A Triple Win with Guest Cohen McHale-Fleming

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Podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We have a guest today, but before we get to our guests, I want to talk specifically about reviews because Matt, we did not get a review this week. Come on people, leave us a review if you like it. Yep, give us a five star if you like the show. Give us a four star if you don't. Tell us what you want us to change. And Cohen,

you're our guest today. Cohen Fleming, you work for a company called Ironsight, and I've known you for a very long time. And I heard you on somebody else's podcast, and you were literally spitting words of wisdom. And it's like, how have we never gotten you on this show? So I do appreciate you taking time out today and coming on our show. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that podcast was an interesting experience. You did an amazing job. We'll actually put a link in our show notes. You'll want to go back

and listen to them. But today, we're going to talk about something that we actually haven't talked about before, which is a triple win. And Cohen, you actually came up with this subject. If our audience doesn't know what a triple win is, explain it to them. Yeah, yeah. From my perspective, a triple win, it's one of the more cost-effective ways of really trying to get your message out to exactly who your target audience is. And how you do that is you want to find, obviously, a win for yourself. We're all in business here, so we're all looking

for those personal wins, but the other two are super important. So the other one's going to be your clients, who you're actually going to market for. That third win is go and find somebody who has a shared audience, shared client base, shared values. And let's go try and add some value together. An example of that for us would be like working with technology matching firms. Their whole job is to go find really good solutions for their clients who happen to be our clients. And we think we're a really good solution. Working together, all three parties,

you can all come out of it better off. I love the idea. And it's actually something that we don't do enough of. And from a sales point of view, guys, what an easy way to win is when you can capitalize and basically partner up with somebody else that would also benefit from whatever prospects or clients you're bringing in. If you have part of the puzzle or part of the solution, and somebody else has the other part of the solution, and then between the two of y'all, you'll help the client, and now the client's happy because you helped them solve a problem. How awesome a win-win-win

for everybody this is. Yeah. Yeah, I find it really keeps you focused and realizing, you know, business, it's about people. And marketing sales, it's about people. And in particular, the energy industry is very about people, very relationship-based. 100%. And it's also this industry, even though it's large and global, people know each other and they talk. And so if you do great work in this industry, word gets around. And vice versa, if you do bad work in this industry, word also gets around. Cohen, I want to go a little bit deeper into this.

Iron Sight's not a large company, right? So you have limited resources, like a lot of our listeners do. This triple win has to be a way to help lower your cost of either client acquisition or whatever you're measuring from marketing point of view, because you're not footing all the resources by yourself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We want to really spend a lot of our resources on building our product on supporting clients, you know, once they get on board. So from the marketing perspective, yeah, anything we can do that makes us just as effective without necessarily having a

price tag attached to it, that's our win, right there. Yeah. There's a lot of low cost or sometimes zero cost solutions out there that a lot of people may not be aware of. The first thing pops my head is creating your own content. It takes a little bit of time, but it literally cost you nothing. And because you're the subject matter expert, that content is super valuable. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And especially like when you're creating that content, trying to find the right space for that in terms of where somebody is. If you're just trying to

get lots of attention, that's great. That can be really effective when you have a more limited team creating content. Maybe you want to really maximize that kind of middle of funnel, bottom of funnel experience focusing on content there. Yeah. Well, so let me tell you, I don't know if I've ever shared this story with our audience. When I first started modal point, which was 15 years ago, I read that video was going to be the next big thing. I also read that content was to be the next big thing as far as ranking organically and social. I got confused between engagement

and the ability for companies to buy for me. So I started creating content and the people that would respond, that would engage, that would like it, that would reply back. I learned what they like to do and so I created more and more content for the audience, the engaged part of my audience. What I didn't know Cohen is I built this huge following of people that could never buy for me because the people that could buy for me, the VPs and the senior VPs and the directors are not the ones that are on Twitter going, yeah, that was an awesome post. I love that you brought

that up. So be real careful marketing teams out there and making sure that you're attracting the people that can buy from you, that can partner with you and not just the people that are engaging with your content. It was a hard lesson to learn how to go back and start from scratch again. Yeah, yeah. When you do get it right, you get that content focusing on the right spot. It does something amazing, which is it helps reduce the friction of the buying process. We sell software and we get some really great results, sometimes unbelievable results with our clients and the

market, it is a little tired to buy in software. At this point, a lot of people have heard a lot of things. They've tried a lot of things. There's definitely a degree of skepticism. When you can create some good content for people who are right on that precipice where they need to smooth things out, they don't want to have to go searching around for answers to their questions. So much of that buying process for us, our sales cycles are fairly long in some cases and so much of that buying process is happening outside of our team's direct line of sight, direct ability to

influence or to communicate anything you can do. You do an amazing job with how you sell some of your ad space. You've reduced the friction so much, it makes it so easy. If I could, I'd probably be able to buy a whole bunch of it. Yeah, I appreciate the comment. I have to give credit to you. That was my marketing team that put that together and Cohen, I thought it was a bad idea and so I was going to let them fail so they would learn their lesson without even promoting it when they turned it on on the website the very first day we started selling stuff. So number one, I was

wrong. So I don't know if this audience should remember that because that means you probably should not take marketing advice from me, take sales advice from me, but not marketing advice. But number two, exactly to your point, what my marketing team hypothesized was that we had a group of potential buyers that didn't want to talk to salespeople, that just wanted to do the transaction, not have a calendar invite for a call on stuff and they were right. We have a group of people that buy from us that just want to do the transaction and so we made it frictionless for

them and it was very successful. Yeah, I mean there's been a huge shift in how people buy online. I mean you look at like just ordering a pizza, you don't need to talk to somebody. I think that there's kind of a throwback to like the 1-800 numbers. You could call 1-800 number, you could learn something without having to talk to somebody because you don't want that high pressure sales and 75% or something like that of people are already through the buyer's journey before they pick up the phone and talk to somebody and if you can do things to curate the content because

everybody's busy to help move it forward like you said Cohen to get those people right on the edge and push them forward but also like if someone's ready to buy like let them buy. Why do you need to stand in the way of doing that and I interviewed somebody that's on like the Google team and this was right during COVID what was hitting into it and the number one recommendation they made was every business should figure out how to put a cart on their website even if they had sell a service-based business like because more people are using online they want to go through the whole

buying cycle online or a lot more people do not everybody right like but it's certainly a trend. Cohen I want to bring you back so you talked about the triple wind how do y'all go about finding that other partner that somebody that you can share the work with where y'all both benefit like what's that process look like? Actually for us for the most part it's happened largely on kind of a referral basis right we hear about a company doing some great work Darcy Partners comes to mind right and so I hear about that first thing I want to go do check it out see if they have

the trust of the market which from what I've seen they do and then you put your best foot forward and you just remember it's a people thing so just reaching out engaging hey can we participate in this event just like with sales you're gonna get a lot of no's no we're not gonna do that no we don't do hosted webinar you guys can't promote this you can do that exploring that and go checking it out instead of just dropping a profile on a page and leaving it there yeah go chat with them if you can but yeah in terms of finding those places it's word of mouth and same way I think I got in contact

with you somebody had mentioned hey you got to check out this OGGN sure enough check it out see the some of the stuff you're putting forward and I think yeah Mark seems like a cool guy it seems like he's getting some good stuff going on and it seems like he's first and foremost he's bringing value to the same people I want to bring value to that's the secret I didn't pay Cohen to say that ever but I will give Darcy a plug ourselves they are a good company I don't know if you met who's saying but when I first met them his mother on Fridays was coming to cook lunch for the entire

team like how cool a company cultures that when the CEO's mom is coming in and cooking for the entire company once a week I love those guys over they're doing some really great work so here's another question a lot of people especially in oil and gas are fiercely competitive fiercely protective of what they're doing and they see other companies that are in or near their space as pure competition and they want nothing to do with them and Matt and I have this idea that even though other companies may be doing the same thing that Matt and I are doing like there's

other sales and marketing podcasts out there that doesn't mean that we can't work together because they have a slightly different audience than we have they would probably like exposure to our audiences and we would like exposure to their audiences so how do you feel about working with semi-competitors even up to direct competitors I think you got to do it but if you're going to play the game go play the game and do you want to keep everybody off the court so it's boring to play boring to watch boring to participate in no you want to have some of that healthy interaction

and again we happen to run into this quite often where there's overlap between we got like you said kind of a semi-competitor so we can do some things really really well but they can also do some of those things really well however there's going to be some type of synergy there's going to be some type of opportunity for you to move forward together and if you can do that well now you're shared client your shared team they're going to get a hundred points on the board instead of 75 yeah for us it's a must it's a must to keep that dialogue open yeah and I agree and I think as we

go through time it's interesting to watch I keep saying this new younger workforce but the oldest millennials now in their 40s and so now we're talking the Gen C guys and girls they are so much more collaborative than my generation was that it's just natural for them to work together even with their competitors and I actually think that is an amazing thing from a business culture point of view I never really did like the us versus them mentality and that can be taken to the extreme if you look like what's going on in say politics here in the US it's ridiculous regardless

of what your political beliefs are you want to get something accomplished I love the fact that this new younger workforce is starting to collaborate much more back to your triple threat so we talked about working with other companies that are in your space we're talking about working with maybe even competitors but the benefit to the client for the customer that you have in common is amidst because now you're bringing the problem solving and thought leadership from two different companies together to focus on this one client that has to be amazing for them as well yeah yeah it really is

when you get a few more perspectives around the table it makes everybody better it's going to make us better I'm going to be able to say hey have you guys thought about doing this and maybe they're a semi-competitor maybe they're just a great synergy as a partner you help highlight maybe where you have some gaps you help get a new perspective on where you can bring value and for the client you can think about it like you've now got two organizations that are fighting to bring you value and for our perspective we don't want to close any deals just for the sake of

closing them it actually doesn't benefit anybody if we close a deal that we don't think is going to be a good fit it's going to burn our time it's going to bring the client's time it actually also helps you qualify each other and validate and again in the software space people they need some ability to trust you and to validate that trust and so getting a few more people around the table really helps with that yeah it's a half of my sales audience gasp when you said sometimes you don't want to close the deal but it's true in my career I've closed deals that

we shouldn't have and the cost both financially and emotionally of dealing with that those bad deals it's just not worth it and salespeople I know you have a quota to meet I know you have commissions and obligations but sometimes you got to just walk away one of the other things that I love about this triple play idea is so you're bringing the best and brightest you're bringing multi perspectives multi books of knowledge and experience to help the client solve a problem the client actually benefits from this but how do you structure these type of deals

how does ironsight structure these type of deals internally so from a sales point of view traditionally if we have a partner on a sale we end up ahead of time figuring out some way to split whatever the profits are the revenue or the commission or whatever from a marketing point of view how do you work that tactically when you work with a different company well for me it's mostly from a marketing perspective in let's go find somebody that's aggregating content or knowledge or something along those lines and let's go be a piece of that content we kind of play into that

space so there's typically at least when it's taking it from a marketing perspective I'm not trying to split when split commissions split sales split any type of thing like that really what I'm saying is like I want to actually bring you some value and if that works for you and you see the value and I see the relationships you have in the industry and the value that you bring you're going to bring an amazing experience and you're going to put together an amazing event much better than I can but an event has to have some people there it's got to have some interesting

points so that's really how I approach it there in terms of like on the the sales side of things and for us when it's like working with other software companies that varies quite a bit we don't have each deal that's so unique where we've got this like really well-defined structure and we don't want to break from it so yeah it varies yeah each engagement is going to be unique anyway right if I read between your lines it sounds like sometimes one of the things that you do is offer just to produce content to help the other company that's worth a lot because that's the

hardest thing even though earlier we talked about it does a caution thing what it does caution is time so by you volunteering to write content that's be something super valuable to the company you're trying to partner with yeah yeah and the best and easiest content for us is just existing so if iron sight in the market as is it's bringing value and I can help connect and help a partner see that value then really the content is them getting to learn more about us me sharing a little bit more sometimes if you don't even need to go so far as to start writing

articles and doing that kind of thing it's really like they know who you are and they see value you know who they are they see value and you also get to share that and spread that across your client so we'll bring some names and faces to the table as a part of that again it's just building those relationships and when it's a triple win the incentive is that you found a win for all three people it doesn't need to necessarily be monetary it doesn't need to necessarily be hard work even all right go so we lost Matt I think he could still hear us but because we lost him and he

