Bringing Sales Out of the Playing Golf Era

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, everybody, we're back with episode three. You doing okay, Matt?

I'm doing well. Loving the dream. Speaking of loving the dream, another big shout out to Rigger for sponsoring this show. Hey, everybody. We're running field operations. You want to get paid quicker and you want to get rid of paper field tickets and you

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It helps your peers find the good shows that are out there. And then Matt, what is today's topic? Well, today's topic is very similar to the last topic, but we're turning the tables a little bit and we're going to view it from a different standpoint. And so I wanted to ask you, Mark, from a sales background, what do you think that the oil and gas industry needs to do to modernize their sales?

Whoa. That could be a four-hour conversation. Let's see if we can keep it down to 20 minutes or so. So actually, let's look at how it's traditionally been done. So traditionally, a lot of the sales that was done in this industry all over the world was done, built on relationships.

And that's not a bad thing. I think I mentioned this earlier. You need to know that your vendors are not just vendors, that they're actually truly partners and you have to have a high-trust relationship. So building those relationships and use that in your sales process was a way to assure that if something bad happened, we could all jump in together.

You look at what happened with the BP-McConda disaster. When BP lost control of that well, what you may not know is the hundreds of service companies that jumped in without contracts, without negotiating rates, with anything that just came to help knowing that was all said and done, BP would pay them what they were worth. And that was a very great story of how those relationships and sales help when something bad happens.

But what's happened, Matt, is times have changed. The oil and gas industry needs to drive efficiencies. They need access to new technologies in process, but they need that done in a way that is not being pushed down their throat. Nobody likes to buy something or feel like they're trying to be made to buy something. And so salespeople, when I got started in this industry, used to be educators.

You know, I would go to Halliburton or I'd go to Exxon and I'd say, here's all the stuff my company can do for you. Do you need any of this? And that was great because there was no internet. And so the salesperson's role was to help educate the buyer on what they could buy. Well, that has changed because of technology.

Now anybody can go online and figure out what any company's selling, figure out who's doing business with them, figure out their price points. And so now I think a good salesperson is a problem solver. Once again, in the context of the relationships are still important, but instead of the relationship being the most important thing, can I help you solve a problem, Mr. Byer? And if my company cannot help you solve a problem, can I recommend another company, even

if it's a competitor, to help you solve that problem? So now I think salespeople needs to be focused on helping their clients solve problems. So if you look at it from that point of view, then the process that salespeople and sales teams are using also needs to change. Maybe you don't spend as much time on the golf course or at the steak dinner building relationships and maybe you send more of that time helping your buyers understand how you

can buy from them and how you can help them solve problems. And this is the point of the conversation, Matt, where I typically get salespeople that sell what they think are commodities and go, well, look, I just sell drill stem. It's all based on price. And if I can't be the low price leader, somebody else will buy the drill stem at whatever. That's not true.

The years and years of you selling drill stem, think about all the questions you hear over and over again and think about what your customers trying to accomplish. If somebody's drilling out in West Texas and they can get somebody else's drill stem cheaper, but they can get yours quicker, that gives you a competitive advantage. Because that person that's buying that drill stem isn't looking for the cheapest drill stem.

Now, their procurement supply chain may make you think that, but they have a project they have to complete and it has to be completed on time and on budget. So by understanding that, by understanding that maybe you can get them what they need quicker instead of the cheapest, you didn't help them complete that project. You've now helped them solve a huge problem, which would be what happens if that project runs over budget over time.

So I need sales people and sales teams to start thinking differently in oil and gas. It's not so much, do you know the VP, although that's still helpful? It is, do you know what that VP's business problems are for this year in 2023? And do you know where he may need some help? And can you help him, even if that is not your own company, right, doing it? So if you think about it that way, then the sales process needs to change, the sales culture

needs to change. And one of the things I think is beautiful that you bring to this conversation is content. We talked about LinkedIn before, we actually talked a little bit about if you don't have a good social media strategy, your employees that could do it for you, you see it on social media. But from a sales point of view, using that and creating content showing prospective clients

how you can help them solve problems is genius. I do it all the time. You look at a lot of the videos I put out on LinkedIn, it's information that I could sell. And if I wanted to, I could easily sell it. My predictions I do every year, I could have the market research company pay me a lot of

money for those. And actually, I've been offered that before. But in return, all that would be is a simple sale. By me release that content for free, what's happening is our buyers, Motelpoint, OGGN buyers are starting to see Mark LeCours and OGGN as experts, as companies and people that can help them with problems.

And in our case, that problem is how to get in front of other oil and gas companies. So I give away that content for free. What I'm really doing is educating my potential buyers or my future buyers on what we do to help solve problems, which can help them. So the whole entire sales organizations need to change and it's funny, Matt, I don't want to name the company, but it is a subsea company that is a sponsor of ours and you can figure

it out if you do a little bit of research. Their biggest sales are the people in their organization that drive the best results or not their sales team. And by the way, don't reach out to with hate mail. I know y'all, I love y'all to death. They have portfolio managers who run projects inside their clients organizations.

So think of ExxonMobil. That portfolio manager that's inside of ExxonMobil gets to hear everything that's going on, gets to understand where the next projects are, what the dates are, what the budgets are. And so the portfolio managers who are actually delivering these projects inside Exxon actually drive more sales than their own sales team. Think about that for a second.

That should be flip flopped, right? So the salespeople should actually be tagged with these portfolio managers in these future project meetings, in these budgetary meetings, so that the salespeople hear the same thing the portfolio managers and then help the customer solve problems. But this company is still running a little bit behind times and they have salespeople who do nothing but manage the customer relationships, even though the portfolio managers drive more

sales revenue than the sales team. Such an easy thing that you could fix to actually probably increase revenue 10 or 15% just by joining those salespeople with the portfolio managers. Yeah, no Mark. I mean, you really touched on a lot there. I've always known sales is like professionally helping people buy, and there's some kind

of acronym associated with it. But you touched on two big topics and I don't know where you want to take this, but one of the things that I heard you say is storytelling and communicating that content and arranging it in a way that tells a really great story of a testimonial or what you can do for clients. And then the other thing that you touched on was how to build yourself up as an expert in the eyes of your customer.

I mean, really like people buy from people that they know have their back and that are going to keep them out of a ditch and that they know that they're making the right decision and building those USPs for the company unique selling propositions that you can offer based on I guess problem solving and what the goals and KPIs are of who you're selling to, but also how to build yourself up as an expert, right? So building the company up and building your sales up.

And so I think that again, this is where I guess sales and marketing come together to better tell that story and to build that expertise. I call it building the know, I can trust and then communicating that through doing Google actually talks about something called eat expertise, authoritative and trust. They've recently added another e to it. So it's like a eat and it's experience.

And so experience, authoritative, expertise and trust are the things that Google's looking for online and Google's mirroring what people are looking for in real life. And they have a lot of data analysts that look into that and find that I think you've really touched on those. I don't know which rabbit hole you would like to go down, but you've certainly teed up a few of them.

Let's talk about a cub. So sales people and sales organizations out there, let me share something that's really cool. I'm seen as an expert. So when somebody engaged, when the company engages with me and they want me to fly out or lately, jump on a zoom call, whatever and meet with their team, that is the start of

a sales cycle. I get paid for that. Listen to what I'm saying. When a company reaches out to me and wants to engage with me, they pay me to fly out there and meet with them because I'm seen as an expert. I'm not seen as a vendor.

If I was seen as a vendor, I would have to eat those travel costs, right? And they pay me to help educate their team and maybe help them fix a problem, which would be us selling something to them. But because I'm seen as an expert, they look at me completely different. You know how rare it is I get pushed back on price. It almost never happens.

Why? Because I don't let myself be a vendor. I'm an expert. I am still selling services 100% but I'm looked at differently. To your point, Matt, the reason the industry looks at me as an expert is because the content I put out there and I've been putting content out longer than anybody else.

I didn't even know what the word vlogger was. I started doing it 15 years ago and my marketing person said, the next big thing in search is video. So I'd said, I'm just going to start with video since that's the next big thing, next big thing. I had no idea I was starting the first all you had vlogging channel.

I got videos that go back 15 years and they're horrible. The content is great. The technical quality is horrible, but I've learned over the time. The other thing you brought up, which is really important and it's also subtle is one of the things a good salesperson does is help his clients buy even internally. I'll give you a perfect example.

So for OGGN, when we sell podcast sponsorships, that typically comes out of somebody's CapEx budget. If they don't have extra money laying around, they have to get that approved, usually say yearly cycle to pay for a sponsorship. Once it gets approved, then if we do good business, they pay us. We invoice them to pay us and then we have to go through this whole process the next

year, next budgetary CapEx cycle. However, with some of our clients that did not understand this, if I rent them the podcast instead of sell them the podcast, it now hits their operational budget, OPEX, OPEX budgets in companies are what keeps the light on what pays electricity bill, the janitors, you know, construction call, not construction costs, but anything that's a reoccurring monthly charge.

