Building a Winning Sales Team with guest Jason Jeray from Oracle

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. It's a beautiful day in Houston.

Sitting here with Matt, my co-host, how's it going, Matt? Doing well. Dude, we have a recorded person a long time. I know, this is great. Yeah, and what's even greater is we have a guest today. Hey, Jason.

Good morning. Jason, you work for a little company some I may have heard of. You want to say who you work for? Sure. I work for Oracle North America. And what do you do for Oracle?

I run our sales team for energy, utilities, and industrials for North America. Ah, great fit for the Sales and Marketing podcast. So Oracle's an enormous company. It's very old. It's been around for a long time. When I think of enterprise companies, Oracle's probably the number one company at the pops

of my head, just because you've been around for so long. When I, years ago, and I worked at Bell, I used to compete against your guys sometimes, your sales team. Some of the best sales teams I've ever had to compete against as far as knowing everything that is going on, knowing the structure of the deal, the price points, relationships, and all that to me always impressed me.

Jason, when you're thinking about the fundamentals of building a sales team, especially an enterprise sales team, where do you start? Right. Well, I think what's most important today is really having a team that's focused on your industry. So that's why at Oracle, we're completely verticalized with our sales teams.

And what I look for more so than people that are professional salespeople, I look for people that understand our industry really well. So we actually look to hire people from some of the companies inside of the industry, such as Baker Hughes or Schlumberger, people with real field experience. I love that. I love that.

So you're building that domain expertise in your sales team itself. It's not a separate function that you have to pull in. Your frontline people know the industry. Correct. So Matt and I, we've talked to this before we turn the mics on, Matt and I firmly believe that sales and marketing should be joined at the hip.

But I also am a big believer in verticalized approaches to sales because the CTO at Walmart deals with totally different problems than the CTO at Chevron deals with. And if you don't know that difference, it's not going to be effective in serving your customers. Yeah. I'd say another key point is also the location, right?

It's super important that the people that you hire live in the communities that they're selling to. We try to make sure all of our salespeople are located either here in Houston or Oklahoma City or Denver, close to where our customers are. Love that too. I tell people all the time that if you want a solid sales presence in the oil and gas

space, you have to have boots on the ground in Houston. You don't have to necessarily start there if you're a small company, but at some point on your list of priorities to have boots on the ground, not just because the local communities, but there's a different culture. You mentioned Oklahoma. Selling in Oklahoma is slightly different than selling in Houston, right?

And then the oil and gas industry is truly global. So selling in Brazil is different than selling in London, which is different than selling in Dallas. And all that has to be taken into account when you build a sales team. Absolutely. Yes.

I would say the differences are actually significant between the different areas, right? Even Oklahoma, between that and Texas, there's quite a different people that work in those offices and their approach to business. So you have to be cognizant of that as you approach your customers. Okay. And verticalized approach, domain expertise, I think it's a fantastic way to start.

So in your hiring phases, when you're bringing on new sales teams, obviously you look for that sort of stuff, what else do you look for? There's a couple of key things that are going to make you successful within Oracle, right? So first of all, you have to be a really good communicator. So in the interview process, it's really important that you see someone that's able to articulate their thoughts very easily.

In sales, it's important to be able to be, you know, shift on the fly as you're talking with customers. All you can do is rehearse something and regurgitate it. It's going to be really difficult to be successful in sales. Yeah. So not only do I agree with you, I think actually a lot of sales people get too caught up in

that. And what happens is, just like on a podcast, a good podcast host isn't, I'm not trying to think ahead of you right now. I'm just in the conversation and I'm listening and I think it's the same way with sales conversations in person. You don't need to have this spiel.

You need to be able to listen, ask good questions, right? And understand your product enough to be able to tell your client you can help them or probably even more importantly, tell your client you can't help them. And I think that's a vital part of being a good salesperson. Yeah. Definitely asking questions.

And like you said, you want to ask questions that are actually getting to a solution that are going to drive value for the customer. I think a lot of times sales reps get caught up in asking questions of stuff they should already know and that doesn't add any value to the customer, right? So you want to ask questions to help them get to a solution that's going to solve a business problem for them.

The reason I smiled when you said that is I get cold called all the time. I'm sure you do too. And these people that reach out to me had to do zero research. If they would do five minutes of research, maybe they could engage me as further conversations. But when you reach out to me and start talking to me about my copier problem, we don't own a single copier, you know?

Well, Jason, I want to hear kind of what pre-call analytics that you do or you train your reps to look at before you go into the call. Like you said, they need to know these things, right? So what are the things that they need to check the box on before they walk into the meeting? And then, you know, what are they looking at to do that? Like, because there's so many different tools out there.

People have so many different processes. I would love to hear that from a marketing angle. Sure. Well, a lot of the tools that we use are obviously Oracle tools, right? So we're using the Oracle sales tools to drive and understand our customer's business. But I would, to answer your question in a couple of different ways, one, not every energy

company is the same, right? Even inside of the industry, it's super important to understand what aspect of energy that your customer is specifically in, right? So even in the super majors, they have different areas where they really focus on. And so you need to know your customer intimately, what's important to them, what brings revenue in for them is really important, and then, of course, helping them manage costs.

If those two things are what typically drive the big energy companies. I love the fact that you know there's a difference in the cultures between Exxon, Chevron, VP and Shell because they're radically different. That just shows your expertise in the industry right there, even knowing that. So you've hired people, you've figured out how to get them in front of the right potential buyers, you've trained them.

How do you manage a sales team? So we have a lot of senior sales leaders that listen to this podcast, and that's one of the questions, one of the feedback we get back a lot, is managing sales teams in the early 2000s is radically different than measuring sales teams now in 2025. Yeah, I mean, I focus on a couple areas with the team. One is their level of engagement, right?

I still think sales is, to some degree, it's a math game, it's a game of numbers. And it's how many customers have you reached out to with a message that's been customized for their business? And if you reach out with a hundred messages, even if you're only 30% successful, you're going to have 30 new opportunities. But if you only reach out 10 times, even if you're 50% successful, you're still way below

where we need you to be, right? So level of engagement. So some of the things I track most closely with the teams are how many new customer contacts have you made? I usually check on that either monthly or quarterly, depending on the sales rep and how long they've been with us and what level of trust I have in their work.

But you still want to, even the most senior rep, you want to be checking on a semi-regular basis, how many new contacts have you added within your customers? What messages are you delivering to them? So those are the types of things I think are most important. I smiled when you brought that up because Matt, a million years ago, was actually one of those guys that dialed for dollars before he got into marketing and so he knows all

about that. And Matt, actually we've never talked about this because I used to run inside sales teams too. What do you think is the magic number? Actually, it's all three come up with the number. If you have inside sales rep literally dialing for dollars, how many dollars should they

do a day? Well, it depends if you have like good conversations, right? Because they would always say 60 plus calls a day, you know, and you could leave 80 messages in a day, but you're not talking to anybody. So it depends on who you're talking to and are you moving the needle forward? Because also there's some people that get on the phone that want to use you as a therapist

and those just are talking about all kinds of stuff. So it was really important to qualify them, move them forward through the process. I would say if you're having, you know, 30 calls a day where you're actually talking to somebody and engaging, you're going to crush it like from those numbers that would trickle down. Yeah.

So my number would be 50. If you have a good inside sales rep, more than 50 and they're just trying to make a metric so you leave them alone. Less than 50. So you're just curious. Yeah.

The metric, right? But I'm saying actually talking to somebody and having engagement, not leaving a voicemail, not like setting up another call. If you have 30 calls a day where you're actually engaging with somebody and you're moving the needle forward, potentially setting up a meeting or a next step or whatever, you'll just absolutely crush it.

And so the days that I was more successful and did it for seven, eight years and did it quite well at it was when I had lower calls, right? And I prepped the day before. That was the biggest thing is like really doing a lot of the research of the outreach. If it's cold outreach, prepping those calls and then having those good conversations, the lower calls worked like days I actually felt like I got more accomplished.

What about you, Jason? What do you think? Yeah. I mean, my team are pretty senior season sales representatives. We don't really do the inside sales, but I would say you guys are probably in the right area.