we can't hear him completely we're going to just give him all the action items at the end of the show because he can't say no so triple win for everybody I love where you're going with that ironsight if people don't know what ironsight does let's give them a little bit of background and help them understand more of what we talked about today so what does ironsight do yeah yeah so at a high level ironsight is connecting the office in the field for field operations there's lots of software that helps people schedule document analyze do all kinds of stuff but

what's that field experience like you need that field adoption so we connect the office in the field in that sense and then we also connect there's a lot of siloed systems so you're creating loads of data across the board and none of those networks speak to each other so we want to move the right information from let's say you've got a rock somewhere we want to move that information from your command center out to the field so your team can go take action we want to document what actually goes on in the field and then we want to push that back out to the end systems

that are needed so kind of like a combination of like a project management tool mixed with something like a uber eats or something like that except you're not ordering food you're ordering your field services and the approach we've taken is we use kind of what we think is the fundamental workflow that any field service is going to use so that's requesting work scheduling the work going and doing it documenting it and then reviewing that work afterwards and by taking that approach to what we do it lets us be really configurable to handle all types of

different services all types of different activities yeah a couple of super important things you just rattled off I want to back up on so the first one is configurable instead of customizable and if you don't know what that means that literally means it's drag and drop you can design what works best for you the other thing is are you kidding me only gas industry has siloed data no way like everything is siloed in this industry it always has been it's ridiculous and y'all being able to help with that is huge and then bottom line is and actually was having

this discussion yesterday bottom line is if you can't help the guys in the field your tool will not be adopted and one of the things I love about what y'all do is it's so easy to use and it's so intuitive that the guys in the field see the value in using the tool which means that the company adopted and you get to improve all the different metrics which by the way if you're listening to what cohen's saying it sounds like he's just improving efficiencies in the field it's way more than it's everything from hs and e-metrics at lost time instances you know for sure if you

have to roll a truck at three in the morning or if you don't have to roll a truck at three in the morning it's making a huge difference and I think cohen I'm guessing here but I think a lot of your clients were probably the smaller service companies that are out there and by giving them this enterprise level tool you're allowed to compete with some of the bigger companies that have the budget to do their own type of stuff in-house yeah so we actually when we got our start and up until very recently we've really focused our commercial offering actually on the other side of the

network which is the why we call it demand and supply so demand for us being the people that need to go get work done that's typically going to be like an energy producer midstream company something along those lines and then they take our software and then they would go and say okay all of our service providers this is how we're going to start managing work documenting what's going on here you go here's this tool for the service riders it's free right but we have to get adoption in the field 100% because there's also the element of like these service companies and

necessarily go choose to use ironsight at that point now recently we've been starting to open up the ability for the service riders to manage multiple clients and clients that aren't even on ironsight in the first place so before it was like you get onboarded by big EMP and you can only use ironsight for that that EMP now we've opened the gates where your service rider you can now start to use it still for that EMP if that's how you got introduced to ironsight you can go and quickly add all your other clients and start to use this tool for them as well to your point

about getting adoption in the field it's the same thing we need to be able to get adoption in the field for people that didn't necessarily choose to use the software or make that purchase decision we need to get adoption from service companies we have to show them value and make their lives easier and we also have to do the same for some of the world's biggest companies and I know this is sales and marketing podcast not the technology podcast but I do want to talk a little bit more about the tech stack in that a lot of our listeners work for the large service

companies the mid-sized smaller operators so one of the things I know that people are in their heads are going right now before they go check out your website is do I have to forklift anything do I have to get rid of any of my old technology that I bought that I invested time and money in to actually work with ironsight can we just bring ironsight yet that'll be situation dependent so it depends on if you want to double up or maybe you bring in a piece of software for a very very specific use case and it's not one you want to pay us to replace but it varies quite a bit so for a lot of companies

the case is typically no because they're using paper they're using a lot of paper a lot of phone calls a lot of group chats a lot of excel spreadsheets in the sense of getting rid of those things you're probably almost always going to start shedding some of that weight when it comes to other technologies like if you have just a purely dedicated just only a forms documentation thing we might replace that if you have a ticketing software we might replace that if you have the field extension for like a cmms or erp we'll probably replace that there's a lot of things

we can replace one of the trickiest things that we run into and this is usually for the mid to large-sized companies is they've already started building typically attempting to build their own version of what we do with much more limited scope and when you've put 30 million dollars into doing something like that that's really challenging to go and it's a lot of sunk cost so yeah maybe if you spent 30 million dollars on that solution and we can come in and maybe we'll charge you two million and you know that'll work right away and you can get it going what a great segue back

to sales so a lot of companies out there that sell technology only ask to go into the same problem where the company that you're trying to sell to is already invested money into their own solution and we all know that it probably is not going to be very good and it's going to be expensive and you can have a maintenance cost you may even have a bunch of app dev guys on payroll just to keep everything running so let me tell you what you really need to get around when you're in that position it's not so much the money the companies invested but that will be the first thing you

hear it's that it's people's jobs and people's reputation in the company nobody wants to be the guy to spend 30 million dollars the company's money come to find out they have to do something else so from a sales point of view you got to find who those people are that was champions of that original investment and make friends with them and start showing them the benefits and then all you really need to do you don't want to forklift and replace the initial install because that's not going to work culturally somebody's going to get mad somebody's losing a job all you

want to do is get a little piece of the business and show them how you can help them then what happens is the company's own users of your tool see the benefit versus their inside tool and they will start adopting it themselves without ruffling any feathers it takes some time you're going to have heightened time awareness takes a couple years but you can come in replace existing investments but what you can't do is make them forklift it right away that will never never work yeah no you're exactly right that is typically how we'll go about when we take off a deal and we get an

implementation we want to start to exactly where's like the lowest friction point for us to start that's going to bring the most amount of value so what's the lightest lift for both of our teams to get us in the door start seeing some results and then where are we going after that as well and roughly what does that timeline look like but it's also going to change as you get in there right you're going to get feedback from your team you're going to realize oh wow we can actually use it for this use case and we want to go focus there and the upstream side of the demand side

for us there's massive operations there's typically some place we can go in and get a good start yeah all right time to wind the show down we're going to go ahead and put a link in the show notes both to Cohen's LinkedIn profile and also to Ironsight but real quick Cohen if people wanted to reach out to Ironsight and they're not going to the show notes where do they go yeah you're going to want to go to www.ironsight.app or hop into LinkedIn look for Ironsight technologies those are going to be two great places to find us yeah and people if you have any need for field service type of

stuff check them out they're just good people and they do great work all right since Matt's not here it looks like I gotta do all the rest of this stuff myself one of the things remind the audience to sign up for our two newsletters we have our Sunday update which includes everything from recipes from the oil field from 80 or 100 years ago to humor to quick video updates some information to help you in your oil and gas work week coupon so just check out our Sunday update Cohen I'll tell you the story again once again my marketing team brought me the idea of starting

another newsletter once again I thought that was a stupid idea because when I hear newsletter I think spam once again I let them do it on their own to fail and not only did they not fail they went from zero to 21,000 subscribers in six weeks for a Sunday update isn't that crazy yeah that's a spectacular failure yeah so once again that's why I'm on the sales side of this podcast not the marketing side of this podcast so go check that out the links are in the show notes we also have all gas events newsletter if you're in sales and marketing it's super useful it lets you know

where all the oil and gas events are around the world plus a lot of times there's free coupons that nobody else gets to get you in those events for nothing Matt and I's all our social profile links are also in the show notes we're still working on our insiders group our mastermind group for all the gas sales and marketing professionals we're gonna be launching that early next year now it's time for the LinkedIn fail or tip of the week and Matt actually brought this up even though he's not on here it was a great one as far as a fail if you have a LinkedIn

profile make sure you verify that and it's really a simple process for me it was all a matter of just uploading my driver's license and taking a selfie and then LinkedIn could look at that to make sure I really was who I said I was and now my profile is verified and Cohen I actually noticed about a 30% uptick in activity on my post on LinkedIn after verifying my profile so it absolutely gives you a little bit more reach it cost you nothing and we've all been hit by the spammers on LinkedIn this helps LinkedIn prevent people from making up fake profiles and hit you up to

try to sell you stuff so that's our LinkedIn tip of the week is to make sure you verify your LinkedIn profile all right Cohen it was a great having you on the show we're gonna have to get you back on the show maybe we even with Matt's bandwidth is a little bit better so you can participate but thank you thank you thank you for coming on yeah thank you so much for having me and yeah of course I'm gonna plug everybody go check out IronSafe check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast

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