There's no approval needed for an OPEX budget. So by me understanding how to move something from a CapEx budget to an OPEX budget, when I get that pushback of, oh, well, we can't do this until next year because I have to get budgetary approval, I have now helped them buy for me in a way that they didn't even know they could do. And once again, that's a salesperson being a problem solver.

Let me help you figure out your budget issues. Yeah. That's one of the things that we do all the time that is subtle, but it's huge because I understand how large enterprise finance works. Not sure if that answered your question, but I love the conversation that we're having. I like that.

I think that the problem solving is really understanding how to understand what the customer wants or needs to do and then figuring out a way in which you can help achieve that. And ultimately finding a win-win solution. You know, it was funny you were talking and I was like, oh my gosh, like he's talking. So I wrote a book quite a few years ago, it was one of my first books. It was called Build Your Brand Mania.

And this is when social media was on the rise and people didn't quite understand how to leverage what was going on. And so I really wrote it for the layperson to understand and really actually wrote it from a salesperson standpoint and you really fit into that model pretty well. I came out with another book called Rise of the Personal Brand where I took a bunch of other influencers and told their story of how they built their self into an expert,

a celebrity, you know, a thought leader in the space and it helped position them to take up more of that mind chair to, you know, better sell their products or services, right? Like, and that's the strategy that's been working well in the new economy. And I think that that's a lot of what we're maybe talking about here is how does a salesperson leverage marketing on a micro level as well as on a macro level. And you laid out a perfect example of how you did that for yourself and you've really

positioned yourself as an expert consultant that people are going to engage with and then you're going to help them solve a problem and how you're probably going to solve that problem is by offering some kind of product or service that you're familiar with or that you're offering because it's actually what they believe is the solution for them because they were attracted to your content in the first place. Yeah.

And by the way, folks, we'll put a link to Max Books in here so you can go check them out. I didn't even realize you had those out there. This is really cool. Yeah. Yes.

So when you look at sales needing change in oil and gas, marketing needs to change too. We talked about in the previous episode, but the marketing team is the one that is going to position you and your company as a thought leader. The sales person or the sales team is the one that's going to take the work that marketing does and converts it into dollars, quite frankly. It is interesting to see the number of salespeople lately in oil and gas who are actually establishing

their personal brand or trying to, and I think it's wonderful. We talked earlier about LinkedIn. There's a lot of people that all of a sudden have gotten comfortable with shooting short videos about their day-to-day on LinkedIn, and I encourage you sales leaders to encourage your sales teams to do the same thing. Don't make your sales team a bunch of order takers.

Make your sales team a bunch of thought leaders. Like Matt said, make your company be seen as a thought leader and allow your sales team to show their personality. With today's smartphones, it is incredibly easy to shoot and edit really good video. LinkedIn is giving you extra LinkedIn points if you upload native videos so you get more reach, and your buyers and your existing customers will see it.

And if you're doing this and your competition is not, guess what? When that customer or that potential buyer has a problem, they're going to think of you and your sales teams first. So sales leaders, I highly encourage you to actually not only let your sales team do this, but encourage them, maybe even offer a class or two. There's always a couple of people that are scared to press that publish button.

And look, I have put some horrible content out there, Matt, over the years, not on purpose. You know, you just get through it and it makes you see more real. So it doesn't need to be perfect. And in fact, actually, Matt, I'm glad we have this conversation. In OGGN's research on people listening to podcasts like this one, one of the things that we've learned is that people want good content that's educational.

But if it's too scripted and too perfect, they won't listen to it because they think they're being sold to, they think they're being marketed to. They'd rather have it more real and valuable than more spit and polished. Do you see that on the marketing side? Yeah. There's data out there that talks about the behind the scenes or the just unedited

videos do about three times better than the really, you know, polished videos. Certainly, I think there's a place for the polished videos, but putting content out there that's real, that is what, I mean, has driven even, what is it? Just attention talk shows and like a survivor and like all these shit, like everybody just wants to watch people do stuff. And the more human you can make it, the more people are going to feel connected

to you, certainly through podcasting and putting content out there, you're showing a side of yourself that people are going to get to know you better. And that's what you're trying to do is add value and make connection. And so I do think that building the personal brand is the right way for small business for salespeople, but certainly there's that line there, right? If now you're into homemade content and how do you square that with your sales

organization? I think the way to square that is there's some really good methodologies out there on ways to follow and how to build content and how to personalize things. But I think building your own personal brand from an employee standpoint and a salesperson standpoint to make yourself invaluable, there's a ton of value in that. And then I certainly think that there's a value in transforming your sales team

into experts and thought leaders versus order takers, like you said. So I think it's good for everyone. And now everything's so interconnected, you just need to put yourself out there. I think there was days when people had different social media profiles, maybe they had their LinkedIn and then their Facebook was personal or their Instagram was personal, but now it's all intertwined.

And you just need to be authentic on who you are and just own that. And I think even to the point that you said of putting content out there, that was bad. And in the beginning, like, do you think every single person that's out there, like, I don't know who you follow, Grant Cardone, do you think his content in the beginning was like fantastic?

No, it took a lot of practice. It took a lot of time, you know, like a buddy of mine in the podcasting space, he runs podcast, he wrote a book called start ugly. And I just think that there's truth in the title there is you just need to start. You need to get going. You need to start making some momentum, start making some waves, and then

improve as you go. That's the only way you're going to get better. And so there's certainly a lot of people that are hesitant about video or just putting themselves out there. Well, like, you got to get comfortable with it. That's the world we live in.

That would be my answer to that. Yeah, another thought. So there's a lot of big, very complex sales organizations, especially on the technology side, think Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Amazon, Google, who have dedicated sales and marketing teams for the oil and gas industry. They realize the revenue potential is here.

But the oil and gas industry, even though it's a normal company, they're oil and gas industry, even though it's enormous and it's global, it's still an industry of people doing business with people. It truly is. It's one of the things I love about this industry. But these big, huge tech sales organizations that point their people

on gas because they're worried about things like shareholder value and public relations, they don't let their sales teams put content out there. And that means that inside the oil and gas industry, I look at you, SAP and Oracle as a faceless sales machine. I don't know your people. I don't know your culture.

And I am more likely to buy from you if you let me see behind the scenes. Let me see what you do for fun. Let me see that y'all are goofy. Let me see that y'all give back and y'all plant trees. Don't just stick and nothing gets corporate marketing. No hate mail, but from a sales organization point of view, let's have

you be more real and more human. Yeah, I mean, more social, social media. Yeah, yeah. I think humanizing your people is really important. And certainly, if you're a salesperson out there, you can figure out what that line is where you could have your own personal blog, right?

That was something that I saw years ago that really worked. Well, is I remember salespeople that had their business card, right? They would give them their business card, but they would give them two cards. They would give them another card behind that, that had a link to their social media profiles and also had a link to their blog, right? Back in the like day, we're talking like 10, 15 years ago and driving people

to the blog to see the salesperson as something different than just a robot from the company made them want to do business and help that person even more because they know, I mean, if you're a buyer, you know why someone's there and you're going to do business with people you know, I can trust, right? And so the more you can humanize yourself and the more you can intertwine that with them on a, like I would say, you know, there's different layers.

Let me go back to digital marketing just for a minute and talk about email automation. One of, this is like a pro tip, okay? So people often ask me when they're doing a newsletter, right? Do we do a newsletter like once a quarter? Do we do a newsletter once a month? Do we do it once a week?

Do we do it daily? Like what do we do? I get asked that question so much, Mark. Like we need to do a newsletter, you know, the salespeople need to share it. Like how often should we do it? And my answer to them is actually always the same.

What kind of a relationship do you want to have with your customer? Okay. So do you want to be acquaintance? So okay, quarterly, do you want to be somebody that they're aware of that you kind of talk to on a regular basis? Think about like a personal circle of your friends, right?

Who do you talk to monthly, right? Who then do you talk to weekly, right? And then who do you talk to daily? So it might be like family. So maybe daily might be too much, but maybe you want to be considered family by your client.

I think weekly is really good. People think that that's too much, but if you're putting out thoughtful, unique content that people like, they actually have a very, very high engagement. We've even found on social, putting stuff out daily, even multiple times a day is actually better, right? But I just say, look at it from the standpoint of what is the relationship you

want to have into your customer? How do you want them to be positioned in their mind and then do that, right? And then that goes for salespeople as well as companies too, is how do you want to be viewed by your customer? And also that comes down to how do you sell, right? What kind of information do you want to communicate?

It's all about building that story, building that brand online of who you want to be. Certain people sell differently. Certain people have different qualities. Some people are, you know, they're going to call you back at any time of the day. The other people are going to be like, Hey, they've been doing it forever. They got it.

They're on a beach somewhere. Like call me if you need me. Like there's different people. There's different strokes for different folks on what they're offering. You got to figure out authentically who you want to be to who and then present that online, like present that online and connect with people in that way.

So see sales leaders and sales teams and salespeople. Why should have a marketing person as your best friend? So Matt just laid it all out to you. Do you know how much more sales you would do if you did half? Well, Matt just rattled off and said, that's another place where the industry needs to change.

And it's kind of a thing for the show of where Matt and I both believe that marketing sales should be one. Unfortunately, Matt, it is time to start winding things down. So you've heard me say this before. We have an insider's group come and stay tuned for that. That's going to be a whole bunch of really incredible awesomeness.

So we membership only, it's going to be a limit number of people. So if you don't get in early, you're not going to get in unless somebody leaves. You want to connect with Matt and I on social, all of our social channels, all our links are in the show notes. We have our monthly SNM newsletter. Stay tuned for that.

And that was going to be fun. And then we have our LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. And this week it's my turn. We're doing a fail. And you can't make this stuff up. Matt and I were discussing this and somebody hit me up on LinkedIn and

literally the timing was impeccable. Here it is. This is literally just happened today. This is from Joe Winters. Hey, Mark, thank you for accepting my connection request. I hope you're having a blessed year.

The purpose for connecting is because I'd like to see if I can help you change more lives and add six plus figures in your sales to your business with your own podcast show. Have you ever considered using a podcast to get premium clients for your business? Question mark. So number one, Joe, this means you did zero research on me.

I run the largest podcast organization in the oil and gas industry. And literally we're talking about your fail on the oil and gas sales and marketing podcast. So you did zero research mistake. Number one mistake. Number two is that you probably are sending this generic message to everybody

hoping to land. If you would have spent five minutes, Joe doing research on me and saw that I had an existing podcast network with, I don't remember how many podcasts are now 18 or something like that, then your message could have been a little bit different such as, Hey, I see that you have a lot of podcasts out there. Is there a way I can help you increase sales for your podcast sponsorship?

If you were to show me that message, Joe, I would reply to you. Unfortunately, because you didn't, you just made the LinkedIn fail of the week. The timing of this, you can't make this stuff up, but it's legit. You want to comment on that, Matt? Well, Mark, I mean, I think that through the availability of information online, you can really craft a very tailored message to prospects.

And, you know, so again, it's a different sales strategy. He's reaching out to a lot of people hoping someone's going to raise their hand and that message could land well and land on fertile ground. But he's kind of spraying and praying, right? As far as like his strategy, as opposed to at the other end of the spectrum, doing a lot of high quality research, reaching out to somebody and catching

that hook, like you said, right? And so it's just a matter of also understanding who you're going to be working with and how they work, right? And so, like, you know, I don't know, you can make your own assumptions on how to do that. Certainly, I can tell you personally, I am guilty of all things faux pas,

like in marketing and sales, I was, I even talk about in my book, I was before the Can Spam Act, I was emailing everyone, I was fax-bossing people. I did that, right? And that was early in my sales career. And so this guy's just trying to make something happen, right? Like, so if he doesn't have a tailored message, like how, now you can see

what kind of automation he has, what kind of build Fallope is, what I would tell you is if you look at someone's marketing customer journey, that really can tell you how good of a product they're selling is, that may not apply to everybody in oil and gas, but certainly people that are selling services. Typically, if they have a really good sales process, they probably have a really good service and I'll just send it there.

Yeah. And one of our future shows, I'm going to go into deep detail on how we do research and do very, very targeted emails. And Matt, when I get it right, I have about a 70% conversion. That means seven out of 10 emails that I send, people reply back and they want to engage with me.

When I get it wrong, it's less than 1%. It's ugly, which tells me that I missed something. But I think the days of spraying and playing are over, because what it does, everybody has 100 emails a day that comes in, everybody gets blasted by all the financial advisors of LinkedIn, no hate mail financial advisors. And I think the days of spraying and praying are over with it.

You end up aggravating people as opposed to when you actually spend time doing the research and you engage in a conversation with something they are struggling with right then and there and they appreciate if you reach out. It's just a totally different reaction. Anyway, this is our weekly session. If you want to call me on LinkedIn and it's funny, you'll make the LinkedIn

failure tip of the week. Humor is good. Humor is good. Yeah. All right, we've got to get out of here. So 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.