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As a business owner for now 24 years, I cannot allow my personal opinions, john, to screw up smart business decisions.
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And even if you think AI is the end of the world and it's the Terminator, and it's going to come to get us and it's going to be in 25 years, the world's just going to suddenly boom, be gone and it's going to be the Matrix.
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My point to you is wouldn't you rather have a successful business between now and then?
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Hey, Uncommon Leaders, Welcome back.
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This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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I'm your host, John Gallagher.
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We've got a class today on communication and connection from Marcus Sheridan, who's the author of the new Endless Customers.
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He's also the best-selling author of they Ask you Answer.
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But what I love about the story that Marcus tells is some of the things that he's done in his own personal business to save it through the examples of leadership that he's led through.
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A speaker who is now sharing that message across many stages and, ultimately, a guy that helps leaders improve their communication and connect better with others.
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In the case of his book, we're going to focus.
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It's going to be talking about customers in that space, but I think it flies right in the face of leadership and how we have to be better at connecting.
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So, Marcus Sheridan, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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How are you doing today?
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John, it's an honor to be here, buddy, and I think we're going to have a great, great conversation, one that the listeners are going to be able to truly take some stuff away and apply, which is, to me, what it's all about.
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I think that is what it's about.
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I think they'll be able to run something through right off the bat.
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So let's start you off, though the same time, same way I start off all first time guests, and that's to tell me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are as a person or as a leader today.
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I think I was about 11 years old and uh, and I grew up in a home that was lower middle class, consistently in debt.
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And one time I was outside and my dad's white pickup truck was outside the garage just sitting there and some man pulls up to the house and he gets out of his vehicle Another person was driving him gets out of his vehicle, he gets in my dad's truck and he drives it away and I was like what's going on?
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And I saw my dad just kind of like watched it and I was so confused it's just a completely baffled what's going on.
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And so finally I'm like dad, this guy he just took your truck you watched.
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He said that was the bank.
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I said I don't understand.
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He said I I defaulted on my payments and they repossessed the truck and he walked away.
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And it left quite an impression on me about debt and just how quickly, if you're not a good steward, things can be taken from you.
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And of course, it's funny how those lessons would come back later on in life as a business owner and as a leader myself.
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But yeah, that left quite the impression as a young man.
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Well, you've got a lot going on right now and it probably aligns really well with that story of your company back in 2008.
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You were a partner in a pool company riding the real estate industry I was in real estate at the time as well down to the bottom no pun intended in terms of the bottom of the pool in 2008.
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And you had challenges to face and choices to make if you're going to keep your business going.
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How did you do that.
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What did you learn and how did you do that?
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Yeah, john, we started the company in 2001.
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I was right out of college.
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Then you get the crash of 2008, 2009, and it looked like we were going to go out of business.
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But the one great thing about pain and suffering is that and I'm sure anybody that's listening to this has felt is that it forces us outside of our comfort zone and oftentimes, when we're in pain, that's when we do the thing that we should have been doing a long time ago.
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And, unfortunately, most people need that motivation of pain.
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The great companies, the great leaders, they come from that perspective of we're in pain even when they're prosperous.
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This way, they don't have to, you know, they don't have that constant cycle of pain, prosperity, pain, prosperity, and so, in our case, 2008, 2009,.
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I'm like we're going to lose it.
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But I really started to learn about the buyer during that time and studied how the buyer was changing, how I was changing myself, looking at things like inbound content, marketing, stuff like that.
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But what I really heard in my simple pool guy mind was, marcus, if you just obsess over your customers' questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns, and you're willing to address those online, honestly, transparently, you might save your business.
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And so, to make a long story short.
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We created just a slew of content, articles and videos that went online that really addressed every single question I'd ever heard as a pool guy, and we became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world.
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As a pool guy, and we became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world, and it went so well that by 2017, we were getting so many leads from just around the country that we started manufacturing our own pools.
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And then by 2020, we became the fastest growing manufacturer of fiberglass pools in the US.
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We had the first franchise of fiberglass pool companies in the US and I was able to sell the manufacturing side of the business in 2020, 2021.
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I still own the original River Pools, which is essentially a franchisee of the bigger franchisor, but this whole journey was documented in my book they Ask you Answer, along with this framework that we used, and that framework has now been applied to hundreds of thousands of companies around the globe, and fundamentally, it's about how to become the most known and trusted brand in your market.
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But what's wild, john, is most leaders don't have the audacity, the courage, the faith and the common sense to follow the principles, even though they're so bloody obvious.
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Why don't they what gets in their way?
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Yeah.
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So let's just analyze it.
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And so, because of what happened in November of 22 with ChatGPT and AI and its impact on the world, its impact on Google, its impact on sales and marketing, I said we need a third version of they Ask, you Answer.
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And that book is called Endless Customers and if you're listening, you can find it at endlesscustomerscom.
