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Your company employs smart people who are bought into the vision of what you are trying to achieve and are a great culture fit. Despite this, something is still missing that ties your marketing, sales and leadership to help you achieve your revenue goals as one team. ‘They Ask, You Answer’ Workshops can help you get alignment, increase website traffic, leads, sales close rates and shorten the sales lifecycle.
In this article, we’re going to cover:
What is They Ask, You Answer?
They Ask You Answer (aka TAYA) is a practical framework and sales and marketing philosophy that assumes one simple truth: if your prospect or customer asks a question, you answer, and in doing so, you will become the most trusted voice in your space and will gain more business than you ever have before.
In order to implement TAYA, you need to at least do the following:
- Form a Revenue Team
- Ensure the sales team is using Assignment Selling and video
- Publish three blog articles every week
To learn more about TAYA, check out our Comprehensive Guide on TAYA.
What is a TAYA Workshop?
If you’re finding that your marketing and sales teams are out of alignment, it may be time to consider a TAYA Workshop. TAYA, or They Ask You Answer, is a workshop that helps you bring your marketing, sales, and leadership teams together with the single goal of increasing revenue.
You might find that Marketing is spinning its wheels creating content they think will work, but the sales team doesn’t find much of it useful for closing deals with prospects. All the while, your prospects are having one messaging experience on your website, and then a completely different one when they finally speak to someone in sales.
‘By aligning your marketing and sales teams, you can more easily achieve your revenue-generating goals. When you hire RedPandas to train your sales and marketing teams in a TAYA Workshop, we implement our They Ask, You Answer framework. They Ask, You Answer gets leadership aligned on goals, marketing producing content that helps buyers make decisions, and sales teams moving deals through the pipeline faster.
Get Alignment
Getting alignment between your sales and marketing team is key to increasing sales and shortening the sales cycle. When the marketing team sits in their own silo, separate from the sales team, they end up writing content that, while being entertaining and interesting, does not directly speak to the customer’s main questions and concerns. And how can you blame the marketer? Sure, they can create their buyer personas and build content based on this, but it’ll never hit the nail on the head – it’ll never be just right.
That’s why it’s absolutely essential to get the sales team involved in the content ideation process, so that they can provide rich, real, necessary information for the marketer to utilise.
Getting your sales and marketing teams working together all starts with forming a formal Revenue Team.
The Revenue Team meets weekly or fortnightly and is made up of key players from your sales and marketing teams. The revenue team’s main goal is to increase company revenue, and they do this by developing and executing content to be used in the sales process to accelerate the sales cycle.
In other words, the marketing team sits down with the sales team and finds out the exact customer questions and concerns that the sales team deals with, and then the marketing team produces articles around these. Once the articles have been produced, the sales team uses those articles in the sales process as educational tools to provide prospects with at different stages of the sales cycle, depending on the specific questions and concerns that the prospect has.
Because the sales team was involved in the content ideation process, they actually respect the content, use the content in their sales conversations and provide feedback to the marketing team with what is working and what isn’t.
Our experience shows that once a Revenue Team is established and content is being generated and used, the sales cycle is shortened and close rates improve significantly because they do the obvious job of proactively answering buyer questions and concerns.
When articles that DIRECTLY answer prospects questions and concerns are produced in tandem with the sales team, a strange thing happens. Your company is perceived as the trusted voice in the space, and everyone wants to buy from your company, because trust is the emotion that guides the buying exchange. And it is this, which is the key to success.
A TAYA Workshop teaches you how to get alignment between your marketing and sales teams so that you can successfully answer buyer questions, thus resulting in shorter sales cycle and increased close rates.
Objectives of a TAYA Workshop
The TAYA Workshop has three main objectives:
- Get everyone bought into the vision of TAYA, what it is and how it will transform your brand as an authority
- Get alignment between the sales and marketing teams
- Start the process of content ideation and walk away with content ideas that will generate sales
Get Everyone Bought into the Vision of TAYA
In order for TAYA to be effective, your entire company must be bought into the mission of becoming the #1 Teacher in your industry, with an obsession on answering all of your ideal buyer’s questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible.
In order to achieve this, we make sure that all of your leadership is part of this meeting and we show your teams exactly how TAYA impacts their role.
