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So, you’ve heard about They Ask, You Answer and you’re ready to take your business to the next level by implementing this framework. But, you’re wondering, ‘why can’t I just do TAYA myself?’
I mean, all you have to do is write 3 articles per week and include sales in the process, right? It’s an understandable assumption, until you realise it takes on average 18 months to take an organisation to TAYA mastery – and that’s with the help of a TAYA accredited partner who has done this many times before.
While we encourage every business to implement TAYA with or without a certified TAYA partner like RedPandas, you need to be aware of the problem you may encounter doing TAYA yourself.
In this article, we’re going to cover:
The Reason Why Businesses Started Asking for Help With TAYA
When it comes to TAYA implementation, the most difficult part is not understanding the concept, but executing all of the components that make up the framework of TAYA.
TAYA isn’t just a marketing initiative – it requires sales, leadership and the input of customer facing or internal subject matter experts. This level of alignment between various departments in the business can be more difficult to achieve than one might imagine.
When a CEO or Marketing Lead pushes the TAYA initiative, they may find it difficult to get all hands on deck. Usually, they find that they often will need an expert who has done it before with businesses just like their own. When you’re being coached by someone who knows all of the roadblocks ahead before even starting on the path, you’re going to get to the end destination with less hiccups and in a much faster time.
Roadblocks can include, but are not limited to:
- Struggling to hire the right Content Manager
- A poor content strategy that focuses too much on top of the funnel
- Articles that don’t rank, don’t convert visitors
- Lack of training on how to see what impact marketing is having on sales
- Getting sales to use 1-to-1 video or the CRM properly
- Poor sales calls that go unchecked and have terrible conversion rates
- Websites converting less than 4-5%
This is precisely why businesses started asking for help with TAYA – they don’t want to waste 12+ months and tens of thousands of dollars on poorly trained staff.
The Problems with Doing TAYA Yourself
There are generally 4 big problems when it comes to doing TAYA yourself:
- Struggling to create 3 quality articles per week, let alone 3 articles that hit the mark in terms of driving leads and ranking in Google.
- Struggling to have an efficient process for execution, resulting in slower production times and bottlenecks
- Struggling to leave bias out the window when writing content
- Competing priorities will dilute your effect and you won’t have a big impact on sales and marketing
Struggling to Create 3 Quality Articles Per Week
TAYA can be summarised as the process of uncovering customer prospect’s worries, needs, issues, fears, barriers, uncertainties, pain points, hopes, and dreams, and respond to these buyer motivators with honest, thoughtful, and complete answers, and to build a culture around this in our team. This method will massively and directly impact sales.
In order to make this method work, we need to consistently produce 3 quality articles per week. Not only do we have to write these articles, but we also have to make sure our articles rank in Google and generate leads and that our articles are written following a blog article writing process that works time and time again.
On face value, this seems really simple, however, in order to achieve the above, it involves more than just writing the 3 articles. We have to:
- Conduct research to better understand customer questions and concerns.
- Speak directly to our sales team to understand customer questions and concerns.
- Create blog articles and videos around each of these questions/desires.
Conducting research involves either directly speaking with customers or using online tools such as SEM Rush to uncover customer questions and concerns. These questions and concerns are then used as the basis for article ideas. By using these, we can ensure that we are actually answering questions that our customers care about, thus giving us the opportunity to become the most trusted voice in the space.
Following research, the marketing and sales team needs to collaborate to further uncover customer queries and concerns. Your sales team spends EVERY SINGLE DAY with prospects – who better to talk to about the storm than those who live in the thick of the storm every single day? By doing this, we can ensure that these articles not only answer our customer questions but that they can be used by our sales team as assignment selling content in the sales process to shorten the sales cycle and increase conversion rates.
And finally, you need to actually write the 3 articles every single week, following a proven-to-work blog article writing framework that ensures your content ranks and generates leads.
