. The same is true for any company looking to become a thought leader in the digital age.

  I stress again that there are many great agencies out there that do produce great content. There are also many great ghost writers. But the fact remains, if you want to be heard above the noise of your industry, you can’t just be average. You can’t be like everyone else in your space. You must do more, and you must do it better.

  Thus, owning your content effort, versus renting it out, can make all the difference.

  All of this leads to the opposite of outsourcing your company’s content, something we call at the Sales Lion “insourcing,” which we define as:

  The process of using your existing employees and their knowledge about your services and products to produce educational content for the marketing department—leading to better, buyer-centric content, more informed sales teams, and dramatically increased brand awareness.

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  How Block Imaging Embraced a Culture of Insourcing

  If you read the foreword of this book, you’re familiar with the story of Block Imaging and Krista Kotrla. Krista wanted badly to turn Block Imaging around and knew that the principles of They Ask, You Answer would be the key not only to saving the business, but to making them the leader of the medical imaging equipment space in the process.

  But when she approached the sales and leadership departments of her organization, no one seemed to share her vision. The excuse? It was
twofold:

  “I don’t have the time.”

  “That’s not my job.”

  Let’s look at both of these excuses for a second. In life, when someone tells you they “don’t have time,” what they’re really trying to tell you, without actually telling you is, “That thing you just explained to me is not as important to me as it is to you.”

  In other words, they don’t see its value.

  The funny thing is, whenever we as humans or businesses see the value of something, we quickly start to make the time. In fact, “time” becomes a non-issue when profit and worth are identified.

  The excuse of “That’s not my job” is essentially the same. In 2016, if someone within an organization tells their marketing department, “It’s not my job,” they obviously don’t understand what has happened with the shifts in sales and marketing in the digital age. They don’t understand the 70 percent number we discussed at the beginning of this book and just how much the buyer’s journey has changed.

  Again, they don’t get it.

  In Krista’s case, neither management nor the sales department at Block Imaging understood the value of this incredibly important philosophy. Without question, though, the story of marketing departments not getting help from the rest of the team is prolific throughout the entire world today. And when I say “prolific,” I am not exaggerating. In fact, since starting the Sales Lion, the number 1 e-mail I have received from readers—and it’s number 1 by a longshot—sounds something like this:

  Marcus, I am in marketing. I believe so much in using this honest, transparent teaching philosophy in doing business. But I just can’t get management and sales to see what I see!

  I have received hundreds of these types of e-mails over the years, and the frustration from the sender is almost always palpable.

  The Silos Must Be Eliminated

  Krista’s dilemma is the same one shared by most people in marketing: they understand their products, services, and buyer, they just don’t understand them the same way sales or management does. Simply put, they are not (generally speaking) subject matter experts. After all, it’s the sales teams (among others in the organization) that hear all of the main prospect and customer questions. It’s also the same sales team that is tasked with answering these questions.

  So if sales is on the front lines, why would they not be included in the part of the sales process that has the greatest impact on the sale? The idea that we can simply tell marketing, “Go and produce this content. Get us lots of leads. Move prospects down the funnel” is utterly ridiculous and outrageously improbable.

  Understanding the What, How, and Why

  When Krista asked me to come and speak to her company, and help the various departments catch the vision that was inbound, content, and They Ask, You Answer, I knew it was a tremendous opportunity, for myself and also for their team.

  For the team because they would all be in a room, with their full focus and attention on understanding the what, how, and why of becoming the best teachers and educators in the medical imaging space.

  For me because that was the first time I would go out and teach such a workshop—one focused on developing a true “culture” of content marketing. Because I could see the workshop was going to have such an influence on Krista’s team, and because I knew so many other “Kristas” who were out there struggling to achieve the same type of uniform vision and buy-in she was seeking, I knew that my days of being a pool guy were numbered.

  Since that day, I’ve taught hundreds of these same workshops around the globe, and the results have been extraordinary. But the key to making them so effective comes down to three simple things:

  What is this thing we call content marketing?

  How does it work (They Ask, You Answer)?

  Why is it so very important that everybody in the company participate in it?

