What are the advantages and disadvantages of They Ask, You Answer?

Beforehand, we make a few assumptions about you as the reader of this article:

And now you're wondering: what's the catch at They Ask, You Answer?

In this blog you will read about the advantages and disadvantages we encounter in practice at companies that are making the culture change that They Ask, You Answer promises.

Are you ready to understand what awaits you if your company chooses to get started They Ask, You Answer?

Here's what you need to know.

First, let's pull the Band-Aid off and talk about the drawbacks of They Ask, You Answer, which are sometimes glossed over when people are excited about the promise of They Ask, You Answer.

Building trust takes time. Creating content takes time, as does teaching employees how to use the content.

By engaging with They Ask, You Answer, you commit yourself to providing the most AND best publicly available information in your industry so that your ideal buyers can make the best informed decisions possible.

You also commit yourself to changing how your company delivers information, starting with how you communicate with prospects and customers.

What we often hear after the first 90 days of working with a management team is:

"We completely underestimated the amount of work and change that this journey would entail...".

Scary, isn't it?

Fortunately, this feedback is always followed by:

"And we all agree that this is the most important change our company needs to work toward to be successful in the next 10 years."

Why is it so important to know this? Because management teams that are successful with They Ask, You Answer think in years, not months. They are willing to invest more time and money over the next two years to see how this investment pays off in the following 10+ years.

If the next four quarters are somehow up or down for your business, you don't have the mindset necessary to become the voice of your industry - not yet, at least.

"How long would it take to see results from working with Buzzlytics?" It depends.

From the organic inbound side, we post valuable educational content online and wait for people to find it and contact you. This usually means that only after the first six months where we publish two to three pieces of content every week do we see a dramatic increase in organic traffic.

After twelve months, you start to see the so-called field hockey stick growth of sales and closed won deals in your CRM graph. And eighteen months later, you look at your business very differently.

This timeline also assumes that there is not already a mountain of quality content online with which we must compete to be "the best available answer." If we are not creating the best available information available online from our buyer's perspective, then we are not creating new traffic to our website.

However, the sales and sales enablement side is an entirely different story. You create positive ROI the moment someone on your sales team closes a deal that would not have closed without the use of written and video content in the sales process.

This can be a matter of months or just a few days.

How fast it goes depends on how effectively your sales and service teams can articulate what content they need. It depends on how quickly they get started with "assignment selling'. And it also depends on the extent to which your employees truly believe that sales material and service-oriented content will make more money with less effort.

Not all management teams have control over these variables, which brings me to the next drawback.

What does They Ask, You Answer mean on an individual level for everyone in our company?

Is it a marketing initiative? A sales initiative? Or both?

Is it just another business framework or summer program?

One of the first questions we ask leaders in our sales process is, "How much control do you think you have over company culture?"

The answer is telling. A typical follow-up question is, "How do you plan to talk about what we do here when we work together for six months?"

We ask these questions because they reveal the extent to which the management team understands what we are actually doing together when we say we are "doing" They Ask, You Answer.

By implementing They Ask, You Answer we change the culture of a company - the shared values, beliefs and characteristics of the employees who make up a company. This is the highest level of change and undoubtedly the most difficult to do successfully.

If you don't have some degree of control over the culture of your company and your employees, it's almost impossible to adopt the habits that will help you become the most trusted voice in your industry.

Can you teach your sales and service teams to type emails differently? What happens if we want to change what a one-on-one conversation between a sales manager and one of his employees looks like?

Does sales make time to meet with the videographer to finalize information for a script, or is it okay to be "too busy"?

And remember, this is not about fulfilling agreements made. This is about changing beliefs.

Each of your employees will ask themselves these questions:

Therefore, They Ask, You Answer simply cannot be something we do "in addition to" everything else. This is not something that comes on top of everything else. It is a philosophy that must be embedded in every part of the organization.

How you communicate this change in your business is the most complicated and important part of implementing They Ask, You Answer.

We've met countless management teams that never had a real chance to create lasting change in their business, and that's because they didn't have a handle on their own culture.

Your industry is constantly changing.

Your competitors change, your buyers evolve, your employees change, your website needs updating, and the publicly available information about your industry is constantly increasing.

You need to hire full-time employees to take ownership of individual digital sales and marketing efforts, because their job will never be finished. By agreeing to become the most trusted voice in your industry, you agree to remain one.

You will update and optimize outdated content. You'll try to find ways to educate your sales/service team about the hundreds of resources at their disposal. You will continually work to improve the culture in which your employees are obsessed with buyer inquiries.

This work will never be "finished," just as WebMD or Wikipedia will never be "finished."

How do you change people who don't want to change?

The answer is: you don't.

You'll need to hire several people in the first year of this journey, including a content manager and a videographer. You may also need a specialist for your website, HubSpot and social media. These three roles simply cannot be divided among fewer than three people. Those who "wear multiple hats" will fall short.

You will also need to teach your entire company why you are doing this, who the new faces are and what this all means to them individually. We ask everyone to subscribe to this company philosophy and also to change their role around this philosophy.

This requires a complete reconstruction of the onboarding process for new employees and of the training of current employees.

You will almost certainly come to a point where you are faced with the following questions:

If you practice They Ask, You Answer the right way, you'll quickly realize that it's all about your buyer.

Treat people how you want to be treated - or at least how they want to be treated.

As fellow buyers, we recognize that sense of frustration, that feeling of "Just let me buy from you on my own terms" - and yet, as companies, we often fail to make that happen.

It is your responsibility to provide your customer with the type of buying experience they prefer.

There is undoubtedly a segment of qualified buyers who, for whatever reason, never get beyond the "marketing" phase of interacting with your business.

They might have been ready to buy something on the same day they visited your website, and yet they were not given the information they needed to consciously move themselves from your "marketing phase" to your "sales phase."

Do companies get to decide when a buyer is ready to talk to a seller? They don't. But you should make it clear when they are ready.

This means something different for each company, but the principle remains: it should be easy and clear for a buyer to recognize how to transition from your marketing efforts to your sales efforts.

Close the gap of "I don't know what I don't know."

How afraid are buyers in your industry of making the wrong decision? The greater that fear, the more information and transparency are needed to make a sale.

Here's another question: are you leading your buyers through the sales process or are they leading themselves?

If your buyer leads himself, most deals in the sales process fall through due to buyer indecision.

Buyers don't want you to tell them what to do before they apply to your company. They want to educate themselves on their own terms.

But once they have checked in with you, they have indicated that they trust you enough to learn from you (and be guided by you) during the rest of their purchasing decision.

If you properly guide your buyers to make the right buying decision for them, you must be able to clearly explain the entire sales process to them.

You should be able to tell them what questions to consider at each step, and it should be clear when the buyer is ready to move to the next step or when it's time to drop out.

By creating content specific to your sales process, you add the structure that makes a buyer feel like they are truly being guided through every consideration they make. This decreases the likelihood of buyer's remorse and stalled deals due to indecision.

OK, now let's talk about the benefits of They Ask, You Answer for your business.

Every video script, every blog article, every interview with a content expert is another training exercise. Why? Because you're asking your employees to formulate the answers to questions in a way that should be standardized enough for your Web site and/or sales process.

Sales and service personnel pride themselves on answering on the fly questions they receive all the time, answers that may also vary from one employee to another. After all, everyone has a different opinion of what the "best" answer to a question is.

But by standardizing your tone and process, you'll save time in the future with prospects asking the same questions, and the content produced will be the best training material new employees could wish for.

We can use data to improve our sales process instead of trying to collect all the best practices from the three people who are "somehow doing it right."

Sales and service personnel can sometimes struggle with having their processes standardized. Suddenly they have to send prospects specific blogs and videos, they have to use email templates and they have to guide their prospects through a process.

In our experience, however, employees are happy in the long run with the structure that standardization brings. They often feel they have more control over their time and can handle more clients in less time.

Moreover, standard activities provide us with data, which in turn gives us insights to improve sales/service activities in ways we haven't experienced before.

When you become the most trusted voice in your industry and the best source of information for an entire industry, you make more money.

If you are the leading authority in your industry, you will have an increasingly prominent presence online. You'll "own" the traffic and leads for your industry, and you'll make more money from the influence your company has - usually in unexpected and new ways.