Now that we’ve established how to do assignment selling, let’s revisit one of the first questions we asked in this section:

On average, how many pages of your website would a potential client or customer be willing to read?

Well, the following story is an example of what is possible. It’s also, in many ways, going to sound unbelievable, but trust me when I say it’s absolutely true.

I’m giving you an example of a customer experience I had that really changed my perspective in terms of the way teaching can affect the sales process, as well as the willingness of shoppers to consume information in order to become comfortable with a buying decision.

About five years ago, when I was still a pool guy, I was up late one night using HubSpot to look over the leads that had come in to my swimming pool website that day, and one of the leads was from a man named “Mr. G.” I saw that he had come to the site because he was searching on Yahoo for the phrase “cost of a fiberglass swimming pool.”

But once he got to the website, something very interesting happened: He viewed 374 pages!

I know what was going through my mind when I saw this, and it’s probably the same thing that’s going through your mind. Right now you’re probably thinking, What in the world??!

There are a lot of assumptions you can make when you see that someone has viewed that amount of website content. You might be thinking to yourself, My goodness! This man has way too much time on his hands!

Or, Geez, he must be a competitor!

Or, Maybe he has some sort of rare OCD disorder where he can’t get enough information about swimming pools.

In any case, I was very perplexed—and almost stunned—to learn just how much of our website content this individual had read.

But this isn’t all. In fact, the story gets much more interesting. The same night that I discovered that Mr. G had read 374 pages of our site, I was continuing to look through the leads that came in when I noticed a lead from a lady named (Mrs.) G. It was easy to put two and two together and realize that Mr. G had a wife, who was also researching swimming pools.

What made this even funnier was that she had found us because she had been searching on Yahoo and typed in “Richmond, Virginia, swimming pools.”

On top of that, she had read more than 140 pages of the website herself.

Now, if you take these two individuals combined, this couple had read more than five hundred pages of our site.

Five hundred-plus pages . . . about fiberglass swimming pools.

The next day, I called Mr. G on the phone. He, of course, acted like he had known me for years, and quickly agreed to have me out to his house for a sales appointment.

Now, what do you suppose that sales appointment was like?

I will tell you. I walked into the house, and Mr. G was standing in his living room with a spreadsheet in his hands. On one side of the sheet was a model of the swimming pool that he was planning to buy, and on the other side of the sheet he had listed every option and accessory he was buying to go with the pool. Of course, all he needed from me was one little thing: the price.

I walked out of that appointment forty-five minutes later with a $5,000 deposit and a signed contract in my hands. As I drove away from the home, I started to laugh, as a thought occurred to me:

How much selling had I actually done that day?

The answer, of course, is none. The Gs weren’t just 70 percent decided when I got there, they were more in the range of 99.9 percent decided that they were going to use our company.

Frankly, my only job on that day was “Don’t screw this one up, pool guy.”

Thus, I laughed.

It turns out that Mr. G was not a freak, not a competitor, and not retired. Rather, he was a surgeon. But he was also a consumer—a consumer who, along with his wife, wanted to feel comfortable with a buying decision.

In fact, if you think about how you buy things, and how much research you do when you’re serious about what you’re buying, you’ll see that you are likely grossly underestimating people’s willingness to become comfortable with their buying decisions through the power of great, helpful information.

My appointment with the Gs was one of the last ones I ever went on as a pool guy. It was also easily one of the most powerful and memorable, because it taught me a clear lesson, one that I’ve seen time and time again, in multiple industries and businesses, all over the world:

Content—assuming it is honest and transparent—is the greatest sales tool in the world today.