Brand to Bottom Line: CX, CRM & Revenue Growth

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. Howdy. Welcome back to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing show by OGGN.

We're here at the Cell Oil Conference for having some great conversations. I have the founder of Hexagroup here, and you've recently rebranded from what I understand. Tell me a little bit more about your new positioning. Yes, sir. Thank you for having me around here with Hexagroup, and we've been in the business of B2B marketing in the oil and gas industry for maybe too long now.

It doesn't get me much, much younger by the day, but around 30 years. And we've seen the need really to reposition as more of a customer experience agency and really helping companies design, manage, and improve the way customers interact with every across all the touch points. In practice, we're really aligning branding, marketing, sales, and service as a whole. And so that's really the main differentiation, working a lot with private equity firms.

It's really how we improve the brand valuation, how to improve the bottom line and the top line. So that's where we are. You know, absolutely. Brands been around a long time, actually have had some friends socially, I know, work for you.

It's a very small world when you get into oil and gas, and working with trusted agencies is absolutely important. I would love to hear your experience as a marketing agency reaching out to oil and gas. What are their needs? What do they need help with? What are they looking to you for?

And what do you see as the biggest issue that's getting missed? I think that there's a lot of companies that come and say, hey, I need this, but they actually need this. And I think it might be something around your new positioning is because you're seeing a gap in the market. Yeah, I can address that first.

And definitely many times around, you get called for a marketing issue. And after a 20 minute conversation with your marketing person or even a C-suite, you understand that they have a sales issue or vice versa. Or someone asks you for, oh, we have a lack of leads, I want leads. And realistically, they don't have a brand. And when you start talking about branding, historically, you are seen as Mr. Creeley-Fufu

and stay away from my company. We don't want a new logo because branding will new logo, which is not the case. So that's been historically what we've seen. So to answer the other part of your question, what the evolution today is a little bit different. If you're working for a company that work in private equity, for example, and are owned by private equity, companies are being sold more and they start realizing that brand

valuation is critical. We're starting having a different conversation with our customers. And the other main element that they start realizing is the blend between B2C and B2B. So I think two main reasons. The first one being that technology brings a lot of new way of buying and people want to buy self-serve, self-research, buy the same way they buy on Amazon.

And the other one is B2B buyers are people and people have emotions and emotions are what the brand is supposed to be doing. So just being the trusted brand is not enough. So we have to align to that as well. One of the podcast interviews I did on a separate podcast was with one of the members of the spam team from Google.

And this was pre-COVID. What he recommended is every business, B2B businesses that are listening here, you need to get a cart on your website because buyer behavior is changing and people want to self-serve, check out. That might not work for everything in B2B. There's some complex selling, but there's a lot of distribution.

There's a lot of packaged offerings that could be a starting point for certain size companies. And we see that more and more. Some companies have these digital transformations, kind of 2.0 really. I think everybody's catching up to 2.0 and now we're already on the next evolution with AI and everything else. We got a new account very recently and the mandate is we have to catch up from a digital

standpoint. Our interaction with our client is 100% human. They do have a part of their business that they sell to the home depot of the world and even that, they're not really ready for that. So they want to actually position themselves as the trusted digital leader and they work in the safety world, but they don't have much yet.

Tell me about that customer experience. What are the things that you're doing to expand your current service offering to service that need a little bit more? Back to what we were saying, you're talking to a CFO or CEO of an organization. You're going to talk to him about marketing. Doesn't care.

You're going to talk to him about branding. Doesn't care. Because you've got to show the dollars and cents. Exactly. It's going to say how much it's going to cost. What's my ROI?

If you tell him about increasing your top line and tracking the service part, loyalty, customer loyalty, NPS score, leads, pipeline, validity of your pipeline across the board now is listening. Now you're going to have that conversation. You were speaking a different language. Exactly.

We wanted to adapt to that language because realistically we were doing it anyway. But we were doing it fighting for marketing dollars and fighting against sales dollars or customer experience dollars or whatever they call it. And that is the main shift. It really helped us being able to actually manage a bigger budget, but very efficiently based on what the needs are.

That's what I've seen. Marketing dollars get relegated to just marketing and sales needs to be part of the conversation. I like the CRO. That was a good move to combine those. But the conversation is much broader and if you want your marketing strategies to work and get attribution, you've got to get bigger visibility of what's going on with the CRM

and what are sales teams doing and also what other campaigns are getting run outside of the engagement with maybe a vendor agency on the outside or a freelancer. There's this much bigger picture of what has to happen to influence the sale. And I think that marketing a lot of times was responsible for the end result, but didn't have the tools to twist to make those levers turn and do what they need to do. However, they've had to do it anyway, but also not maybe get compensated for it to make

sure the marketing campaigns work. So it's been an uphill battle for sure. And then they're really even at the larger corporations, they don't have the visibility. That's the big, yeah. How many logos did I lose because I had poor customer service? I'm bringing in 10 new customers, but I'm losing five every month.

Is that worth it? Where should I put my focus? Those are really easy questions that you need to get answered. Yeah. We had a previous conversation here at this conference about visibility in the CRM. And a lot of salespeople are pushing back on what they're having to enter in because

what they're entering in is to help the executive team figure out the numbers or whatever. But a lot of times that data is inaccurate because mid-level salespeople are maybe changing the data or not washing it, but manipulating it in a way that represents what they think the higher-ups want to hear and it's not tracking. So it's not helping the salespeople and it's also not helping the executives. But man, that CRM is really important to get work in right because it unifies a lot of

the data and you can plug in different components to it. How do you tackle that or how do you view tackling that organization should be thinking about it? From the technology standpoint, CRM and poor adoption has been a critical issue, especially in energy where the salespeople own the Rolodex and then they don't, they fear that sharing data, inputting information is not worth it.

So I have some clients actually a publicly traded company of mine that I'm acting as the fractional CMO for where the CRM was only used to input the deal when it was closed just for the salespeople to get their commission. So that's how bad the adoption was. I think the way it's changing is that more and more the energy industry is looking outside of the energy industry to bring people that have a different mindset.

And when I'm talking about specifically the pharma, if you look at the pharma industry and you're looking at the business development people and salespeople in the pharma world, they are getting compensated on how many engagement they had with customers, how many presentation they sent, how many presentation they had, how many visits they had. The number that's not directly related to revenue, but it's related to how you actually to increase your revenue.

But you can put a dollar value on each interaction at a level and you can roll it up. The crazy thing is when you look at these models, they map pretty dang well of all these interactions lead to this deal and then what is the cost to acquire that customer. I've seen it map out a few times like almost exactly. It's pretty interesting. So what doing that in the small and mid market?

Of course, we're not big pharma, but we had a few big win and we tend of continuing pushing it. What do you think organizations in oil and gas need most from a marketing company or a marketing agency or like a consultancy? Like I feel like there's this viewpoint of marketing, which is changing and hopefully this podcast is a little bit due to that is marketing is for brand materials at conferences

or there's the company level marketing that's positioning the brand. So there's familiarity with the logo, but the heavy lifting is done by the salespeople. I feel like there's still this disassociation or gap between marketing tech that salespeople can leverage to help them sell better, not just a marketing qualified lead. And then there's the whole viewpoint on a marketing qualified lead, which I think I've talked about previously.

The marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead should be the same thing. It should be a qualified lead or not. Are we fishing on the right pond? Are we getting the right kind of people? But that integration between marketing sales. So what are you seeing as far as where that gap is and really what a lot of oil and gas

organizations or sales companies into oil and gas need to have, but they're not utilizing? You're making the point here. Look at Schlumberger SLB, right? SLB now, but when did they have their first marketing executive on the org chart five years ago? Less than five years ago.

They were in business for almost 100 years and there was nobody with a marketing responsibility that of course there were many people with marketing responsibility, but not someone responsible. Now they have a chief marketing officer at the start. So that's changing across all the energy food chain, right? And today, I don't think you have to push and educate the market as much about the

fact that marketing and sales at least and branding should work hand in hand. But I think there's a lack of knowledge of how it could integrate best or we get a lot of calls and people, they've latched onto a certain word or a term and they're like, I need this, but that's not necessarily what they need. They might need something completely different to just set the table for a lot of people and sales organizations that are listening.

What is the bare minimum that their internal marketing companies should be doing? And if they don't have an internal marketing company, they should engage at third party to do. Yeah, if you're talking about the technology level, they have a CRM, they have a CRM that provides a lot of marketing automation. Let's take technology in a hub spot, right?

For example, and you implement it across the board. So email automation is like a service offering that they should be utilizing. That's table stakes. That should be a workflow automation, optimization. All this is, that is the basic, right? Automated your LinkedIn outreach to some extent.

There's a lot of things that need to happen knowing that really to get people's interest, you need to have multiple touch points, podcasts, okay? How many companies should actually, if you look at the podcast industry, that's much, much stronger than blogs. In six months, you'll have more podcasts and you have blogs and everything is evolving. So I think internal team should get, have this basic, the agency world is always bringing

and pushing the table, pushing the issue. And then really aligning the reporting across all those four segments is important to do. What I'm hearing from you is CRM and email automation is a foundational layer. Reporting is key to get proper reporting all the way through the organization. And then thought leadership is another category here. Is there any other layers, as you view it, that they should be adding, if they're doing

email automation and they're like, check, we got it, we're tagging stuff, we're doing drip emails. What's like the next thing, retargeting? What I'm seeing is really that, and maybe it's a lack of education of the marketing team or marketing team is, especially when it's the interact with sales, is really focused 100% of new business.

And they completely forget that their existing business can grow, if they grow the existing business 20%, they don't really have to work hard to get new business. These people need marketing, they need love, they need interaction, they need to be invited to events, they need to have an interaction with the sales guy on an ongoing basis. So when I'm talking about automation and CRM, let's do automation on the existing, nurturing your existing people.

Yeah. And I think that's really good to speak to that in oil and gas. There's only so many targets you have, right? There's only so many targets that you can go after. And if you have a big account, what's your utilization of your services inside that account in all the different departments?

And also, attrition is, I don't know if the data is 100% accurate, but I heard that it costs roughly 75 or 150% more to acquire a new customer versus to maintain an existing customer or something like 25% of the cost to maintain an existing customer of what it would cost to get a new customer. So it just makes sense to run a good business, maintain existing customers, focus on that retention, and focus on that growth of existing customers, and not so much on that.

And I think that I don't see a lot of marketing dollars going to brand management and reputation management to existing customers and events and marketing campaigns to existing customers. That's got to be tied to that finances to justify the budget because that doesn't come up a lot in conversations initially for sure. It's also something that doesn't have to be a big... Yeah, it doesn't have to be a huge piece of budget.

But you should dedicate something to it and be thinking about it. When we look at our communication matrix across prospects and customers, internal and influencers, we have minimum target that we are. So we say, if you have an existing customer that's a tier one, it needs to have five touch points amongst with the salespeople, with the company. Yeah, with the company.

Four of them are automated, and people do it, newsletters and things like that. But if you actually start making it a part of your process, and then when someone has an issue, they need to be able to easily report it. And many of... Many times, and even in our organization, when someone has an issue, who do they call? So that needs to be very clear.

And I think that's... Yeah, I think apathy is the number one reason people leave a relationship, a business relationship as they start to feel like a number, and they don't have that personalization. And now with automation and social media, you want your customers to follow you, because you also know that when you're posting, it's not to just acquire a new customer. I've seen, and this is a little bit outside of oil and gas, but it always irks me when

a company is running a sale where they're given a discount for a new customer that doesn't get offered to an existing customer. Because as an existing customer, some kind of sale or something, you're like, I'm not important enough to get associated with that. I hear it a lot. I just became a number.

I don't feel like I was getting the customer service. So thinking through that automation, thinking through the touch point of that perfect customer experience and finding a way to do that at scale can really help people or people. And you want to make them feel special. And if you know what you wish you could do for every customer, there's no shame in automating it because you're wanting to create that experience for everyone and time is limited.

Yeah, and really selling to an existing customer is so much easier. Look at just a very simple example. We've been doing web work for 30 years. Our first website was ConocoPhillips back in the 90s, right? And today, with the whole AI-based searches, everybody talks about it. So let's say you have 150, 200 clients that you're managing website for and very tactical.

You go talk to them and say, you want to be visible to the chat GPTs and the AI research on Google. You need to do some tweaks. The tweaks is going to cost X amount of dollars. You want to do it first. And I said, thank you for thinking of me because it didn't really cost money.

It would make sense, right? And then how fast and easy is it to close a deal like this? And then you will actually make someone happy because when someone, what is the best hairdresser in Houston and you have salon, and I'm not, it's not an Arangas example, but it shows up. Wow.

Because that's, so I think for me, selling to existing customers is. The name of the game I think will be in 18 months is LLM Visibility. I think that's really. The search volume is not quite there yet, but those leads, I've seen data talking that they're highly engaged and then I've heard that Google's just equally as good. But I would tell you from what I've seen personally, that's where the market's going.

That's where the technology's going. And LLM Visibility, I think will be the future of search engine optimization. It is. And it is. We'll have more data. The same way we had more data on SEO and we could be very practical with SEO, it's going

to be. Some of it the same, not right now in the dark, but it's going to be clearer by the months. Yeah. What are some maybe more use cases and examples that you think would be helpful for people, sales people that are listening to this to think about, hey, I should incorporate marketing

into what I'm doing. I have many conversations with sales consultant and we work with a lot of them because again, I'm not a sales consultant, but I work with them because together we can actually serve the client. We use a lot of, and we have a lot of relationships. I think sales consultant, when they go and see the issue of their, of their, they are

faced with, for a customer, they have the same thing because they are called to solve a sales problem, but there's no branding, there's no marketing. So they know it's going to be a struggle. So you need to provide them with the incentive venue to actually solve that issue. And everybody works together and is compensated for it because I think there's two things. When you're a sales consultant, you're a sales guy, more than, and you need to make

sure that number one, you're going to please your clients so you can have a repeat business. And second, whatever you're going to be reselling, you're going to get, you're going to see the benefits, right? And so that's how we work very well with, with our sales consultant. I'll give you, I'll give you a good example here. The same company that, that is reporting their close rate, their closing after the fact just

to get them. Yeah. Yeah. They have two big kind of segments. The company doesn't know what the right part do. And they have around a hundred plus people that are facing the customer on a daily basis.

You look at it from the inside, you say, if actually these 50 people would talk about what the other company, the other side of the company does and vice versa, you can make a killing. We need it to help these people be successful in cross selling. And for us, it was, we could say, it's messaging, we can do it ourselves, but there is some specific skill set that a sales consultant brings to the table that makes it happen a

lot quicker. So we hired, we worked with actually someone present here today that was actually presenting at CellWell. We worked with him extensively and he basically developed the whole sales playbook and everything else and big success. So everybody's happy.

And also we realized that the people facing the customer, they felt like, wow, the organization is actually helping me be more successful. And the other thing, the other thing we're doing as well from the inside is working a little bit more with HR. So they can change a little bit the compensation plan to actually help with this type of interaction. I like that.

Is there anything else that you think would be relevant to this discussion that we haven't talked about, to add some more things to think about for people that are listening? Back to the B2B and B2C and not put a big line in between because at the end, another little story, we had a very good customer, very good, very strong customer in the UK. And they came to us because we were the B2B expert in energy and we were going to help them.

We had a fantastic relationship for almost three years and when management changed and they wanted to increase and scale this relationship, they decided to go with another agency out of the blue. Steller results and why? Because they wanted the B2B ideas and so they went with a company that has never ever worked in oil and gas, right?

Having an open mind when you sell your services to oil and gas and the fact that especially marketing services that this line is blurring every day and then the creativity is important I think is more and more front. I would say what I've seen is a lot of things that I learned in B2C can be applied to be in B2B because I think that they're a lot further ahead actually. B2C and direct to consumer, a lot of those strategies work on people, people are people

and I'm starting to see that line blur as well. And there's a lot of things that B2C has figured out and doing and implementing that B2B needs to catch up. I think it's been a lot of the logos. That's my personal view is that a lot of these companies because they've established a big brand and their salespeople carry that big logo, I've seen a lot of salespeople go from

that big company, get recruited away for a great compensation plan that's like low base big commission and they can't get in the door anymore the way they could and they realize that the logo is what was getting them in the door. Now I think that's getting eroded too but these companies haven't had to move as fast because they've had the big brand around them. And now there's a lot of smaller players and mid-sized players really coming into the

space and taking market share and I think they're starting to wake up. Yep, I agree. How do people get in touch with you? How do they find out more information about what's going on with Hexagroup? Like I said, we just launched on the website yesterday, hexagroup.com. There's a lot of information on the site and I think that's the best way to contact us.

So I run a podcast that I would love to have you on in the near future. What's that podcast called? So people can check it out. It's called the Energy Marketing Podcast and it's called Hex Files. So we're taking a little bit of the Hex Files approach to it and it's fun, it's been entertaining and we had some interesting guests.

Awesome. Everyone, go check that out. My name is Matt Bertram. This is the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast. Remember to make a difference, not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGN, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network

for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to OGGN.com to learn about all our other shows and don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.