A Day in the CRO Life and Matt’s Grumbling Pays Off

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Matt, we're downtown Houston. We are, I've been down here in a while. Me neither, we actually could not get to Jeremiah's office, we had to actually call him to come get us like little kids. We did. Jeremiah, welcome to the show.

Thank you, thanks for having me. So I've known you forever, you're the Chief Revenue Officer for IFS. Before we get to all the other stuff, what is a Chief Revenue Officer? That's a good question. I'll do my best to describe what it means to me and the role that I represent within IFS.

So I am the Chief Revenue Officer of the Asset BU. We do have another Chief Revenue Officer as the collective whole of IFS. IFS is a large componentizer, modularized ERP, EAM software provider. Started out 40 years ago in Sweden in the nuclear industry, providing maintenance software to the nuclear plants. And then since then it's grown into a billion dollar software company, all the U.S. Navy

to a number of commercial airliners, to offshore drilling platforms, drillers, contractors, to service providers. I've expanded really big footprint now with a heavy focus on assets and services. So if you make assets and you service assets and you've got guys out in the field services and those assets are on contracts, or if you're maintaining your own assets, that's where we want to be.

And that's what we do. So back to the CRO question, my business unit is the primarily focused is around the software for the assets. So that we have software specifically for manufacturing, to finance, to construction companies, making these assets, my team is purely focused on making sure we develop, support, and acquire software to maintain the assets, if that makes sense.

So from my perspective, the CRO role that I have, I straddle, I think the last count I have is about 60 sellers around the globe, a number of VP, head of VP, first line sales managers around the globe, and then also another acquisition. We acquired a standalone Bessebreed EAM software last year called Altamo out of the Netherlands for those terms, EAM, Enterprise Asset Management, so maintenance management software. And so that falls within my BU as well.

So I'm in charge of the overall strategy to go to market, the marketing, how we market this and the industries that we're solely focused on. And right now, we're solely purely focused for the most part, with a few exceptions around EU and our energy utility and resources. In addition to that, we acquired P2 at the end of last year, and I'm straddling that acquisition from a go to market because if anyone's familiar with P2, P2 is a dominant

player in production, production accounting software, and a few other things too. They actually own quite a few software technologies, but their biggest revenue source from a software space is Merrick, which they acquired some time ago. Merrick is production accounting, operational. So basically, the really interesting thing for us, being the people that manage and maintain assets, is that P2 is responsible for, as an oil well produces, the oil.

They're doing the joint revenue accounting, the financing of it, tracking, but they're tied to the SCADA systems. So they know when something's about to go down or a water tank's about to fill up or chemical tanks are empty. They know this in real time. And so for us, we see there's a really nice marrying of applications here to truly automate

the oil field. Yeah. I love it. It's a perfect strategic acquisition, and I've known P2 forever. So you touched a little bit on strategy. Let's talk a little bit about that because you're really kind of making a break in the

future finances of the company, right? So you have to help set strategy. What does that look like? Stressful. I get it, dude, right there with you. No, it's good.

There's a lot of excitement with acquisitions and potentially a few other acquisitions coming down the line. IFS, like I said, it's been around for 40 years. We've got some really cool technology, and to me, one of the main reasons I came back is the technology. It's hard for me being in the sales my entire career and technology career is standing behind

something you don't believe in. So it's just something I can't do. It's really hard. You've really got to see what is the benefit, what are the problems that we're solving here. And traditionally, as EAM software, in my opinion, it's a commodity market.

You've got players like SAP and Oracle and IBM Maximo out there, and what are they doing to make things different, make things better? And the vision that Darren Ross, our CEO, has laid out, our goal here is to do what Salesforce did for the CRM. Our goal is to do the same for assets. So we really want to look at the market and change the dynamic to these monoliths or these

archaic maintenance software or ERP software to bring in generative AI, like ChatGBT. We're all in on Microsoft, so we're heavily invested in all of Microsoft's applications. We're embedding the ChatGBT into our development, into the implementation of our products. So those are the things that get me excited that I can get passionate behind, that we can automate a lot of these things. A lot of the pains that you see time and time again in these industries where they go and

implement these big software applications and create their own internal problems from those big implementations, a lot of these seem like no-brainers to fix. It's just how do you fix them when there's so many different problems from people to time and money to solve these problems. And so we do have a really, the vision that we have is great, it's just a matter of executing that vision.

Yeah, it's really interesting. So I don't want to name names SAP and Oracle, but I don't know a single installation in the oil and gas industry that has hit budget and is launched on time, right? It's always a mess. And then once the implementation gets done, the user experience is usually not what everybody was promised, right?

And that's one of the cool things. I know IFS is one of the cool things about what you do is y'all tend to, your projects actually hit time, hit budget, and your user interface is actually, I don't want to say it's enjoyable, but it's intuitive, so it makes it enjoyable to get the work done. So pretty cool, we talked about strategy and you touched a little bit about managing the sales team.

You know, you have global responsibilities. What is that like managing sellers all over the world? It's good. I like it. It's challenging. You know, it allows you flexible hours early morning to late nights, depending on where

your cadence those are. I am not a, I guess from my perspective, traditional sales manager that I've had in my past. I've always viewed, when I moved into management from enterprise sales as a sales rep to management some years ago, was what is my value? My value is not getting on a cadence call and asking, give me the update on this deal and me taking notes so I can pass that on.

If that's the value I'm bringing to this organization, I don't want to be here because you could do that in email. My value is, I hope, and that's what I try to bring to any of the organizations I come into as a sales leader is looking at the deals differently. How do we make this a higher value deal in the sense of solving a bigger problem? It's not always about the size of the deal from the revenue that we're going to bring

home from selling our software or our services. For me, I'm really intrigued on how big of the problem is that we're solving the organization. Once we know if this is a really big problem and this is, you know, a large working capital problem or uptime in production and there's a lot of money tied to this problem, then the money will come. Yeah.

So I think that that's something I've always seen if you manage, like the bigger problem you solve, the greater opportunity it is and then the more money you manage or what you're responsible for translates into value, translates into, well, paychecks for salespeople. And so it's really important when you look at it from a strategic standpoint or a consultative sales standpoint to figure out what is this bigger opportunity look like? And you started to speak my language there when you're talking about how do we get creative

on who can we bring in? How can we grow? How can we solve this problem? How can we add value? Because the thing that I've always seen is like, you know, you try to do it all yourself and even with sales and marketing, you want to build a team, right?

You want to build a technical expert to come in. You want to pull different resources and sales guides to do that, but your value is being a trusted advisor to the client. It's not, you know, ChadGBT could just ask the cadence, right? You could automate that out. It's like, where are you filling the gaps with the value in between there?

Yeah. So for me, I guess to be a little bit more pointed on it too, with the focus on the EU and R, that's where most of my career experience, mostly upstream along gas is most of my career experience. It's eight years, a little bit more in mining and in a little bit in power generation utilities. And the ability to understand what those maintenance crews and reliability engineers are dealing

with on a daily basis and understanding how that affects their bottom line and how the CFOs are bound, because that ultimately is why you buy a maintenance management software system. There's nothing sexier or attractive about it, but it's ultimately is to track the cost and hopefully improve the uptime reliability of your equipment. And so, again, back to what I really bring into the table when you have these sales reps,

I've got a whole mixed bag of sales reps from brand new to people older than I am, they've been doing this longer than I have, and they're all fantastic with their own different experiences is the first challenge as the CRO that you always have is trying to break down the wall that I'm the CRO guy, and they're nervous about what they can and can't say in front of me. And once I can break that barrier down by just the guy here that's been here, done this

with a lot of big on gas, a lot of big mining companies, just trying to share my experiences to try to improve the deal or cut and go to the next deal if this is not a real deal and just try to coach the best I can. So I guess the really the tie that off is sales coach is the best I can and collaborate with them. And I'm not going to go in here and say that I'm the best sales rep ever to live, but

I do pride myself in the experience that I've had to I've actually when I got started born and raised in Southeast Texas and was an outdoor machinist works for a diamond offshore as a rough neck for a while, put myself through college. So I have some hands on experience. And I tell this to our executive teams in London that I'm not the most polished guy. I sell software to maintenance guys.

I don't sell software to executives in Sweden or London. If that makes any sense. That coaching element, that's something that in my sales career, I've had some phenomenal sales managers and I have some that really sucked, right? And that coaching element, I think is so important, especially today's younger sellers. You know, my generation, I didn't want to hear from my sales manager because I heard

from you something was probably wrong, right? But this younger generation, I have some younger sellers that work for me. They kind of want that constant feedback. And I actually think it's wonderful because they actually will sit and listen. One of my favorite things to do as soon as we walk out of a client meeting is give direct feedback with the understanding there's no emotions attached to it.

And then I ask the same. So even though you're the leader of the sales leader, oftentimes you get good coaching from your front line people. And I think it's a two way exchange that benefits everybody. I totally agree. Totally agree.

I think our generation or my generation, I'm 45. So just to be clear on generations. I wasn't raised with much advice if that makes sense. Oh no. You just gotta figure it out. And so that also creates an environment that's hard to take criticism.

And one of the things I've learned in my early stage of my career is anytime for a sales manager, I've always been, Hey, if you don't like something I'm doing, please let me know. Let me know as soon as possible because I don't want to be six months into something. And you're like, every day you're just getting resentment. You're like, I'm going to fire this guy. He's a jackass.

And he doesn't know what he's doing. And I don't want to be in an environment. I don't want to create an environment as a leader that judges you for asking for help. I don't expect everyone to know. I don't know everything. We need to work as a team.

This is a team effort. We're building something we're selling and to support the revenue targets and the growth targets we have. This is a team effort. So very much requires everybody to put their heads together. We have a bunch of smart people that we built a team that globally all have different

life experiences that we need to leverage. And I can't stress that enough. I say that repeatedly on our sales meetings, come to us. We're not expecting you to know everything and be an expert on all things. So I'm going to go completely off script here just because it popped to my head. I've had a little bit of sales manager experience hats off to you for doing it because I didn't

like it. Whether it be a front line bag carrier and be responsible for my own income. But you ever have a situation where you have a rock store, I mean literally a rock story team that's just killing it, but he or she leaves a wake of bodies behind them. It's a weird place to be as a sales leader because in one hand they're generating tons of revenue.

But on the other hand, they just don't fit, right? That's a strange place and it's a hard decision to make. Yeah. Yeah. The pre-med on us. Yeah.

Yeah. My last role at the last company before coming to IFS, it was a small software company got bought by IBM and as we merged in, they were a handful and the egos, they were a handful of people that have been with our company for some time and extremely smart, just brilliant. They knew the business. They knew the industries that we served and you could put them in front of the customers.

Customers loved them, fly them anywhere in the world, from Ecuador and Norway to Petronas and Malaysia and they blow their socks off with their sales presentations, but everybody in the company hated them. They were just absolute arrogant asses and if finally you just get to a point where it's a toxic environment, it's a toxic environment. This is not, and you do your best to coach them, like you can't treat people this way.

This is not, and at some point, so you pull the plug. Yeah. You just can't have an environment where someone is, even though they're great at one thing, they're horrible and it takes, you got to balance it. Yeah. I learned my lesson too, and that's the result, right?

Is they're not a good fit and the quicker you let them go, you may have a loss in revenue, but the entire team, basically it's like a weight off their shoulders and that revenue comes back. It doesn't poison the well, right? If you're trying to set a certain kind of culture and you have someone rowing in the other direction, it just takes longer to get back on track.

So you mentioned earlier about senior leadership. You're in a unique place, right? So you and your team are the only people that are bringing money into the company, and yet you also have to make your senior leadership happy. That has to be a balance. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, so let me be very clear. I have a BU. There's three main BUs within our organization. There's aerospace and defense. Then there's the service management aspect of it, and then there's the asset piece of

it. And so those are the three main business units that ultimately report up to our leadership, my peers, if you will, and then my leaders. So I have, you know, I report to the president and board that oversees two of the business units. And we have weekly forecast calls.

And there are many... How many direct reports do you have? I think I missed that piece earlier. I'd actually like to go count it now, but I don't know exactly how much because we acquired a company last year that took over. So in some of this is being reorganized right as we speak right now underneath this whole

business unit. So a couple hundred. Okay. So. But back to your report. Yeah, so I have weekly forecast calls with our global CRO that's out of headquarters

for London and reports to our CEO, and then I report to our president and board member that oversees. It's kind of a... It's a very matrixed organization. So it's complicated to like multiple bosses. Right.

So you just try to make as many of them happy as you can. And I'm also guessing that sometimes you have to like tow the line and go, look, this is not legit. Yeah. Like, look, I'm not gonna... I think in the last few executive leadership roles I've been in, I prefer just to be direct.

And you know, one of the things that I've seen in so many failed sales leaders is they know deep down that say this quarter, they're not gonna make it. But they're... I don't know. It's a hope and a prayer. I'd rather just be like, hey, there's no way we're pulling this off.

And deal with that than with the failed expectation. And then try to... You know, you can't be Eeyore. I heard that one the other day. It was a good one. But I'd rather just be brutally direct.

It's funny about sales leaders because you don't see this with like project managers or engineering managers. If a project manager has a piece of the project running behind, that's the first thing they do is report. But you're right. There's something about the culture of sales.

I don't know if it's hope, like maybe this magical deal will come in the last day. But at least for us, I agree with you 100%. If there's a problem, I want to know about it. If it's a revenue problem as soon as possible, because then you can deal with it. Yeah. Absolutely.

You get contingency plans. Is it gonna... How's it affect this profitable? We're hiring people. So maybe we need to slow on hiring in this region because you're not gonna hit that number in that region.

There's all sorts of different levers that can be pooled and it's just a matter of being honest with yourself and everybody else. I mean, I just had a call getting ready for my forecast call this morning yesterday with a sales manager and they had a deal that just started like four months ago and they're calling it for Q3 and our average sales cycle is 18 months. It's like, so you're gonna break the company record.

That's what you're gonna do here. Right. He's like, I'm gonna try it. I was like, come on. Let's be honest. There's so many stage gates.

That's why we have a process. That's why we need to follow these processes, but you're not gonna... I will be the first to take you to it and buy you any steak dinner you want. You break that company record, but let's set proper expectations internally and then it's a great... If you actually do it, then it'll be an even bigger win.

Yeah. I love it. So we talked about your interface with senior leadership, interface with your sales team, about marketing. That has to be another place where you have to spend a good bit of time. It is.

Yeah. So IFS, it has a really good marketing department. If you need content, material, you want to go to a show, you want to do something, but we don't have unlimited funds. So the biggest thing that I've been back at IFS now for six months, for me, it is... I need to see if we're gonna invest, so go to a conference, go to a show, or invest in

some type of... There's so many things to throw your money at on marketing these days. What's the return on investment? It's got to be a clear return on investment to get leads. I mean, that's the goal, at least for us. The challenge that we have as IFS is that we're not IBM, we're not SAP, we're not Oracle.

We're not that recognized. So the challenge from my perspective is it's more in the strategy and go to market and in having marketing to support that message. It's picking the things that you're best at and really amplifying that messaging in that area. So for that problem, they think of you as the solution.

Yeah, exactly. And really trying to... One of the things I'm a big fan of right now is, so the way we've structured my sales teams after EU and R, so we've got sellers here in Houston, and they're primarily focused on oil and gas. There's a few utility generations, but for the most part, upstream oil and gas, a little

bit of midstream too. So divvy out the accounts that there's some rhyme and reason. There's some logic. We're not going, I'm not going to go try to convince ExxonMobil of ditching SAP. They're going, they just rolled off of that account from my last job. They're on the path of the largest SAP HANA upgrade in the world.

And I'd like to say we got good salespeople. We're not that good. But you are good enough to realize that that's a waste of your resources, and so you leave it alone. Yeah. They don't do that, and they waste valuable time and resources.

I will say that tongue in cheek. So I am actually talking to ExxonMobil and a couple of others, big SAP shops, because we have made some acquisitions of some products that don't replace. They add value, and they actually add a lot of value. And so from my perspective, and don't tell any of these other clients, this is like a charging horse.

And that's the strategy. So if we can get our foot in, and we've gotten our foot in a door at a number of these big firms, it's AI-driven optimization engines that can go in, that can say, look, SAP is this big, big system that everybody's using from finance to supply chain procurement to maintenance, creating all this data. But it also creates some very aggregated problems.

And so we have some really cool technology that can simplify some stuff, like shutdown, turnarounds, planned schedules. So planning goes into that. And they've lost that ability in SAP and other systems to execute a proper schedule. You think about if you're managing a couple at the Gulf of Mexico, how many offshore platforms you're managing, and the Gulf of Mexico with several hundred crews going in

and out with contractors, and you have scheduled maintenance, right? And you're trying to balance all those schedules and those jobs. And do you have the parts? Do you have the right electricians or everybody that's needed for those jobs ready to go? And so most of these companies today, the best they can do is two weeks in advance. A world-class maintenance organization is going to have a 90-day schedule.

And so what happens is that they're dipping into safety stock, they're helicoptering parts and people out last minute and spending way more money they need to be spending to execute these jobs, if that makes sense. Makes total sense. And so we have some really cool technologies and optimization technology that can plug in the SAP and look at all the, here's all the jobs that we want to do, here's all the

resources, so here's the parts that we do have, and here's the crews, there's their schedules and does load balancing and says, oh, here's the schedule you can actually accomplish right now with what you have. And it's constantly looking for any type of changes. So if, you know, a guy doesn't make the next rotation, the electrician they needed for that job, he misses rotation, then it's going to reschedule automatically and give you a

new Gantt chart. We got to get you on the digital doershow and talk about that because I got a feeling we could go deep into how companies like Exxon have their project schedules in Primavera and their finances in SAP, but they need something in the middle and I suspect what you just rattled off, even though I don't know, is what sits in the middle of that, which should be super valuable.

Wrong show for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me tie this back. Sorry, I didn't mean to give a complete software pitch, but the strategy is, so when we look at how we divvy up the accounts, IFS from an EAM ERP sales strategy is going after the tier two players, the smaller players that don't want to go spend 20, 30, 40 million

dollars on a big EAM or ERP implementation and you can stand up something that is actually functionality wise deeper. And I say that because where I just left my whole five years at IBM Consulting was building large working capital business cases to justify HANA upgrades at some of the largest industrial accounts in the world. We'd look at all their inefficiencies of how they're running their current SAP environment

and then we would look at all their inventory, the maintenance spare parts of their buying and all their maintenance practices and show all the inefficiencies and it's because SAP is really hard to use. Yeah, no, it really is. And it's a finance system and it wasn't built for the asset and the maintaining of the asset and sorry not to slack these guys, they've done a fantastic job of infiltrating the market

and so my job now is to bring in a better solution in my opinion that's easier to use but has more technology to make this more effective. So anyway, the strategy back is the tier two players and then or the tier one players like the ExxonMobil, the Exxon, the Oxys is where we have these point solutions that we can have a faster turnaround. That's a quicker sales cycle and a bigger opportunity, not a bigger opportunity but

a unique opportunity that could potentially grow into something else. So we've done this at a number of big accounts in Europe where there are pure SAP shops, we're able to plug these tools in, show the value and then once they realize like, hey this thing's actually like this optimization engine, we have it embedded in our complete software too. You can buy it standalone.

It's already embedded in all of our operations from procurement supply chain to optimizing your schedules. So you don't have to connect it all, it's already, you just turn it on in our software has it already embedded in there. So once they start seeing that vision and understanding that flipping, you know, keep SAP for your finance, we don't care.

We have a great general ledger but that's not what makes us great, what makes us great is our ability to maintain these assets and optimize. So that message right there, right, certainly in long form, like sales conversation, you can tell that story, I'm just curious from a marketing standpoint, how are you amplifying that message to attract people that are raising their hands saying, this is kind of an issue for me, I'm interested in something like that, I'm just curious about that.

Yeah, that is the challenge that we have on a daily basis. Once the accounts are divvied out, the way I'm really kind of attacking this is that we have some really cool sales training that we've done, we've hired a bunch of, I don't want to say sales coach, but mental health therapist that have gone through a number of coaching on verbiage and how to understand who the teachers are in the organizations, who are the learners, who are the naysayers, what verbiage you want to use to when you

engage these accounts and these people in these accounts to, because I think the biggest problem that no matter whatever sales organ, you may have the best product in the world is especially in the US, Europe is a little bit different, but in the US, no one answers the phone anymore. Right. I know, I don't.

Yeah, me neither. That phone probably gets about 20 calls a day from random numbers and it is a, you know, the cold calling and I think for a long time, people have known cold calling has been dead, but people still do it. We still do it. Oh, I don't open that can of worms here, Jeremiah.

Because we think cold calling is awesome. It just, we don't use the telephone anymore, right, because you're automatically annoying somebody. Yeah. We think the process of reaching out with good information about a problem that you have is still valuable.

I totally agree. It's all in how you execute that message. So I'm just like picking up a blind phone call, but we still do it too. We still have. See, this is just so funny to hear this conversation because you look, I started as an executive recruiter on oil and gas and so I was calling 60, 80 times a day, picking up the phone, getting

people to answer, right? And we had to use like directories and like literally the phone book. It was, it's still run like 50 years behind schedule. When I started incorporating technology to support the salespeople with automation and retargeting and stuff like that, the pendulum for me swung completely the other way because the question I was hoping to get to and we're getting there is what you can do now online.

Okay. You're competing against these big companies and their marketing teams and what have you on whatever that one message is that you're trying to hit that target persona, get them to raise their hand. Even at the big companies, you're competing against, okay, let's say five, 10 people, two of the people don't really care.

Two of the other people are looking for jobs, you know, like people have other jobs now. If they're working from home, you only have like one or two people that even like really care and then you have like a limited budget for this one specific area. So if you take even a smaller budget, focus it in that area and create that focus beam of light and that message, right? That when people are searching on Google, Google is like one of the number one places

where people go for information and then there's YouTube as the second largest search engine. If you focus a content creation strategy in a way to catch that pain point in a certain way to get them into like a sales funnel to then get them to a salesperson really quickly, it starts to produce a steady stream of leads, right? And so attraction marketing, I don't know, you can coin in a lot of different terms, but you know, sales is over here and then attraction marketing is here and then you

got to look at a bell curve on where you're comfortable and where you fit. But it's just fun how all these pieces fit together because. I think you've got to, I mean, what I tell my sellers is we've got to be bold because we don't have a big brand recognition and we have a marketing machine and we're driving AdWords and we're doing the LinkedIn, the sales navigators, the AdWords, those leads are the worst.

So AdWords, sorry to step in on this, but I'm not a huge fan of AdWords either. I would tell you that AdWords are specifically for, because there's two types of people. There's people that search organically and then there's people that search for ads. The data says the people that search for ads are typically coupon hunters because you have to have a kind of offer. You got to run them to a landing page.

You got to grab them immediately or it's an emergency, right? So okay, like I need something today. I can't remember any time I've ever clicked on an ad. You do the research, right? Right. Like I'd rather look for the organic search and I agree, like you've got to be in the

organic search and that, you know, we have a massive team to get us in those areas. But the importance for us, like it's a very, very specific point in targeted marketing towards very specific problems. And so one of the biggest things I've been working on in the last few months is conveying to the marketing teams the industry-specific problems that we're solving. You can't just say we have oil and gas software.

Like it was literally just on the call yesterday going, nobody in oil and gas goes, I work in oil and gas. What is that? Like right? Yeah. Like upstream, you're an offshore, on land, are you in services or are you on a pipeline

or are you in a chemical plan or a petrochemical, you know, such a massive industry and it's such a catch all term. It just shows that you're just trying to tap into a market you don't really understand. See, Jeremiah, you fit right. So the whole philosophy of this show is that we believe sales and marketing has to be joined at the hip.

So basically you just agreed with that in the fact that the sales people know what the job titles are and what the problems are and what people are searching for. If they would just convey that information to market, the market would not have to do this broad shotgun approach. So if they would work together, if salespeople would bring the marketing people with them on client calls and let them just listen to the conversation.

Love this. Unfortunately, we're way, way over time. This has been great. I want to kind of close this out. So, Jeremiah, real quick, your back story, right? How did you get here?

That's a good question. So I grew up in Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas. My stepfather worked on an offshore drilling platform for Sipada. I don't know if you've heard of Sipada or Sipado. I think got bought by Diamond. I think Diamond bought Sipada in the 90s.

When I got out of high school, that was my first job out of high school as a roughneck on Diamond's oldest drill ship. So it was an old barge, I think, not barge, but I don't know, it was an old ship from the 40s. They converted it to a drill ship and it was a rust bucket. I remember my first week I was chipping rust in the villages.

So you knew what chipping hammer is? Oh yeah. And then they got me needle guns. Needle gun, yep. Yeah, so we were called the bilge boys. So and then from there, I worked my way up to an outdoor machinist and I realized I needed

to go to college because this is not a no offense to anyone. I think I got in at the right time, but I actually have teenagers and going to college now and the craft jobs, I fundamentally think are the better routes at this point. I do too. In some of these, not everybody rushing in the IT because it is a flooded market and you know, I think chat GBT is going to replace a lot of this at some point, but I don't laugh.

I laugh, you know, it is interesting world that we live in right now. But growing up in Southeast Texas, I worked and from there, I worked in quite a few chemical plants for construction as an outdoor machinist and put myself through college and get a computer science degree and figure computer science degree would get me away from the industry as quick as possible. You know, it really had no, you know, that's all I knew growing up around the chemical

plants and in the offshore, in my mind, I wanted to be out of this. I want to go to Austin. That's where the, you know, Austin is a cool place and I got my first software job in Austin. It was maintenance software and they're like, Hey, you know a little bit about oil and gas and refining and chemicals. You can be ourselves for that.

And so immediately it was right back in. So but it was kind of need to come back into it from a different perspective, not the, you know, wearing no maxing covered in grease and coming in more on trying to solve some business problems. And so anyway, you know, not to sound maybe that sounds a little bit arrogant in the sense of, you know, because I still have family members that all operate in these industries

and I live off of these industries. So it's been a very fortunate career path that I've had. That field experience is invaluable. I think everybody should have a little bit of it. If people wanted to learn more about IFS, where should they go? Yeah.

So people will put a link in the show notes, both to Jeremiah's LinkedIn profile. If you want to talk to him, so just don't call him on the phone because he's not going to answer. We'll also put a link to IFS, which I do want to give IFS a shout out. Years ago, they sponsored our monthly mixer or they were one of our sponsors for a monthly mixer here in Houston and that money went to fight human sex trafficking. So I want to thank your company.

You literally helped save a little boy, little girl's life and then just, you know, to take pride in that and trying to give back is something that's moving y'all's culture. I just want to recognize that. All right. Last thing, Jeremiah, if you had one piece of advice for a CRO in oil and gas, what would that be? If you're going to be a CRO at a tech company in the oil and gas industry, understand the

problems that that softwares or that technology is solving. How big is that problem? I mean, for me, and one of the things I've probably missed and how I got here is I tried to attach myself to really good technology. So I'm not the most polished or the brightest, but the technology that I go get behind is probably some of the best technology I've seen in the market and solve some really big

problems. Love it. All right. This is where we do our product review. I want to give a shout out to amateur. So you heard us talk about their presenter on I think our second to last show and Matt

wind because I think it was very nice and they heard the show. They appreciate and they sent another brand new one for you, Matt. So now you have in the hand. I do. It's awesome. We're going to let you use it for a while and come back and give

another review since they're nice. That's the sense of it. Yeah. And then if you want to send us a product to review, we're happy to do so. Just know that we're going to tell the truth. If it's great, we're going to say it's great.

If it sucks, we're going to say it sucks and send us something gadgety. Please. Nothing heavy steel in the show notes. There are Matt nice social links. You want to connect with us and things social and then our insider groups come in this fall.

It's time for a LinkedIn tip. Matt, do you have one? I do. I want to expand a little bit outside of LinkedIn, just based on our conversation and say, one of the biggest tips is when online leads are generated, getting them connected with a salesperson and following up as quickly as possible is

so important based on the stickiness of the lead. One of the things that I don't think people realize in the online education industry, funny enough, have this figured out. Someone calls you if you raise your hand like I'm interested within seven minutes is their KPI because you've got to catch the person when they're in that mindset of shopping for whatever it is, because if you catch them, then you

can push that conversation forward and maybe close the sales cycles. If not, it might be a month. It might be two months before they get back in the mode to actually considering that thing. It's not that they take that long to get back to you. It's they take that long to get that decision and that process and that

thinking in front of them to take that next step. And so, you know, just in the spirit of connecting sales and marketing, just closing that gap of them communicating and talking. And there's even software and automations of, you know, auto calling two people and text messaging and all that kind of support. And there's a lot of these things that you can use AI and automation to

plug into to help take a good salesperson and make them great and make great person like, you know, God or whatever. That's a great tip. That speed is so. Can I add something? Yeah, of course.

This is one thing that the only social media I'm on anymore is LinkedIn. And the one thing that's kind of been my pet peeve for the last probably year on LinkedIn is just the mass, just spamming of your company's products without any thoughtful, not saying be make it Facebook. I don't really don't know. I think everyone, most part of people try to avoid political and anything

that's, but, you know, so I always try to have a mixture of work, something funny and something thoughtful. And two of those don't have to be connected to it. Right. If that makes any sense. Total sense.

Sometimes it's a little bit more engaging and it shows you're not just a parrot. Yeah. The fails, if you listen to the show, some of the fails that I talk about, they're always that somebody trying to sell me something with no idea who I am, what I do for a living at late, like zero. And my thing in the back of my head is like, does this ever work?

So it must work at some point, but it works in volume. And they're looking at 0.01% conversion rate. Right. Yeah. So all your LinkedIn spam or stop, it hurts your brand. Don't do it.

If you want to learn how to do it properly, reach out to Matt and you'll have to spend all that time spamming people like Jeremiah Knox. We hate it. All right, let's get out of here, Jeremiah. This was great. Thanks for your time.

Thank you. Remember, make a difference and not a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast. A production of the oil and gas global network. Learn more at oggn.com.