AI’s Impact on Oil & Gas Sales: 5 Key Strategies

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. Hey, welcome back, everybody, to the Oil and Gas Sales

and Marketing podcast. And audience, Matt and I owe you a little bit of apology. Had a bunch of y'all reach out and say, why'd y'all stop doing the podcast? We just got busy, both of us. I know that's not a good excuse,

so we'll commit to you for 2026. We will try to get episodes out on a regular basis, maybe not every week, but a couple of months. How you doing, Matt? Haven't talked to you in a while. I want to apologize to everyone as well.

I was going through like an accelerated MBA program put on by Goldman Sachs, and Capstone Project is next week, and I'm pitching, and that just sucked up all my time in addition to some fractional CMO gigs I'm working on outside of what we're doing at EWR Digital.

And so I certainly, you handed me the baton and I did drop the ball. We were distributing podcasts from a conference, and then everybody was pushing to say, hey, when is my podcast coming out? So we started releasing a lot of them a week.

If you haven't gone back and listened to all those interviews, I would encourage you to go do that. There was some really great interviews, and even though they were all released maybe in the same week or over the course of a month,

they're all still really relevant. So if you haven't gone back and listened to those and you're just looking at the most current date, I would encourage you to go check some of those out. Yeah, good advice, good advice. Dude, you're married.

Oh, yeah. By the time this comes out, Paige and I will have announced this with All In Gas this week. The coolest thing is to hear the intro change from Mark LaCour and Paige Wilson to Mark and Paige LaCour.

It just sends chills down my back. But yeah, if you don't know this, I just married my co-host, All In Gas this week. Was not out of the blue. We've been a couple for a long time. The funny thing that is a lot of our listeners,

the women that listened to us, a lot of them figured out, like we'd get notes saying, hey, y'all are more than just coworkers, right? But none of the men have ever figured out. So it's gonna be interesting to see what the audience thinks. And then to make it even funnier,

we got married on April Fool's Day. So then you have a lot of people say it's an April Fool's joke. No, it's not. But I could see why you would think it was. And we did that on purpose. But yeah, speaking of things like life changing,

AI is changing the industry from the bottom to the top. I've seen some amazing things for us, plan maintenance, helping engineers clean up Excel spreadsheets. We're a big paid version user of Claude. We use it a lot in our workflows.

But the biggest change I've seen is in sales and marketing. And these changes are fundamentally different than the way sales and marketing people have worked in the past, especially around things like visibility and what's gonna happen in the future. So I kind of want to talk through some stuff.

And by the way, people, everything that, or most of stuff that Matt and I are gonna talk through, Matt did a wonderful blog post on the OGGN.com. Let's go check it out. It's called Why All In Gas Companies Need AI Visibility, Not Just SEO.

Let's start there, Matt. Why do All In Gas Companies Need AI Visibility and Not Just SEO? To get into the article, I would encourage everybody to go read it. I feel like a lot of businesses that are generating leads

really, even when we go back to like how this podcast started is sales managers or people in that vein or that pillar looked at marketing, like graphic design and like conference setup. And the sophistication has really helped with account based selling, targeting the right people,

reaching out to them, marketing in that channel where 365, like all they see is your brand and how marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads are really just business qualified leads and they should really be viewed as the same thing. AI creates personalization, okay?

That is one thing that it can do that no other and we're starting to build some really intelligent systems that can reach out to people, can create some automation and it really understands your customer with all the different inputs that it brings into that. I would also say that's one vein, okay?

So that's again, one vein of how you should be thinking about the other vein is from an investment in your brand. So there's a lot of people that good old boy, like we have salespeople, like we don't need to build our brand. You're really just trying to get face time

in front of the customer and salespeople are one way to do that, but they do a lot of personal research on their own in their own time. Even when they take your business card and meet you, they put it in Google, they put it in AI now

and they ask AI, I'm seeing a lot of search traffic of the referral out traffic, the referred out traffic from a brand to chat to BT or Claude or Gemini or Proplexi or whatever because they wanna know more about the company. If you haven't put the information out there properly

and built the site architecture and the information online to do that, you're gonna get the wrong stuff. I'll give you an example. We have a publicly traded oil company that's operating in the US as well as in Australia

and there's a bunch of fracking and stuff going on there. There are certain components that like they had a CEO change and AI was still saying the old CEO was the head of the company. It's about how that information is getting distributed. I'm starting to talk a lot about this

and we're doing these dig audits. It's digital information governance. Like how is your information being interpreted externally and what information are you protecting internally? It really is like brand reputation. How are they gonna recommend you?

How are they gonna view you? That's not just search systems, that's not just SEO. SEO is changing. SEO and traditional marketing is course and buggy and now we're operating in a new paradigm and people are asking the AI more and more.

I think everybody's gonna have an AI system that they use and they're gonna ask it for references on things to buy, what to do and then they're gonna talk to other AI's to figure out what should be get recommended. How do you get in that system? And so having visibility of your brand,

getting your information out there in the right way, building that trust is how you're gonna get recommended in those systems and that actually, there's some studies out there that show the conversion rates are 300% higher when you have a trusted brand

and when it's recommended by a chatbot or AI bot versus finding that information yourself. There's certainly a lot of people that are doing that research but it's becoming more and more prevalent and how are these AI's picking it up?

And I know I'm going on about this. I'll let you ask the question of like, how to do that but podcasts are- Well, before we get there, I want to back you up a little bit. One of the things that,

we have a small sales team here at OGGN. One of the things is AI is allowing us to do a lot of research very fast before we have that initial sales call and we use it and we're not the only ones using it. The world is using it

and if your sales teams aren't using it now, they will be using it very shortly. Think about this folks. What happens when people are doing research on your company and they get wrong or erroneous information,

all of a sudden you can't control that. Making sure you understand AI to the point that it's putting the right information out there about your company is super important now. It's going to be even more important in the future. And we're using AI now to do things like analyzing calls,

scoring leads, recommending next steps. Who else does this person know that may be in my network? That sort of stuff. And if we can't get that stuff right, if you're a company out there

that depends on buyers finding you, if you can't get that stuff right, you're going to lose dollars. You're going to lose sales dollars. And the more importantly, if you have competitors out there

that understand that better than you do, they're going to pass you up. And this isn't something that doesn't need a huge investment in money, but it does need an investment in time to learn this sort of stuff.

And what I thought was really cool about the article that you wrote on the OGGN website is you made a very specific sentence. And basically it said something to the effect of companies that load longer competing on reputation and relationships and operational performance.

They're now competing on how they show up when people search for them. I want to get back into, so I think SEO probably still matters. You should have some SEO efforts. Understanding how to get AI to understand

who you are and what your company's doing is super important. And I've seen errors all over the place. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because I think that the other thing about that is there's another whole business model I see growing

where AI is basically mining information from public websites. Who then benefits from that? The company that has the AI is definitely benefiting from it. They may or may not be paying you.

They're probably not paying you, but they're using your information to make profits. So then you get a whole thing of how do we deal with that? The typical, what is it? No follow, robots, text? I'm sure AI knows what it means.

I'm not sure it wants to listen to it all the time. So it may still index your site even though you've asked the SEO spiders to stop. It absolutely does. We've saw that with search. I think you brought up a really interesting point

that I can speak in a vocabulary that people understand. One of the things that SEO was doing but was maybe framed inappropriately and as well with the AI systems is a single source of truth about your company. I'll give you a perfect example.

A buddy of mine got referred to another friend in our network and he was looking for a CPA, okay? And the guy on LinkedIn said that he was like chief bottle, washer, like whatever, those funny titles or whatever. And he also didn't have his phone number on his LinkedIn. It's very difficult for the AI

or it's more difficult for the AIs to understand who you are and what you do if the information's not coherent across the web. Building those coherency in who you are as a person, who you are as an entity. So like also if your title's different

on different platforms, that's where schema comes in is linking it all together to say this person's the same person, okay? Mark, you're on this podcast, you're on multiple other podcasts. Like tying all that together to say

this is the same person to build that compound authority of oil and gas across the board. AI doesn't necessarily understand that. It might think that you're different people or your company's a different person

or if you have a different website or you go buy something different, having that single source of truth and tying that all together is incredibly important and having this kind of entity focus is where it starts because that's where your trust is gonna compound.

Think about the real world and the digital world being a mirror, like a twin. Even your AI is a twin that understands you and can talk to people. You're wanting to build clean data so that these things can work more effectively

and understand you as I think where it starts. If SEO does that great, if AI of billability does that great, but it's all about trusted, like everything's in a vector, so it's all math, okay? So here's the easiest thing. When you're trying to triangulate a point with GPS,

you want three points of verification. Once you get three points of verification, that's a more trusted directional where it sits and where other associations as an entity are associated with each other and what neighborhood do they live in?

If you're a drilling contractor, you wanna be in the same neighborhood with other drilling contractors or if you're a software company that services oil and gas, you wanna be in that neighborhood. To your point, we are actually building a tool

that is taking and ingesting all the OGGN podcast and maybe somebody that's an investor might wanna have access to that data. If people are buying and selling companies from an M&A standpoint, that information could be useful and then the question becomes,

do I want the AIs to have access to this data or do I literally want to not just no follow but put it behind a walled garden and say you don't have access to this? So there's a tool out there that you put on for all the IT directors that are listening.

Golly, I wish I knew it. But what it does is it protect- I guarantee you Matt will remember what it is. We'll put it in the show notes, whatever this tool. Yeah, okay, okay. Anyways, what it does is it blocks your IP address

from actually getting shown. So when you get attacked, it blocks it and it basically shows a mirror of your website. And there was this big hoopla a couple months ago about it set default to not share with the LLMs because it's trying to protect media companies.

Does that make sense? It's trying to protect media companies to say, unless you want us to show this data, we're not gonna show it. So you can tell it to set an index because once it's ingested, and I wrote another article,

actually I just recently posted that on LinkedIn. I have a newsletter on LinkedIn, but once your information's out there in the wild, it is gone, okay? It is absolutely gone and you can't get it back. So from a salesperson standpoint,

governance is becoming a big issue. If you don't have an AI policy, you really should get an AI policy. And really you shouldn't be using free. And if you're using paid, there's actually a little option and options to turn off, feed the models.

And you really need to have governance and direction from your IT team on how they wanna use it. They might set up their own LLM that everything stays within the company because if you're taking public information or private information, or IP, or internal sales data,

or whatever it is, and you're putting in these LLMs, it's gonna teach the overall model how to do it if you don't have your permission set properly. Does that make sense? Makes total sense. You need to know how you're utilizing this data

to make sure you're not feeding the LLM stuff that you don't wanna teach it because it's gonna learn and then when other people use it, and it's called shadow AI. And that's something to think about, but also think about it.

If your team is not directed on what they can and can't do, and they're putting these things into the models, and then they leave and go to a competitor, guess what they did? They just took a bunch of proprietary information that they felt into their own LLM

that's not tied into the company. That's like why you wanna use company emails, right? You can shut it off. Everything needs to be in a company email. You can track it. It's a governance issue.

And that's something that people aren't really thinking about it. And there's a lot of compliance issues. There's even like a big penalty in Texas if you're using these things improperly. And that's just something I think people

need to start looking at. So I like the fact that you mentioned OGGN podcast, harvesting that data and understanding that once it's out there in the AI public world, you're not getting it back. But the other part of this is companies like us

and people like you and me who produces content, we own this. This is our intellectual property. And if somebody's gonna benefit off it financially, it should be a negotiation with the content creator and the companies that want to mine that content

and use it for commercial reasons. I'm not saying you need to spend a million dollars, but there should be some commercial benefits for both people, for the creator's side and for the people mining that. But I want you to start more about podcasts and content.

Cause one of the things I love, and you have a quote in there that basically says why podcasts and content matter more than ever? Why does it matter more than ever, Matt? The name of that tool or technology is called Cloudflare. I don't know why I was running a blank on that,

but Cloudflare is so important. So wait, this is crazy coincidence, and Matt and I never talking though we work together. Guess who sponsored our next mixer in Houston, Matt? Cloudflare? Cloudflare.

I wish you would tell me this stuff before we get on the podcast. Guys, we do talk. We just talk about a lot of different stuff and there's some gaps in things that we do. We actually do talk a lot, but it is natural.

A lot of the things that are happening in the chemistry and how things happen, I think are not by coincidence. I think that there's a bigger plan for it. That's just personally how I view the world. But yeah, Cloudflare, there's a big hoopla about that. They want to protect user information.

And I just think that it's a broader conversation that's happening of what are you doing with your data? Data hygiene has been an issue for a long time. Think about how many emails that people have that are unread, how people are storing files. There was not a lot of education.

Like we had typing in school, but it wasn't like what's your information architecture when you're in business? And I think that should be a broader conversation. And now we're overloaded with data, so it's incredibly important.

All right, so let's talk about podcasting. Podcasting falls into the category mark of media. So when you're talking to your PR director, or you're talking to your executive team on sales, like there's usually a budget and there's a category of PR versus marketing versus sales.

Okay, like when you're talking to your comms people. And YouTube, as well as podcasts, fall into that category of news, of media. And the data that's been produced on podcasts, as well as on YouTube, is getting ingested by the search engines and by the models.

Now, I think that the important thing about podcasts is chopping them up into topics, smaller topics, because it's like when you go to a restaurant and you wanna drink Sprite or Dr. Pepper, or whatever your drink is, tea, whatever it is, a podcast sometimes could be a broader topic

of fountain drinks, right? And then like I used to call it a suicide, you would go get a little bit of everything in the drink. If it's not focused and it's not on a particular topic, in a lot of times podcasts meander off of a specific theme, the LLM say this is not directly about that,

I wanna show the absolute best answer, I wanna have trust in this answer. So it's about kind of chopping it into smaller pieces and then organizing that information. That's super helpful, but podcasts in general on broader topics, if you're not doing,

if you're not doing pressure leases consistently, podcasts are the number one way to get that content out there and check that box. And it's actually Mark, it's almost considered, I would say it's adjacent to speaking at conferences, okay? It's not as important as speaking at conferences

if you're trying to build authority, but it's very close to it and it's in again, that same vein if you wanna go with that concept and a lot of companies are not doing it. It's the number one best way I think to create content or to build association like through the sponsorships

because companies are sponsoring these podcasts, all of these topics and conversations that are getting ingested that are getting out there are related to that particular industry. So you're not just getting the benefit of the viewers, you're getting the benefit of the association

that has knock on effects that's maybe harder to track the attribution of where stuff's coming from. But what I have seen with a number of clients that we've had is we can tie brand awareness through podcasting to higher conversion rates. It helps improve the sell.

It helps improve the close rate. It helps improve the trust. The buyer wanna buy from companies that they know trust and podcasting is the number one way to humanize that is to do that. There's a lot of other benefits from it

and I would encourage you to go read the article about that. Yeah, and I just got a second. Everything Matt has said, and I'm saying that from experience. OGGN has been around for shoot 12, 13 years now and we see it with our sponsors all the time. It takes a little bit of time,

but when you start telling the sponsor's story on a podcast in a real authentic way, not trying to sell anything, but bringing on their customers and talking about how they help their customers solve these specific problems in the oil and gas industry,

the sales just naturally follow. They're organic. People get to know you, they listen to you, they hear the information. We have a new flagship sponsor. Big shout out to Navvis for Oil and Gas This Week

and they're on our YouTube channels and interview with ExxonMobil. And Matt, I can't believe I got ExxonMobil corporate comms approval to show it, but I did. And they've picked up a whole bunch of sales leads and they had nothing to do with the video

other than one of their people are on it with ExxonMobil, why interview them? Like I said, from experience, we see this happening for the last decade of companies are on podcasts. It drives sales in a different way than almost anything else,

but it's out there forever. We can go back and look at the data. Big shout out to Red Wing Boots, our original first sponsor back in 2011, 2012, whatever. They haven't sponsored anything with us in I think seven or eight years.

However, I can see the data when people find the podcast that they sponsored and they binge on it and they hear, hey, go to redwingshoes.com forward slash podcast. They're still getting leads driven to that landing page even though they don't spend any money with us now and we love them to death.

So we let that happen. We want them to still continue to draw leads, but imagine having a lead generation machine where the leads that are coming are highly qualified and you haven't spent any money on it. It was done in the past

and it's still there producing results for your sales and marketing. I don't know any other digital media out there that keeps performing after you stop paying for it. I think that's a great point. I think something to add to that conversation is positioning.

I don't think people understand how important positioning is and I hear all the time from different sales teams. I'm looking like, okay, we're selling against Mackenzie, we're selling against Bain and they're like, or Goldman Sachs, right?

Like a bunch of people that do reserve loans and stuff like that are like Goldman Sachs told us to do that or this or whatever. That's because they have a brand that people trust over time. That doesn't happen immediately,

but all these companies, they go from a big brand, that a big logo that gets them in the door and then they go work at a smaller company that has a bigger cop plan and then those phone calls don't get answered. Podcasting and getting your brand out there

and having people see it over time is just an investment in your brand and that's becoming more important today than ever, okay? And the best absolute way to do that, to create a ton of content that can be repurposed a lot of different ways is through podcasts

and it means something to the LLMs and you're creating information, you're creating co-citations with other brands and other people that guess what? AI can map all those connections. You can say I'm good at this,

but if you're across the table or on a podcast where you're engaging this person and then your digital twin, your digital brand online is seeing those associations and it's mapping everything, it's why it builds your trust. I also say the OGG and events,

coming to the OGG and events, coming to them, getting a picture, tagging other people from other companies in it, you're building that network and association. So all of these things are maybe from an attribution standpoint, that's why everybody like leads to ads

or a salesperson closes the deal, but there's so many different factors of what you have to do to close a deal and it starts with the perception in people's mind of that brand saying, I would like to work with those people,

that person, that brand. And yeah, like you're building a digital footprint that's gonna last forever. Now, to your point Mark, old podcasts are gonna have an impact, but there's a step down that happens over time.

So refreshing some of that content, so if you have a old sponsor, which funny enough, I was going through a lot of your old modal point blogs and I actually saw the post where you had the side and there's two sides of when Red Wing was your sponsor,

they sponsored again, okay, you link back to that. Now it builds length of time, right? So now it builds trust over a certain period of time. So it's really about like information architecture, like that's really what I'm an expert in, like people put labels on it,

but information architect, site architecture, how these LLMs work, how they interpret data, how what the guardrails on those are, that's really where I'm playing. And I think that the importance of that is starting to come to the forefront

because man, the sales almost made by the time they talk to you. Like I'm seeing that happen a lot, like there's a lot of heavy lifting that's done by marketing before the sales person even picks up the call or people are like,

oh, I've heard your brand or I wanna ask about this. That's marketing doing the work. Again, that pairing between marketing and sales is so important. And I just, I don't think enough energy or budget is equating to that.

And now AI is going into workflows and systems and we probably don't have enough time to get into all that. But it is, that's why we're starting another podcast. Yeah, so this is a perfect time to stop this conversation here. People, I'll put a link in the show notes,

go read the blog or it goes in a much greater detail and we went here. Why all in gas companies need AI visibility, not just SEO. You mentioned MotelPoint. I sold it to you. Thank you for buying it from me.

My original company that I swore I would never sell because my name's been attached to it for 15 years and you're the right person, Matt. I trust you, you do quality work with this industry and you're gonna bring MotelPoint to the next level. Talk a little bit about what you're doing with MotelPoint.

First Mark, thank you so much. I wanna be a good custodian of the brand for you and I'm excited about carrying on its legacy. So I just wanna say to everybody, thank you. Mark is the kind of person that you wanna work with. He's good by his word, he's trusted,

he's a great partner in all the things that we do together. And I'm just so glad that this all happened. And so what are we doing with MotelPoint? Energy commercialization advisory. We can help take you to market. We understand the industry.