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And so in this book, we have come up with four essential pillars of a known and trusted brand.
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I'll tell you each one of the four and then we'll quickly see why folks push back on this.
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All right, and it's going to be pretty fun because it's an exercise in buyer psychology in many ways.
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So the first one is be willing to say online what other companies aren't willing to say All right.
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So there's a bunch of directions we could go with this, but let me just tell you one really quick, and I actually opened the book with this story.
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It's so fascinating Amazing leader named Steve Sheinkopf.
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He's the CEO of Yale Appliance in Boston, massachusetts.
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Now Steve came to me almost a decade ago and he said Marcus, I'm just frustrated.
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We're producing this content and stuff, but we're just not really seeing growth when it comes to traffic, lead sales online.
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I want to grow.
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We're not scaling like we need to.
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What's wrong?
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And I looked at his stuff that he was producing.
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I said problem is the content.
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You're producing, just like every other business out there, but you're not really addressing what buyers want to know.
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You're not obsessed with the buyer.
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He's like well, what do you mean?
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I'm like everything they ask you have you addressed it?
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Well, online?
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He took that to heart.
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He called me a few months later.
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He said you know, one of the questions I keep getting is what are the least serviced, most reliable appliance brands that you sell?
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Because they sell kitchen appliances.
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And he said my dilemma is I've got all this data, marcus, that I could openly talk about this, but if I openly talk about it, I've got to throw some of these manufacturers, some of these vendors, under the bus, right.
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And so I said what are you going to do?
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He said well, I guess I'm going to focus on the group that matters most the customer, the buyer.
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Make a long story short.
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The first time he did this was in 2017.
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He's done this every year since then a series of articles and videos that address the least service, most reliable appliance brands.
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Now here's what's wild about it, though, john.
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What he does is he takes all the service calls he ran from the previous year.
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He tracks every unit he sold from each brand as a retailer.
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Every service call he ran for each brand.
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Therefore, you learn the least serviced all the way down to the most serviced brand that he sells.
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He publishes it as this huge chart on his website, and you literally see the 2025 list that says the least service was Gagadon and one of the most service was GE.
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And so it's like wow, and that's what makes him different, because did the vendors get upset?
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The ones that were ranked poorly, yes, and what did he say?
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He said well, this is data.
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That's all I'm doing is showing the data, so maybe you should worry more about making a better product than getting frustrated for the fact that I shared the data of our service calls.
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That's how he became the gatekeeper of that industry.
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That article, the first year it was written, got 50,000 reads a month on average, 50,000 readers a month for a year straight.
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Right Alone, the series has done millions in views and visitors just to his website.
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This is why Yale Appliance is, in many ways, a household name.
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When it comes to kitchen appliances today, they are the gatekeepers.
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This is what's possible, but you see how many.
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What percentage of leaders listening to this right now.
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If they owned like an appliance retail shop would do something that audacious.
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Most would not.
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Great question, I mean.
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I'm thinking.
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The thing that comes to my mind is well, I got consumer reports to do that for me.
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Well, don't let anybody else do that for me.
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To your point you, would you ever leave?
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Yes.
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Why would you allow?
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someone else to dictate your success, the success of your company or even the conversations that are having within your space.
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My obsession is if anybody's thinking it about the product or service that I sell.
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I, as a leader, want to make sure that my brand, my company, is a part of that conversation.
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So Steve Sheinkopf was willing to say what other CEOs and leaders in his space weren't willing to say, and see the whole problem.
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You know it's wild, john.
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I've been speaking about disruptive, audacious sales and marketing practices for the better part of 12, 13 years.
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During this period of time, the number one email I've gotten isn't from business owners and leaders saying hey, marcus, we want to grow like Steve.
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That's the number two type of email that I get.
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The number one type of email I've gotten from marketers Marketers saying you know, marcus, I get it, but the problem is leadership doesn't.
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They won't allow me to do some of these things that I know would generate massive success.
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Bad, very bad.
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So that's who you wrote it for, right.
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I mean, you wrote it for the disruptor ultimately.
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You had a disruptor in mind when you wrote it.
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Yeah, for the ones that are willing to be the digital David in a land of Goliaths, that want to make their own rules and not play by the rules they've been given, because ultimately we see this over the history of the world the rule breakers always end up becoming the rule makers.
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And the previous leaders become the rule followers because they were afraid to replace their own business models Pretty much similar to what Google's doing right now.
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Right, google's going to be taken over over the course of the next five to 10 years unless they do a dramatic U-turn in their current approach.
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They want to continue to feed their revenue stream with paid ads, and so the user experience right now for Google search isn't nearly as good as it is for some of these AI platforms.
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A lot of people are still learning about them, so they don't necessarily know that, but unless Google changes, they will be replaced by a better UX for the market, and you see, this is what we see over and over again with that pride prosperity cycle that we were talking about earlier.