Around 60 would be probably good. With my team, I really want them to do at least one or two per hour. So if they're doing around 15, 16 reach out today with strategic messages. Now prioritizing also obviously customer facing meetings. So there might be some days where you don't get a lot of new reach outs because you're very busy meeting with customers.

But on the days where you're focused on reaching out and establishing new relationships or finding new opportunities, say a couple an hour would be good. I think it's really important when you craft a message to an executive inside of an only guest company or even an IT person or a developer, you have to have a very focused message and it takes some time to put that together. So it's not always about volume.

Sometimes it's about quality. Yeah. I agree. We got off on a tangent here just because I was curious what y'all thought. Speaking of cold calling, Matt, you don't know this. The whole reason that we have Jason here is I cold called him.

It still works. It's the same strategy 50 years ago, same thing, hasn't changed. Now I started with an email. Yeah. Oh yeah. But anyway, so all right, this is great.

I don't want to get too caught up on the tactical stuff. One more again from the marketing angle. Do you prioritize or consider when they're doing exposures, which it will wrap into the calls, right? It warms up the calls, but like, is there any like focus on taking that message and putting it out there on social media in any way to kind of warm them up?

I always kind of consider like social media like airfire if we're talking like military to kind of, you know, soften them up to get in there with a call because they're familiar with you. You have the big logo behind you, but I'm just curious what, how you view that. Yeah. So our sales team that Oracle are closely aligned with our marketing leadership.

So I have a director of marketing that dotted line reports into me and we work very carefully to craft messages that the team can post online that are in Oracle approved and sending the message that we want to share with our customers. See audience. Somebody as big as Oracle also believes that sales and marketing should be joined to them. I love this.

I think I knew that from a previous conversation to have with you, but I think every company that has a marketing organization should somehow attach those marketing people to their sales team, even to the point that I think some of marketing's income should be tied to sales results, right? I don't know how many times I've heard this conversation with very big companies where I get both sales and marketing in the room together and marketing goes, we sent you 300

leads last month, you didn't close a single one and sales turned around and go, they all suck. And if they would just talk, they would fix both of their problems. Yeah, it's super important to be aligned, especially if you're in a vertical strategy like Oracle is. So we have tight alignment there.

I mean, it's interesting. I'm reading Elon's biography right now and he talks about aligning engineering with manufacturing, which is something really unique that he did at Space S and Tesla. And he put his engineers right on the shop floor with manufacturing to watch them make the products so they could see where the engineering might be deficient and they could quickly readjust.

Dude, that is genius. I don't know how many times I've been offshore and there's some gate great that you need to open to access something and some engineer overdesigned the safety factor. So two people physically can't pick it up. Now, it's not going to fail. It's strong.

But for that exact reason, he was never in the field and he didn't realize that some person has to remove that great. That's genius. All right. So here's something else that's changed. Our industry in oil and gas has changed dramatically in the last, say, 10 years, even in the last

three or four years. Now, for the new presidential administration in place right now, it's drill baby drill. So the industry itself is changing. We have younger people coming in, new drivers. How do you deal with those change in marketing dynamics with your sales team? Like training or like, how do you deal with that?

Yeah. Well, Oracle definitely invests a lot of money in our team for training our sales folks. I think each industry, if you have a vertical, it's going to be very specific. So the oil and gas industry specifically is going through major transition right now. As often the case, they were slow adopters for cloud technology. But now I think most of them are starting to realize for their long-term viability they'd

need to start adopting cloud, at least in certain aspects of the organization. So yes, they have younger people coming in. They want to recruit young people into their organizations. And when people, younger people come in, they want to know what cloud provider you're using, right? And if you say we're not, they're like, oh, well, then I don't want to work here, right?

So they're changing very, very rapidly. And we are changing in how we interact with them. Yeah. It was not that long ago that if I talked to any CIO in this industry, they swore nothing would go beyond their print. They would never touch the cloud.

And now they realize it's not just the cost savings. It's the speed of performance. It's the ability to stand up apps in hours instead of weeks, right? The cost-saving thing, I think at first, a lot of companies view that as an important part of moving to cloud. In a lot of cases, it's not necessarily any cheaper to move to the cloud.