  Since that day with Block Imaging, Krista has had the help of well over fifty employees who have contributed to producing hundreds of articles, videos, and so on that have gone on the company website. But it all happened because they understood one key thing:

  Everyone is a teacher, and everyone’s voice matters.

  When companies think this way, anything is possible. The marketing department changes. So does sales. Silos are eliminated. Culture and teamwork are enhanced.

  And just to help you really catch the vision of what is possible when things are done this way, read the following e-mail Krista received from one of her sales team members in early 2016, five years after the original workshop:

  Guys,

  Y’all may be sick of hearing these stories, but I still get a kick out of it. I just had a conference call with a pain management center in Arkansas. Come to find out before we even spoke, the purchaser had printed off several of my blogs to bring to her board meeting. It enabled her to answer questions on comparison models, budgets, what equipment they needed, etc.

  She had read and seen so much of our content, she said she couldn’t wait to talk to me. She told me who my competitors were and how much they were quoting. Even when I told her we would likely charge more, she said, “but I trust you guys, I’d rather work with you.”

  I realize they don’t all line up like this, but when our funnel is working at its best it is so so so sweet. . . . I’m sure I could still find a way to screw up the deal, but the point is, I couldn’t be better set up to succeed.

  The effort to produce the content is WORTH IT! Thank you to the stellar efforts of the marketing team for really setting us apart.

  Think about it, when was the last time your sales team sent an e-mail to the marketing department that looked like this?

  To close this chapter, here is a direct quote from Krista, speaking on the final results of They Ask, You Answer for Block Imaging:

  “Because of Insourcing and Content Marketing, we can account for at least 20 million in sales we otherwise would never have gotten.”

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  Starting Off They Ask, You Answer with a Bang

  Company Workshops

  I hope that by this point you’re excited about They Ask, You Answer.

  You want your organization and brand to be seen as the most trusted thought leader of your space.

  You want to embrace insourcing and involve your team of subject matter experts.

  You want this to be a culture.

  All this being said, cultures aren’t built on e-mails, announcements, and mission statements.

  As you might imagine, if you finish this book, set it down, and then send out an e-mail to your team that says, “Let’s start answering customer questions and blogging,” you will likely get nowhere quickly.

  Again, your team must understand the what, how, and why of They Ask, You Answer so as to allow what is a “program” in many people’s eyes to eventually become a culture.

  This is exactly why workshops (as well as long-term training) with the entire team are so critical to success. With every single business and brand I’ve worked with that has experienced exceptional results, a workshop has always been the key to kicking off the magic and creating a unified vision.

  I discovered this first with Krista and her team at Block Imaging; I have since witnessed it well over two hundred times in the workshops I’ve taught to organizations, large and small, over the past five years.

  But if you want to give a workshop to help your team catch this vision, what is the best way to go about it? What are the key principles to focus on? What must the team clearly understand in order to get started?

  In this chapter, we answer these questions by showing you the eight essential principles participants must embrace from the very beginning so as to find the greatest success with content marketing and They Ask, You Answer—principles that are ideally taught in a workshop designed to lay out the entire vision of the content marketing efforts.

  Principle 1: Consumer Expectations Have Changed

  In this section of the workshop, the purpose is to shift the min
d of each attendee into “consumer” mode. In other words, we want them thinking about the way they use the Internet, how their expectations have changed when they are researching and vetting companies online, and the feelings they experience when a website doesn’t give them what they’re looking for.

  Unless someone has the ability to look in the mirror and analyze the way they shop, buy, and engage the Web, it’s very difficult for them to understand their prospects and customers at the level necessary.

  Principle 2: The Way Google and Other Search Engines Work

  Here’s a little secret: Outside of the tech/marketing world, a huge portion of people do not understand how search engines work. Nor can they articulate how and why Google ranks and shows some sites (pieces of content) over others.

  Ultimately, the key to this section of the workshop is to help every person realize the goal of Google (and other search engines) is to give its customer (the searcher) the best, most specific answer to their question (or need, problem, query, and so on) in that very moment. At the same time, even though Google wants to give great answers to their customers, most companies and industries don’t embrace this “teacher” mentality online, leaving the reward to third-party websites that are more driven by consumer questions than by product pitches.

  Principle 3: The Way Consumers Search and the Big 5