Account Based Selling: A deep dive into strategies and success stories

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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, welcome back everybody. What's up, Matt, other than it's 400,000 degrees outside. That's all I can handle. I don't want to go outside. I think I need to move from Houston. It's getting too hot. Oh, it is ridiculously hot. Matt, you came up with a fantastic topic today. You want to tell audience what it's about? Well, I just know we hadn't talked about account-based marketing before,

so I thought that might be a good topic because it really involves collaboration. Yeah, and account-based selling, the idea around it has been around for a long time. It's the account-based selling combined with account-based marketing that's relatively new where you can hyper-target whatever you want down to the individual. And I use this strategy all the time. So each week, and people think I'm crazy. I actually love to cold call. To me, it's like big game hunting, right? So you have that big kill. You got to prep for it. You got

to do your research. You got to be in the right mental space. You got to make sure you have the right gear. And I have one day a week in my calendar where I do nothing but cold call. And when I do this, I'm very specifically targeting. So this week, it was a cold call targets were companies that have supply chain solutions that the oil gas industry would need, which means that I did my research, which was interesting. So the big players in this space, the IBMs and the SAPs and the Oracles and the Microsofts aren't doing

real well right now. They've all had layoffs. They're hurting for revenue. However, there's a bunch of smaller companies, a lot of them just being funded that have tons of money that are growing like crazy in the space. And so that's who I targeted. And I was able to find companies that met that exact criteria that weren't too big, that were funded by venture capital, that had some type of supply chain software tool that the oil gas industry could have. And I sent out probably 20 emails and those 20 emails, I had 11 people reply back to me,

which means I was on to something. And I don't always have that type of success. Sometimes I have zero success, which tells me that either my target's wrong or my message is wrong. But it's a great way to think about bringing a new revenue to the door. So Matt, at a high level, what do people need to understand about account based selling? I want to back up a little bit because you were talking about cold calling. And certainly I used to do a lot of cold calling. And really why I moved from the sales side of the fence to the

marketing side of the fence is you were talking about your day, right, or your week. And I certainly had a lot of sales calls and closed actually two deals this week. However, I had people calling me. I had people getting on my calendar. I had to prep for the call because they had raised their hand and scheduled an appointment with me and they were ready to buy. Now, in the beginning, it's a little bit more of a shotgun approach when you're getting inbound marketing. But if you do your SEO right, if you do your marketing right, if you get your messaging right, you get the right

kinds of people calling you. So I'm getting the exact targets. I got actually two oil and gas companies, one to do a brand package for they want to be taken a little bit more seriously. They're a startup. They have some IP. I had a manufacturing company call me that they're looking to kind of tweak their brand. And then I had a drilling company or like a was it downhill tool company that wanted to do some increase their digital presence, do some SEO, do some math. So I certainly had sales calls too. I just had them coming in versus going out.

I think it's honestly better to have them going out. And that's what we're talking about with account based marketing. But some of the power in marketing today, when you get hyper focused and you get the right lures in the water, you can't guarantee what fish is going to grab you. You're not like spearfishing like you're spearfishing. But certainly, it's another way to generate leads for your business. So yeah, the only sales and marketing podcast that connects sales and marketing to fishing. Yeah, hey, that's something there. But account based marketing, right? Like cross

functional collaboration, personalized outreach, identifying targets, really what digital marketing does. Okay. And this is really how again, I transitioned like across the fence is I was doing the cold calling, I was sending the emails, I was saying, I'm doing repetitive things that should be able to be automated, certainly in the age of AI right now, even more so even more so AI to personalize it. But I was looking at how do I give the same personalized experience to multiple people at scale, right? And so customizing that automating components of that this is where your

CRM comes in. This is where like tagging that would send like a drip email, it's really taking a sales person and making them like putting all kinds of technology and armor on them to make them like Ironman, right? Like that's actually how I look at account based marketing is, okay, you figure out who you're going to target, you're doing B2B sales. Now you take a lot of automation, and maybe you're using some VAs, we did that podcast about that, and you utilize social selling and you're attacking an account, and you're working through, okay, how do I land this account and what are the

different vectors of getting in there? Yeah, I love it. So let's talk to a real example. I don't know if you have one off the top of your head, don't name the company, but kind of name what they do and how you would attack this. And if you don't have one, let's do a general one for the audience. So do you have one that you could talk to or do you want us to do a general one? I don't have an oil and gas specific example that I've worked with. So let's pick Chevron. So everybody knows who Chevron is. Let's say that you've decided that