It can be, but it's not a guarantee. But as you said, actual speed to market, deploying technology much faster. And quite frankly, the best technology that's being released is only available on the cloud. So if you insist on staying on-prem, you're going to become a dinosaur in your industry. And the other piece is there's this battle going on between all the hyperscalers to build data centers, and they have all the access to all the materials that you need.

So even if you're a big, you know, a big, super major company, you can't get access to the materials you need to build data centers. So they're moving to the cloud out of sheer necessity. You know, Jason, I want to bring something up. This is a sales and marketing podcast, but one of the things about cloud is actually it's more secure than on-prem.

It's just a different level of cybersecurity, different things you have to understand. And a little thing happened with Oracle that was in the news, and I just want to hear it from Oracle. Y'all were not hacked. Correct. Yeah.

Just a little quick. Can you just kind of explain that real quick? Even though this is a sales and marketing audience, I just want people to understand that Oracle is as secure as it can get and always has been, and what's happening was just somebody that didn't click bait on the news. Yeah.

I mean, there's an official release from Oracle on that, and that's really the only thing I can say around that subject. It basically just says there was no breach at Oracle. The credentials that were published were not valid credentials for the Oracle cloud. Yeah. And audience, we're going to put a link in the show notes if you're interested in that.

We'll have there so you can read the official release. All right. Back to sales stuff. So, we've talked about basically your role and how it goes out to the customers through your sales team. How do you support that, nurture that, measure all that, turn it around.

You work for a big company. You have internal pressures. You have metrics you have to hit. Jason, how do you balance your management wanting you to do this and having to use your sales team to hit those metrics while at the same time keeping everybody happy? That's a hard thing to balance.

It is, but I think the way that you can be most successful in this industry or any sales job is building a really good team. So if you build a really good team that's executing, then the other things are going to fall into place much easier. So there are three parts to my job. One is managing and building a sales team.

Two is forming relationships with our customers. I try to spend a lot of time in front of CIOs and CTOs in person, out in the field. And the third is reporting up my expected revenue numbers. Right? Those are the three aspects of my job. And if you get the right team in place that are executing, reporting up good numbers becomes

very easy and you can spend more time with your customers. So that's what I try to focus on, bringing the right people in, investing in the people, training them and making sure they're successful. I love that you still pick up a bag and go out in the field and talk to your clients. That's beautiful. I know a lot of big companies where their sales leaders have become kind of disconnected

with what's really going on in the front lines because they never leave the office. And I think if you're a sales leader in that role, you need to stop and think about that for a second. What is keeping you from leaving the office? And if it's your own internal management team, maybe it's time you push back or look at other options because I firmly believe, I do it too.

I run a company. I'm out in the field with my clients all the time. I firmly believe if you're a sales leader, that's one of the top things you need to do is be out there. I love that you do that. All right, let me, this brings me to something else.

New sales person, new hire, right? Do you get involved, you and the new sales person intimately? And I mean that in, do you do ride-alongs? Do you bring them with you? Do you coach them? How does that work?

Yeah. So no, there's no sales people that report directly to me. They all go through regional vice presidents that report up through me, but I definitely, when we bring a new person in, I always go through part of the interview process. And then I always like to reach out to them on their first day to kind of give them some, just some idea around the culture at Oracle and what our team's all about.

And then, yeah, there's going to be at least a couple of times in the first quarter where I want to go on a meeting with them, meet with one of the customers, see them in action, provide them input feedback. I love that. You know, when a, my last corporate gig was with Forrester Research a long time ago. And one of my favorite things about that company is my second customer call, our CEO wrote

along with me and he didn't get in my way. No, no, no, he believes, he believes so much in staying in front of the customers that was his, one of his to-dos is when they hired a new salesperson, he would get his admin to figure out a time in his calendar to go right along and he literally wrote along as my assistant. He was the CEO of the company, but he didn't take over the conversation.

