Building Inbound Buy-In with Marcus Sheridan

Marcus Sheridan - the founder of The Sales Lion who famously saved his pool company during the 2008 recession by turning riverpoolsandspas.com into the world’s most-trafficked swimming pool website - shares his approach to building inbound buy-in with clients.

Training Clients to Own Their Content

Unlike most agencies that produce content for their clients, The Sales Lion trains clients to create their own. The typical retainer lasts 8-12 months, during which time the team works intensively with the client’s internal teams to build content creation capabilities. Marcus is highly selective about which clients he accepts, requiring complete organizational commitment before engaging.

His philosophy is uncompromising: this is a religion. Every department - sales, marketing, leadership - needs to be fully bought in for inbound to work. Partial commitment produces partial results.

Firing Up the Sales Team

Marcus’s primary focus with inbound is getting the sales team fired up, excited, and engaged. Mandatory workshops for sales and leadership teams are a non-negotiable part of the process. By answering the questions that prospects actually ask, the team can deliver positive results from day one. People can get their arms around stories, Marcus notes. They often cannot get their arms around jargon, but they can get their arms around stories.

Hiring and Culture

Employees at The Sales Lion work remotely with flexible hours and no time tracking. Content managers are typically hired from journalism backgrounds rather than marketing because storytelling ability matters more than marketing vocabulary. The hiring process includes a 700-word article assignment with a 48-hour deadline. Individual employee branding is emphasized - no byline-less blog posts allowed.