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If you’ve heard the concept of They Ask You Answer (TAYA) before, you might be wondering what exactly it is and what the program actually involves. We get asked all the time, ‘how does the TAYA program work?’ and ‘what even is TAYA?’ In this article, we’ll be answering just this.
In particular, we’re going to cover the following:
- What exactly is TAYA?
- Taking your marketing in-house by empowering your team
- How does the TAYA program work and what does it involve?
- Who are your trainers and coaches?
- Kick-off & quarterly planning sessions
- Your scorecard
- Weekly & fortnightly training sessions
- What will be included in your TAYA training and coaching?
- What are the different packages available?
- So, what’s next?
What Exactly 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.
Ultimately, They Ask, You Answer is ability of your brand to become the most helpful teacher in your industry.
This sounds like such a simple concept on the surface, but it’s actually quite comprehensive in its scope. The framework of TAYA essentially follows this thought process:
- We want to uncover customer prospect’s questions and concerns, respond to these buyer motivators with honest, thoughtful, and complete answers, build a culture around this in our team, and utilise this within the sales process to directly impact revenue.
- With the right measurement frameworks in place, we can actually measure revenue growth from our implementation of TAYA.
If you want to dive into the deep end, read this in-depth article which covers everything to do with how TAYA works.
Taking Your Marketing In-House by Empowering Your Team
One of the major benefits to utilising the system of TAYA is that it requires you to take your marketing in-house, and by doing so, you empower your team (not an outsourced agency indefinitely).
An incredible by-product of our done by you service that we initially underestimated is the IMPACT training and coaching has on the morale and career development of your employees, especially the marketers in the room.
Good marketers 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. In short, it helps you invest in the long term skill-set and wellbeing of your employees.
How Does the Program Work & What Does It Involve?
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.
Here’s a 90 day overview of what the program will cover:
Who are Your Trainers & Coaches?
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 only once fundamentals are covered)
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.
Kick-off & Quarterly Planning Sessions
The Kick-off Session
Kick-off meetings are exactly what they sound like – the first meeting we will have upon a client signing a TAYA Training & Coaching Agreement.
It is vital not only marketing is in this meeting but also senior leadership (the CEO or Business Unit leader in large organisations) as well as sales and sometimes other customer facing stakeholders.
In fact, if we can’t get leadership sold on the objective of eventually being the most trusted “teacher” in the industry, we won’t take on a client let alone hold a kick-off workshop.
In any event, the key stakeholders in a Kick-off workshop will include:
- A Head Coach from RedPandas
- An Account Manager from RedPandas
- Your Senior Leadership (e.g. CEO or Business Unit Leader)
- Your Head of Sales
- Your Marketing Team
Our objective here will be to align all parties on what objectives the business is measuring itself against, what it hopes to achieve and how we will be keeping you accountable. We also cover general things like how training will work, where we will share and collaborate documents (e.g. Basecamp) and other house-keeping items.
Quarterly Planning Sessions
Quarterly Planning Sessions are notably longer than the kick-off session (they go for about 3 hours) and will be the most constructive, direct and quite frankly most fun meetings you will ever have.
In a quarterly planning session, we will cover things like:
- Your scorecard and how it’s tracking
- 3-5 sales and marketing priorities
- Where are we now vs where do we need to be
- 90-day plan and targets
Your Scorecard
One of the things we discussed above in the quarterly planning session is your scorecard. Scorecards are important because they give us a status report of where we are at and help us prioritise where we need to get to. For this reason, we use the Digital Sales & Marketing Mastery scorecard to help you gauge how you are progressing and to keep your organisation focused in the right direction.
What’s important to note upfront is that it is expected to have a low stage 1 score (less than 20) when you first do this. And that’s ok! The idea is not try and get to 100 right away but rather use the scorecard, alongside your business objectives to help you prioritise what sales, marketing and the rest of the organisation need to focus on.
Weekly & fortnightly subject matter expert training
As referenced in the trainers and coaches section above, you will be assigned a number of subject matter experts based on your organisation’s needs. Specifically, what we uncover in your kick-off and planning session will help dictate this.
Your requirements and the package that you are on will determine not only what trainers and coaches you need but also how frequently you and your team will meet with them.
Below is a typical breakdown of when you will have access to trainers and coaches. Some resources such as content trainers may be required more often than others I.e. Sales trainers or Leadership coaches.
We first conduct an audit of your brand based on the 10 key implementation areas of TAYA, and rank you based on each one.
What will be included in your TAYA training and coaching?
As referenced in the what is TAYA section above, the concept itself is pretty simple – becoming the most trusted teacher in your space – but getting there is pretty comprehensive.
We’ve touched on some of the inclusions above but more holistically, TAYA involves getting your organisation to master 10 key implementation areas listed below.
These ten areas include:
- The Big 5: five content topic areas that are sure to drive the most organic traffic, qualified leads, and quick sales.
- Assignment Selling: Learn to utilise content effectively in the sales process, from prospecting to closing, yielding better-educated prospects
- In-house Content Management: A well-trained in-house content team is faster, less expensive, and better aligned with your organisation’s needs
- Revenue Team: By combining marketing and sales teams into a single team, you’ll unite around what really matters: bringing in revenue
- Learning Centre: Your content has to be well-organised and easy to find on your website so that visitors can quickly access what they’re looking for.
- The Selling 7: The seven types of videos that help your customer build a relationship with your brand before they reach out to your sales team
- Virtual Sales: From 1-1 video prospecting to sales call best practices, your team will flourish in a video-first business world
- Self-service tools: Make buying from you easy with chat, scheduling tools, and more touchless customer experiences
- Sales and marketing alignment: Unite your business around shared goals and core strategy so you can finally replace frustration with teamwork
- Martech and CRM adoption: Don’t just pay for the CRM platform, equip your whole team to use it correctly, end to end.
Based on your tracking on your scorecard and what we uncover together in your kick-off and planning session, our Head Coach will help you prioritise what you need to focus on first. In fact one of the biggest areas of value clients tell us we are able to give them is just that, FOCUS. With so many competing priorities and stakeholders throwing things on our plate, often having an external expert like RedPandas is just what the business needs to remain on track and kick some big goals.
Key priorities in your first 90 days
We get it. The above is a lot. Remember, our job is to separate the music from the noise and help you prioritise the most important, impactful items first. To illustrate, in your first 90 days we’ll maintain our focus with you on four key areas:
- Producing content marketing that generates revenue
- Filming videos that shorten the sales cycle
- Reporting & ROI Measurement using HubSpot
- Integrating content into your sales process
Assigning Coaches To Your Team
Based on the training and the package that you choose, you will be assigned any or all of the following coaches:
- Sales Coach
- Paid Media Coach
- Content Coach
- Video Coach
- HubSpot Coach
What are the different packages available?
We offer three packages:
- Fast: completed over a period of 24 months
- Faster: completed over a period of 18 months
- Fastest: completed over a period of 12 months
The faster the program, the more core competencies you work on at one time. The most balanced and commonly recommended package for most clients so they can move at a decent pace whilst also maintain their day-to-day workloads is the Faster/18-month package.
To view detailed pricing information of our TAYA programs, click here.
So, what’s next?
If implementing TAYA in your business is something you see would make an impact, here’s what we recommend doing next.