He didn't do anything. And then when it was all over, we walked out of the customer meeting, we got in the car, he stopped and goes, Mark, there's no emotion. So I'm about to tell you right now, none at all. And he broke down what he would have done differently, what he liked that what I did. And that has stuck to me.

That was almost 20 years ago that stuck me to this day. I love the fact that you go out with your, your front lines saying, yeah, it's great that he would do that. Obviously that's not going to happen at Oracle or much larger company, but I do want to make sure I'm involved in a lot of times it's more important for me to get the feedback from them, right?

Like, because I will participate in the meeting and I want them to give me feedback. Like, what did you think about what I talked to the customer about? How did you think the engagement was? What would you do different as well? So I always like to take some new ideas and feedback as well. Love it.

I want to get more to your connection with your marketing side. I love the fact that you have a dotted line. How much time do you spend, is the right word, coaching your marketing people? Like, how much time do you spend conveying information from the customers to your marketing team? Well, I would say it's collaborating.

I like that word. Yes. Yes. We probably spend, you know, two or three hours a week, we'll have our own one on one calls on state of the business. I also have her present on my monthly all hands call so that she can bring everyone

up to speed with all the Oracle events that are happening across the country, what they can invite their customers to. But specifically, we're always planning out a couple quarters ahead about what events we're going to be hosting here in Houston, where we're going to be sponsors, where we're inviting customers. So we keep, you know, real tight alignment on that for budgetary purposes and also just

good planning. You know, for the budget, I brought up the budget side of that. So when you're looking at hosting an event, do you and your marketing lead go through a list and agree on what events you want to sponsor? And then does it come out of both of y'all's budgets? Yes.

So we definitely work together to choose which are the most impactful events for our customers and for Oracle. And she has a budget that she can spend every year on our vertical. We also have, you know, discretionary funds that I can spend on events. But most of it does come out of marketing. Yeah.

One of the differences between sales and marketing is they kind of have different roles. Bottom line, your job is to generate revenue for the company and you're measured on whatever that number is. Marketing is to help you get there and there's different metrics that you measure there. So when you go to an event, do you automatically think of how much, how many leads I can generate, how much money I can make off this event?

And does marketing look at things like brand awareness and new customer exposure? And if so, how do y'all mix that together? Yeah. We definitely have a variety of things we're trying to accomplish. For me personally, I'm always just trying to build relationships. When we have events, I spend a lot of time interacting with the customers, learning more

about them. Oftentimes, that's a better time to learn about them as a person. Maybe they're bringing their spouse to the event. You can get to know their family and share information that way. But yes, the marketing team wants to see what kind of value they're getting out of the events, of course, like how many new opportunities were identified.

So we have a tight alignment where we actually go in after an event and we'll enter in all the opportunities, new discussions that we had so that they can justify the investment for the different events. Is our Google be at OTC this year? OTC, Offshore Technology Conference. Oh, I don't believe so.

You don't think so? No. Because if you were, I was going to invite you to our podcast Pavilion to come record live at the conference. We were actually, so is that the one at the up in Greens Point? No, no.

So OTC is the largest offshore technology conference in the world. It's not Toyota Center. Georgia Brown. Not Georgia. NRG. NRG.

Okay. Yeah. They moved a couple years ago. Yeah. Anyway. We've been to that conference in the past, but I know we're not going this year because

I didn't see it on our podcast. No, I was just, I was just inviting you to come hang out with us while we're there. It's gone down in like since COVID. I feel like it used to be the thing and now it is, it is, it is diminished value immensely. When I first started going with the phone company in the late 80s, I would set up my booth that spent $80,000.

My company's money. I did the fishbowl thing, we catch business cards and then I would key punch them in and somebody back in Atlanta would then start the call process and I would make a million or $2. Right. But back then Chevron and Exxon and BP would show up with PO's in their hands because there

was no internet. That was the only place they go talk to every valve manufacturer. So I just picked up the crumbs and I would make my number for the whole year sometimes. Now none of the majors are there anymore and it's because the internet Exxon does not need to go to OTC to go talk to choke manufacturers, right? And so the quality is going down and I tell OTC this every year and they don't listen to

me and I know some of the people in the marketing team that OTC listened to this podcast. So you'll need to change your approach. Still a great conference. It's about content creation in my mind. I think that there could be a lot of opportunity to create a lot of content, to engage with customers, to create that energy and then share that throughout the year.

