Marcus Sheridan

Marcus Sheridan is the creator of the They Ask, You Answer (TAYA) business philosophy and one of the leading practitioners and advocates of content-driven sales and marketing. His origin story is unusual: he is not a marketing academic or tech executive — he is a swimming pool contractor from rural Virginia who nearly lost his business in the 2008-2009 financial crisis and rebuilt it entirely through content.

At the depth of the recession, Sheridan began writing blog posts answering every question his prospects asked — including the questions his competitors refused to touch, like pricing, problems with fiberglass pools, and honest comparisons with concrete pools. The results were documented and remarkable: by 2014, his company River Pools and Spas had grown from $4millionto$5.5 million in revenue while cutting its marketing spend from $250,000to$20,000 per year. By 2018, revenue had exceeded $8 million.

Sheridan has since become one of the most-cited voices on digital marketing, B2B content strategy, and the alignment of sales and marketing through obsessive buyer education.

Core Philosophy

The foundational premise of everything Sheridan teaches:

The single tie that binds all businesses together when it comes to consumers and buyers is trust. And the companies that embrace this reality, and let go of the obsession that “we’re different,” are often the ones doing incredible things in their space.

Every business, regardless of industry, competes on trust. The modern buyer’s decision is made largely before the sales call — 70% of the buying decision happens without vendor involvement. The company that earns that pre-contact trust, by answering questions honestly and completely, wins the meeting and closes at dramatically higher rates.

Sheridan’s working thesis: if you answer every question your buyers are asking — especially the ones your competitors avoid — trust follows, and trust converts.

Key Ideas

They Ask, You Answer as a Business Philosophy

TAYA is explicitly positioned as a philosophy, not a tactic. It requires a fundamental shift in how a business sees itself: from seller to teacher. The teacher does not hide information, does not fear what competitors will learn, does not refuse to address pricing, and does not pretend problems don’t exist.

When an organization embraces They Ask, You Answer, they believe it’s their duty to be the teacher, the go-to source within their particular industry. One that’s not afraid to answer any and every question the prospect or customer may have.

The practical test: list every question you’ve ever been asked by a prospect or customer. Then ask how many of those questions have been answered on your website. The gap is the opportunity.

The Big 5 Content Topics

Through testing, Sheridan identified five content subject areas that consistently generate the most buyer traffic, leads, and revenue across every industry: (1) Pricing and Costs, (2) Problems, (3) Versus and Comparisons, (4) Reviews, (5) Best in Class. These five topics are what buyers research most intensively immediately before making purchase decisions.

Assignment Selling

Perhaps Sheridan’s most operationally powerful contribution to sales practice: the concept of using company-produced content intentionally within the sales process to pre-educate prospects before calls, eliminating the need to cover basic ground in the meeting and dramatically improving close rates.

We discovered that if someone read 30 or more pages of the website before the initial sales appointment, they would buy from us 80 percent of the time. By contrast, if they didn’t read 30 or more pages, the average closing rate was only 25 percent.

The Trusted Teacher

Sheridan argues that a business which genuinely teaches — which is willing to acknowledge competitors, admit its own limitations, and honestly address the “ugly” questions — earns a qualitatively different kind of trust than any sales technique can generate. This trust produces higher close rates, better-fit customers, lower churn, and more referrals.

Book-by-Book Summary

They Ask, You Answer (2019, second edition)

The foundational text. Documenting Sheridan’s transformation of River Pools and Spas through content and its translation into a repeatable framework for any business. Core contributions:

• The 70% rule: most of the buying decision is made before vendor contact
• The Big 5 content categories
• Pricing transparency as trust signal (not revenue risk)
• Disarmament: voluntarily stating bias before making claims
• Assignment selling as a conversion multiplier
• The anatomy of a content-producing organization (Content Manager role, employee contribution, editorial calendar)

The Visual Sale (2020, with Tyler Lessard)

An extension of TAYA into video, co-written with Vidyard’s Tyler Lessard. The central premise: the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text, making video the most powerful trust-building medium available. Core contributions:

• The four Es of video: Educational, Engaging, Emotional, Empathetic
• The six essential video types for a sales and marketing operation
• The “80% video” as a pre-call education tool
• Video in the inbound funnel: YouTube as second-largest search engine
• Episodic video series as sustained audience relationship-building
• Video in the sales sequence: email signatures, before-meeting assignments, post-sale onboarding

Unless we show it, it doesn’t exist. Think about how much of your business is stated but not shown.

Intellectual Position

Sheridan writes from a practitioner perspective, not an academic or consultant one. His evidence is primarily case-based — River Pools, clients through IMPACT (his consulting company), and businesses he has personally advised. He is one of the rare business authors whose ideas are testable in the short-to-medium term with measurable results.

He occupies a distinct space in the sales/marketing literature: he is less about the mechanics of the sales process (territory management, pipeline metrics, SDR cadences) and more about the cultural and philosophical shift required before any sales mechanics can work effectively. His work complements:

• Aaron Ross (Predictable Revenue) — Ross provides the outbound pipeline machine; Sheridan provides the inbound trust architecture that makes that machine more effective
• Seth Godin (Permission Marketing) — Both argue for earned attention over interrupted attention; Sheridan provides the content execution framework that Godin’s theory implied but did not operationalize
• April Dunford (Sales Pitch) — Dunford’s in-room sales structure and TAYA’s pre-meeting education are complementary: TAYA raises the trust and knowledge level of the prospect arriving at the meeting that Dunford’s pitch framework governs

Related Concepts

• They Ask, You Answer — The core framework synthesized from both books
• Permission Marketing — Godin’s parallel framework and intellectual predecessor
• Sales Pitch & Positioning — Dunford’s in-room complement to TAYA’s pre-meeting preparation