IN CLEAR FOCUS: Marcus Sheridan, the author of “Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader,” explores thriving in the zero-click economy where customers get answers without visiting websites. Marcus discusses four pillars from his book: addressing “the big five” topics, leveraging video content, creating seller-free experiences, and humanizing brands. Discover strategies for building trust when AI recommendations dominate the zero-click landscape.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS …
Marcus Sheridan: AI recommendations are going to be pivotal to your success in the future as a business. They will rob you of your glory or they will give it to you depending on how much trust you’ve built in that digital marketplace.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by BigEye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Here’s a sobering fact: Your ideal customers are increasingly getting their answers without ever clicking through to your website. Google’s AI overviews, ChatGPT responses, and social media snippets are creating what some call the “zero-click” economy. For brand marketers, this isn’t just a traffic problem, it’s an existential question about how brands get discovered, trusted, and chosen when traditional digital marketing playbooks are becoming obsolete. Our guest today has spent years predicting and preparing for exactly this shift. Marcus Sheridan is an internationally recognized business strategist, keynote speaker, and partner at Impact, a leading digital sales and marketing agency. He’s best known for pioneering the “They Ask, You Answer” philosophy, which advocates for radical transparency in business communication – an approach that’s proving increasingly vital as traditional marketing channels evolve. Marcus’s strategies have generated over $1 billion in revenue and have been adopted by more than 100,000 businesses globally. He’s the author of the best-selling book, “They Ask, You Answer,” and his latest work, “Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader,” directly tackles how brands can thrive when customers may never visit their websites. To discuss building trust and endless customers in this new era, I’m delighted that Marcus is joining us today from his home base of Virginia. Marcus, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Marcus Sheridan: Adrian, it’s great to be here. I think we’re going to have a productive conversation today, my friend.
Adrian Tennant: You discuss a massive trust deficit that makes customer acquisition harder than ever. What are some examples you’re seeing right now?
Marcus Sheridan: When you think about it, we’ve got a situation where we don’t know who to believe, right? We don’t know what brands to believe. We don’t know what politicians to believe. We don’t know what leaders to believe. We don’t know what CEOs to believe. We don’t know what thought leaders to believe. I mean, it just like goes down the board, right? So the moment anybody or anything says something that we don’t expect, suddenly we just lean in and say, “Wow, I just, I didn’t think that would happen.” And of course, the one thing that is fundamental to business that’s never gonna change, because there’s a lot of changes right now, as you know, it’s crazy. The one thing that’s fundamental is trust. Because if I said to you, Adrian, “Is trust gonna be fundamental to your business, whatever it is, in 10 years?” You’d say, “Yeah, of course.” But if I said, “Is Facebook gonna be a big deal?” You’d say, “Well, I have no idea, because it’s a platform.” If I said, “Is Google gonna be a big deal?” You’d say, “Well, I don’t know, it could come and go. Maybe it’s been replaced completely by AI or some other platform by then.” So platforms come and go, but principles never die. And trust is that centerpiece of every business. And if we win the trust battle, we’re going to be built to last.
Adrian Tennant: Well, your framework for building a known and trusted brand includes four key pillars. The first is about saying what others won’t online, including what you call “the big five.” Marcus, could you explain what the big five topics are and why they tend to be avoided?
Marcus Sheridan: When you are researching something online – and we’ve picked this up over the last 30 years, Adrian, of using the internet – there’s essentially five subjects. It doesn’t matter what industry, product, service, B2B, B2C, there’s essentially five subjects that we tend to research every single time. As buyers and consumers, we want to know number one, how much is it? Roughly, what does it cost? What is it going to send me back? Right? That’s number one. Number two, we want to know what are the problems or the negatives with it? Like what are the issues? How could this blow up in my face? What could go wrong here? Okay. So that’s number two. Number three, we love to compare stuff online. How does this compare to that? Right? How many times have you compared two things or more online? Number four, reviews. We love reviews. But the thing about reviews, we don’t just want the good reviews. We want the good, the bad, and the ugly. And number five, we want to know the best. The best, the most, the top. Think about how many times you’ve gone online and searched “Best” plus another word or phrase or whatever. So cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, and best. This is what buyers want to know. It’s what consumers are searching. This literally dictates what I would call the economy of search, yet businesses still, in 2025 want to bury their heads in the sand with respect to these five subjects, and that is no bueno.
