Building a Sales Team from Scratch (hint – start with marketing)

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast.

I know there's been a little bit of time that has elapsed since Matt and I recorded an episode, so in order to fix that, I have the famous Jordan Driscoll joining me today. Hey, Jordan. I mean, famous. That's sales.

That's a marketing spin right there. No, but seriously, I get more comments on your podcast. And by the way, audience, you haven't listened to Jordan's podcast. Context is for Kings. It is phenomenal. It's actually one of my personal playlists. He's part of the OGGN team.

We're actually recording this on a Sunday. But Jordan, I would say that you're famous. The number of people that reach out to me commenting on your show, mostly good. The number of people that reach out to me trying to get some guests on your show,

not realize that you don't take guests. You've actually ranked in some top All In Gas podcast. Did I ever send you that list? I don't know what I'm talking about. See, I don't know what I'm talking about. OK.

Any D list celebrity status that I have is shocking to me. That's just humorous. Yeah. So, audience, even though Jordan and I work for OGGN, we never talk. And unfortunately, this is sort of the high performance culture we have here at OGG and everybody's out doing their own stuff.

And it's rare that we actually get to sit down and talk through stuff. This is, I promise you, not an episode of me and Jordan catching up. We're going to talk about sales and marketing on this. But yeah, so, Jordan, there's 100 top B2B All In Gas sales podcast list out there. And you made the top 100. And you make the top 100.

You made the top 20. I'll send it to you. OK, fair enough, which is wild because my show is tangentially energy related on the best of days. I mean, you gave me a mandate for a show, which I've taken liberties with, which I appreciate your tolerance of my antics.

But yeah, that surprises me. All right, I'll see that list later. Also, audience, I'll put a link in the show notes to George's show if you want to check it out. Other thing before we get into today's conversation, by the time you hear this, we'll be getting close to our next All In Gas industry mixer,

which is May 29th, Thursday, May 29th. It's the last one that we're going to do until the fall. We always take the summers off. So they'll be linking the show notes for that as well. It's food, fun, prizes, cocktails. It's always a great time at the end of the day.

The money raised goes to a charity to fight human sex trafficking. So you literally help us save a little boy, a little girl's life. So if you're in the Houston area last Thursday and May, click on the link. Come join us. If you join us, come find me and introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you in person. All right, so Jordan was a past guest in my Turbo Talk podcast.

I've known Jordan, I don't know for how long, for a very long time. He runs a sales and marketing group for a midsize company, so SMB space. And I had him on Turbo Talk and we started talking and we had to stop because that shows only 10 or 15 minutes, but we got into sales leadership. So Jordan, I thought today we would kind of rehash that conversation, but we had a chance to go deeper in the sales leadership.

I'm kind of going to put you on a spot here. Yeah, go for it. Our audience is a bunch of sales and marketing leaders. When you're thinking about if you were given an opportunity, somebody brought you into a company from scratch. The company is finance. It has customers, but it has no sales team.

And your job was to build out that sales team. Where would you start? This is literally what I did at the company I'm at now. They hired me when they were going from where they started, which was, I don't know, four to five million a year in revenue. And they had done it all on the backs of word of mouth and that kind of thing.

But they had zero sales and marketing apparatus. They had a dreadful website that they had paid a contractor to build years before. There was zero salespeople, zero marketing staff, nothing, nothing, nothing. They brought me in and they said, can you build this? And I said, yeah, if you've got money, I can, which they did. Now, as with any sort of founder-esque run company, sales and marketing

as a perception within that's always you have to kind of overcome a little bit. I didn't go more than a bit. But where I started was the marketing. That was thing number one. Employee number one was getting myself a solid marketing director and then a and sales guy.

And the rationale behind that is marketing's job is to generate interest and buzz and to be the plumage that draws in people that are interested in the services or products that you're peddling. And then it sails this job to take those leads and turn them into actual billing customers or paying customers. So, yeah, I mean, for me, step one was we had to get the marketing in line

because anytime you're taking that first step from word of mouth only to the wider world of enterprise, you're going to have a lot of low hanging fruit as if you can just get the message out there. That's step one. Stop right there. Talk about that for a little second.

So number one, now we do 100% agree with you. This conversation is actually good because we're actually talking about building a sales and marketing team, which we've never done on the show before. And a lot of medium sized businesses are in the same space where they had that same need. I love this. And 100% agree with you.

If I was going to do the same thing, if I was going to start from scratch, I basically would start with the marketing person. Marketing's job is to drive leads, salespeople's turn those leads into revenue. And I love where he came to you. You found the best that you could find. And I think that's the place to start.

Find the best marketing person that fits your industry, that has experience that somewhat aligns with your company and that you can also afford. I love that good place to start. You hired a good marketing person, a great marketing person. You hired a sales person. What's the next step?

Where would you go next with that? Or where did you go next with that? Right. So I mean, once I had that in hand, the big focus on the marketing side of the house was the web, because I mean, obviously it's the 20th, 21st century. Well, I mean, obviously you have to have a strong web presence.

And if you have a good marketing person that really knows how to manipulate their SEO and to do all the keyword tagging and all that sort of stuff and can generate content that triggers those keywords, both in Google search and LinkedIn or whatever social media you're using, you can wind up generating a ton of leads. So that was focus number one was website, social media, hit those

too hard until we have a steady cadence. And at the same time, we started looking at, you know, what sort of industry events that we're going to be important to be a part of, obviously oil and gas. I mean, you want to get into NAEP as much as you can. You want to get into your software vendors because we do outsourced accounting. So we're using all these different accounting

software, so being plugged in with them and building those relationships so that we would get leads referred from them. Those were kind of the steps. I mean, I always liken it to and I've used this analogy with my board before where I just say, listen, guys, because here's the thing. I'm going to go a little bit of a tangent here, so bear with me.

My board, like many founder boards, and I've had this conversation with a ton of folks that I've consulted with on the side and even with my own board. They always go, well, yeah, marketing is great, but we need the sales guys. We need to start with sales and then we'll worry about marketing later. And I go, no, no, no, no, that's a hundred percent backwards. You will get more leads if you just have a sales guy called calling,

you'll never get anywhere. No, I agree with you. I don't know what it is, but that is the mentality that so many founders have is, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll deal with the web stuff later. Let's just get a sales guy dialing for dollars. I'm like, no, that's a stupid use of money.

You're never going to get where you want to get. You got to start with the marketing that feeds the machine that the sales guy then goes and trust me, your sales guys will be a lot more successful if they are spending 70 percent of their time trying to scrounge out leads. Yeah, give them the leads, let them go do their job. I have that conversation a million times.

And what I've told, like I said, my board and various others that I've consulted with is what we do in this business specifically, whether it's accounting software, whether it's the accounting services, it doesn't matter. The bottom line is that sort of thing is a corporate heart transplant. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I want to go get a heart transplant today.

You just don't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, hey, I want to go outsource all my accounting. It's a painful, expensive, toilsome process that nobody likes. The only time they do it is when they have a need to do it. What I'm selling is a commodity and I can't sell you that commodity unless you need that commodity.

The analogy here is I can't call you up, Mark, and sell you a heart transplant. What I can be is the only doctor you think of when you need that heart transplant. Love it. And that's Marky's job right there. And I'll tell you what, George, I can tell you where some of that comes from by hiring a sales guy first. I've been selling since the eighties and in the late eighties and the early nineties.

If you were a good salesperson, all in gas, you had great relationships, personal relationships with your customers. And if I hired you, if I poached you away from your company, you would bring those customers to my company. And if I did a good job of matching what your previous company did to what my company does, I would generate a decent amount of business, maybe 30 percent

of those relationships would then move over to be customers of ours. So you would hire that salesperson. But George, that was 30 years ago. I can tell you right now, it doesn't work anymore. It's very dependent. There's not a lot of pure relationship sales.

I mean, there are some things that make me wrong. Like first purchasers, crude purchasers, they still live a lot on professional relationships, landmen still live a lot on professional relationships. But so much of the business in the industry, aside from those specific jobs, are not relationship driven. And they are purely, do I know about you?

Do I believe you'll do a good job and is the price going to be right? 100 percent. And buying has changed. When I was younger in my sales career, you really had a decision making. Even a company as big as Chevron or Exxon, there might have been one person that could have just signed the PO and bought for you.

Well, all the companies realized that wasn't good for them. So now there's decision making teams, either formal, where you know who they are, or most probably informal, where you don't know who they are. And they did that on purpose to get away from those relationship sales, which wasn't good for the company. Jordan, we do it here at OGGN.

When we're going to buy a new tool, I don't make that decision. We have literally a board, a team of people we put together to look at it and evaluate and devote on it for that exact reason. So that's where that old thing came from. Hire the salesperson first. And I agree with you.

If you can't figure out how to get in front of the people to use your example that may need hard transplant in the future and help educate them on how you are probably the best if you're ever in that need. So they think of you first. Your sales seems to be very inefficient. I love where you're going with that 100 percent.

Now let's talk a little bit about the team. So you start with your head marketing person, which by the way, like back you way up, hiring that person and knowing ahead of time, they need to have webmaster skills. That was crucial, right? So when you're doing that interview and that was one of the things that you

probably ask questions around is, are you kind of the jack of all trades and marketing because what you didn't need was an SEO specialist. You need something that could do a little bit of everything. I cheated a little bit on that because the first two employees I hired for the team, both my salesperson and my marketing director were both people from my professional network, so I already knew them.

I knew what they could do. I approached them very deliberately and I said, OK, listen here, we're going to go. We're going to build really. I just had to sell them on coming over for what was not a huge amount of money. But I already knew the guys that had the skill sets that I needed. You're right.

That is exactly what I would do if I didn't just cheat and go find the people that I already knew in my network. We're going to be able to pull it off. And for all your sales leaders up there to listen to this conversation and thinking that that SEO thing is not important, let's have a little bit of fun. While you're listening to podcasts, open up your browser of choice and type in

oil and gas merchandise or gas merch, either one. When you do, you'll see that OGG and pops up first. We're not paying for that. That's organic. Google thinks we're the number one gas merchandise provider in the world. Let me tell you what that did to our merchandise sales, which is a small

portion of revenue. We were doing about three hundred dollars worth of merchandise sales a month until we spent the time to actually rank organically, which is called SEO for oil and gas merchandise. Now we're doing $10,000 a month in merchandise. The only thing that changes our ranking is based upon our SEO results, based

upon knowing how to market that in the right way. So that Google would put us in that first page and we eventually got to number one. So don't discount that if you're a sales leader, don't discounting that's marketing magic. It's not. It drives real revenue that you can track.

Like I said, I didn't spend a penny. We're not paying a penny for that. And I mean, we spend not a huge sum of money. We do it very smartly because I've got a good team. But we spend for all of our Google and AdWords and display ads, banner ads and all that sort of nonsense.

We spend five to six hundred dollars a month. I mean, it's not a huge sum of money. And the return on it is, I mean, before you and I got on this call, I was doing my reports for my exact meeting on Tuesday. Just go ahead and pull the number two last week. And, you know, so far 58% of the leads that have come in have come in off the

website and then every time I get in front of the board, they're like, oh, we need to do more business development. I'm like business development generated 7% of our leads last year and 5% of our revenue. I don't give a damn about business development. I don't need a guy going to cocktail hours.

That's never going to generate the revenue that my marketing guy can get leads wise. I need my sales guys to be good at conveying trust and competency. I don't need them wasting time again, doing non-sensey business steps. If there is times when that's relevant and you get to a point where that's the next step, the real magic is setting up a marketing pipeline that feeds the sales pipeline.

Yep, especially in the very beginning, you're crazy to spend time and money on cold calling. Now, if people listen to show know that I love cold calling, the process has changed. Like pick up a telephone and call somebody you don't know no longer works. The idea is still 100% relevant, but that's only after your marketing team is up and running and they're generating leads on a regular basis that you could forecast

with some degree of accuracy. Then when you have no other levers to pull, that's when you start looking at cold calling. It's not the first thing you do. It's the last thing you do. I'll say this.

I want to do us a one more thing and talk about projecting and all of that. So every week, obviously I look at all the key metrics that I care about and there's not a ton. I mean, truly this isn't rocket science. I mean, I know a lot of founders tend to look at marketing with this gimlet eye of I don't really get it.

It's witchcraft. I'm like, that's not, it's not predictable in the same sense that you can say, this is exactly what margin is on something, right? Like I can figure out what a contribution rate is and what sunk costs are in a thing and all of that. Marketing is a little bit less unless you're Google or Amazon.

I mean, then you've got so much data you can come up with relatively accurate numbers, but at this scale, it's a little ethereal, but there are certain metrics that you can look at that will be a bit predictive. So for instance, to your point on web traffic, the numbers I look at, I've actually got my core card that I track right here. The numbers that I care about are on a weekly basis.

What is my overall web traffic of individual web views? What is my organic traffic, which is going to be a portion of that because organic traffic tells me how well that's working. What are my social media engagement numbers? And if those three numbers are typically high, especially for multiple weeks on a row, then I can predict that I'm going to hit my lead generation targets

out of marketing. And if I'm hitting my lead generation targets consecutively, then I can predict that I'm probably going to hit my sales targets for the quarter, right? Dude, we're right there with you. I look at almost the same metrics. I don't break up organic versus indirect.

I look at total web traffic. I would have had more time, but I look at total web tracking. Is it up or down? That's all I want to know. Up or down, right? And I compare it to year over year.

Like how this is tracking against this time of year, by the way. And then the next thing I look at is I look at our social media stats. What's the engagement there? Predominantly on LinkedIn. And then finally, I look at the ratio of leads that are coming in to revenue generated year over year.

And that gives me a feeling of what we're going to do next month or next quarter based upon the metrics having it from me. And it's surprisingly accurate. It is. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, again, none of this is rocket science. It's just not. Well, if you're a finance guy on a board and I go, hey, web traffic is going to be somewhat predictive of what we're going to do for lead generation. Lead generation is going to be in turn hinging on how sales does. And they're just like, well, okay, but scientifically, how do you calculate that?

And it's like, listen, man, again, we're not Amazon. We're not doing big science here. This is just the way it works. It's the invisible hand of the market. But yeah, I mean, that's too long. Didn't read very, very conceptually easy and practice.

It's a challenge. You can quantify it. So you can't say it's going to be 27.36% of whatever. You can say that we had a 10% uplift. So I expect a 10% of sales. If you track your metrics and you always look at the Delta over time, you'll

start being able to come up with a number. I do this when I'm trying to predict the price of crude, I call it a fudge factor because I know Russian OPEC lies and I track how much they lie every year. And I actually use that as a number to figure out when they say they're going to do X, what's the reality of it? It's surprisingly accurate over time.

So I'm just telling you, it's sales leaders and people that run businesses don't think marketing is this mysterious black hole. You have to be a guru in marketing. I'm saying it's not, it's numbers. It's Excel spreadsheets. It's just a little bit different.

It's not a 101 correlation, but it can easily be a 102 or 103. And once you understand that ratio, it's predictable. All right. I don't want to get caught up in this. Yep. Yep.

Sorry. Sorry. I could go on this for a minute. I don't want to run out of time because it's rare that I get you on the microphone for this show. I've been trying to get Jordan on the show for months and half the time

that he didn't make it was my fault. So I'm trying to get this done. Well, to be fair, I've traveled a lot the past month. I've had multiple board meetings. We've had in person in San Antonio and then traveling for time. Like it's been a very busy quarter.

So I'm glad to actually be in my office. There were cobwebs when I got here last week. So I was like, I've been gone a little too long having a guys. All right. So the next thing is, and this is something that I struggle with myself over the years.

I still struggle with it sometimes. You work for a smaller company. You have a smaller team. You don't have a lot of resources at your disposal. How do you inspire the team to continue to do the stuff to be successful? You and I both know that most salespeople are inspired by the revenue,

the money they take out. Some people aren't in the marketing departments. A lot of times they're not really concerned about that so much, although I do think that marketing should eventually, as the company grows, has some type of compensation that's connected to sales metrics. And Matt and I believe that sales and marketing should be joined at the

hips and all the guys are about two separate organizations. But let's get back to how do you inspire a small team when you have limited resources? The first thing, and I think I picked the top one is in the military. There's whenever in this kind of goes to general management, but it's certainly applicable in a sales and marketing team as much as anything else.

There's four basic things that will motivate an employee. When you boil it down, it's just four and it's called mice. Money, ideology, coercion or ego. Money, are you coin operated? Put a coin in you, you do a task, you get another coin. That's how most people think of salespeople as being motivated, which is

not always entirely accurate, by the way. One of the best sales guys I know, actually, maybe the best sales guy, I know what pains me to say. He is as much ideology. If he doesn't believe in the product and believe in whoever his boss is, he's just useless.

But if he actually feels inspired by his boss, the man is unstoppable. I mean, he would just a million dollars in recurring revenue every month. It's insane. The money coin operated is that how you get motivated with certain salespeople. That's what it is. So you build a comp plan that incentivizes them with a smaller base and a

higher variable commission. Other folks are inspired by ideology, which is, do I believe in the product? Do I believe in the team I've got? Do I believe in the thing I'm doing? These are your doctors, your preacher, maybe not your doctors necessarily all the time, but a preacher is a good example.

Nobody aside from some particularly televised exceptions are in it for the money. Most of them are in it for the flock, for the good word. That's one thing. Are you an ideologically motivated employee? Coercion, which is basically, are you motivated by the fear of a thing?

Maybe it's a fear of not being able to feed your family. Maybe it's a fear of embarrassing yourself and your social group by not doing your job or whatever, but are you a fear driven employee? You manage those a little bit differently because with them, they don't really care about the praise. They don't really care about the money necessarily other than what they need to

get by on. They just care about not being in trouble in some variety, which again, sounds kind of cold to say, but I mean, you manage that person very differently than you do somebody who's ideologically motivated. And then lastly, ego. Maybe you're doing this just because you don't want the praise.

You want the adulation. You want to feel important. You want to feel, I can tell you for me, handedly, I'm a money and ego person. That's how you motivate me. Those are the two levers.

I don't really care about the ideology. I'm not particularly, you can't really scare me into doing what you want. As many of my previous bosses in my early career learned, I'm not really easily cowed into things. But if you want me to go and walk through the gates of hell, give me a nice title and slap on the ass and add a boy and then money and I'll go do it.

So I think with every employee, you just figure out what are the levers that move to each one individually and then build your comp plan and all of that around those things and your management style around those things. Yeah. For almost my entire sales career, it was money. If my W two was bigger this year, it was last year.

That was a good year. If it was smaller, it was a bad year. Nothing else really mattered. And that worked really well. And now that I'm older, I could turn around and see that how my sales managers over the years of different companies use that.

And in fact, they specifically hired for that. That's when the reason they brought me is like, okay, this guy, more money he makes the happier is and the better he'll do for the company. The funny thing is, yeah, 100% not even ego. I didn't care what my title was at all. Yeah.

Yeah. One of my mistakes I made earlier, not early, but mid careers. I took on a sales leadership role and all of a sudden my personal income wasn't up to me anymore. And that was a mistake. I quickly went back to carrying a bag just because once again, that title

didn't matter to me or the amount of power I had in the organization didn't matter. But the funny thing is as I got older, that changed. And now I think the biggest motivator for me is how much control do I have over my free time now in order to have control of my free time, I have to make enough money that I'm not worried about the finance part. Right.

So the money's still important, but it's just funny how that changed. But you're 100% right. Everybody's different. And I've known and it's really interesting. You brought that about your top salesperson. If I think of the top salesperson I've met in my entire life, he was not money

motivated at all. It was all, did he believe in the product in the company? And if he did, he was unstoppable, amazing. And if he didn't, he was gone. He literally was just gone because it wasn't what motivated him. My last question for you, you build the team, you work for a small company.

If you do a good job, you're still at the small company, but now it's a midsize company. The team grows and is no longer two people. Maybe it's eight, 10, 20, whatever. And this is something Jordan, I personally am struggling with right now at OGGN. How do you stay involved with the sales and marketing team at the same time? Make sure that you're not being a micromanager.

Here's one of my problems. And this happens to me all the time and I bite my tongue. If I asked you to do something and you do something differently than the way I would do it, even if you give me the results that I'm looking for in my head, because I'm old enough to keep my mouth shut now, I think you did it wrong. Even though you gave me what I asked for.

So how do you stay involved in the team as it grows and make sure that you're keeping that culture, but at the same time allow them to grow and blossom on their own without you being the constraint? I am a big believer in structure. And again, it's probably just a whole different military time of life. I want a team that is kind of like we're all in the trenches.

And so my team knows they can throw jabs at me and they can joke with me and all that. And I'm going to punch back, but they also know that when I give an order, I expect it to be carried out. Like once I've made a decision, your job is to execute, joke times over, go make it happen. That's sort of the culture that I like is we're all kind of moving fast. We're all trying to row in the same direction.

We have fun while we do it, but we can get it done. But the organizational side of that, very, very quickly, I hired a marketing director with the intention of building a team under them as funds became available, which we now have a decent sized marketing team. And then I hired a salesperson and I knew I was going to hire more salespeople, which I since have, and then I made a sales director.

I just promoted the one who I thought was going to be best at it, which is as many people who are successful at this know, you don't necessarily hire your best salesperson to be the sales leader. You hire your best people manager to be your sales leader, because you need somebody to deal with the divas. All right.

And that's not necessarily your best sales guy who also wants to keep making money properly to your point. What I do on my team is I obviously spend a lot of time talking to my marketing director and my sales director, because those are the two people that I have to interface with the most. But once a week, I make sure that we have at least a good 30 minutes to an

hour team meeting where everybody on the team for my most junior marketer, my most junior SDR, we're all in a meeting together to talk through the big numbers and to talk through where we're at for the prior week. And what we have going on this week in a nutshell, I don't need to be like super in the weeds, just, Hey, what do you guys need resource wise? Is there anything in the way that I need to go?

Do my senior vice president get out of the way maneuver on? Or is there something you're lacking or some sort of problem? And it keeps me sort of looped in. I get to have some time with everybody, but I also make a point of very definitively making sure that my two directors are handling their job. Right.

I'll give you an example. I had a year or two ago, let's happen a few times, but I was shut it down pretty fast as somebody will come into my office and it's invariably like an SDR or a junior marketer, right? And they'll come in and be like, Hey, I think I want to take PTO on Friday. Is that all right?

And I'll look at them and I'm like, did you talk to your boss? Do I have the power to authorize anybody's PTO? And yeah, I sure can. Don't come to me. Go to your boss. I'm one.

I don't want you overturning that person's authority thinking you can just be bop into my office. Now, if they're out, that's a different story, whatever. So there is putting up a firm wall of you don't come to me until you've taken it through the chain. If you're on in the sales team, you have a sales director to talk to about

things that are not big, big, big problem. I mean, obviously, if certain things you do come to be all right, if they touch you inappropriately or something, yes, by all means come talk to me. But I mean, getting your PTO approved or there's some sort of a deal that you're stuck on, you talk to your sales director first, then you come to me when that can't get a resolution.

I set pretty firm lines about what problems I expect you to try and solve yourself and then try and solve with your supervisor before you wheel me in. And again, it's not to be a jerk about it. It's I've got lots of other stuff that I have to do on the corporate level. I can't just be piddling around with, oh, this qualification call. I'm having a hard time reaching out to them.

Okay, talk to the sales director. This isn't like I'm glad to hear about it, but y'all need to solve that. I got to keep you guys out of my office trying to put monkeys in here. That's what I pay my directors for. I have one time a week where I for sure get to sit down with everybody in the room and we get to have some fun and go over the data and keep that relationship going.

But then I make a very clear delineation of you go through your chain of command first and you guys, I promise you are good enough to solve 90% of your problems before they get to me. And then when it gets to me, I'll do my King Solomon thing and make a decision nobody will like. But it's also a morale issue thing, right?

There's no greater way to kill a team's morale than to let people go around or under or above the leadership hierarchy you have in place. It kills the leaders morale. It kills the frontline employees morale. It turns into a free for all. And then quite frankly, if you have a team that does that, you probably

didn't build a good team. You probably made some bad hiring decisions, right? Or you have some bad rule enforcement or whatever. But that's a quick way to totally demoralize the team. I love that you do that. Do you still do ride alongs with your new salespeople?

I've gotten to the point that I don't do it as much. My sales director does most of that stuff. I will occasionally jump in. If my sales manager comes to me and is like, Hey, this person's really just doing an amazing job. I think you ought to check this out.

Then I'll jump in and sit through a meeting or whatever. Usually though, I try not to mostly because here's an interesting thing. Once you hit BP SVP, if I get on a call, it suddenly becomes my call. I know. Nobody acts like normal. It's funny, actually.

Right. Right. It's no longer just, Oh, I'm doing my job and trying to like sell this guy. It's now like, Oh, Jordan's here. So I better wait and see what he wants to say. It's like, Jordan doesn't want to say pretend I'm not here.

Okay. Ignore the time. It's I'm not looking device. So that is problematic because it's harder for me to see at this level and especially a new employee that just is still kind of feeling their way around. If I'm on a meeting, it turns into a very different dynamic.

And whether I want that or not, it's just human nature. If I'm in a call and the CEO gets on that call, it's like, okay, well, I am the only SVP in the company, but also you're the CEO. So I mean, you kind of call the shots here. I know who the boss is and it's not me on this one. And it's the same thing on a smaller scale with the sales team.

Oh, I try to get the occasional ride along in, but it's hard to do because they just get to, I don't know, stage fright, nervous. No, so I have the same thing. And it bothers me a little bit because I like to get in the trenches every now then to your point, I don't have bigger things that I have to do from a corporate point of view for run the company.

However, every now and then I sort of like going back to when I used to carry a bag and I'd like to just hang out my frontline sales, but I don't want to be the guy. I want to be the driver for a second. And it doesn't work anymore. It's kind of disappointing. All right.

Well, so Jordan, first thing I'll run out of time, went a little bit over, but this has been great. Love having you on here real quick. We got to pay the bills, which by the way, we don't have a sponsor for this podcast. So what do you get sponsored? It's a great podcast.

If you're a company that likes to get in front of sales and marketing leaders and all gas reach out to me, speaking of sales, I'll cut you one hell of a deal. But between now and then, our two newsletters are in the show notes. The links there are Sunday update. They keep sticking my face to other people's bodies, which is kind of weird. People tend to love it.

All gas events newsletter that's in there as well. Sign up for both of those. All of that and our social channels links are in there as well. Insiders group is about 50% full. We want to get about 60 sales and marketing leaders and all the gas to be part of this mastermind group.

Like I said, we have about 30 so far. So until we hit that number, we're not going to pull the trigger on it. So if you're interested in joining that, the links in the show notes for that as well. Jordan, I will put you on the spot. I meant to prep you earlier and I completely forgot to do it. At the end of the show, we always ask our guests to have a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week.

So it's something that you saw on LinkedIn that was just horrible. And you want to tell people not to do it. Or it's something that actually impressed you like that was pretty cool. The one fail that I don't want you to rattle through though, is the spammy outreaches on LinkedIn because we've covered that 10,000 times. Do you have a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week for the audience?

What I would say is for the love of God, have a good profile picture. I mean, I know it sounds junior. There's some sort of band between your Bart Reynolds shirtless tender profile pick. And your obituary photo somewhere in that range. Try and hit one of those. Okay, because I don't know how many times I'll look somebody up.

And we had a guy apply for a job and my sales director sent me their profile just to see the picture. And it was like this kid with a backwards hat on in a tank. And I'm just like, this is your LinkedIn profile pic, dude. Really? The backwards hat, the sleeveless shirt, really? I don't think so.

I'm not even having a conversation with you. And in fact, if my sales director tried to bring you in for a view, I would discipline them. This is no, you're selling yourself on LinkedIn. Have a good, well lit photo of you not looking like you're trying to seduce someone or break into a convenience store.

Okay, this is great. This is great. So true. It's so true. In fact, if I can find it, I'll put this in a share notes as well. About a year ago, I ran across a website and it's literally embarrassing

LinkedIn photos is all it is. And it's hilarious because you don't think somebody would be that dumb, but the links are there so you can click on it and bring some to there. It's like surely somebody actually really put that as their LinkedIn profile. Yeah. And I'm just like, and you're applying for a job looking like that, sir.

Or madam, what are we doing here? Off the cuff without any prep. That's what I'd say is for the world to God, have a decent photo, please. Well lit in a natural pose, wearing something that is vaguely appropriate. And that's all you have to do. It's not so hard to recognize, guys.

Somewhat recent. Yeah, I just had to update all my photos because I've lost a lot of weight in the past year. You have lost a lot of weight. Christian living, which is I still drink and smoke when I want to. I just only eat meal one meal a day and have to work out.

But the point is, like I had to update my stuff because I'm 40, 45 pounds down from what I was. And fat boy, Jordan's not really representative of skinny boy Jordan. Now I had to go through and do all that and get some nice new headshots made and all that good stuff. But I mean, the folks that I see rolling around with just the worst of the worst.

I could go on this tangent for a while, but yeah, get a good LinkedIn profile picture, please, for the will of God. Yeah, great tip. All right, let's get out here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, 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.