Account Based Marketing

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing 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. Welcome back to the oldest and most listening to Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast on the planet.

Sitting here with my co-host, Matt Bertram. How you doing, Matt? Oh, I'm feeling good today. It's a Friday. I think we should open some of that wine or something. Something over there.

I think it's time. It's four. It's wine o'clock somewhere. And if you can't tell, we're at the fifth ring corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas. What Matt is pointing to looks like a wine bar in one of the meeting rooms, which I think Ian is a great initiative.

I don't know. Was that your idea? Or did somebody talk you into it? It's the one rider I have for every office I have around the world that has a wine fridge. Love it. Are you hiring?

I don't see. I don't have anything to do with the decor or the layout. That's my one rider. I love it. I love it. I love it.

And Todd, you're sitting here with us, bringing all your expertise and background and experience and knowledge. And what a great subject because this is something that people get wrong all the time. We're talking about actually, so Todd, this is a subject you brought up. You have a lot of experiences, a lot of expertise. Let's talk about something that a lot of companies get wrong, but a few companies get right, which

is account-based marketing. First thing. One of y'all. What is it? A lot of probably chief sales officers may be going, what's account-based marketing? How do we explain that?

Yeah, interesting. So yeah, you're right that a lot of people want to do it. A lot of people have invested in doing it. A lot of people have attempted to do it, but few have truly done it right. So what I say is there's the account-based marketing or ABM as some people would call it.

And there's ABM done right and ABM done light. And if you were to summarize it into a process to be able to develop enough technology and information around an individual prospect that you want to speak to, to appeal to them in a compelling way one-to-one about what your product or service offering is, and then systematically automate it to be able to touch them through a journey. So at different stages in which they're gaining awareness, they're gaining some interest and

ultimately getting to where they raise their hand and said, please speak to me. There's complete science, there's great technology, there's marketing stack that goes into it. But it all goes back to a true art, which I've said before, it's the art and the craft of storytelling. And you have to tell the right story at each and every phase of that. Well, for once in this conversation, I'm not really sure what we're talking about.

So I still want to get some definition around. So it's about the account-based marketing. Is that the targeted individual, a group of individuals, or a group of companies that have similar businesses? I think there's two questions to answer here, what it is and how it works best. Lots of CMOs and chief revenue officers or CEOs or CFOs get seduced about what it is.

It's technology-driven, it's persona-driven, it's a means of identifying your highest value prospects and focusing your marketing effort where you think it's going to have the greatest impact and greatest revenue impact and the greatest conquest impact. That's what it is. And these people who live in numbers go, that's what we need because we've done spray and pray for our lives and if we can identify our highest value prospects and we can identify

the personas who are going to make decisions based on our products or services and we can send materials to them accurately, precisely, then we're going to win out. And on paper, that would be it. But it falls down onto how you do it. Does that answer your question? No, it totally answers my question.

It's a focused marketing effort on the highest value prospects based on a thorough understanding of the personas that are going to be influential in that decision-making. And people go, wow, that's what we need because it's going to lower our cost of attribution and lower our cost of attraction to sale. And then it falls apart. Do you know what I love about that concept at least, whether it falls apart or not, is

now because every company, even if you're somebody as big as Amazon, every company has some type of limited resources, which means you're now taking your limited resources and you're applying them to be the most effective way possible. Am I getting that right? Exactly that. Love the idea.

Well, let me just, it wasn't that long ago that somebody really smart said, you know, half of my advertising dollars work, we just don't know which half. Well, this is a way to solve the half of my dollars are working because now we have attribution. We have true attribution as to who's engaging, what are they doing, what are they buying, how can we put some predictive analytics behind it to say, ultimately, eventually, if I pull this lever and do some more of this, this is what's going to happen.

If I turn this off, this is what's going to happen, right? Wouldn't a CEO love that? So clients and CEOs and CFOs love that premise, but once again, I'm going to say, and then it falls apart. All right. So let's do this.

Let's divide the show into half. I'll be the timekeeper. Let's start with what's going to be the most fun part of this, I think. Let's talk about how it falls apart and how it doesn't work or what do companies do wrong? Well, because let me tell you what I've seen from account-based selling is that I see companies get sold a tech stack that is guaranteed to be the best thing in the world and it doesn't

work at all. Then the top sales leaders or the top performer salespeople leave, right? Because they're being handcuffed, they're not allowed to do what they're really good at and the ones that are left because they're more junior don't have the experience when the account-based sales falls apart, they don't have anything to do. So then that company's entire revenue model falls apart because somebody got sold something

that can't deliver. And my question always is, were they sold something that can't deliver or were they sold something they don't know how to use? Well, there's one little piece of that, that the history of selling of all time is your best salesperson has an amazing Rolodex and I just showed my age and as soon as they leave, all of their people leave with them, right?