Adrian Tennant: Your second pillar emphasizes showing what others won’t show through video. How should brand marketers think about becoming media companies?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, that is the future, and it’s hard for a lot of people to swallow, because over 82 percent of all the content we consume online this year is going to be video-based. And heck, if anybody who’s listening to this has got teenagers, it’s much more than 82 percent! I mean, it’s like becoming prolific. Not everyone just wants to read the thing. They don’t just want to see the words. They want to visually feel like it’s proven to be true as well – and, you know, a couple thousand years ago, we heard the phrase, “seeing is believing.” It’s more true today than it’s ever been before. Now, granted, AI could affect that a little bit with all the synthetic media that is around the corner. But that being said, video is a big deal, and it enables us to connect on a much deeper level. And the idea, Adrian, is before you meet someone, let’s say a salesperson, you should feel like you’ve seen their face, you’ve heard their voice, and you know them before you ever shake their hand. So if you’re listening to this right now and you have a business, I would challenge you on that. Before someone shakes your hand, do they feel like they’ve already met you? They’ve already heard you? They’ve already learned from you? Or is that initial handshake the first time any of those things have ever happened? And I would say, if that’s the first time, then you’re failing them. You’re failing yourself because you’re not creating that extraordinary relationship of trust that comes through that incredible media that is video going forward. And one other thing about video, and this could be controversial to some people, and it’s going to be hard for them to believe, but there’s a very strong argument, Adrian, that from a brand perspective, your YouTube page is going to be much more important than your website in five years. There’s a reason why YouTube is the number one podcast platform in the world – podcast platform! It’s still the number two most-used search engine in the world. And the next generation spends way more time on YouTube than they do on, certainly on people’s websites. And so these are the things that we should be thinking about. And instead of being married to the past and being tethered to it, you have to say, “Well, times change, things evolve. People are leaving Google and going to ChatGPBT. What am I going to do? Am I going to complain about it? Or am I going to take action on it?” And I think it’s what we’ve got to do, but we’ve got to take action.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you’ve identified YouTube as the search engine your buyers trust. So Marcus, how should brands approach YouTube differently from other social channels?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, what’s interesting is they’ve all gone from what is being social first to recommendation channels. It’s interesting. It’s fascinating. TikTok screwed everything up because in 2017 – it came out with a different algorithm. It wasn’t about your friends or your connections. It was about showing you stuff that was interesting to you. And once they figured you out, the more they figured you out, the more they showed you stuff that you wanted to see. And I mean, it was more powerful in a lot of ways than a drug. And so then the other platforms, Facebook and Instagram said, “Okay, we need these too.” They named them Reels. And then YouTube came out, and they named them Shorts. And so this vertical-style short-form videos is becoming a centerpiece of our society today, whether we like it or not. I’m one of those people, just as a side note, Adrian, I don’t sit there and allow my personal opinions to screw up smart marketing decisions. And so sometimes, and I see, well, if there’s a lot of negatives to a platform, let’s say like in this case, TikTok, well, I’m going to make sure that we’re putting some of the positive things out there with it. And so if you’re going to use YouTube and if you’re going to use these platforms with YouTube, you’ve got a couple of different components to it. Number one, You gotta say, “Alright, what are those big five questions everybody’s asking about those subjects?” No, by the way, I mean, you could easily go to ChatGPT right now and you could say, “I want you to be an expert on Marcus Sheridan’s ‘They Ask, You Answer,’ ‘Endless Customers’ methodology. And I want you to brainstorm his big five topics, cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, and best for the thing that we sell, for the products or services that our company sells. And I want you to come up with at least 15 for each of the big five. And I want you to have a strong hook and a powerful title with an SEO component to it.” And just by a simple prompt like that, you can just get really incredible brainstorm titles that I would have liked, that somebody would have paid me for five years ago. But now you can get them, they’re readily available to you. And then you can start to create an editorial calendar that just crushes in your space, and with YouTube, that’s where you want to go. Now, the thing about YouTube is people ask all the time, “How long should it be, the video?” As long as it needs to be to answer the question well, right? And to fulfill the need or the promise of the video. Don’t buy into this idea that everybody’s attention spans are short. That’s not true. Everybody’s just really impatient. And they just don’t have a high tolerance for anything that doesn’t interest them because they can be highly selective today. And so that’s why you see a lot of folks that are crushing on YouTube with a two-hour podcast or a 30-minute episode or whatever that thing is. One thing too, is you got to remember that story arc is incredibly important. You want to be a storyteller. You want to learn how to break down that fourth wall. You know, when you’re talking to somebody on YouTube, you want to talk to them in such a way where you say things like – you know, let’s say you were selling, like in my case, as a previous pool guy, fiberglass swimming pools. So I make a video on how much a fiberglass pool costs. I might say something like this: “Have you been researching fiberglass pools and you’re asking yourself, ‘well, how much do these cost?’ Nobody seems to want to talk about it online. Are you saying to yourself, ‘I just need to get a sense for what this is going to run me because I’m trying to set my budget’?Well, if that’s you, you’re not alone. And here at River Pools” – or whatever the name of your company is – “we get asked that question all the time too. And we feel like it’s your right to at least get a sense for what it is before you talk to one of our salespeople. So in this video, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have an honest conversation about all the costs and associated pricing that comes with a fiberglass swim pool. And by the end, you should have a very good sense as to what a fiberglass swim pool would cost you.” Now that’s just like personal. It’s simple. And that little format that I just did, you could follow that with any industry, with any video, but it’s just talking to you. It’s like, “Are you thinking this? Are you asking this? Are you frustrated with …” Right? That’s how you want to think about this. And that’s how you want to do this. And, you know, YouTube is one of those things where many people say “I’m not good on video.” But then, all of a sudden, they start doing it. And then I hear them say things like, “Actually, I’m great on camera!” If you’re good with people, you could be great with video. I’m serious about that. Start seeing the camera as a real person, not as a camera. Start talking to a specific person. Think of a person who you’re talking to, and you’re going to see that the algorithm will start to recommend you, like we talked about, and you’ll get traction.
Adrian Tennant: Your third pillar involves selling in ways others aren’t willing to sell, including what you call “seller-free” experiences. How do self-service tools contribute to brand trust?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, so really important stat here, Adrian. 75 percent of all buyers today say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience. Think about that, 75 percent. And that number’s growing every day. It doesn’t mean that we hate salespeople, we just don’t wanna talk to them until we’re good and ready, until we’re confident, we’re comfortable, we feel like we’re not gonna make a mistake, right? And so the way you take advantage of this as a business is through self-service. And self-service are generally tools, interactive tools online that allow you to get an answer or take an action that previously you would have had to have gotten by talking with a human first. So let me give you a classic example. And in the book “Endless Customers” I give you five specific examples of self-service. One of the most powerful, and it should not come as a surprise, are self-pricing tools. So self-pricing is when you allow someone to get a general estimate as to how much the thing is going to cost. Because the first question someone has, the gateway of the buyer’s journey, is the question “Roughly, what’s this going to cost?” Now, if they can’t get a sense for that, many people stop on the buyer’s journey. They don’t continue, or at least they don’t continue with you. And so you want to open up that gate. You want to give them permission to say, “Okay, now I feel like I understand.” And the way you do that, one of the best ways to do that is through a pricing estimator. And so it asks a series of questions. If you’re listening to this right now, if I came to you and I said, “Can you give me a sense roughly for what your product or service costs?” You’d say, “Sure, but let me ask you some questions first.” You’d ask me a series of questions. And at the end of that, you’d say, “Well, Marcus, based on what you just said, you’re likely looking in the neighborhood of X to Y.” And I’d say, “Okay, great. That’s wonderful. That’s all I need to know.” And so that is a catalyst. That’s a gateway. I actually started a software company on this called Priceguide. It’s amazing. We’ve got a ton of data on this. Priceguide allows you to quickly and easily build pricing estimators. And this specializes with service-based businesses and manufacturers. And what’s so cool about this is what we’ve found now, we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of clients using the software. And that is when you add a pricing estimator to your website, and you show it clearly on your homepage, and you use the phrase, “Get instant estimate,” or a very similar phrase – but that’s the power phrase, “Instant estimate” – what happens is you see a three- to five hundred percent increase in leads, conversions. So if you’re getting five leads a week right now from your website, let’s say hypothetically, if you put a pricing estimator on there, you’re going to get 15 to 25. That’s amazing. It’s going to build your database and it’s going to help you in the short term and the long term. This is going to be table stakes in the future. I can tell you for service-based businesses, especially 90 percent within the next five years are going to have a pricing estimator tool on their site. The question is, if you’re listening to this, are you going to be a leader or are you going to be a follower? Because I can assure you that you’re going to have to give in to this at some point. The question is when.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s make sure we get the name of your software. Can you just repeat it for us again?