you want to add Chevron to your portfolio of clients, you're not doing business with Chevron now. How would somebody start that? Well, if you're going to start with Chevron, honestly, the best way into Chevron from what I've found is you find a vendor that's already in with Chevron and then you get a contract with them and then you do a double margin business and then boom, you're doing business with Chevron. Well, no, let's back up. Let's look at our subject, which is account based sale and account based marketing. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Okay,

so what you would do, right? What you would do is you would identify who you think your buyers are on LinkedIn, right? You would through your personal network or if you're part of like SBE or something like that where you have a database or a directory, you figure out who your targets are. It might be multiple targets, typically in oil and gas, you got the field guys, you got the procurement guys or maybe even operations and then you got the executives or C-suite or whatever and you're identifying that target persona and what is that pain point

and what is that messaging that you want to reach them with, right? So you're identifying who you want to reach. It's multiple vectors, typically, and then you're going to try to figure out, okay, what is that customer journey to get the conversation opened up and in the direction you would like to have it done, right? And I would typically say, again, if we use the analogies, I have a lot of guys like veterans on my team, marketing is the air support, right? And so you're softening them up, right? You're getting them familiar with your name.

And the cool thing about marketing is now there's limits, okay? Like they continue to raise like how many people you can target, how hyper-focusing you can get from a privacy standpoint, but you're softening them up, you're getting them familiar with your name. You can do things so narrow that, you know, maybe a couple different companies, a couple different job titles, certainly, you know, if you're uploading a list, and then you can do a lookalike list, that's a great way to do it is upload a customer list, get a lookalike list, and then it's about three times bigger.

I can give you a real specific example, and I might have used it in the past, but it was targeting actually one of the service companies, one of the larger service companies that had a full, their own IP, right? They had their own network, and you can do something called IP targeting, along with like geofencing. And we basically sent a message that said, X, Y, Z service company, we love you, please give us a call. We would like to do business with you. And then it had a link to a landing page of a little bit more about them, but it was certainly customized for,

with the logo and everything like that to that company. And what ended up happening is it went out on the network, and so many people saw it, and they started forwarding it to the right person. And basically, they got a call to just make it stop. You know, you can use advertising to create an omnichannel environment to your targets, where it looks like you're everywhere all the time, and you are, but it's like a bubble around them, basically, right? Like where they're seeing their ads. And that's getting really, really narrow and personalized. And that would be, in my opinion,

the place to start with account based marketing is softening them up with different levels of marketing, getting them familiar with your brand, and maybe putting something out there to start opening up the conversation. Yeah. And if you listen to Matt and you said the word IP, and that sentence he meant internet protocol, not intellectual property. That's one of the funny things about the English language is you have words that mean two different things. So he identified the internet protocol of their network, and then that's actually a number, and he served ads that exact number.

So all the people in that company saw the ads. So I want to back up a little bit because I love where you took this back to our Chevron analogy. Whatever your company does, you got to figure out who in Chevron has that problem that you solve. And that person will have a title. And to Matt's lookalike audience, you can look for other people with that same title. We use a tool called Zoom Info. You got to pay for it, but it gives you access. I literally have people's private cell phone numbers, right? I can Google Chevron and get everybody's email address, everybody's job

title, their direct line, all that stuff. Now, having the contact information isn't what's important. A lot of salespeople freak out and marketing people freak out when they see these big databases, because without the right messaging, it's worthless to have the database, but you do need a way to source contact information. And then, since you're targeting people inside a Chevron that have the problem that you solve, your messaging is going to be similar. Remembering, though, that different people have that problem in different ways. So if you're selling something that helps with

production on a well site, the people on the operation side of Chevron are going to be really interested in hearing you talk about how you can help them increase production. However, by increasing production using a tool, that means you have less people on the well site, which means you can have the same conversation with people that work in health safety environment, talk about how your tool helps reduce lost time instances, same tool, same problem from a different lens. Then, because Chevron is corporate and public and has shareholders, you could talk to their CEO

about how your tool helps a shareholder value. And if you can talk shareholder value with any CEO of any public company out there, they'll listen to you. So same tool, different lenses, look at it, and now you're targeting the people they still want, how they see the problem, and you can reach out to them. And that there's millions of ways that marketing can help with this to get your messaging out there at scale. Instead of the way I do it, which is individual emails one on one, you can amplify that times 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000.

Yeah. So a couple just examples of this is there's a few companies out there that have these large content networks, and they publish a lot of content about certain type of topics. Some of these databases that you subscribe to, basically, you can get it down depending on how the database is set up to their login information, essentially, and what sites they looked at. So we were doing some targeting in the blockchain space, and there's actually specific IT people that I know at some of these major companies that are actually interested in this. And they've looked at multiple articles

because I have access to this data. Remember, your phone is just like a giant pixel, right? Anything that you go to on your phone is recorded or games that you play or whatever. And there's different ways to reach people. Now, they start widening who you can target, how narrow you can get. But if you can string together, or you're focused on a particular industry, you can go, hey, serve this ad to people who have searched these category or these topic of sites, right? So you could go oil and gas engineering as maybe a category, and then serve ads. Now,

it's a little bit broader. The more narrow you get, even on Facebook, it's got to be at least 200,000 people, right? So if you're tying, like I'm doing a campaign right now, we're trying to get super, super narrow on a specific thing. And you can't quite do that. I got to keep widening it a little bit. I think that's social media. And there's tools that you can use that basically you take the zoom info information, and you put it in there, and then it pulls up all their different handles where they're active, and you can manage everything in one dashboard.

So a lot of what marketing has become is, well, it's data driven, right? And if you label the data properly, if you have a big database of a bunch of names, it doesn't really help you. But that's where lead scoring comes in. There's different tools that you can use to clean up emails. But the better you can label your data, the more valuable it is. And that's why a lot of these CRMs are not being used really properly. But you can set up triggers and tags, right? And that's what we do is like, okay, this person really like this person, I have a couple different drip emails,

I'm going to tag them in my database, and then it's going to send them an email every week, right? A nurture email, and then oh, it's going to throw it on my calendar to call this person. So now that person had five touch points, or whatever, whatever number you want to come up with. And then it tells me to call them. How much better of a salesperson does that make me when they've had five touch points? Maybe they're seeing some ads. And then it reminds me to call them, right? Because I think a lot of people, salespeople are still doing sales the old way, I guess. It's

certainly effective. And the more eyeballs you can get with somebody, like getting somebody on a call or showing up in front of them is good. It was just, I guess, for me, like, doing the same repetitive thing all the time I go, there's got to be a better way. Like, there's got to be a more efficient way. And I think that that's essentially, from a marketing standpoint, what account base selling is doing is taking a good salesperson and making them fantastic. Yeah, I'm a respectfully disagree with you. The old way is selling an oil

and gas, which was relationship base, where you took the right VP out to play golf or the clay pigeon range or fishing or whatever, doesn't work anymore. It still works isolated instances. But here and in Europe, especially, the ethics rules have been enforced. Yeah, well, this committee based. And now there's no longer a decision maker, there's a decision making team. And so if you're still selling oil and gas based relationships, your days are numbered and you need to learn how to do things differently. I do want to talk about some old stuff that we can

morph into account based selling. So, you know, back to our Chevron example and back to our tool that helps with production. We talked about operations. But now you have a different window to look at conferences. So, OGGN is bringing three podcasts to an SPE conference in about a month called the submersible pump symposium. How much more niche can you get than a society of petroleum engineer conference on submersible pumps, right? Well, guess who's interested in submersible pumps? The guys that are worried about production, about operation, right? It's one of the ways you get

oil out of the ground. So, along the same theme, we've now just identified a conference that is going to be full of people that meet your persona, your target client. And if you know how to work the marketing tools, you can figure out who from Chevron will be there. In fact, some of these conferences actually put their attendees and their exhibitors online so you can see it yourself. So, once again, you can narrow down, you can niche, make sure you have your messaging right. You can go to this conference and you can talk to three or four people at Chevron who have an

interest in what you do. They have a problem that you can solve and they're all there in one place, all because you took this account-based selling idea and layered it across something like a conference. Well, okay. So, how marketing might get involved is prior to the conference or at the conference. So, prior to the conference, if you have permission to use the emails, right, like I got to like disclaimer that, you can put those in to social media channels, okay? If you have exclusive permission to use them. Actually, Matt, let's stop right here. This is really important that a lot of

people understand this. So, in the U.S. and in Europe, if you take somebody's email and load it in an email tool without their permission, number one, you're breaking the law. Number two, you're going to quickly get delisted and nobody's going to see your emails. In matter of fact, if you're not careful, you could have your domain. So, if you work for 123company.com and you're putting people's emails into MailChimp without their permission and you're sending stuff out, rather quickly, 123.com is going to get blacklisted. All the internet service providers talk to each