We have the different connections. A lot of like where my time's been spent recently is going through the Goldman Sachs program, building the right relationships to raise money. So there's a lot of great opportunity that we can do there. But after re-establishing that,

we are looking at adding an AI layer. I believe every business is gonna have an AI layer. I think how people not only are searching and finding information is changing, but how people are interpreting that information are making decisions with that information

and what AI is doing for them. We do have some audit frameworks that we've built. We've trademarked digital information governance. We've started to do audits on brands. We've seen a big need with publicly traded companies on how their information needs to be cleaned up,

finding that single source of truth. So we're starting to do some of these audits and it's branching off into a lot of other work, frankly, and we're really hiring competitively right now and we're raising some money to do that. So there's a lot of exciting things that we're doing

within modal point. I've been working with a number of IT directors and we're really helping businesses become AI assisted and then become an AI first and really trying to help increase that gap but do it in a smart way through proper governance.

And I think that's where it starts. I think the biggest opportunity out there is oil and gas because everybody is not everybody, but there's a lot of people that are still operating in kind of the industrial era. They're just now going through some digital transformation,

starting to see the value of digital media and how that impacts. AI is not gonna just affect marketing, it affected marketing first. It's affecting legal document review. It's affecting a contractor review.

If you have a well head, right? Or you have a bunch of wells, you gotta be reporting to the Railroad Commission. AI can help fill out that paperwork. The use cases for AI is like, what are the use cases for the internet?

Okay, that's where things are going and the people that make that shift now, it's fundamentally changing the way you do everything. It's a step change. And those businesses are gonna start to get real head start. And I think just like I've talked about it before,

but Netflix to online streaming, people are still using Redbox. They are, okay? But the majority of people are utilizing streaming. What company do you wanna be? Do you wanna be the company that has moved into streaming

and that's where kind of the majority of flow is? Or are you gonna be at the tail end of it and still be operating in a Redbox format? And Redbox is still out there, but they're not a ton of companies that are doing it. It's been consolidated and it's harder.

And so taking that, moving that forward now in the proper way before people take the lead is I think one of the most important things. And I don't know. This is something that I'm super passionate about. My mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft.

I saw what happened with the internet. I'm in a place to really take advantage of it. I've gone through a lot of extensive post graduate training on some of this stuff. We've hired some PhDs and machine learning. We're building some different kind of models.

We're setting up certain environments. We're building agent orchestration. And I don't talk a lot about it on this podcast because that's not really the focus, but that's what we've been talking about, Mark, is certainly committing to oil and gas marketing.

But if people wanna go deeper on some of this stuff, starting a podcast to address that, I know we've been talking for a year now. Before we go there, just one pause real quick though, because I know some of the old Legacy Motel Point clients listen to this podcast.

Motel Point, it will still be the sales enablement company that it started off to be to help companies sell to the oil and gas industry. Matt just brings another layer of expertise and technology acronym to Motel Point, which is what was needed.

But he's also branching off to other things. And Matt, I'm looking forward to you knocking out the park. I can't wait to see Motel Point be a $10 billion a year company with you leading the charge. It's gonna be wonderful. We need to get out of here.

However, if you haven't figured out yet, Matt's gonna launch another podcast on the OGG Network around AI. And this isn't gonna be a bunch of theory. This isn't a bunch of academia. This is Matt talking about how AI affects business,

what to do, what not to do, what to watch out for. So stay tuned for that podcast. We don't have a name yet, but as soon as we get a name, we'll let you know. But just follow OGG on any of the social channels. Make sure you follow us on LinkedIn, our company page.

It'll be the first place we make this announcement. Matt, we ran over a little bit, but dude, it was good catching up with you and audience, we will be producing regular episodes of Sales and Marketing Podcasts. Any closing words before we shut this thing down?

I know I covered a lot of stuff and we went all over the map. And I think that's what's happening today. There's just a over amount of content production and there's so many different noisy channels and you've got to really look for the signal

and your brand and who you are and what you're doing needs to be incredibly focused and build that single source of truth as well as create that strong signal so people can be attracted to it. And if you're not taking anything away from this podcast,

know a stuff change is happening, it's not coming, it's here and you need to make sure that people know what you do and that goes back to brand positioning. People need to know what you do, how you do it and they need to know and trust you

to make the decision to go with you and that's gonna provide a lift to everything else you're doing with the business. And AI is part of the conversation today. Every conference I've gone to, there's a AI component. It's being utilized in a lot of these different ways.

You need to figure out how it works for you, what those guard rows are and leverage it. Perfect. All right, folks, we're out of here. Remember, make a difference, not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM,

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