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Hey listeners, I want to take a quick moment to share something special with you.
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Many of the topics and discussions we have on this podcast are areas where I provide coaching and consulting services for individuals and organizations.
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If you've been inspired by our conversation and are seeking a catalyst for change in your own life or within your team, and are seeking a catalyst for change in your own life or within your team, I invite you to visit coachjohngallaghercom forward slash free call to sign up for a free coaching call with me.
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It's an opportunity for us to connect, discuss your unique challenges and explore how coaching or consulting can benefit you and your team.
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Okay, let's get back to the show.
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Absolutely.
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Let's just go there right now, because I saw that at the end of your book, in terms of one of those barriers is the pride cycle.
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So you've said that a couple times.
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Tell me about the pride cycle and what exists in that, because you say pain, prosperity, but there's other pieces of that.
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Yeah, it's quite fascinating because when you understand how the pride cycle works, you see it in every facet of your life, and not just your life, business, personal.
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You see it in the history of the world.
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I mean entire countries and cultures and civilizations rise and fall with this thing called the pride cycle.
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So essentially how it works is imagine a circle and at the bottom of the circle you have pain.
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And this circle is essentially a journey that we're going on.
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And because you're in pain and let's just be hypothetical, let's do a really simple one on a personal level.
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You're overweight, you're unhealthy and you're like man, I've just let myself go.
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Now, because you're in pain, you say I got to make changes enough.
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So you have disgust, I'm going to make changes, I am going to get uncomfortable because I'm more frustrated with this current pain than the pain of change.
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And so we start to do the little things.
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Maybe we cut out the sweets, maybe we start to go to the gym or get the exercise or get on the treadmill, but we start to do the little things.
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And because we start to do the little things, we start to get results.
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Because we start to get results, we start to experience momentum.
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And now we're coming up that left side of the circle and by doing the little things we start to finally get to the top of the circle, which is pleasure.
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Pleasure means man, I did it, I lost the 20 pounds I am so proud of myself.
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Yeah, look at me.
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But something happens when we get to that place of pleasure Very human we get comfortable and we say you know what, maybe I can cheat a little bit today, maybe I can just, you know, have that extra serving, maybe I don't need to go to the gym today.
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So we stop doing the little things that got us to that place and because we stopped doing the little things, we don't need to go to the gym today.
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So we stopped doing the little things that got us to that place.
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And because we stopped doing the little things, we don't even realize that at first we start to slide down the right side of the circle.
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And so you can imagine.
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The right side is stop doing the little things In business.
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It's stop innovating, stop pushing, stop disrupting.
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Get fat, get happy, get comfortable, become Kodak, become Blackberry, right, and just don't change.
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And because of that, all of a sudden we're back to where we started, and that's the circle.
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This is why you see economies rise and economies falls.
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They come into debt and then they, you know, quit the spending like or you know, you understand what I'm saying.
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It's like there's like this cycle that you see with economies.
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You see this cycle, you know, with governments and with politics, certainly with relationships.
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My goodness, I mean the person that's like I'm going on date night every Friday because you know we're seeing a therapist, a counselor, and I'm going to do the little things.
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It's like, oh, you know, relationship is good, but you stopped doing the date night.
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And you know relationship is good, but you stopped doing the date night.
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And you know you stopped doing you know like five love languages or whatever it is.
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And then suddenly you're like oh, we're having problems again.
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We don't know what happened.
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Pride cycle, love that and I think about that.
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You know, the I've often used in my coaching said people will change when the displeasure of remaining the same use the wordust, is greater than the discomfort of the change itself, because it's going to be training new muscles one way or the other.
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If you stay with fitness, get yourself in good shape, but you stop doing those little things, next time you get back in the program it's going to hurt again.
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It's just going to hurt.
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It's like I don't want the pain.
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It's which pain would you prefer to choose?
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That's right.
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Right, I'm either going to get on the treadmill and experience the pain of that, or I'm going to experience the pain of looking down and not being able to see my feet.
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Like it's the same.
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Principally speaking, it's the same.
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So, yeah, and it's amazing to me how, when I've looked at my life and I look at the ups and downs, usually it's almost always because somehow the pride cycle had crept in.
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It's so real.
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When I read it I just smiled.
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I'm like this is exactly what we go through.
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You start doing a little research on it.
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It's crazy how much research is available.
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It seems like to your point, in religion, in our spiritual journey as well.
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It's part of that too.
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I mean, it's very much a part of what you find.
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And so you get to the, let's say, we're at the top of that cycle and we're at that prosperity point.
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What's the way in which you encourage organizations in which you stay at that point and not go back off of it?
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What's the way in which you encourage organizations in which you stay at that point and not go back off of it?
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What's the way to stay there?
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I think that's great.
