The Big Five That Buyers Look For with Marcus Sheridan

So let’s say you said to yourself, “All right, I want to embrace this mindset, this philosophy—which is really a customer-first mindset. It’s a mindset of being the best teachers in the world and becoming obsessive listeners.” That’s the first thing that you essentially agree to right now. Once this happens, then you say, “All right, if we’re going to really address our customers’ questions, we need to start with what they’re asking.”

And so you get your salespeople together and ask, “What are the questions you’re hearing every single day, exactly how you say them?” And there are a lot of questions—a lot of questions. Now, here’s what’s interesting though: the book talks a ton about this. Shane, I’ve never seen an industry that’s an exception to what I’m about to tell you. So whether it’s B2B, B2C, service, product, big, small, local, or national, there’s basically five subjects that buyers are obsessed with for almost any product or service.

Five subjects in the book—we call it the big five. What are the big five? These are the things that you and I want to know before we engage a company, so we feel like we’ve done a little bit of vetting and our work, and now we can move to the next phase of the buying process. So those five subjects are this: as buyers, we’re obsessed with, “How much is it?”

We want to know about the money as buyers. We want to know what are the negatives—the issues, the problems—with this particular thing, this company, this methodology. Okay, so we want to know about money, cost. We want to know about the negatives, the problems. We want to know how that thing compares to that other thing we’re also looking at. We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like we always have to compare so as to make an informed decision.

Okay, so as buyers, we’re obsessed with comparing. We’re obsessed with what everybody else is saying about it—in other words, reviews. And we’re obsessed with finding the best. We like to research what the best thing is. It doesn’t mean we’re buying it—we just want to know what it is so we can work off of it. So, cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, and best—those are the big five. That’s what buyers like us — you and me — we want to know.

Here’s what’s crazy. Buyers are obsessed with them, and businesses do not like to talk about them—they don’t. So here’s a quick litmus test that gives you the fastest gauge of whether your content is truly effective, especially in generating sales revenue. That’s how I really define efficacy in the world of business: what generates sales revenue. I’m not here to talk about what drives a click—I just don’t really care, right? When you’ve looked bankruptcy square in the face, you don’t care about vanity metrics any longer. You just care about what really drives revenue.

Now you’ll see that these five subjects help your sales team immediately. Your sales team could be using them all the time. The litmus test is this: what percentage of the content on your website could be used by your sales team today, right now? In other words, what percent would they say, “That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for,” because I’m dealing with that right now with a prospect? If the answer is not much, you have a problem. I can tell you that at least 80% of your content should be aligned under the umbrella that is the big five.

And you’re like, “What do you mean that only has five subjects?” Oh, no—it’s actually way more than that—but these five cover almost everything. They really cover a ton of questions that people are asking all the time. These are all the bottom-of-the-funnel questions, right? And what’s interesting about content in general and content strategy, Shane, is that the mistake most companies make is they start at the top or outside of the funnel.

It’s generally very fluffy, and a sales team or salesperson could never really benefit from whatever was produced. It wouldn’t help them very much. Let me give you an example: let’s say I’m a pool guy, and I wanted to produce an article or a video that says, “Five fun games to play in your swimming pool.” That’s nice, but it’s completely worthless to me as a salesperson—as a pool guy—in my course of selling pools. In almost 10 years, nobody ever asked me, “What are some fun games I could play in the pool?”Because they didn’t care to ask me that. They had another set of questions to decide if they wanted an in-ground pool, if they wanted a fiberglass pool, and what type altogether. I mean, just like all these components—specific questions. And so, because we didn’t mess around with fluff and attacked those bottom-of-the-funnel questions, we got immediate results.

You see, companies shy away from immediate results because this is the stuff that companies usually never talk about. So let me give you a couple examples, if that’s okay, because this is really important—it’s the crux of what we’re talking about here. People used to ask me all the time, “Marcus, how much is the fiberglass pool? What’s this going to cost me? Just give me a feel for what we’re looking at here.” And what I’m about to tell you applies to both B2B and B2C. So whether you’re selling a service or a product, it’s the same deal. Please don’t put yourself in the corner thinking this doesn’t apply, because I promise you that it does. And if I asked anybody listening right now, “Have you researched how much something costs online in the last year?” you’d say yes.

And I said, “Okay, so if you’re on a website and you’re researching cost and price and you can’t find it, what’s the emotion you experience?” You say, “Frustrated.” And I say, “Why?” And you say, “Well, because I’m the buyer, and it’s my right to know.” And I would say, “Okay, so when you get frustrated, do you sit there and dig further on the website?” You’re like, “No, I immediately jump.” If I said to you, “Well, when you get frustrated because you can’t find it on someone’s website, do you say to yourself, ‘Well, that’s okay’?”

They’re not talking about cost and price. They’re a value-based business, and I’ll call them on the phone instead—which, again, is completely false, because that’s not what you do. It’s not what we do. Instead of calling the company or digging further on their website, we just keep searching and searching until we find it, and generally speaking, whoever gives us the answer we’re looking for is going to get our business.

And if we get to the psychology of this, the real reason we get so upset as buyers is because we know that they know the answer to the question, and because they know the answer and aren’t giving it to us, it feels like they’re hiding something. The moment you or I feel like anybody’s hiding anything from us, trust is gone—and that’s the business we’re all in. That’s the one thing that we all share.