And the goal initially was get everybody that you know into a centralized location and let's learn a little something about them, right? The premise of the ideal CRM. So now once we have that information, what are we going to go do about it? So then we need a tech stack which is going to allow us to segment it and form smaller groups in which we can talk to those individual groups in the right way.

Mark, I would even say you start with like what your target personas are. No, wait, remember, we're supposed to be talking about how it falls apart first. Oh, well, how it falls apart is people don't know how to use the technology. Like most people don't know how to tag in a CRM drip that they've created for a certain target persona that's going to create those touchmush because essentially, Mark, what you have to do and maybe we're answering this differently because I think you've got to

understand what perfect looks like or what you're trying to do first is and then identify how it falls apart. But the reality is you're trying to create the perfect experience for that target persona. So who is the target and then what does that customer journey look like and what are those objections and what do they need to hear 80% of the time, 80 plus percent of the time usually will convert.

And so laying that out in a way where you can replicate that in mass and you can turn it on and turn it off is what I think that end goal is. I mean, for salespeople, it's just air cover. Well, but is the data we're going to start with the company CRM because if so, I love you all. Yes, service companies.

90% of your CRM is full of bad data, right? And so you can't start with something like that and expect to build out an end product that works. Well, you look at your past customers and then maybe you do a workshop or a session to figure out who do you want to go after, right? Because maybe potentially your past cover is maybe not your most profitable customer

or where you want to take the business. So you've got to map out where you want to go and then you work backwards and figure that out. But that whole journey, like we talked about in two podcasts ago, I guess, is, well, most of this is done online before they pick up the phone and call somebody and to soften them up from an air cover standpoint, starting to hit them at every decision making point

along the way where they see your brand is a beautiful thing. And it's not that actually hard to do, but it's the implementation of it. Let me go back to what you said just to answer your initial question. Where does it fail? The disconnection between sales and marketing and sales isn't bought in, so they're not putting the right data in, they're not cleaning the data, they're not staying up to date with

it. Absolutely. Marketing is not sharing their value of why they should be doing it. And that's a complete disconnect. And it fails there. This could be a long episode.

This is good. So data is one, extent of ambition is another failure point. You can do almost anything with the right tech stack, but you have to have the resources to do it. Yes. And so this is going to sound like I've got the most mediocre ambition in the world,

but it isn't. Do 10% right, really right, and then go 15 or 20 or 25. If you aim for 100, you're guaranteed to fail because the tech will overwhelm you. So for goodness sake, get the right data and then operate in the art of the achievable based on the resources you have at hand. If you want to run a nurture campaign, then you better have a content production team

behind it that can sustain a nurture campaign. If you don't, it's going to fall at the first hurdle. Then in Matt and I are old school marketing students, if you like, and I know I speak for Todd, then it fails based on what you put through the system. If you put poor stuff through the system, it will lack any engagement. It will pass like a ship in the night.

In the old school metaphor that was drummed into me when I first got into this industry, the premise of any communication is to attract and hold. So it better be creative and it better be interesting. The favorable attention of the maximum economic number of the right kind of people. There's where your MarTech, your ABM sits. Crucially, while a selling story is told and a desired action or reaction is taken,

if it fails at any hurdle, it fails as a piece of communication and it fails as a piece of targeting. And the only bit the ABM addresses is the maximum economic number of the right kind of people. If the data is right and the plumbing is right, but you better get the other bits right as well if you're going to make it work.

All right. This is perfect. We identified what it is, why it fails, right? I think there must be a cultural element in that failure part too. Todd mentioned CRM. As a former salesperson, the reason I didn't put all the right data in the CRM wasn't because

I was lazy. It was because management didn't incite me to put the right data in there, right? So they didn't incite me to drive the right behavior. I didn't know that then. I know that now that I'm more experienced. All right.

So we've established the base on what it is, what it fails. Okay. Now let's talk about what can it do? What does account-based marketing do that really helps a company succeed? Yeah. So let's just say where they start from.

Oh, great. Please start. So here's where they start from. The CEO, the sales manager, the marketing manager is saying, guess what? Our current results are pretty mediocre, right? We don't get the conversions with the right individuals that we need.

The conversations aren't moving fluidly. The leads that are coming to us are not qualified. Why aren't we getting traction? We're doing lots of great stuff, but it's just not hitting right. We go to every trade show. We do social posts.

We do all of these things, but there's no connectivity. And because I have no vision of what's going right and wrong, I have not clear and even how to fix it. So that's where they're like scratching their head. If I keep doing what I've done, I'll always get what I got, right? They just got a bunch of activity going on.

Exactly. And really smart people that have money within the organization say, I have to fix this. And then they come to companies like us and they say, what would you do, right? And we then evaluate where they are, evaluate what they're doing, look at what they have from a technology standpoint, look to see if they have a clean database, really give them a once over as to where they're at.

And that's where the right versus light ABM kind of holds. And I think Ian's right to say, resource is resource, right? You're not going to add an entire team to do this. You're not going to go and staff up to this completely. But if you say, I can get incremental gains by just doing it slightly different, get buy-in from leadership, get buy-in from the sales team, get buy-in from marketing and progress

by what's the lowest hanging fruit from a specific persona group, right, that I can go after. Now, there's a difference in creative ABM, I'll clarify creative, because I think creative ABM lies heavily on the visuals and the storytelling, even more so than on the technology, right? And that can be done, right, with a narrow focus, very narrow focus. When you start saying, I have so many audiences, so many channels, I need a creative ABM for

10 different groups, like it's just overwhelming and that's where it fails, right? I just can't feed the machine, right, I can't keep the machine going. That's my perspective. Ian, you know, I think you could probably parlay that a little bit deeper. I'll take it one step further. If you're going to operate in creative ABM, you're going to need to balance a left brain,

the logic and the right brain of creativity. Yeah, the mapping, yeah. Exactly that. You can put all the logic in the world and if you look at the activity in the M&A sector, the creative, in the creative space in particular, the big four and others piled into buy these kind of businesses, ABM, data driven, all the rest of it, bought them and then realized

that without the right creative material going through this plumbing that they'd bought, had very little effect, they'd bought a process. The process in itself will deliver nothing. You can define the best process in the world, but it's what you put through the pipe that's going to really, really matter. So little did I think when we started this business that we would have data analysts

in a creative agency, or fundamentally, I hope, a creative agency. But if you're going to operate in this field, you've got to have that left logic brain working in tandem with that right creative brain. In the same way as Mark opened one of the episodes to say, you got to have these creative marketers working with the people who are at the co-face in sales. It will be a combination that makes it work.

It will not be driven by one or denied by the other. Two things. One will bring up a little bit later because I'm genuinely curious, but it's definitely going down a rabbit hole. But the one I am that pertains to this, so if I listen to the tech vendors, they will tell me in all sincerity that in order to do account based marketing correctly, I have

to have the right tech stack. Is that true? You have to have a degree of a tech stack in order to do it to some effect and connected. If you want to do all of it, all of the time, always on, then you better have the biggest tech stack in the world. But the whole idea of light or creative ABM is to work within the resource constraint

that any company is fielding. I would tell you, most companies, when I go and look at them from a consulting standpoint, they're using whatever the tech stack is, they're using 10%, 20% of it. And so instead of going, trying to convert to a whole new software system, it's like, let's use this one correctly first. Let's get something working and then making those incremental improvements.

So my other question was this, y'all said something that caught me off guard. I'm pretty versed in this industry. I've been around for a little bit, been in sales and marketing. You all have conversations with CEOs and presidents of large companies and they actually use the terms persona, conversions, true marketing terms. Am I getting old?

Am I missing the change in our industry? So do CEOs actually understand those terms and use them? I think that what they do is they understand the challenge their team's facing with the mediocre sales, with the slow growth, and they're saying, what's the solution? And I do think there are some CEOs, they're savvy enough to understand the value in this type of thing.

They may not know the terms, they may not know the fire, they don't know how the sausage is made, right? And don't need to know how the sausage is made, but they surround themselves with a great VP of marketing, they surround themselves with great advisors like us and say, I'm going to empower you to fix it, I'm going to give you the resources to fix it because I know what the problem is.

I have come across some CEOs that are pretty savvy in this. I love that. Depending on the industry. I'm going to come in there. We all come across CEOs who have become savvy in it because what they bought or what they thought they bought, the magic sauce of automation and the like, hasn't worked.

And then they look and say, well, I spent that money on a tech stack and I bought into the principle of hunting the big fish and focused effort and all the rest of it, but I'm not seeing the return. And then they're forced to understand terms like persona and attribution and lead generation in the lake because they're now in it. They've bought it, they've invested in it, and now they're trying to figure out why it

doesn't work. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned this, but the premise of the show to Southern Matt and I believe in 100% hold hardly is that sales and marketing should be joined at the hip. I am hoping that Matt, sometime soon that we add CEO to that mix, that the CEO, the head of sales and the head of marketing should all be joined at the hip.

I love the idea. Well, a CROs are a good like step in the right direction, okay? And I'm starting to see a lot of organizations start having a CRO where you have somebody like the left hand and the right arm. Like what is going on with both of these parts that are all trying to achieve the same thing? There's always been this disjointedness at back to even the beginning of this podcast

that they're not talking. And so in the marketplace, it's just broken, right? But I think the CEO is the person that comes down and says, well, let's get this done. And what I've seen actually with a lot of organizations is sales has kind of worked up through the ranks and they're starting to run a lot of these companies effectively and they understand this stuff.

And those are the companies that are pulling ahead. And so I'm seeing a lot of culture change. That's great. So let's say the past CEOs came through operations or finance and now more coming through a sales and marketing group rare, but it does happen. And the ones that are have the right mind for that do surround themselves with individuals

that want to go tackle that. All right. So this is great, Matt. We may need to add CEO to our insider group. But Ian, Tom, we'll go back to account based marketing. So we talked about what does it work?

What it looks like? What works the importance of technology? How important is it for the marketing leaderships to buy into this whole hornetly? That's a great question, Mark. I'm going to answer that with a question. I'm not sure you can be half pregnant.

Ian, this is a weird world, 20, 20, 40, 50, 40. I was like, I could go a lot of different directions here and there could be some. Hey, it's about that. It's my show, Todd. Matt and I show. We talk about whatever you want.

Come on. There is data available to us everywhere. We no longer have to spray and pray. We no longer have to have 50% of the advertising and doesn't working. We can focus our effort. So the principle of focused effort is undeniable.

So if you've then taken the step beyond that to say, I'm going to buy some more tech by virtue of a CRM or something that can attribute my marketing effort, you're halfway into that journey. Now, you're unlikely ever to come back. All of us have lived through the booths era where all B2B was done on trade show floors and things of that nature.

It's a different animal. We now have the ability, based on technology evolution, to target and target precisely the biggest fish that we want to get to. The buy into that is a pretty small step fundamentally, logically for any business to do. Then you're unlike, unless you have the worst experience of the world and some do, but even then they're going to come to maybe somebody like us and say, look, we're kind of halfway

across here, but we're not seeing the traction that we want. Can you help us out? But it's unlikely they're ever going to go back. So one of the things that I have seen to kind of piggyback on what you're saying is there's a lot of traditional marketing agencies and advertising agencies out there that are half pregnant, maybe, or they haven't fully committed to the data.

They want to still do things the old way. And that's where organizations like mine come in as a white label because they don't know how to utilize the data. They just want to run the print ad. They just want to put up the billboard. They just want to do the TV ad, and then it doesn't work, and they don't even know why.

Those days are numbered. I've looked at the revenue spend on even TV. It's really going to the personalized sell and utilizing the technology in a way that's meaningful. So if you have good data, your account-based selling can outdeliver a company that has more money than you.

And that's where I'm standing. I couldn't agree more. I'm never subscribed to the Silver Bullet in marketing. It's not one channel, and God knows, all of us have lived through the companies that come in and tell you it's all about SEO, or they tell you that it's all about ABM, or it's all about.

That's pretty good. It is. No, I know. But it's not the only thing. It's a tool in the tool belt, absolutely. But if every problem was a nail, every solution would be a hammer, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But not every problem comes in that shape. It's not always a nail. And it's never all about anything. It's about an understanding of the audience, the mapping of the audience you're trying to reach, and then a pic of the tools to do it.

I mean, funny, and let's just be a little irreverent for a minute, I think there's still a queue to buy a billboard at Midland Airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for sure. And a high demand for it as well. Right, I think there's still a line for it.

So there's a reason that people want it there is some visibility. You know what, I did a call, and I would tell you even some of the people that are delivering some of these things haven't figured it out. I wanted to buy billboards at OTC from certain airlines. Okay, I wanted to pull the data of where most people were coming from, and then the path that they walked in the airport to whoever's going to pick them up or baggage claim.

They couldn't structure that for me. They couldn't set that up where I could buy the digital billboards along the way. Well, it's a little off topic, but I will tell you that billboard companies have got into geofencing and you could geofence locations like the airport. Like the airport, like 45, like OTC in the buildings and triangulate the data to say this individual flew to Houston, this individual came down 45, they're staying at the Hyatt

and now they're at OTC and all of a sudden you're like, bing, bing, bing, bing, right. So there is a little attribution, not 100% there, but. You did remind me. I do want to tell you thank you for last year. Y'all did sponsor our booth at OTC. That's right.

So thank you. I really appreciate it. People love that. All right. Something else popped up in my mind. Marketing officers in this industry, especially for large public companies, one of their biggest

problems is justifying their budget to upper management, right? And after listening to all three of y'all experts around this account-based marketing, wouldn't that fix that problem? Wouldn't that, if it's done right, wouldn't that allow you to justify your spend with real data? Done right?

Exactly. Versus done like. I will say that we had a client, I hope she's not listening right now, but she told her CEO that I will guarantee X number of leads by X date. And then said, you're okay with that number, right? To us.

Oh, to y'all. I committed to this because I'm committed to this, right? And you know, it's multiple stages, setting it up. Great news. What you go do about it after that? Well, that's where the- That's another, if I may be exibald, at a conversation with

a client a week ago today, they have the ability to do the very thing that we're talking about the creative ABM. They have the data, they have a machine that we can provide that's going to provide the content and things, but we had a look at the customer experience and there was a sea change in the way that they wanted to drive people to the checkout in virtual terms and it changed with a completely different looking feeling.

The drop-off rate of people going all the way through the buyer journey to hitting the button to buy was enormous. And actually, we can earn our corn by fixing that. Not fixing the top of the funnel, but fixing that. See, it's not about just the tech, it's not about the creative. You've got to look at everything that happens thereafter.

So if you generate a response, and remember we talked about whilst the selling story is told and that our action or reaction is taken, you better have all the right information behind there that tells the customer the right place that they're talking to the right people. There's evidential stuff there, there's case studies there, there's commentary there, there's testimonial there in order to see the thing through from the top of the funnel to the point of sale.

It's not enough to have unqualified leads. You've got to look at it all the way down. And if you said in a previous conversation, how far is that customer journey online, driven potentially by creative ABM, you're going to have to give them 70% of the material that used to be provided by the salesperson before they're going to pick up the phone or send you an email.

Exactly. That's how you have to build it. Yeah. So it's not enough just to have the lead gen activity at the front. You've got to think about the customer journey beyond. Then it comes back to the loop of you generate the leads through creative ABM.

And then the salespeople have to be trained properly not to just cherry pick the leads that come in or not to develop them. So we've had a lot of that issue too is we're generating the right kind of leads and they only want to grab the whales. And so how do you nurture the rest of that? And so it all kind of fits together online, offline, back online again, salespeople.

What is that whole funnel? I should do an episode on driving the right culture of salespeople. So what you just described, I guarantee you, if I walk there and change the way the compensation was done, I'd fix immediately them just picking the whales. That's another podcast conversation. Well, maybe one other thing before you finish and Matt's just touching it.

Sell them is a customer's journey linear. Yeah. They'll pick it up. They'll put it down. A prospect's journey linear. They'll pick it up.

They'll put it down. They're provoked by a conversation internally. They'll pick it up again. They might pick it up in a different place. As marketeers, we think about it in a linear process. I'll feed them this at this time, but it's an always on.

You can predict customer behavior to a point, but you cannot predict customer prospect behavior absolutely. I want to like add to that after the podcast, but I'll tell you, like what I've seen in other industries outside of Olin Gas, let's say like education industry, you have like seven minutes from when the lead comes in, you have to move that potential customer as far as you can down the funnel as fast as you can, because as soon as they start doing

something else, they're no longer a prospect. They're doing something else and you got to wait for them to come back on. And so really, like when you're creating this funnel, you don't know that this is happening that people are stopping, starting, stopping, starting like you don't know how to do it. And you always have to be on, right? And so you want to have your salespeople at the ready, ready to go, and your marketing

ready to go to push them through that funnel as quickly as you can, because when we're talking about accounts to be selling, we're talking like big enterprise, like you can speed up these sales cycles, okay? Like these sales cycles don't have to be as long as they are. If you're leveraging some of the stuff that we've talked about today. So Matt, we're time to shut down the show.