Marcus Sheridan: It’s Priceguide. You can find it at priceguide.ai. It’s incredibly inexpensive, costs about $200 for an entire year, and you usually make that up in the first day.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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My book translates well-proven marketing theories and frameworks into actionable strategies specifically designed for B2B marketing. Drawing on over 20 years of experience, I address the unique complexities that B2B marketers face on a daily basis. This book will help you build stronger brands and drive measurable revenue results. You’ll discover how to leverage AI and connected data for actionable insights, with real-world examples to illustrate effective B2B marketing in practice. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25 percent on “B2B Marketing Fundamentals,” when you order directly from KoganPage.com. Just enter the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and UK. I hope my book helps you develop the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to deliver effective marketing strategies that drive tangible business impact. Thank you! |
Adrian Tennant:
Welcome back. I’m talking with Marcus Sheridan, partner at Impact and the author of “Endless Customers: A Proven System to Build Trust, Drive Sales, and Become the Market Leader.” Marcus, your fourth pillar is about being more human than others are willing to be. Now, in an age of AI and automation, what does this exactly look like in practice?
Marcus Sheridan: Well, there’s a lot of ways. And of course, some of the things we’ve already talked about, Adrian, relate directly to this. If you’re doing video as a company, the key is that you show your people. In fact, if you’re the CEO or the leader of your company, you need to get from behind the desk and behind the camera and get in front of the camera and start talking to your audience directly. Because the fact is that people resonate with the market much more than brands resonate with the market. And this is just, this is generally speaking, universal. If I asked your audience, “Have you ever heard of Kylie Jenner?” Pretty much everyone would say, “Yes, I’ve heard of her.” If I said, “What is the name of her product line?” Most or many would say, “I have no idea.” And that’s because personal brands are oftentimes much more powerful, much more influential than company brands. My personal brand is bigger than my company’s, and so I use that. Now, there are other ways you can personalize and be more human, too. For example, we’ve been sending email the same way since we were calling it electronic mail in 1996, when it first came out, text only. So is your sales team sending out text-only emails, or are many of them video-based one-to-one emails? I send out, and my sales teams from my different companies, send out many of their emails as a video instead. The person understands them, it’s clear, it’s not misinterpreted. interpreted. It humanizes. Is your sales team doing that? They could easily do that. You look at doing more video, one-to-one or one-to-many, that’s just one way that you could do it. Showing your people, showing the behind-the-scenes of your company. Showing the training process that they go through, having a section of your website and your YouTube channel that talks about your staff, recruiting, and what it’s like to work for you, super powerful. Another one that’s coming up, and this one’s pretty controversial to some people, but I wrote about it in “Endless Customers” because I think it really matters, is things like digital avatars. So imagine you come to my website at, let’s say, River Pools, and you’re greeted by someone that looks just like me. You and I are talking, the people can’t see us, Adrian, but you and I are like, we can see each other’s face right now. We’re having a conversation over video. And what if we could experience that same thing and that was like a chat bot? So instead of a bot, it really did look like a person – that is a real person talking to you. Let’s say you came to the site, Adrian. And the person said, “Hey, I’m AI Marcus. I’m not the real Marcus Sheridan, but I’m just using all of his content that he’s ever produced about swimming pools to answer any questions that you have. And so if you have a question, you can ask it here. You can type it in the box. You can say it out loud. I’ll answer it for you.” Or even if you wanted an estimate, I could give that to you right now. Now, would that be a powerful experience? Oh my goodness, yes. Would a lot of people prefer that? Yes. Because what’s interesting, what we find when it comes to AI, a lot of people will say things to an AI that they won’t say to a human. Because they don’t feel judged by the AI. It’s really interesting, isn’t it? And so if you can combine the two, so the whole idea is that we use the technology to humanize, not that we say, “Oh, well, if I’m using more of it, I’m gonna be less human.” No, they do not have to be diametrically opposed.
Adrian Tennant: For those who might still be focused on performance metrics, Marcus, why do you believe brand building should take center stage now with AI and zero-click searches?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, you said it, zero-click. Over 60 percent of all Google searches end in no-click. No-click! I mean, the click is that glorious blue link [that] has made businesses what they are. You know, Google just turned 20 years old. It’s made businesses what they are in many ways, so many. And now, many of those same companies are saying, “Uh-oh, I’m seeing less traffic. Suddenly, this is like harder to do.” What happens in a world … because every single person that’s listened to this is probably using ChatGPT more every day, or a similar platform, and using Google less every day. There is a clear pendulum that’s happening. So if we’re being very honest with ourselves, that means anything that you’ve built on Google, may not be very viable in five years. Could be three, could be six, whatever. And so this means that traditional SEO from Google and paid ads on Google, if that has been the catalyst for lead generation, you could be in trouble. You could be in very big trouble. So, if you want to be future-proof, you need to build a known and trusted brand. That’s those four pillars we’ve been talking about. That’s gonna be the key. Brand is more important than ever. And you’ve gotta do this in such a way that not only are you building your brand with humans, But you’re building your brand with AI. That AI is recommending you. AI recommendations are going to be pivotal to your success in the future as a business. They will rob you of your glory, or they will give it to yo,u depending on how much trust you’ve built in that digital marketplace. Now, how do you build that trust? Through trust signals. What are trust signals? Every single review that somebody posts about you online, it’s a trust signal, potentially. Every single piece of content you produce online, that’s a trust signal. Audio, visual, text. Adrian right now is producing a trust signal for his brand. I’m producing a trust signal for my brand. All of these say to AI, “Hey, when you’re looking for such and such, maybe you want to consider these people.” That’s the power of trust signals and you’ve got to get really, really good at creating them.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s get specific. Any top tips for how brands should start creating them?
Marcus Sheridan: Yes. Let me give an example of what a future shopping experience might look like. Let’s use pools again, because it’s easy for everybody to understand. And this is hard for people to fathom, but this is happening, Adrian. In the future, you’re going to have this thing called an AI agent. You’re going to have different AI agents, but they’re basically digital assistants that’ll do anything you want to do without you having to spend the time to do it. So you might say to your little digital assistant, your AI assistant, you might say to it, “Hey, we’ve decided we want a swimming pool. I want you to research all of our local swimming pool companies within a 60-mile radius. I want you to research, and I want you to come up with your list of the top five. Out of those top five, I would like for you to recommend two to three. I’d also like a general price estimate for each one for our project based on these parameters that I’ve given you.” And then AI is gonna go and it’s going to come back in much less time than it took a human. And it’s going to say, “Okay, I researched all of these companies. I took their different reviews that they’ve gotten. I took all the content that they’ve produced on their websites, the education that they have. Many of them didn’t have enough reviews. Many of them didn’t have enough content. So I eliminated those. And as I started to find the ones that had good reviews, I noticed only a small percentage of those had pricing estimators. And so I used each one of those pricing estimators for the parameters that you gave me. And I’ve come back with these three companies with the corresponding price ranges. Now of these three, would you like me to recommend you which one I think you should go with?” Now, that’s your future. You might say, “That’s crazy!” No, it’s not. Because if you’re talking to Alexa every day and asking it to play you music, trust me, you’re going to be asking that same type of experience for, “Hey, who should I use for my swimming pool?” That’s our future. And so what can you be doing as a company? Putting more trust signals out there that comes in the form of big five content. Like we talked about in those customers, especially leaning into that text and video, but also through interactive tools. This is going to be incredibly important. So that self-service tools on your website, especially self-pricing, make sure you do that. And now all of a sudden you’re going to increase those trust signals dramatically more than your competitors are doing.
Adrian Tennant: Well, as I’m sure listeners have picked up Marcus, your approach requires radical transparency, including discussing pricing and problems openly. It might seem counterintuitive to be so transparent. So to address that concern, doesn’t this risk alienating potential customers or worse, giving competitors an advantage?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, I appreciate the question, Adrian. And I would say to you, if you’re listening to this, first off, do you believe in the golden rule? Do you believe that you should treat others as you yourself would want to be treated? And if you say, “Well, yes” then let’s not try to add a caveat, which is, “but, but, but my customers are different, but my buyer is different. My industry is different.” See, we like to say that, and it’s fundamentally not true because trust runs in the same vein across the board. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter who. Also, are we losing customers if we’re being honest? If we’re being honest, we would have lost them anyway, I believe. I believe that’s the case. Now, when it comes to something like pricing, just think about your own behavior. If you’re on a website, if you’re looking for cost and price information and you can’t find it, well, what’s the emotion you experience? Well, you get frustrated. And if I said to you, “Do you stay on that website looking for cost and price?” You’d say “No.” If I said, “Do you call that company and say, ‘hey, I couldn’t find pricing on your website. Could you give me a sense for pricing?’” You’d say “no.” I said, “Well, what do you do?” You say, “Well, I keep searching until I find what I’m looking for.” And see, generally speaking, whoever gives you what you’re looking for, they’re going to get your business. Now, there are three major reasons why companies don’t talk about cost and price online. The first major reason is they say, “Well, every job is different.” That’s the easiest one to explain through text, through video, is you talk about what drives cost up and what drives cost down and why some companies are expensive and why some companies are cheap. So that’s how you define what value looks like in an industry. The second reason that we don’t talk about cost and price, we say, to your point, Adrian, “I don’t want my competitors to see it.” What’s funny about that is if I went to your sales team or anybody that’s in sales for your company right now, and I said, “Do you have a pretty good sense as to what your competitors charge?” They’d say, “Absolutely.” And so if you have a good sense as to what they charge, they’ve got a good sense as to what you charge. This is the big secret, non-secret. Everybody acts like nobody knows what everybody’s charging, when in reality, everybody’s got a pretty decent sense as to what everybody else is charging. Besides that, when was the last time your competitors paid your bills? Like never, it’s not going to happen. We just shouldn’t be basing important decisions on what the competition is doing. We should be obsessed with the buyer, not the competition. They will lead the way. The competition will slow you down. Third reason we don’t like to talk about cost and price is we say, “Well, we tend to be more expensive. If we’re more expensive, we just might scare them away.” The thing that actually scares us away during the buyer’s journey is ignorance. when we can’t find anything. That’s way more scary and it’s way more bothersome too. Frankly, it really makes people kind of angry. And so when you educate someone on value and you explain to them why some companies are cheap and some companies are expensive and you give honest ranges, that’s all they need at first, man. That’s all they need. Now you’ve done something that over 90 percent% of your competitors aren’t doing. You’ve won the trust battle, which is huge. You’ve won it with AI, you’ve won it with the human, you’ve won it probably with the search engine. Now you can get the traction, you can get the momentum. So again, it comes back to the golden rule. Now I explain all that and you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Yet there’s still probably a part of you saying, “But I just, I don’t know, I just think our buyers are different.” I’m telling you, I’ve got too much data on this. I’ve got data on your industry and every other industry out there because I’ve been talking and teaching about these transparent subjects and how buyers learn online and vet companies. I’ve been doing this for well over a decade. I’ve spoken on about a thousand times and I’m telling you this is where we’re headed. It’s not getting less transparent. We’re not going to get less honest because anybody can learn this stuff now. So they’re going to learn it from you, or they’re going to learn it from your competitors, or they’re going to learn it from AI, which hopefully is sourcing you, or it’s sourcing your competitors. Which would you prefer?
