Neil Dudley: The Cowboy Perspective, well, it might be hard to define, but I guarantee if you think about it, you’ve got one in mind. Whether you’re building a legacy, an empire, or a family, I bet when your friends look at you, they see some cowboy in your face. Y’all come along, let’s talk about this or that. Maybe when we’re done, you’ll go away with another perspective to put under your hat.
TCP Nation, I’m super excited about this episode. I hope if you’re listening to this, you have the kind of open mind it would take to allow a person, in this case, a specific person named Marcus Sheridan, to affect your mindset, affect your perspective, affect how you think about really everything. If you do that, I believe there’s a chance for you to affect change in your life in a way that is huge. It’s worked for me. If I could point everybody to one person to say this guy is who I would kind of direct you to, to just pay attention to, follow him on LinkedIn, I beg you, here he is, Marcus Sheridan. Let’s do it.
Hey, TCP nation. Here we go. We got another great episode for you. I managed to commandeer a guy named Marcus Sheridan onto the show. And I want to tell you everything about him, but he knows too much to spend time diving into all that. I’ll tell you, Google him, Marcus Sheridan, and you will know he knows what he’s talking about. He shows up on the whole first page of a Google search for his own name, which is a very perfect illustration of he’s good at what we’re fixing to talk about. And we’re going to talk about things that aren’t marketing and sales as well, just some philosophical things about what you might be looking for in employees and people that you’re thinking about hiring. But anyways, Marcus, thanks for coming on the show. And is there anything that I might’ve missed there that you think is important for people to know before we start talking?
Marcus Sheridan: Well, they ain’t going to judge me on any of that stuff anyway until I start talking. So, we might as well just go, right. The longer a bio is of somebody, the more annoying the person gets. So, I go to these events and they’re like what do you want us to say? And I’m like, well, the truth is if you say too much, they’re going to hate me before I even get started.
Neil Dudley: Sure, just put me out there, let me go. Wind me up and turn me loose. Okays so, surprise question for the first thing here. I sent you a few conversation starters, but I was just talking to my sales team, and I have a philosophy about vacation auto-responder emails. I’m curious, what do you think about those things? Do, don’t do? Is there a good way to do them? You have a surprise, kind of let me spring that one on you.
Marcus Sheridan: Well, let me put it like this – I have seen ones that actually impress me. I’ve never done them myself. I’m just not into that. And I don’t necessarily know why I am or am not into that. I just feel like you’re responding to every single person that contacts you with the auto responder. So, I think if you do it creatively, though, if it shows you have a personality and a soul, that you’re just cut from a- if they stand out, then I think it’s actually a cool thing. If you say the exact same thing everybody else does in a vacation auto response, well, then I don’t think it’s necessarily going to add any value to your life or that person that’s emailing you.
Neil Dudley: Totally. I love that. I totally agree with it. That is my stance actually. I don’t- I actually just say don’t do it. I don’t care if you’re on vacation. Actually, if I’m a customer, if I need something from you, I ultimately don’t care if you’re on vacation, I need what I need. So that’s kind of my stance on it. All right, so you made some great content for LinkedIn and that’s where I pay the most attention to you on.
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, it’s where I live, man. It’s the one, it’s the last bastion of, for the most part, for the most part, non-negativity, not much on the political side. And I think places like Facebook grate on your soul. Whereas LinkedIn really actually I think if you use it the right way, it does add a lot of value, potentially, to your life. You can bring value to others. And it just doesn’t have some of the same drawbacks.
Neil Dudley: Right. How long do you think that’s going to last?
Marcus Sheridan: I don’t know because it’s one of those things where people do tend to mess it up. And it’s one of those things where if we’re not careful, it’s just going to be another form of Instagram. And the truth of it is, Neil, here’s where it’s interesting. If I wanted it to or if anybody wanted to, but if I wanted to in my position, I could do way better on LinkedIn than I do. All I’d have to do is take some deep, witty, pithy, whatever quote you want to call it, some wisdom of the world, add my 2 cents and share that, and it would actually resonate. It would do well. And you see people that make a living off of that on LinkedIn. I just don’t like it. To me, there’s value in original thought. And that’s what I try to do. I try to put original thought there. Now it doesn’t happen all the time, but it forces me to figure out what’s happening in my brain, my worldview, and to discern it in a way that it brings value to the marketplace. Whereas if I just take somebody else’s quotes all day long and pontificate on them, what am I really getting out of it? Sure, I might get some shares, sure, I might get some followers, but I’m not really proving anything to myself. And that’s the thing that I’m interested in.
Neil Dudley: Absolutely. That’s why I love you because I’m getting to think about things from a high-performing guy’s perspective and through your eyes, which hopefully goes into my brain. And then I kind of circulate it through my experiences at stuff, and it comes out to be a Neil reality. It’s not Marcus’s, it’s not somebody else’s, it’s mine through my filter. And I just agree with you so much. Matter of fact, let’s just touch on a few of those things that I’ve caught in your content on LinkedIn that I just thought were great. And this is kind of a quote from your post, it may not be exact, but it gets us started talking – the idea of teaching youth to be a responsible employee/worker, in today’s world, it seems that it’s pretty prevalent that parents are calling in to let their kids’ bosses know they’re not going to show up to work. Man, that was just like a slap in the face to me. It’s like that’s true.
Marcus Sheridan: And it’s these helicopter/snowplow parents that is prolific in society today. So, the backstory on this, if you’re listening to this right now, is I’ve got a few different friends in the restaurant food service space, and one owns a restaurant and she’s got employees. And she says when they’re essentially teenagers, generally, the person that’s calling in for them when they’re sick is their parents. This is utterly, utterly, to your point, ridiculous. And here’s what’s crazy about places like LinkedIn though, there is a group of people on LinkedIn that no matter what is going to always defend the employee. I don’t care what happens. So, there’s people, I can post that and a lot of people are like, yeah, that’s problem because we’re not instilling accountability and responsibility in our youth in our future generations when we do something like this, when we allow it. Parents are the ones that are guilty, not the kid. Because heck, who’s not going to do it if the parents are going to do it for them. I mean, I don’t blame actually the kids, this is a parental thing. But yet, I had people tell me that I think it’s the boss’s problem for not building up enough trust with the employee so as to be able to get that call. That is so stinking, ridiculous. Like give me a break. And by the way, this particular person, she’s as sweet as the day is long. I mean, she is not some headhunter when you come into work, she is a sweet soul yet. Notwithstanding, she is getting the calls from the parents. You cannot tell me that that is good or that bodes well for us in the future.
Neil Dudley: Totally. I totally agree. I hope everybody’s listening. If you’re a parent, don’t do that for your kids. My daughter just went- we just had a little birthday party from my middle daughter. And they went to a Pinspiration location, which is this fun crafty place. Well, my oldest daughter just took a sour attitude throughout the whole thing, just whining, it was making it all about her. And it was embarrassing. And guess what? She got to go back and apologize to that store owner for acting like that. Everybody in there is trying to cater to her happiness and she’s just choosing not to do it. I think that’s just an illustration of me seeing your content, it gave me – this is how we help people – it gave me the thought to think, oh, I’m not going to let this happen. This is such a disservice to my daughter if I allow her to think this is how she can act in life. So, it’s one example.
Marcus Sheridan: We’ve forgotten that much of the pain we experience are positives. And the goal in life is not to eliminate pain. The goal in life should be to derive as much as we can from those experiences that we have. Now is prevention a good thing? Yes, prevention always is the best cure. But one of the very few guarantees in life, other than death, is that you will experience pain and hardship. And if you try to eliminate that, you’re going against essentially God’s law. You can’t eliminate this. And so, there’s been many times where my wife and I were in a conversation, and one of our kids was going through something rough, and I said, oh, this is good pain. This is good pain, honey. Let’s let it ride. Let’s let it ride. Right? Sure, we don’t necessarily want them to fall off the cliff, but we do want them to scrape their arms quite a bit.
Neil Dudley: Absolutely. I say it like this – I want them to get hurt as bad as they can without dying. And then, man, that just builds resiliency. Okay, next topic, the marketing industry should not require college degrees. Some of the best people are self-taught.
Marcus Sheridan: Yeah. And in fact, I’m seeing this more and more and more. I own an agency. We hire people. We do not, absolutely do not look at their degree. I have gotten to the point where, and this might sound terrible, I would prefer to not have somebody with a marketing degree on my team. If you forced me to make the decision, like if you said with or without? I’d say without. And the reason for that is public universities have designed a system that is the antithesis of creative and critical thinking, especially from a marketing standpoint. Furthermore, what happens is most of these professors, many of which are tenured, they’re not in the game, man. They’re not out there grinding and doing it, like really living digital sales and marketing. Like I’m living every single day. In other words, they’re out of touch, and they’re teaching curriculums that by the time they’re taught are often 12, 24, 36 months outdated because of what’s happened, what’s developed from a technological standpoint and a trends base standpoint. I’m stunned at the amount of times I’ve spoken to some university class and somebody has told me how come I never heard any of this when I was paying for my degree? And so, this applies to even like developers and programmers, like some of the best people I have didn’t go to college, they were self-taught, and they just got out in the workforce. And look, gang, if you listen to this, no, not to my doctors right now, but for a very large portion of the professions that we see today, I absolutely do not think a college degree is required. In fact, I think it can be more harmful than good. And as Mark Twain, I believe, said, never let your schooling get in the way of your education. And that’s what we’ve allowed to happen in society.
Neil Dudley: What do you say to somebody that says, well, you just think that’s the way it is because that’s how your career actually went? Now, you didn’t know- from what my research tells me, you weren’t a natural born marketer. You had to go Google it and then you taught yourself through HubSpot and etc. You just now come to this extremely high performing level you are today. What do you say to somebody who says that?
Marcus Sheridan: Which is the majority of- Like if you look at some of the greatest business case studies of marketing really never does the person that was in charge of it did they go to school for that profession. Not at all. And the reason for this is because the greatest marketers are not filling within the circle of the test. They’re just not following that plan. Like literally nobody told me, when I was in the process of doing They Ask You Answer, which if you’re listening to this, that’s what people know me for more than anything and my philosophy, my framework, that’s a digital sales marketing framework for businesses. Nobody taught me that, but it was, for me, it was like looking in the mirror and saying, okay, how have I evolved as a buyer? What drives me? What would I want if I was the customer in this situation? Would I want them to talk about cost? Yes. Would I want them to openly and transparently discuss problems and issues and negatives, why they’re not necessarily a good fit for me? Yes, I would. Would I want them to compare themselves honestly and transparently with competition? Of course. I was like this is all the stuff that I would want as a buyer. And so that’s what we did. And that’s how we became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. And that philosophy, I’ve seen it now applied to, I mean, literally thousands of businesses with the same success. It is not taught in schools. And this is the problem. It is not taught in schools. Could it be taught in schools? I guess it could be. I mean, sure, some college professors have had me lecture to their students about my experiences, about my teachings, but as a whole, it’s not happening right now. And it’s just so much more involved, too, when it comes to great marketing because we’re talking about great messaging, great copy, persuasion, influence. I mean, fundamentally we’re talking about trust and communication. That’s what it is, my man. That’s what it is.
Neil Dudley: Absolutely. Like you- think about somebody that has to have a degree to do the profession they’re in, that still does not guarantee them sales. They still have to be able to market their skillset, right or wrong.
Marcus Sheridan: To this though, Neil, it is like the stats show that the very high majority of people who got a degree four years later are not in that field of, in that same field, industry of study, etc. And so, the sheer data shows that most of us are not going to be- like I got a degree in fricking Spanish, and yet people know me as a sales and marketing guy. That’s more symbolic of where the world is than somebody that got a marketing degree and becomes a stellar marketer and writes a book on marketing. Guess what? You don’t find those people almost at all.
Neil Dudley: Totally. Absolutely. Okay, listen up folks, that was good stuff. We got to go to the next topic. Culture and the importance of a good one. Making a little tactful joke about the CEO. I just said here, I typed it out. I personally really love this one. Talk about that a little bit and where you come up with that idea?
Marcus Sheridan: One of my posts on LinkedIn, lots of people wanted to say that’s crazy or they want to get offended by it, and they’re missing the mark. So, my post was this: I get hired to come into companies and to identify what’s wrong from a sales, marketing, or sometimes leadership standpoint. And I’m world-class in those settings, extremely good at reading rooms and understanding things for what they are. One of the things that I do that quickly tells me as a signal of the quality of the culture and the openness of the culture of the company, especially the leadership team, is if we’re together, if I’m from speaking to that group and I make an appropriate – keyword appropriate – joke to the CEO that’s a little jab to him or her, but it’s something that is appropriate yet it’s funny and it’s going to be true. And then I’ll just gauge and see if the audience laughs, if they’re scared to death, if they look around the room and see is anybody else laughing right now? Now somebody might say that’s contrived. No, it’s not because I’m a professional. And you can’t tell what I do is contrived because I’m a funny guy. And so, when I’m working a room, the jokes come, the humor is just what it is. It is what it is in the moment. So, you’re not going to sit there and say, oh, that’s canned. No, it’s not canned.
Neil Dudley: Right. I’ll bet you’ve been in situations where you didn’t make a joke about the CEO because it just didn’t appear.
Marcus Sheridan: That’s exactly right. Because I understand how to read a room and I understand how to read people.
Neil Dudley: How’d you learn to do that?
Marcus Sheridan: That’s the interesting thing. Since I’ve been, I guess since early on that I can remember, I had an unusual obsession with perceiving the way people were receiving something. Let me explain this better. I can remember being in I think it was middle school, and the teacher was teaching something, Neil, and I could see that there’s members of the class that couldn’t understand what was being taught, like they weren’t getting it. And the teachers kept going on, like everybody was getting it. And I remember thinking, but they’re not getting it. Why are you keeping going? They’re not getting it. Yet, they just kept going. The teacher kept going. And today when I watch a presenter, I can’t help but to watch the audience and gauge the amount of people that are saying I don’t get it. And that’s why to me, it’s dumb not to dumb it down. And that’s not a knock on the audience ever. That is a compliment to the world’s greatest teachers and communicators, because they’re not trying to sound smart. That is not their goal. Their goal is to have communion with that individual or that audience that is with them in that moment, that the light bulbs actually come on. And that generally doesn’t happen if the goal is I want to look smart. And a lot of people would say that’s not my goal. I’ve had many, many speakers come to me and say, Marcus, what’s the edge that I’m missing? And I said I can tell when you’re on stage that you’re trying to prove yourself to the audience. No, I’m not. I can tell it. You haven’t let go. You haven’t released the need.
Neil Dudley: That’s an example of them – no, I’m not. You got to be able to hear that and say, wow, thanks for telling me that. Like you can, somebody that can respond to that criticism or that truth with a damn, I better think about that, that scares me, I don’t want to come across like that. Instead, it’s a sure sign they do have the problem, and they’re no I’m not. No, let go of the defensiveness. Actually, nobody cares. You are important for what you can provide. I was saying something like this, the famous people of the world, I bet you would even probably subscribe to this truth, don’t have much more knowledge than people you’re right next to in your life. All you have to do is talk to them. They somehow get put on a pedestal as famous or on Instagram influencer or whatever. There’s other people in the world that have that same knowledge, the same capability, they just don’t leverage it. So maybe you could do a lot something for yourself by just talking to those people.