Get Alignment Between Sales and Marketing Teams by Forming a Revenue Team
One of the cornerstones of success for TAYA begins with forming a formal revenue team. In our workshop, we help you form a Revenue Team and show you how to run formal Revenue Team meetings for true collaboration between sales and marketing.
Walk away with Content Ideas that will Generate Sales
We actually start the process of TAYA with you, helping you generate as many content ideas crowdsourced from your team. We make sure that these content ideas fit into The Big 5 topics that most commonly generate sales.
The risk of doing a They Ask, You Answer workshop internally
A common reason why businesses conduct a They Ask, You Answer workshop is they’ve got the TAYA or Marcus Sheridan bug. Someone, usually the marketer or a business leader, has read the book and is excited to meet with the team and collate all their ideas for content.
After the initial gusto and excitement of trying to implement TAYA without help comes disappointment, usually around the 3-6 month mark.
Why the disappointment? Well, nobody was trained properly to write 3 articles per week that Google loves, the sales team although initially keen, doesn’t use the content in their sales process and the majority of the 10 concepts of They Ask, You Answer like Assignment Selling and 1:1 video are not being used because nobody has been trained on them – or even knows what to focus on first.
When you think about it in hindsight it makes sense: Do we expect that if we handed out the They Ask, You Answer book to everyone in the organisation plus a couple of workshops in a year would transform a company? Of course not.
If that were true, Marcus Sheridan would just be an author and not an owner of IMPACT and RedPandas and there would be 100x more examples of businesses doing TAYA.
“My question to people when I meet them after they are excited about TAYA from one of my keynotes is: What is your plan for implementation? In other words, how will you get your team bought in? What is your plan for getting people trained on Assignment Selling? How will you prioritise the 10 concepts of They Ask, You Answer and track your execution plan? If they don’t have an answer for this, I recommend they get help from TAYA certified coaches and trainers immediately.”
Moby, CEO @RedPandas
It takes more than reading a book and attempting an internal workshop. If you truly want to transform the company to think, live and breathe TAYA then you need an outsider. From experience, attempting to do an internal TAYA workshop without experience will be at best 30% as effective but more importantly, won’t have enduring stickiness in the business.
How Does a TAYA Workshop Run on the Day?
A TAYA Workshop will involve four components:
1. Kick off call: A TAYA coach from RedPandas will get on a kickoff call with you PRIOR to the workshop in order to get alignment. After understanding your goals and assessing your current efforts, your TAYA coach will be in a good position to manage expectations on the day. This helps us create an agenda for the Workshop so that we can ensure success. Although every workshop covers the same principles, there is also a level of customisation depending on the goals and needs of your company.
2. Send Agenda: following the kick off call, we create a customised plan for your TAYA Workshop depending on your goals and needs, which we send to you prior to the Workshop.
3. Workshop: the next step is to run the workshop. This typically lasts 3 hours. In the workshop, your TAYA coach will guide your They Ask, You Answer execution plan and develop confidence, mastery, and independence for the front-line sales and marketing teams at your organisation
4. Lunch & De-brief with leadership: following the workshop, and a lunch break, your TAYA coach will debrief with leadership and guide you through the next steps you should take internally as a business.
Whether or not you need a coach ongoing after the workshop is irrelevant. The TAYA workshop conducted by someone externally who has done this many times before, will help you set up for success with the collective accountability you need from your team.
How Long Will It Take to Get Results?
Implementing TAYA with someone familiar with the real-world success factors and experience will see you generate increased close rates and sales from prospects within 2-3 months. From a content side of things and using TAYA content to obtain new traffic from SEO is closer to the 6-month mark.
Check out this detailed article about how long it takes to reach different milestones with TAYA for more info.
Cost of a TAYA Workshop
A TAYA Workshop costs $10,000 + travel costs. The Workshop also includes a video recording of the session so you and your team can go back to the training at any time.
What if I Want Help Implementing TAYA in my Business Long Term?
We offer TAYA Coaching over a 12 month, 18 month, or 24 month period to help your business implement all of the principles of TAYA. If you have the budget for TAYA Coaching, then you can apply here to work with us.
How To Get Started with a TAYA Workshop?
To get started with a TAYA Workshop, you can get in contact with one of our Advisors here.
Want to learn more about TAYA before you apply?
