They Ask, You Answer
We’re already on our third entry of our company book club blog! This one is all about They Ask, You Answer! This is going to be amazing and so full of good, applicable knowledge. I hope that you get as much from it as we all did over at Lemonade Stand!
The Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan was the third book of the Lemonade Stand Book Club. This one is all about marketing and how to grow your business. I have heard it said (and I must say that I am inclined to agree) that this is the absolute best book on marketing ever written. If your business is struggling or you feel that you do not understand how to market your company or your product (first off, I might recommend checking out a cool digital marketing agency to help you out – like Lemonade Stand…), or your business isn’t being found by people (especially online), then this is probably the book for you! I cannot recommend it enough, and it has absolutely changed the way that I view our company and the way that we do business.
That might sound a little intense or exaggerated – it isn’t. I promise. The concepts presented in this book are so incredibly simple, yet so utterly mind boggling, that you will never look at companies the same way, and you will have more than enough things to change about your own company to keep you busy for years to come.
The main idea behind this book is that you create your business around the central idea of providing answers to people’s questions or burning desires. I’ll provide a few examples as to how companies have done this, so that you can get the idea, but that’s basically it!
It’s an awesome book.
So why is They Ask, You Answer just so good? Well, Marcus provides a number of tips on how you should be performing your marketing, and I am going to cover some of those, so you can see just how amazing this stuff really is.
I started writing this article thinking that I would be able to get through all of the best ideas and concepts that you should understand from this wonderful read; however, I was only to get through one of them, before I realized that this should probably be broken up into a few different articles. This post will focus on the single topic that I felt was most important, and then I will include a few follow ups specifically on They Ask, You Answer. So stay tuned!
Pricing on Your Website
Put your pricing on your website!
One of the first and most important concepts discussed in this book is simply that. Marcus iterates and reiterates time and time again that everyone needs to have their pricing available on their website!
No excuses!
For some industries, this is a hard pill to swallow. Maybe you believe that your product or your industry is too complicated to provide your pricing structure on your website. Maybe you think having some mystery around your pricing and a big “call for a quote” button is what really draw people in and makes them want to do business with you. It’s not.
Hiding your pricing is not doing you any favors. Think about it from your own perspective as a consumer. When you are on a website for something that you’re maybe thinking about purchasing, and no prices are listed, and the only thing you can find is “call our team for pricing info,” how likely are you to actually follow through with that and make the call? If you need the product enough, maybe.. But most of the time, you’re probably going to try to find a different company that will offer you the same thing where you can know, going in, what you’re going to be paying. Nobody wants to talk to a sales team before they even have an idea about how much a product costs. It doesn’t make sense to us as consumers!
So, if you, as a consumer, do not appreciate this approach to pricing, why would you assume that your business will be the grand exception to this rule and people would just love to have to contact your sales team to understand your pricing? They don’t want to do that!
People want to hop on to your website, get a clear picture of pricing, and then be able to make a decision right then and there.
This will do a few things for your company.
First of all, it makes you look a lot less shady. Generally, people don’t hide things unless they have something to hide. Same idea applies here – if your company is hiding its pricing, then people are going to instantly lose some trust and start asking “well why is this information hidden? What does this company have to hide from? Why would they want to hide that from me?” You will create an instant bond of trust with a potential customer if you are completely open and transparent.
Two, you get a lot more qualified leads coming in from your website. Take a look at your sales funnel. How many people do you have to talk to in order to complete a sale? Let’s say that it is eight on average. Eight people find your website, look over your services, and decide that they want to call you. They start talking to you and then find out that maybe you’re out of their price range. Maybe they had no idea that a service like yours could cost what it does. They’ve now wasted their time, and you’ve wasted yours. Instead, let’s imagine that those eight people visit your website and are provided a clear picture of what they could expect to pay for your services. Now, is anyone going to contact your sales team that isn’t willing to pay that price? Not very likely.
Having pricing on your website will aid you immensely in your sales funnel process. The only people that you have calling in and inquiring about your business will be those who have already checked out how much you’re going to cost them. No more surprises. It still might take the same eight people, but now out of those eight only two or three actually contact your team, and then you can make a sale by speaking to only those two or three people rather than having to spend time on all eight of them.
How cool is that???
This is incredibly important, and it is one of the first things that I would recommend that you do after reading this book.
Now, to answer the question “What if my product or service is too specific? What if a custom quote has to be given for each potential customer due to the tailoring that must be done for each proposal?”
That’s a very valid question! How do we go about that? Well, Marcus has a great answer for us.
The company that he helped lift off of the ground was called River Pools and Spas. They built pools for people. It’s hard to think of a more customized industry! He did not have the ability to put on his website “a fiberglass pool will cost you $15,000 no matter the conditions, size, or shape of your desired pool!” That’s just not possible. There are a ton of factors that go into the actual pricing of a pool. So what did he do? Marcus wrote an article about all the potential factors that could affect the price of your pool. I’ve included a link to that article here, so that you can check it out for yourself and see what his approach was.
This article details all of the reasons why your desired pool might be more or less expensive than other pools and how much that could end up costing you. He provided information to people. He didn’t give exact numbers, but he provided price ranges for certain things. This allowed people to calculate their own cost based on the various features that they wanted or issues that they might be facing with construction, water, pool shape, etc. People could then add this up themselves, and, by the end of the article, they might have an idea in their mind that the pool they want will cost somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000.
Now, going back to the sales funnel idea. If they know that this is the base range, is someone who only wants to pay $10,000 for their pool going to even bother calling in and asking Marcus to send someone out to their house for an official quote? NO! They have no reason to. They know that this pool is way out of their price range, and it would be a waste of time to even bother Marcus and his team. This means that Marcus’ team is now spending less time chasing down every single potential lead and sending out an estimator to hundreds of homes to give out quotes. Instead, they know that the people who contact them will be seriously interested in pursuing this, and it will be very worth their time to send someone out and to start meeting with this potential client.
Lemonade Stand’s industry of digital marketing is also a very customized service, and we build out custom marketing packages for all of our clients. We took Marcus’ approach to pricing and wrote up articles on all of our services and what might cause the price to increase or decrease for those services. If you want another example (not nearly as good as Marcus’s), go ahead and read through some of the articles that we have written here.
This is absolutely critical in taking your business to the next level. It can definitely be challenging and it can even make you feel extremely vulnerable, but I promise you that it will help you to grow and to attract more and more people and to attract the right kind of people who are more likely to turn into future clients and customers.
As stated above, there will be more articles coming on topics from They Ask, You Answer, so keep your eyes peeled!
In the meantime, If you want a copy of They Ask, You Answer, you can pick one up here, or you can reach out to our Lemonade Stand team here, and we will send you a complimentary copy! We LOVE this book!