So you say, “Well, Marcus, you don’t understand my business.” No, I do understand your business. In fact, there are three major reasons why companies don’t talk about cost and price on their website. It comes down to three fundamental reasons. The first and biggest one is the old answer: “Well, it depends. We have a customized solution. Every job is different, etc.”

So if I came to anybody that sells a product or service, and I said, “Can you help me understand the factors that would drive the cost of your product or service up?” you’d say, “Yes.” And if I said, “Could you explain the factors that would keep it down?” you’d say, “Yes.” Then I said, “You gave me a quote, and some of your competitors gave me a quote, and I see that they’re very different in terms of price tag, but you’re essentially all telling me you’re going to sell me the same thing. Help me understand the delta here? Why is there a difference? Could you explain that?”

Anybody would say yes, because you’ve probably explained that—especially if you’re in sales, you’ve explained it hundreds of times over the course of your lifetime in that profession, right? So the idea of “it depends” is the easiest one to explain, and it’s the most important one to explain. You need to explain all the factors that drive it up, the factors that keep the cost down, and why some companies are expensive and some companies are cheap.

If you do not explain that, you will unintentionally commoditize the very product or service you’re selling. What commoditizes anything is ignorance in the marketplace, and what allows that ignorance to exist is the fact that companies don’t talk about the basics until after someone has shaken the hand of the salesperson. That goes against everything we’ve become as digital buyers and digital consumers.

The second reason why we don’t talk about cost and price on our website is we say it’s too expensive or more expensive, and we don’t want to scare people away. But what we all know is that what actually scares us away is when a company doesn’t talk about cost and price—it’s ignorance. That’s what scares us. It’s no different than, let’s say, hypothetically, if you wanted to go to a new restaurant tonight, Shane.

If you’re like most humans, you’re probably going to do two things: look at reviews for that website and look at their menu before you go. It’s pretty common—most people do this. So if you go to the menu before you go and there’s no pricing, are you still going to go? Almost all people now won’t go. And it’s not because they can’t afford it—most people could afford most restaurants—but because they leave that blank, and the moment they leave it blank, they plant the seed of doubt. When seeds of doubt exist, our trust is broken and we stop. That’s just how it works, right?

is we say things like, “We don’t want the competition to know.” What’s funny about that is if I came to anyone with any experience in an industry—especially in sales—and I said, “Do you have a pretty good sense of what your competitors charge?” they’d say, “Of course.” And here’s the big secret: if you know what your competitors charge, or roughly what they charge, it means they also know what you charge.

This is the big secret— it’s a non-secret. Everybody acts like nobody knows what everyone is charging, when in reality, everyone has a pretty good sense of what the others are charging. Besides that, when was the last time your competitors paid your bills? They just have it, right? So why in the world would you allow your competitors to stay between you and that thing we call trust?

So if you look at it like this, it just doesn’t make sense. We produced an article on how much a fiberglass pool costs—we were the first swimming pool company in the world to aggressively talk about swimming pool cost. We covered all the factors that drove it up and drove it down, gave price ranges, the whole nine yards. To make a long story really short, because I wrote that article on how much a fiberglass pool costs, or a guide to fiberglass pool costs, it’s generated over $7 million in sales since the day it was written for a little swimming pool company—$7 million in sales off of that one article that explains why “it depends.” You see, you can’t always answer, but you can always address. This is the part that too many people forget, and usually the victory goes to the one who’s willing to have the conversation—even if it means the answer isn’t found—but they at least help the buyer, the consumer, say, “Okay, now I understand the parameters here, and I know what I’m getting myself into.” $7 million.

For 90% of our clients that I’ve worked with—hundreds of clients—that have embraced the “ask, you answer” approach. For 90% – this is B2B included, the number one traffic, sales, and lead-generating content, it has to do with cost and price. Yet when I’m in a room, Shane, and I ask audiences—because I do this all the time and speak full time professionally, right—I’m always asking this question, “How many of you in this room right now talk a lot about cost and price on your website?” I’ve never had an audience where the number was over 10%. If you go to a B2B, service-based audience, it’s less than 2% of the room. It goes contrary to all logic, yet it’s still a prolific problem among businesses all over the world. We’re simply not treating others as we ourselves would want to be treated as buyers. We want to know, and if we know and feel good about it, then I’ll give you a call. But if you don’t bother telling me and expect me to call out of ignorance, then you’ve got nothing coming. That’s the game we’re in.

Well, to me, I’m just really good at analyzing my own behavior. So I’m constantly, throughout any given week, saying, “Well, I would like that. I’d want to know that. Or that would turn me off. That would annoy me.” And I think we actually overanalyze. I don’t think you need to read any books on psychology—I haven’t. But if we’re just willing to look at what makes us feel good about a company, or about a piece of content, or about a video—what makes you look at a thumbnail on YouTube and say, “I don’t like that guy”, yet I haven’t hit “play”—then analyze that. There’s something there. By the way, the answer to that is the person is trying to appear smart in the thumbnail, and immediately that turns you off. That’s the reason—if you get to the core, it’s a threatening component to it. And I just don’t think most marketers spend enough time in this land of self-awareness, really looking at it and calling a spade a spade. We’ve all got this capability within us; I think it’s untapped for the most part, Shane.