Two things. So first thing is Ian and Todd, I want to ask you a question because we talked about a lot in this episode and our listeners tend to be the large Olin Gas companies out there, the CMOs, the chief revenue officers. Can fifth wing hold somebody's hand from beginning to end? If a chief market officer is like, I've heard of account-based marketing, I don't know

even where to start. Can they reach out to you and you can actually help them all the way through concept, tech stacks, implementation, training, all of that. Yeah. I think that first step is the buy-in, right? And that's the hardest step because it takes a commitment, right?

And honestly, we tell our clients, we want leadership commitment from day one. So you talked about CEO earlier, if we're doing any project, we want the CEO to be knowledgeable about it, to have the check-in, to be in the workshops, to have opinions on that. So to answer your question, yes. So the very first piece of it of getting sales and marketing aligned, getting leadership buy-in on it, laying out a path for expectations of what's going to happen each of the phases

of this and will go as fast or slow as people need because they're evolving their entire way of how they sell and how they market. I mean, this is a complete change for them. So there's some change management aspects of this that we have to hold their hand through. But really, people want to rush to the end. They want to get to, let me do a campaign as fast as I can and test the system, right?

So it's fine. We can do campaigns along the way for validation after we've done a few of those setup steps and a few of the cleaning the data and those issues. But I think it's all about that. You made the commitment. You're there.

You made the investment. You're here working it through. And then what you go do with it is really where the magic happens. All right. So if people want to reach out to Fifth Ring so you can hold their hand through this process, where should they go?

Yeah. They can go to FifthRing.com, reach out to myself, Todd Gregory, in the U.S. What's your cell phone number again? It is. It is. 976.

All right. I can give myself a number because it's Q2P and nobody's going to die there for a few of the cold charges. All right. So here's my other comment. Matt and Ian, outside of this conversation, I really think y'all too should schedule another

sketch spot on this show that y'all too run. Y'all too together are so dynamic and you'll have so many things in common. And I would love to listen to y'all. If you need me there to work the gear, I will. But I think if y'all are up to it somewhere in the future, y'all should do it. All you guys sales and marketing episode, just y'all too.

Just run with the like you're talking. I could have listened to you the whole day. However, we got to pay the bills. We got to get out of here. Audience, you know the deal. Two newsletters.

We have our Sunday update. That's everything from 100-year-old recipes from the oil field, including some of my old family recipes. You may not know this, Matt. My great-great-grandfather is a very well-known chef in New Orleans. He owns five restaurants.

Some of those restaurants are in our Sunday update. Y'all should get to see behind the scenes. Look at the OGGN. There's very short videos on what the market is doing. So great thing. Free.

Once a week. Links in the show note. If you're in sales and marketing, which I guess you would be if you're listening to the show, our oil and gas events newsletter is a great resource. We take all the oil and gas events, put them in your inbox once a month for free. Back with Matt and I on all our social channels.

Those links are in the show notes. Insiders group, which we may add CEOs to, depending on what's going on. I think that could be a good idea. We're working on that. We're working on CEOs. Now, it's LinkedIn's failure tip of the week, and I actually have a LinkedIn tip.

I had a young salesperson, a young woman, that reached out to me speaking of Marcom. She actually works for a company y'all would know the name of, and she shot me a video that she sent to me on LinkedIn, and in today's world, 2024, that's not that uncommon. You know what she did in that video, Matt? You won't lose. I'm going to tell you, she actually talked about my love of Maulback.

I have a love for the wine Maulback, which means she spent enough time researching me that somehow she figured that out and let me tell you, yeah, true ABM, even though I know she's a salesperson, I connected with her emotionally in immediately when she said the word Maulback and I have a call with her scheduled next week. Now, audience, do not send me videos talking about Maulback. Do not send me bottles and stuff.

Yes. Absolutely. But the whole point is you can customize a LinkedIn introduction in a way that doesn't take you a lot of time, that actually makes a real connection, which is what this young woman did. Her name is Sarah.

Big shout out, Sarah, because I know you listened to the show. All right, guys, we've got to get out of here. 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. And more at OGGN.com.