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And that just goes back to that constant self-audit, right?
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So if you look, for example, at endless customers, there's these four pillars, and these four pillars are meant to be an audit that leadership teams can just literally sit around the boardroom table and say can we honestly say we're doing this?
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So what are the four pillars?
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Number one are we saying online what others aren't saying?
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Are we talking about the things that others aren't talking about?
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One of the biggest examples from the book is discussing cost and price.
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Now this comes from.
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They Ask you answer.
00:18:34.790 --> 00:18:36.946
It comes now into endless customers.
00:18:36.946 --> 00:18:56.715
I've got more data probably than anybody in the world no, not probably I do On the power of discussing cost and price, not giving exact prices, but teaching what goes into cost and price and helping understand a prospect, understand value and, roughly, what is this thing going to cost.
00:18:57.217 --> 00:19:05.088
There is so much power in that, and so most companies refuse to talk about that because they say I want to wait so we can control the conversation.
00:19:05.088 --> 00:19:09.426
As a buyer, you don't want to be controlled and so this is very, very frustrating to you as a buyer.
00:19:09.426 --> 00:19:11.650
So, number one say what others aren't willing to say.
00:19:11.650 --> 00:19:17.179
Number two show with video what others aren't willing to show online.
00:19:17.179 --> 00:19:23.583
So I would ask you, as we do this audit, what are you saying right now online that no one else in your space is saying?
00:19:23.583 --> 00:19:41.598
Like Steve Sheinkop with the list of appliance brands, right, like all the companies that were willing to talk about cost and price, even though 95% of all industries, in terms of companies, still don't talk about cost and price at all, especially most B2B service-based businesses.
00:19:41.598 --> 00:19:42.849
I mean, don't even get me started there.
00:19:45.409 --> 00:19:49.637
So, third pillar, my second pillar was show what others aren't willing to show with video.
00:19:49.637 --> 00:19:55.577
What are you showing right now that others in your space aren't willing to show with video?
00:19:55.577 --> 00:20:09.051
Super fast example of that when we started manufacturing pools, we were the first major manufacturer to create an entire series eight videos, 10 minutes long each, that showed everything about our manufacturing process.
00:20:09.051 --> 00:20:15.311
If you wanted to start manufacturing pools, john, you could watch these videos and it would be like a course on getting started.
00:20:15.311 --> 00:20:20.269
And my competitors, literally they called us up and they said why in the world are you showing this proprietary information?
00:20:20.269 --> 00:20:22.316
I'm like you think it's proprietary, give me a break.
00:20:22.316 --> 00:20:25.839
But the problem is that's the lie they're telling themselves.
00:20:25.839 --> 00:20:31.875
So what are you showing, from a video perspective, that none of your competitors are willing to show, or at least 95% of them?
00:20:31.875 --> 00:20:34.142
Number three are you selling in a way that others aren't willing to show, or at least 95% of them?
00:20:34.142 --> 00:20:36.287
Number three are you selling in a way that others aren't willing to sell.
00:20:36.867 --> 00:20:44.353
Now this one, and I've got some powerful examples in the book, but the most obvious example are self-service tools.
00:20:44.353 --> 00:20:56.112
Self-service tools are interactive tools that generally you put on a website that allow someone to get answers that previously they would have gotten by talking to a human, but they now get them by having this interactive experience.
00:20:56.112 --> 00:21:01.220
So, for example, you could be the with River Pools.
00:21:01.220 --> 00:21:03.270
We were the first fiberglass pool manufacturer.
00:21:03.270 --> 00:21:05.586
Now, keep in mind, we have dealers that set the in price.
00:21:05.586 --> 00:21:21.945
Okay, we were the first fiberglass pool manufacturer in the world that had a pricing estimator on our website, and so somebody could come on there and, by answering a series of questions about what size you're interested in, what shape you're interested in, here's some options.
00:21:21.945 --> 00:21:23.411
What options do you think you're interested in?
00:21:23.411 --> 00:21:25.867
Just like they would have if they were talking to a salesperson.
00:21:26.710 --> 00:21:32.853
So this estimator tool, this calculator I call it an estimator tool, this estimator tool it allows them to make choices.
00:21:32.853 --> 00:21:40.897
It also allows them to self-educate as they go through the estimator and then, by the end, it gives them a range as to what they would spend.
00:21:40.897 --> 00:21:54.130
Now here's what's amazing about this I actually have a software company that builds these pricing estimators, that allows companies, service-based businesses, to build pricing estimators and put them on the homepage of their website.
00:21:54.130 --> 00:22:05.267
And we've got so much data on this now that we know that if somebody puts a pricing estimator on their homepage that says get instant estimate, okay, that's the call to action get instant estimate.
00:22:05.267 --> 00:22:11.439
Generally there's a three to 500% increase in leads from the day they do it.