other around spam. Instantly, nobody in the world will get your emails, not just your emails, your president's emails, your CFOs, nobody. So, that's how important is that you make sure that you have permission and we double opt in. So, we make you do it twice and all the email tools out there have been built in that you do this, but super important. Do not take somebody's email, do not buy a list and load it into a mail tool because number one, it's not going to work and number two, you're breaking the law. Okay. So, buying lists sucks. Okay. Like, I've worked with a number of those different

companies. I wouldn't recommend it. Now, if someone gives you their business card, you can. That's giving you permission to contact them, right? You know, can spam act from an email standpoint, you're looking specifically in emails and certainly email automation is a big part of account base selling. Even before that, there was a fax blasting. I don't know if people remember that, but not too many people are around the fax anymore, but you know, you can't do that anymore either. And certainly taking that email list and uploading it into Facebook or LinkedIn or

something like that, not recommended. If we want to go down the, maybe we saved the podcast about email automation, there's a lot of things that how to do emails right, how to. Yeah, let's save that for another title. So, go back to how for the conference, you would. Yeah, yeah. Or the conference. So, if the conference is going on or prior to the conference, some prep for the conference, you can do a couple things. I think it's called, and this might be a bad terminology, but like hijacking the hashtag. So, if you start using the hashtag, or like you can do it when you're

at a conference, I've done that before where it's like shows up while, you know, depending on the conference, it'll show up while you're playing and say, you know, you get to see what's going on there. But Twitter, right? Twitter is like, what's going on right now? It's like the community marketplace, whatever. You can target zip codes. So, if like, for example, crypto or blockchain, certainly a lot of those people are on Twitter. So, we would run ads on Twitter. Nobody else was doing it at those conferences. Also, you can do something called geofencing. I talked about IP

targeting, which is one side of it. You can basically draw a circle or actually a hexagon or something like that around the location. And it will show them display ads when people get on different news sites that they're in network on. The really cool thing is if there's a conference that's been at a place for, let's say two years, you can go two years back and grab all that data, right? And likelihood that someone that went to that conference might go next year or might know what's going on and might miss it. And you can show ads to those people. So, you know, again,

there's a lot of ways where you have multiple vectors where if marketing and sales collaborate, you can get a really big share of voice, right? Like, you need to have the boots on the ground, but having the analogy I was using before the air power or the air support is really quite valuable. And another thing that marketing air support could do for you for your salesperson is instead of trying to exhibit at the conference, imagine if you set up five highly targeted meetings at the conference because your prospects are already going to be there.

You already know who they work for. We'll go back to our analogy of Chevron. You already know that they have something to do with production. And so having those five meetings at a conference is going to allow you to do it all that in one day, which you would never be able to do before. And marketing can help make those connections for you so that hopefully you form a relationship, you start the sales process. You're not going to close anything at the conference people, but you'll start the process of them wanting to learn more if you educate them,

which will then eventually, hopefully if you're good at sales, lead to closing a deal. Now you just picked up five new clients at one conference because you were using account based selling. So you use that social selling with maybe it's an inside salesperson if you're outside salesperson and it blurs the line of responsibility at different companies. But yeah, if you're warming those people up through liking their social media, having that target, I can tell you, if I go to a conference, and I do research on who the speakers are, I look at their websites,

I know what's going on. Usually I'll go to a conference and I'll talk to three, four of the speakers and build a relationship because you need to have that in person piece. Now one of the things you can do too is maybe not a private meeting, but if you have some kind of event or some kind of drawing, drawing seemed to do well at conferences or basketball, shooting or whatever, you could stream that live. You could go Facebook live, LinkedIn live, whatever, and people like watching a panda bear just lay around. People will watch that stuff and also

because it's live, it's going to show up in everybody's feed. And so you could say, hey, come to this booth. And that's something that you're leveraging technology and you're leveraging marketing. And if you're at that conference, you're targeting those accounts. Again, marketing and sales work really, really well together if you have some type of coordination. I loved the idea of live streaming and people, this doesn't take a lot of money or a lot of time. You can easily do it from your cell phone in a $25 tripod. But what a great way to get an

audience involved in what you're doing at a conference. And once again, start farming those relationships. It's a great idea of that. So we're starting to wind things down. We actually probably need to get out of here in a minute. Any final words of advice, Matt, if there's a sales and marketing team that are looking at account based selling, it's become a buzzword lately. And a lot of people aren't really sure of how they should even get started. So any words of advice or you might want to get started? Yeah, there's kind of two things I would focus on.

