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So, you’ve heard of They Ask, You Answer (TAYA), but you’re not sure whether it makes sense for your business. As a business that first went through the big decision of doing TAYA ourselves first (before offering training and coaching in this area), we’ve put together an honest pros and cons list of our own and client experiences to help you decide whether TAYA is right for you.
In this article, we’re going to cover:
What is TAYA?
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.
There are 10 core concepts of TAYA however 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.
Cons of TAYA
The cons of TAYA are:
- It’s a long process with upfront work for your company
- The ROI timeline is different for everyone
- It’s never finished
- Not everyone will be bought in
- More expensive in the short term
- If leadership doesn’t buy into the program, it will never work
1. It’s a long process with upfront work for your company
Aligning your marketing and sales teams to produce content that builds trust with buyers takes time. It’s not as simple as having a meeting, brainstorming content ideas, and producing articles.
You have to align your marketing and sales teams, hold regular revenue team meetings, train your marketing team to produce content that ranks and generates leads, and train your sales team on using content in the sales process to shorten the sales cycle.
To do all of this, you’re committing to providing the highest quality information in your space and changing how your company delivers information. The amount of work that goes into doing all of this is considerably more than you might initially think.
2. The ROI timeline is different for everyone
One question we generally get asked at RedPandas is ‘How long would it take until we see a return on the work with TAYA?’
We’ve answered this question in this article where we talk about the short term results you can expect in 90 days as well as the longer-term ones.
However, what we can say is that although we have an expected guide to how long it takes to get results with TAYA, the exact ROI timeline is different for everyone. But why is this?
From an SEO perspective, it’s going to take time for your efforts to get results. You’ll be producing and publishing regular valuable content, and over time, this is going to have a positive impact on your website’s SEO rankings. However, this won’t happen overnight, and while we have some idea of how long this will take, it differs in every case.
SEO results from TAYA can vary for a number of reasons including how competitive your industry is, the health of your current site and whether you will be receiving support and training writing TAYA articles or learning by yourself.
From a sales perspective, results can be seen within weeks in the best-case scenarios. By using sales enabled content in the sales cycle and 1:1 video, salespeople can see close rates increase and shorter life cycles almost immediately.
The thing is, sometimes we get results quicker than expected on the SEO side, and sometimes we get results longer than expected on the sales side. The point is that despite these guidelines and previous client experiences, we know that ROI timelines are ALWAYS different.
What we do know for sure however, is that within at least a 12-month period, you’re going to see increased sales close rates, shorter sales cycles, and increased revenue.
3. It’s never finished
In order to truly be the most trusted voice in your space, you’ll have to be on top of your game…constantly.
TAYA isn’t just about writing and publishing blog articles and using these in the sales process. You’re going to have to constantly:
- Update and optimise outdated content
- Find ways to train the sales/service team on the resources they have at their disposal
- Improve the culture of your employees of being obsessed with answering buyer’s questions
- Stay on top of innovations and news in the industry to accurately answer buyer questions
You don’t ever just write an article and forget about it. The work is never finished, which means you’ll need to have resources assigned to ensuring TAYA is carried out…constantly.
On the other hand, if the results are more than satisfactory, it won’t matter that the work never finishes, because the work will be worth it.
4. Not everyone will be bought in
In order to truly execute TAYA, you’re going to need to have everyone on board. In our experience, at some point, you’ll be left asking yourself some or all of the following questions:
- “What’s going to happen when someone on my team doesn’t (or refuses to) change?”
- “Am I going to bail the first moment someone on my team expresses they don’t like the direction we’re going in?”
- “Am I comfortable with the fact that true cultural change sometimes means people will opt-out and leave the company?”
- “Am I willing to do what needs to be done to achieve what’s possible with They Ask, You Answer?”
Rarely will there be a case where you implement TAYA and 100% of the company is on board right from the get go. Some people just won’t be willing to accept the changes, and in some cases, whether it’s sales or marketing, some people may no longer be a good fit for the direction you want to go.
Like with every major company initiative, good change management is key. Often a TAYA Alignment workshop is a good way to get the entire company aligned and bought in on what TAYA is and the power of what it can do.
On the other side of the coin, TAYA will require you to hire for new roles. To implement TAYA effectively, you’ll need to hire at least a Content Manager initially. As you progress through TAYA Mastery, you will also need to hire a Videographer.
Not only will you have to hire these people, but you’ll need to have a new system for onboarding and training, since these are completely new roles in your business. This comes with a cost, both in time and money.
As a result, by implementing TAYA, you will need to hire for new roles and may face churn for employees who aren’t able to adapt to organisational changes.
5. More expensive in the short term
While the ROI potential with marketing done by you is higher than outsourcing your marketing, the downside is that in the short term, you may have to spend more on done for you training than you would if you just paid an agency to do your marketing for you.
This is because TAYA coaching and training is an investment. You’re taking your marketing in-house so you never need to hire an outsourced digital marketing agency again and this comes at a cost.
Different members of your team will be directly trained by coaches at RedPandas, who each have their own areas of expertise e.g. Head Coach, Sales Coach, HubSpot Coach, Content Marketing Coach, Video Marketing Coach, Paid Media Coach etc.
You are developing enduring skills that your team hasn’t seen before and this will require time and commitment.
6. If leadership doesn’t buy into the program, it will never work
Often the marketing or the sales team is the first group in an organisation to approach us for done by you coaching and training services. This is fine however we will not take on a client if leadership is not at least committed to the principle that being the most dominant player in the space requires gaining trust by authentically and transparently answering buyer questions on your website and training the sales team to better leverage technology and content.
This might seem straightforward enough – and it is once leadership see the significantly better ROI and growth potential of the TAYA framework – but it does require more convincing than using traditional done for you agencies.
To help clients get on the TAYA journey and convince their internal team members, we publish a tonne of helpful content in our resources section and we also offer workshops and in-person/virtual presentations to communicate the objective of TAYA, the problems it solves and what you can expect to achieve from the program.
Pros of TAYA
The pros of TAYA are:
- Greater ROI
- Greater quality control
- Significantly faster execution
- Employees are happier, more skilled and feel more valued
- Saves money in the long run
- Increases the value of the company
Greater ROI
One thing that is empirically clear: To truly achieve hockey-stick like growth, you have to eventually take your marketing in-house. This is evident across SEO, shorter sales cycles and increased revenue.
The factors that influence SEO today are very different to what they used to be 10 years ago. Today, SEO is more about how helpful your content is which was validated by Google’s most recent algorithm update that is literally called the ‘helpful content update’.
Writing three customer-centric TAYA articles per week is the best SEO strategy you could utilise in 2023 and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that supports this.
An example of TAYA in action is Bill Ragan’s roofing. Bill Ragan’’s are a small regional-based roofing company. Before they started TAYA, they had around 100 website visitors per month.
In 2 years, they had a 2,500% increase in organic traffic, close to 10K organic visitors per month AND they’ve grown sales and customers significantly.
That’s just rankings. Then of course there is the increased number of leads that come with strong SEO.
TAYA is a sales-first initiative and so improved conversion rates and shorter sales cycles can also be expected by implementing TAYA correctly.
Using content in the sales process to give assignments to your prospects (aka Assignment Selling) dramatically shortens the sales cycle and increases close rates, leading to more revenue more quickly.
Salespeople love this type of selling too because it genuinely feels less salesy and positions your reps and business more as trusted advisors.
Greater Quality Control
Since everyone is in-house, the insourced approach leads to a greater level of control over the quality of the work being produced. On top of this, who better to share the company’s authentic voice than those working in that same company every single day?
Significantly faster execution
Since everything is managed in house, there are less time lags due to fewer communication channels that need to be accessed every time a marketing activity is ready for review from a manager. Faster turnaround times on work leads to more work overall being completed, and more value for your buck.
Employees are happier, more skilled and feel more valued
We initially underestimated that TAYA training and coaching is the most powerful training and development program leadership and marketing could undertake.
Great marketers especially want to develop their skills and knowledge. Part of the value for a marketer working somewhere is how much they feel they are growing, learning and adding value for the organisation they work for. When working with an agency that externally manages your marketing your internal team simply doesn’t get this value. In fact, sometimes, there is often conflict between internal marketers and the agency you employ. TAYA avoids this and builds better marketer and salespeople.
Saves Money in The Long Run
While there is a cost in the initial stages to get your team up and running with TAYA, this quickly transforms into an investment once your company owns the systems and processes around marketing. When these systems and processes are owned, it allows your team to make a significant impact on your company without ever having to outsource. This results in increased growth and saved costs.
Additionally, companies that invest in TAYA see their inbound leads and conversion rates grow significantly. This often results in less reliance on paid media spend and paying per lead to external aggregators – who of course offer zero loyalty to your business.
Increases The Value of The Company
When marketing systems and processes sit inside of the business instead of in an external agency, it acts as an asset as this can be utilised in the future regardless of management changes in the company, thereby increasing the value of the company.
How can I get started with TAYA?
To get started with TAYA, reach out to one of our certified TAYA experts here.
If you’re still not sure if TAYA is right for you yet, then you might want to check out these resources first:
