Let's take a look at how one company used content to completely revolutionize their sales process. I am Marcus Sheridan, I'm the CEO and President of The Sales Lion, and also am a former pool guy, River Pools and Spas. The river full story is one that's been talked about a lot at this point in inbound and content marketing circles, but to make a long story short, we started the company 2001. Things were going okay until the market crashed in 2008. I remember the day of the crash, within the next 48 hours we lost five deposits of people said we're going to get a pool. They withdrew that deposit, so we lost a quarter of million dollars and business in the first 48 hours. Over the coming weeks and months, it got worse and worse by January 2009, we're literally looking over the edge of bankruptcy and I think I'm going to lose everything. That's when in January of 2009, I start to read all these fancy phrases like inbound marketing, content marketing, social media, all this stuff. Really in my mind, my simple pool guy mind, what I heard was okay, so what you're telling me and all the stuff that I'm reading is if I just obsess over the questions my customers ask every single day, good, bad, or ugly, and I'm willing to address them on the website through texts and video, I might save my business. Okay, fine. That's what we did and we embraced a simple philosophy at the time we called it, "They ask you answer." We said we're going to be the best teachers in the world when it comes to, in our case, fiberglass pools. To make a long story really short, we did just that. We became the most traffic swimming pool website in the world. Today we get about 600,000 visitors a month. Last year we were the largest installer fiberglass pools in the country. Because we're getting so many leads outside of area, I had to make a choice. Do I stay where I am just installing pulls in Virginia and Maryland or do we do something with this huge brand that we've built, this momentum that we've built digitally speaking? We started manufacturing pools as well. That's gone incredibly well and incredibly fast period of time. I would guess within the next 10 years, we're probably the largest manufacturer of fiberglass pools in the US, but that's the quick story of River Pools. Let me tell you a quick story about how content had a major impact on our sales process with our organization. Since understanding this principle, we'll call assignment selling, since understanding this principle, I've taught it to organizations around the world and every single one has a similar pattern. Let me describe. At the beginning of 2013, I was looking at my analytics from my website and some of my lead behavior. I was comparing two groups of people. This group here have filled out a form and said, I want to get a quote for swimming pool and they ended up not buying. This group here had filled out a form to get a quote for a pool and they ended up buying. I said what is the difference between the non-buyers versus the buyers? I noticed the number 30 just kept jumping out underneath the group that had bought. Of course, that number 30 represented the total pages they had viewed. This is what we found specifically and this is very critical. That if somebody read 30 or more pieces of our content or consumed 30 more pieces of our content, before the initial sales appointment, they would buy 80 percent of the time. If they didn't hit that number, the closing rates were about 25 percent, which was industry average. We went from being incredibly average to being elite sales organizations. I said, "My goodness, I've been selling the wrong way for years." Because for years somebody would call me up and say, "Hey, Marcus, I'm checking out your website or heard about you from a friend. Could you come out of my house and give me a quote for a pool?" and like every other pool guy, I would go out to the house and I would give them a quote. But I would get there and I would answer the same questions over and over and over again. In fact, this is what we found as we've worked with sales organizations. 80 percent of all the questions that sales professionals gets on a first sales appointment are the same questions almost every time, 80 percent. Yet as organizations, we continue to send them out there to answer those same 80 percent. What would happen if before you met with that prospect they not only knew the answer to those 80 percent of questions, but they had heard them from you, they heard your voice explain it to them. They had seen you explain it to them. They knew the answers because you had taken the time to teach them through the digital mediums that we have available to us today. Yes, you're right. Sale cycles would go down, sales appointments in terms of time would go down, closing rates would go up. The fact is, we would spend dramatically more time selling and less time teaching. We're in the face-to-face experience but yet we keep sending them out there to teach the same things over and over again when all that stuff should have happened beforehand. Which is why the content we're producing, should be extremely sales-based. In other words, very buyer-centric questions, not fluff, and that's what we started to do at River Pools, and that's what we've taught companies to do. In other words, you'd call me up and you'd say something like, "Hey Marcus, I'm checking out your website, could you come out to my house and give me a quote for a pool?" You see knowing the power of 30 page views for us, this is how that response changed. I would say, "Sure, I'd love to come out to your house, but you're getting raised, spend a lot of money. If you're going to spend a lot of money, I know you don't want to make any mistakes. So as to make sure you don't make any mistakes, this is what we're going to do as we're talking on the phone right now, I'm going to send you two things that you're really going to like. The first thing I'm going to send you, is a link to a video that's awesome. This video's going to show you the process of pool showing up, going in the ground, patio going around, all the clean up. This way you're going to see the whole thing. This way, when I come out to your house on Friday, you're not going to say so Marcus, What does this process look like? You're already going to know which sidebar." That just saved me 35 minutes on the sales appointment. "The second thing I'm going to send you is this guide, if you will. This guide's great because it's going to answer all those little questions you have right now about pools. Like, should I get a heater with my pool? What's the best type of heater? Should it be gas, should it be electric? Should it get a cover? What's the best type of cover? Should it be mesh? Should it be solid? We're going to answer all those questions. It's a little bit long. This guide is about 30 pages, but I promise it'll be well worth your time. Will you take the time to review those things before our appointment on Friday?" Do you realize 90 percent of the time the answer is exactly the same? Sure. That's the answer. If they do that homework, I know that 80 percent of the time they're going to buy and just so this hits home. When life was great and the economy was booming in 2007 and everybody could get a loan for a pool and it was easy to buy a pool, that year we sold 75 pools. In order to sell 75 pools, I had to go on 230 plus sales appointment myself. My whole life that year was getting up early, driving 2-3 hours to go to a sales appointment, sitting in a home for 2-3 hours, and then driving 2-3 hours home. I didn't get to see my wife, I didn't get to see my kids, I didn't get to work with more qualified buyers. Then we understood the power of Content as a sales tool. We integrated it into our entire sales process and then the magic happened. By this point I had moved on and I wasn't just the pool guy, I was now doing the sales and marketing consulting. We had brought another salespeople that supposedly weren't as skilled at sales as I was. Let me give you some real numbers. In 2013, we sold 110 pools. In order to sell those 110 pools, we went on about 150 sales of plans. You can do the math. Which sales team was happier? Them in 2013 or me in 2007? That's because I was doing it wrong. Wow, what a story. Make sure you're using Content both before and during the sale. You will start seeing market success.