Everything tends to go better when there's preparation involved. And a lot has to do with targeting and messaging. And there's a lot of pre-work and strategy that needs to happen on your kind of go to market, right? And then the other piece of it is the tracking, the data labeling, the analytics, that stuff is so valuable, right? And a lot of times it's the salespeople that are in the middle from the execution standpoint between those two areas. And so really focus on that because a lot of times like, hey, I'll get my notes in later or you don't get them incorrectly

or you don't label stuff like because you don't see the value in that. And if you find the right marketing person at your company or fractional or outsource or whatever, you can do so much more with the data that you capture. And then also if you're coordinating with who you touched physically, well, let's like in person who you met, right? Who you met in person, you can do really good follow up and you can see interesting insights in that data. So I think marketing is on both ends of it and certainly they can provide some support, but it's the salespeople that make the magic happen.

And salespeople, you may not know this because you typically don't follow these constraints. Your marketing team has a budget and they each year they have to prove their spin. So if you don't help them collect the data on your success and account based selling, they're not going to get the budget next year. So you need to help them make sure they can show their management how you're successful, look at the return on investment. And it's literally just a little bit of time spending collecting this data and putting it in the right place. So make sure you do it. I know a

lot of salespeople don't like to do it, but there's a reason that you have a CRM system in your company. So the last thing that I would say is the one thing that I hear from salespeople a lot when I'm working with marketing departments and the challenge that marketing partners deal with is the online leads are bad or they're low deals or I don't want to focus on that. And they cherry pick that. Well, it goes back to the lures. It goes back to the fishing because if you do that prep work and you put the right lures in the water, you will get the right people. And the more prep

that you do, if you get that in front of somebody, they will click on it or they will go to that site or they will raise their hand like marketing gets the information in front of the right people. But if that information is not correct, then it's not targeted enough. That's why you're getting bad leads. And really the salespeople need to work with the marketing on the messaging that's really going to hook them and of course get it approved and legal and whatever. But I'll tell you when you're right there with the client dealing with those issues, that stuff has to be communicated

to the marketing team and the better creatives or content that they can have, that's what's going to produce the better leads because if you can get in front of the right people and they pay attention to it, if you have the right message, people will engage. That's a mic drop moment right there, people. That's it. We're going to stop right there. This is the place we do our product reviews. Guess what, audience? We're stopping product reviews. Not for a bad reason, for a good reason. We have so much stuff coming in. We're now launching a separate show. It's

called Five Stars and Under. You can still send me gadgets. Jordan Gates and Paige will also be hosting that show and we're literally just doing unboxing product reviews for anything to do with oil and gas. Well, the spy pen, Mark. I still want the spy pen. I will get you a spy pen, Matt. But if you're out there and you have heavy steel, if you have bulldozers, whatever, Paige and Jordan are happy to review those. Matt and I's social links are in the show notes. Scroll up or left pin if you're on iOS or Android. You want to connect with us.

Our Insiders group, we're still working on that. Here's our LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. And Matt, I have a wonderful LinkedIn tip that somebody reached out to me. Listen to this. So somebody spent the time looking at my LinkedIn profile. They listened to five or six of the podcasts, right? And they're not in the oil and gas industry. They only listen to the podcast to learn more about me. They shot about a 45 second video on their iPhone, but it was well lit and had good audio. And it said, Hey, Mr. LaCour, we're a company that helps podcast editing.

And we think you're doing an excellent job. However, we caught in this spot, this spot, this spot places that your editors missed. We're not trying to replace your editors. We would like to be your backup editors. Matt, what a great cold call message. So I responded. They spent the time. It was transparent. It was authentic. They did not try to sell me anything, but they did make a suggestion to a problem that I didn't know I had, which is what happens if I lose both of my editors? I don't have a backup, right? So this is a LinkedIn knocking out the

park, spend a little bit of time doing your research on the people you want to talk to and LinkedIn, shoot a very short customized video and send it to them like this group did to me. And I'm telling you, if your heart's in the right place and you're real about what you're doing, what a great way to respond. I literally responded back in 30 seconds. So they literally knocked it out the park. So the actual name of the company is Podcast R Us, which I think is great. Big shout out to them. Whoever's handling their inside sales, whoever trained their salespeople

are doing a damn good job. And I have immediate sales people with them. So here's something that somebody did right on LinkedIn. I'm going to give them double thumbs up. Nice. All right. Let's get out of here. Remember, folks, 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.