Marcus Sheridan: A hundred percent. This whole phenomenon is to me, this is a very interesting thing because I’ve watched people struggle with this, especially in a very digital world, they start doing videos and you can tell they’re trying to prove themselves. They start speaking and they are trying to prove themselves. They are meeting with the client, they start proving themselves. And like, well, how do I not feel that? Well, the core here, Neil, let’s take this conversation we’re having today, here’s how I can pull this off. I have to be willing on the front end to accept that I am not going to be liked by everybody in your audience, that I will not resonate with everybody. I’m okay with that, and I’ve already let those people go. I’ve got nothing to prove to them. And so, if that is my mindset, I can start to apply that now across the board. Let’s say I’m a salesperson. I go into a sales situation, I am willing always to walk away from the deal. I’m okay with that. And that gives me a position of leverage and authority, which we need to have. In fact, I mentioned this on LinkedIn today, talking about the mistake that agencies, marketing agencies make. Here’s what happens. Marketing agency gets a lead, salesperson within marketing agency proceeds to try to prove to that potential client all the reasons they’re superior, all the reasons why they are the best marketing agency. That’s a huge mistake. Here’s how you go into that sales situation properly – we might not be a good fit, so you’re going to be able to vet me and I’m going to be able to vet you. And hopefully by the end of this, we’re going to know if this is the direction that we should both go in. Now that’s power because it puts you on equal ground. And you’re always putting across this sentiment in a non-arrogant, non-cocky way of I’m okay if you walk away, I’m okay if we don’t move forward with this, I’m okay if you don’t believe me. Any of those things. That’s why people will watch my stuff and they’ll say I kind of like this guy, he just seems real to me. I don’t know what it is. It’s just like, he seems just legit, sincere. Use whatever word you want. But again, 5%, I don’t like him. And that’s okay.
Neil Dudley: He cuts his hair short, that’s a problem, whatever. I mean, I can’t imagine anybody that does just watch you and take your content for what it is wouldn’t like you. But you’re right. You see the negative comments. I don’t see them. I’m not privy to that. I am a small enough character that I don’t have much negative stuff coming my way, but I’ve already been working on the mindset that I’m not listening to the negative. I’m not going to worry much about the positive. I’m doing my thing. I want to talk to the people I want to talk to because they can make my life better. They can make me better for others. And that’s what I’m going to do. And I genuinely love other humans. I want them to have happiness, whether they understand that or not, I can’t help that. Okay. Hey, you’ve spent a long time with me telling me what you think about different things, giving me and my audience a chance to hear from Marcus Sheridan. And that’s all I need. I so appreciate it. I hope we get to bump into each other someday, do a little fist bump, maybe come to Texas and do some cowboy stuff with us.
Marcus Sheridan: God blessed Texas with his own hand. You know, I got to say this about Texas, I have twice in my life been so desirous to eat a good brisket that I got in a plane, and I flew to Texas just to eat brisket, and then I flew home. Now that sounds weird, but I think that’s the way you want to live your life right there. It’s like you know what? It’s in the journey, baby. It’s in the adventure. And that’s why I love Texas. I love the Texan people. It’s just something really beautiful about it. Anyway, I’m grateful that I was on here with you, my man, that we had a chance to talk, and I love your vibe. You’re doing great things and keep it up.
Neil Dudley: Yep. I’m going to send you a care package from Pederson’s with bacon, sausage, ham, all those good things. So, you get a little taste of Texas just for coming on the podcast. And the other thing for everybody listening, did you hear Marcus has done in his life the thing he wants to do? So, he has access to jump on a plane and fly to Texas and eat a brisket if he wants. That’s where I’m going. That’s where I hope you’re going. Everybody, hope you enjoy the show. Marcus, thanks again. Have a great day.
Marcus Sheridan: My pleasure.
Neil Dudley: Well, we’ve came to the end of this episode. I am sad. It went by way too fast. I wish I could do it again. Marcus, if you’re listening back to this, thank you so much, and your team, everybody that is around you and just helps you get the word out. Folks, if you’ve never listened or read, the book They Ask You Answer, please go do it, please. It’s super intuitive and valuable. I think it will make a difference in your business, in your life, in your relationships. Go check it out. Everybody, thanks for listening. We’ll catch you around the next corner for another episode of the Cowboy Perspective.
Hey, if you like what we’re doing here, go to the website, thecowboyperspective.com and check out all the people that sponsor the podcast. They help me make this thing happen. If you have some need that they might be able to fulfil, I’d appreciate you doing some business with them. Thank you.
The Cowboy Perspective is produced by Neil Dudley and Straight Up Podcasts. Graphics are done by Root & Roam Creative Studio, and the music is by Byron Hill Music.