Adrian Tennant: Great points. Your book mentions safety guidelines for AI content. Marcus, what are these, and how do they help maintain that human element we’ve been talking about?
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, well, I mean, the biggest safety guideline that you have is that there’s a human that’s involved. I don’t suggest that you send something out that a human has embedded first. Also, you gotta say, “Alright, when it comes to AI, are we choosing, as a company, a platform that is private, that the information isn’t gonna get out there?” Right? We gotta make sure to protect our customers’ information. We’ve got to make sure, like I said, that it matches our voice and our style and our brand. There shouldn’t feel like when they meet you in person, it shouldn’t feel different. I had an experience not too long ago, Adrian, where I talked to this quote, ‘thought leader.’ He was a prolific poster. I met this person in person. And they weren’t that intelligent. I mean, I don’t know how else to say it. They just weren’t articulating their thoughts like they normally could. And I realized they’re just a face and they’re using a bunch of other stuff. We’re coming into an age of fake thought leaders. And, you know, hey, I mean, I respect anybody for their hustle and their drive or whatever. But if you meet people in person, you want everything that they’ve heard and learned and seen from you to truly be from you. And obviously, AI can enhance that. But man, when somebody meets me, they’re like, “Marcus, you’re just like I thought you were.” It’s like if they read the book, it’s just kind of like “You roll like I thought.” That’s because I write like I think, I talk like I think. I mean, what you see is what you get. I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. There’s been a certain percentage of people that have listened to this podcast already and said, “Not my cup of tea. I’m out.” But then there’s been another percentage that has said, “I’m really vibing with this guy. I like how he thinks,” right? “I like his points. I like his style. I like his energy.” All of it’s good. All of it’s fine, man. And you know, speaking of that, I mean, this is going to be really important for everybody. As you build a brand going forward individually and as a company, you have to get, very, very comfortable in your own skin, understanding who you are, but more importantly, what you’re not. And if you’re not something, you have to let that go. And you have to also let that audience go. It’s okay that you’re not everybody’s cup of tea, that your product doesn’t fit everyone’s needs, that you can’t serve every buyer that comes to you. In fact, if you could, you would be in trouble because that’s an unsustainable business model. So these are just things to keep in mind as we go forward.
Adrian Tennant: Truly insightful conversation. Marcus, if listeners want to learn more about your work at Impact or obtain a copy of “Endless Customers,” what’s the best way to do so?
Marcus Sheridan: Well, I appreciate you asking, Adrian, and I appreciate you having me on your pod with your wonderful community. You can find me at MarcusSheridan.com as a speaker. You can find me on LinkedIn for my best thoughts I put there, always first. You can find the book at EndlessCustomers.com, and our company that helps other organizations become the most known and trusted voice by implementing “Endless Customers” is Impact, and that’s ImpactPlus.com.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Marcus, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Marcus Sheridan: Adrian, my pleasure.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Marcus Sheridan, partner at Impact, and the author of “Endless Customers.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: The Role of AI in Business Success
00:18: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS
00:40: The Zero-Click Economy
01:22: Guest Introduction: Marcus Sheridan
02:35: The Trust Deficit in Customer Acquisition
03:43: The Big Five Topics
05:22: Becoming a Media Company
08:02: YouTube as a Trustworthy Search Engine
08:34: The Impact of Short-Form Video
12:34: Seller-Free Experiences
15:43: Introducing Price Guide
17:01: Being More Human in Marketing
21:00: The Shift to Brand Building
23:20: Creating Trust Signals
25:43: The Case for Radical Transparency
30:01: Safety Guidelines for AI Content
32:30: Closing Thoughts and Resources