As you can see, writing 3 articles per week according to the TAYA framework is more complex than it might seem on the surface level. As such, it’s no surprise that many businesses who seek out to implement TAYA themselves struggle to produce 3 quality articles per week. Having a TAYA Certified Coach helps businesses create the processes they need to achieve a level of consistency that is required.
Struggling to have an efficient process for execution, resulting in slower production times and bottlenecks
Where many businesses struggle is in the development of processes to speed up execution time and prevent bottlenecks in the production process. When you’re producing content every week and having discussions between the sales and marketing teams, things are bound to be slow if you don’t have efficient processes.
When you do TAYA yourself, you do end up developing these processes, but they take time, because it’s a game of trial and error. Where a TAYA Coach will help is in giving you the shortcuts you need so that right from the get go you can execute at a faster speed. This involves strategy, tools such as editorial calendars and interview checklists, content creation processes, and other resources designed to embed your organisation with a process that’s efficient, is focused on output and above all, is effective in driving traffic, sales and leads.
In short, it’s a lot more efficient and faster following a TAYA Coaches frameworks and making them your own as opposed to trying to figure it out yourself.
Struggling to Leave Bias Out the Window
One thing we notice when businesses first try TAYA themselves is that their articles have far too much bias. They can get by for a while, but eventually, this catches up to them as they end up talking too much about themselves and lose the trust of potential customers. This is no way to become the number one trusted teacher in your space.
The reason this happens is because there is a lack of a clear structure and process around writing blog articles. Again, it comes down to process development, which is the biggest problem and bottleneck when it comes to doing TAYA yourself.
Competing priorities will dilute your effect and you won’t have a big impact on sales and marketing
When you’re implementing TAYA there are SO MANY priorities that you need to get on top of in order to have success. It can be difficult to stay on top of it all. One thing that a TAYA Coach helps you with is getting you out of your own way and helping you focus on the most important 3 priorities over 90-day cycles.
These are priorities that will actually move the needle forward in your TAYA efforts, as opposed to jumping around due to distractions. So, businesses go from being overwhelmed with all of the priorities when they try to do TAYA themselves to having focus and direction that allows them to make the most impact in the shortest amount of time.
How TAYA Coaching Works
As a certified They Ask, You Answer partner, our job is to train and coach you on the strategic and hands-on principles of TAYA so by the end of a pre-determined period, you will never need to outsource your marketing again.
We believe that rather than paying another team to run marketing (such as ourselves or a competitor agency), that it would be more effective to insource your company’s marketing.
At a very simple level, this means that your company will do all of the work, and we will train and coach your entire team with our army of sales and marketing experts who have been doing what your team needs their entire careers.
It’s important to note that a They Ask, You Answer training program is not a business coaching program. Business coaches can be great and although strategic, they don’t usually do functional training with your team like setting up HubSpot for lead scoring, teaching you how to create your own videos or how to write articles that rank and convert.
In addition to being strategic (as you’ll see below), TAYA Trainers and Coaches are designed to be extremely functional, practical and outcome driven.
As can be seen above, your training and coach team could consist of:
- Head Coach
- Account Manager
- Content Trainer
- Video Trainer
- HubSpot Trainer
- Paid Media Trainer (if required usually once above fundamentals are covered or upon request)
Each coach is a specialist in their specific area, so when they train your team, they’re going to be teaching you the exact methodologies and strategies that they use on a daily basis to drive growth for our clients and ourselves.
This is probably the most valuable part of our TAYA program, apart from the implementation of the actual system itself.
During TAYA Coaching, we’ll run a Kick Off Session, a Quarterly Planning Session, a Scorecard to measure your success with TAYA over time, weekly and fortnightly subject matter expert training, and more.
If you’re looking to learn about what exactly is involved in TAYA Coaching, check this article out.
Should You Do TAYA Yourself or Hire a Certified Expert?
If you want to do TAYA yourself, you absolutely can, AS LONG as you are aware of the above mentioned problems with doing TAYA yourself and you have a way to navigate these common challenges effectively.
However, if you’re looking for a TAYA Certified Expert to guide you, then you can apply to be considered for coaching here.