Well to Jason's point, building those relationships to me I think is one of the most valuable part and most conferences I go to, a lot of them the most value again is not in the conference sessions. It's when you walk out and go, hey, lay mat and you catch up with somebody. Somebody should design a conference with just that without the sessions. The networking is definitely the most valuable.

I think right now in the energy vertical there's just, there's probably too many conferences. They're happening all the time and you start to lose value. So you know, we try to focus on a couple of the big ones, obviously Sarah Weeks a big one. At Oracle we actually host our own CIO leadership symposium. So I have like 25 CIOs that we get together once a year and we really talk about the state

of the industry, what's going on, what they would like to see Oracle focus on and build. And then of course we educate them on our road map so they know what's coming out. I think that's more valuable than a conference. Agreed. I can't believe we missed y'all at Sarah Week. Our podcast building was set up there as well.

And you know what Jason just rattled off is what we're doing with our mastermind group, Matt. And the value is other sales and marketing leaders in that room, Chatham House rules. You could share everything. It doesn't go out. The links in the show notes you, Matt and I have been talking about this for a long time.

All right. We're kind of close to winding this thing down Jason. I had one more question about your connection to marketing because I love the way y'all are doing this. And like I said, this is Matt and I firmly believe in this. What happens when there's a disagreement?

And I don't mean like in a bad way, but you'll have different business drivers sometimes. What happens when there's a difference of opinion between you and your marketing lead? How do y'all figure out what the solution is? Yeah. I mean, to be honest, we've never really had a big disagreement, but if we did, if that scenario arose, I think, you know, at that point, we'd probably engage our senior leaders

to kind of review the business plans that we each have and decide, you know, what priority wants to take precedent, but that situation has not arose yet. That's a credit to you and your marketing lead that y'all are so aligned that y'all haven't had a disagreement to that point. That's amazing. All right, Jason, if people wanted to learn more about you, where should they go?

Check me out on LinkedIn and I'll be happy to engage and have productive conversations. Yeah. And Jason's LinkedIn profile link will be in the show nights like everything else. Remember, we have our two newsletters. We have our All-In-Gas Events newsletters, speaking of events, you might want your sales people to sign up for this.

So, when I started my first company, there was no place I could go online and find every trade show and conference, so I make my interns clone the interwebs and every month they take every All-In-Gas conference in the world, put it together in a newsletter, we give it away for free. If you ever email me below my signature, there's a link to sign up for that. Then we have our Sunday update, which is our local Houston audiences.

That's where TurboTalk is. They do funny stuff like they keep sticking my face on other people's bodies. My marketing team is crazy, but there's recipes from the oil field. We found a company that's been catered for over 100 years and they share their recipes. We help dogs and cats find their forever home. So, sign up for that.

That link's also in the show notes. All of Matt and I's social channel links are also in there. The Insiders group is growing as soon as we hit our minimum threshold, we're going to launch that thing, which is right around the corner. It's time to wind down the show, Jason. It's time for our LinkedIn fail or tip of the week.

Do you have a fail or tip for our audience? Well, I would say the biggest thing with LinkedIn is don't use it as a substitute for meeting with customers in person. So I think during COVID and just with the younger generation in general, we became really comfortable with communicating virtually only. And in this industry, I will tell you, in the city of Houston, it's important to meet

people in person, face to face, get them out to lunch, learn about them. They're a big city but close-knit community and I think that's really important. It's super important. It's also part of the culture of the oil and gas industry because if somebody like Halliburton works with you, they're working with Jason, they're working with Oracle, but what's really going on, Halliburton has to understand that something bad really happened.

If it's three o'clock in the morning and they lose control of a well or they have a cyber attack or whatever and they pick up the phone and they call Jason at three in the morning, you're going to answer. So the in-person thing is that trust because our industry inherently does some dangerous stuff and you have to have trust with the people, not just the company's work with the persons.

That's a great tip. All right, guys. It's time to get out of here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale.