Champions. How to find them and why you need them

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! And we're back and remember if you want to manage your off-field operations from anywhere worth rigor online or offline whether it's scheduling, dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment rentals or

inspections and maintenance, you can create review, approve and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operational management dashboards on your phone or your desktop. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us, Lingus in the show notes. Matt, guess what? What? We got our second review. All right! Yeah, a five-store review. The only podcast of its kind have

been in the industry for 10 years now. I can say I've looked for this and been unable to find it until now. All I got sales and marketing. These guys do a great job covering relevant topics and giving me helpful tips and tricks for those in sales and marketing. They also have a great understanding and respect for how intertwined the two are and how they can help one another when working together productively. And this is for JBA 0407 from the United States. So JBA

0407, thank you so much for the five-store review. If you'd like to get a shout-out on your show, leave us a review. And remember guys, this is sales and marketing podcast. So if you want your company's name read for free on a podcast, which is part of marketing, leave us a review. It's an inexpensive way to get a little... I like it. That's to be begging for a review, isn't it? So Matt, I thought today our topic would be around champions. And I don't mean champions as

far as the all-field service company. I mean champions as far as the person inside your customer's organization that knows that you're the right fit, that wants to help you succeed in selling to their company. For years, I've always had champions from a sales role, but the way you interface with them has changed a little bit. Just like we talked a while ago about referrals and the way that you work with referrals has changed because of technology. The way that you work with

champions have changed as well. Well, I'm excited to jump into this because I mean, it's all about champions. If salespeople that have been around a long time know that you've got to have that champion inside the company to really open them up if you're developing a new relationship. Yeah, and I'm actually intentionally trying to catch Matt because he's eating, so I'm trying to time it. He has a mouthful of food because we can see each other. This is Friday

afternoon. Late in the afternoon, I finally am getting around to eating. I apologize. No, it's all good. This is a real show. And so if we need to eat, we're going to eat. At some point, we'll be having drinks. We'll do this show. That's probably going to be a really good one or one that's going to hit the trash can. But last night, we were at our industry mixer. We had a couple of people come up and talk to us. Our sponsor for that mixer was a process control company

called Emerson. And so when you look at that crowd, which is a social crowd, you look at the people that were there. And as a reform salesperson, actually, I'm still a salesperson. I sell podcast sponsorships. When I'm looking at that crowd, I'm trying to pick who in those various companies is somebody I would like to build a relationship with that might be a champion. There's a couple of things I look for. So the first thing is, is that person competent in their

role of their responsibilities? Your champion should not be the person that's like the best. Your champion should be the person that does the best work in their company. And sometimes that's kind of hard to figure out from the outside. But when you get in a social situation, you can see how their peers interact with them. And a lot of times you could tell who is the person that's getting the job done in the company. And so that's one of the things I always look

for is you want somebody that's really highly competent in what they do in that company. Like I said, not the friendliest person, although your champion could be the friendliest person, but it's the person that other people in the team trust their judgment. You know, it's just funny you're talking about like social dynamics and like who's like the alpha in the group.

Yeah, I really am. It really am. And if you've done this long, if you can usually spot those people. The other thing is when the executive management teams together, how do they treat this person? If they see this other person as an equal and they treat them like an equal, that is a good indicator that probably is a good champion for what's been interesting with oil service companies and also like offshore companies that I've seen is a lot of times actually

like the assistant to the manager or the director usually like is the go to person that gets stuff done. You know what I mean? Hell yeah. And I've seen that it's really like a discussion around who has the title and then like who has that leadership or who has that access. This is a funny story mark. So when I was in my early 20s and I was also an oil and gas recruiter for about seven years. And one of the ways that I was able to

get into companies is I would go to the parking lot. Okay. And the smoking section in the parking lot and all the older executive assistants were there and working in that area and they would befriend me and then they would like take me in. It's not always the title that has the access or the role and experience. No, 100%. I'm telling you in getting preparation for this podcast recording, I went back and look into who I identify and work with regular as

champions. And in my case, it's often project managers, which is not somebody that you would think would be a champion. But if you think about it, project managers in the company, their day to day job is to get stuff done. And usually they have to get stuff done with a budget constraint and a time constraint. And those are the ones that the business sees as the go-getters, right? The stuff that keeps the wheels turning. And so in my case, even from a sales point of

view, a lot of times my champions or project managers, once I can show them how I can help their company, they're the ones to go help me sell it internally. So to your point, actually, it's never the title. In fact, one of the worst things most salespeople do is they try to reach the C-suite quickly. Let me tell you, if, and that's a big if, if you can get some time with the CEO of a super major, you're going to have about 10 seconds to show your value. And if you

don't show that value in 10 seconds, you'll never have that conversation with them again. However, if you spent that same time with like a director or a frontline manager and you don't show value in 10 seconds, they'll still talk to you. So reaching to the C-suite is, I think, more dangerous in a sales role than reaching people that actually get the business done inside of companies. I think it's about understanding what the landscape is inside the company and

getting someone to help you figure out what that landscape is and who those champions actually are to hit your wagon to a right champion. Yeah. Yeah. So learning how to navigate internally is super important and you need their help. But in order to do that, your champion has to actually see the big picture of their company, but also understanding how your solution fits into their big picture. So they can't be a small picture thinker. They have to be

a big picture thinker. And once again, you know, there's going to be multiple people in a large company that might be a good champion for you and trying to navigate that and figure out who they are is a struggle and it takes time and it takes skill sets. To your point earlier, it takes personal skill sets. How do you form trust rather quickly? Are you transparent? Are you believable? What is your reputation? One of the first things that anybody does in today's

world and I see this all the time on LinkedIn because I can see who looks at my profile is when I engage with a new company within hours, they're checking me out on LinkedIn. So then your LinkedIn profile actually helps the champion credibility make a decision on whether they want to work with you or not. Yeah. And I think that's good to kind of broach some marketing conversation. That is so important. Your online presence and building that out like LinkedIn profiles

that don't have a picture, right? Or they have a whole job description or stuff like that. Like people are trying to qualify that and they're googling your name. Reputation management is a huge part of what we do. And for executives, you really want to match whatever you're doing in person online because that's what Google's trying to do is trying to capture that online. What's happening in person, who you're interacting with. That's what the social media platforms are

doing, trying to layer your connections in the virtual world and the real world. And the more you know that this is an extension of you, it's really important for how your peers view you. It's incredible. And as a salesperson, it's first impressions, right? Like so you need to make sure that that first impression as in the digital world is as it is in the real world. Yeah. And I actually think in some ways it's even more important than the digital

world because your first impression in the digital world is always there, right? It's always there. People can check it out 24 hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere in the world. So in a lot of ways, I think it's more important to have your online presence as transparent and realistic as possible all the time, which means if you change roles, update your LinkedIn profile. People don't have a picture up there that's 15 years old, right? Have something that's current. If you've

gained weight, I'm sorry, change your pictures. So something that, you know, and then here's actually a good one too, Matt. This is something I used to disagree with. And now I think it's a great idea. I used to think that LinkedIn pictures needed to be professional. So professional headshots, you were dressed in business attire. Now, I think it should be the opposite. I think it should show who you really are. So if you're somebody likes fly fishing and you have a high quality

picture of you fly fishing, I think that's a better LinkedIn profile picture than the professional headshot. No, I think it's evolved. Like certainly, I think people also a lot of times might even have a LinkedIn and a Facebook page, but now you know everything is public and people connect with people. People do business with people. And so showing who you are and finding ways to connect, like we were talking about, well, a client of ours that I'm speaking at their

conference. I started talking with their director and he's a snowboarder and a wakeboarder, right? And like he had that on his LinkedIn profile. And we connected about that. I also have on my personal LinkedIn profile that I'm a dad of all boys. And so people connected with me on that. And so it's a good way to kind of break the ice to show who you really are and be authentic and let people see it. Like our lives are being merged. You can't be this person and be that person.

You need to be who you are and that's what people are going to find. Yeah. And Matt, I'm just warning you ahead of time and a little while I'll put you on the spot because Matt is speaking and if you're in the Houston area, you ought to go see it. So I'm going to ask you when and where that conference is so you can frantically try to look it up if you don't remember. I'll give you another couple of minutes. So once you've identified who is your champion side of organization,

you want to make friends with them. You do not want to try to sell them anything, right? You want to form a personal relationship that leads to trust. And I've done this quite often. It doesn't mean that you make up stuff to have conversation with. I have often said, look, I want to get to know you better because I think you would be a good champion side of this organization. Like I'm being that transparent about it and they respect that. So once you've identified your champion, you formed a relationship, there's a couple of

things you need to help your champion with. So first thing is, you know, and I tell all sales people this all the time, even if you sell a commodity like paperclips, you know more about paperclips than the buyer does. The fact that you know more about paperclips or whatever you're selling is valuable in the real world. That's how you separate yourself. That's how you keep from being a commodity. So one of the things as a professional salesperson is when you've identified a champion, you formed a relationship, you have to help them understand the full

business value of whatever your solution is, right? You have to basically train the trainer. And that takes a little bit of time. That is not going to happen overnight. Well, one of the things that you keyed in on for me, and that I tell people when they're networking, we do some like executive coaching and stuff like that, is when people are doing their pitch of who they are, they don't identify clearly enough who their actually ideal customer is. They're like everyone in this sector like oil and gas, right? They're like oil and gas.

And they don't explain their value proposition to a company because what you want is you want people to take your message and be the messengers for you. And when the right opportunity presents themselves, they go, Hey, I have someone I can introduce you to. And the people that have done a good job of communicating their messaging to me of who they're looking for, what they do really good at. When I run across that person, I know that I need to connect them because it's going to add value to both parties. But if you just shotgun, I'm interested in everything, then you just kind

of fall through the cracks, I think. Yeah. And Matt and I rehearsed nothing, but this was the perfect segue because the next thing I was going to move to is that your champion needs to prefer working with you over your competition. So to Matt's point, when somebody brings something up in a meeting in your customer's company, your champion raises their hand and goes, Hey, I know the perfect person for that. And they do that because they prefer working with you over competition. Now, listen to me, folks. I did not say that you had better pricing than your competition.

I did not say that you had better delivery than your competition. What I said is that your champion prefers working with you over your competition. I don't know how many deals in my professional life that I won because somebody else won the deal. So a competitor of mine won the deal. And instead of walking away with my head between my legs, I asked the customer, Hey, can I be the backup vendor in case this client fails, right? And every time they say yes, because there's no risk there. And nine times out of 10, when this happened, the company that

won the business intentionally lobald it and then came back with a bunch of change orders, which then pissed off our mutual client and the client turned around and reached back out to me. And I stuck to my price, delivered the product on time and on budget and they preferred working with me. So remember, it's not about dollars. It's not about price. It's about does your champion prefer working with you? And you make that happen by always being honest, very transparent. If you can't deliver something you say, I can't do that. And they end up preferring to work with you.

So, Mark, one of the things that I've done and that's been successful for us is, yeah, if we lose the bid or whatever, I will approach them and not say that. I think what you said is a great suggestion. What I say is I said, do you want to have a second opinion on XYZ, right? I can be like fractional CMO or I can be a retainer, a marketing consultant to you to help evaluate what they're doing to make sure that they're on track. And I think a lot of what it's about is staying connected with the client, staying engaged with the client, because many times what's happened

when we've done that is to just be a consultant on like accessible to them if needed. They find other opportunities if they like us to work with us to get us in or they're, hey, we have this new opportunity over here. Maybe we can engage you there, right? And I think that there's a lot of times that people because they want to work with you will find opportunities to do that. But you got to stay in front of them. You got to continue to stay relevant. You got to continue to add value. And so certainly that's the role of a salesperson, right?

Yeah. And if you see a theme with Matt and I on this podcast is that we're always talking about staying in front of your clients, whether they're buying from you or not. It pays off. I promise you people. All right. So you found your champion. You've formed a high trust relationship. You've helped them get to the point where they prefer to work with you over the competition. Now you have to help them sell internally. Now, remember, they don't work for you. They have a day job, right? And if they do work for you, that's a conflict of interest to stop that right now.

So first thing is you have to be very collaborative with your champion so you can help educate them so they understand how your product helps their company. So this isn't one of those things where you shoot them a sales sheet. You literally sit down with them, walk them through real case studies, always be there to answer questions with the understanding that they're not buying anything from you and then make sure you're super collaborative. If you're selling something that's complex and you need to bring engineers in, bring your engineer talent in for free

to help educate your champion. I promise you it pays off in the wall run. This is where marketing shines, right? This is where marketing and sales can work together so well. Certainly salespeople have an idea of what's the problem that I'm trying to sell this client. And many times there's other salespeople that have that same problem or they wanted to use that same messaging or that same story with other customers. And many times salespeople as one in the past and homemade sales material is not what no company frowns upon it, right?

And so really if you have a good relationship with your internal marketing people on those case studies, on that messaging on those topics, get it company branded, get it run through legal or whatever. But I can tell you having those sales pieces typically marketing welcomes it and other salespeople welcome it. And that is really, I think where marketing shines the most is supporting the salespeople on helping tell that story in a clear, concise way, whether it's in videos or video testimonials or white papers or case studies, your marketing team is going to be

building that stuff for you. So having a good relationship with your marketing team and being able to get some of that stuff pushed through where you can get it out there, other salespeople are going to appreciate it and you're going to be more effective. Yes. And it makes it much easier for you to educate your champion because you basically have everything already put together. You don't have to try to put it together yourself. And I'll give marketing super props here. They're very good at writing copy that anybody can understand. Salespeople tend to get too complex

because they know the product too deeply. Marketing people understand how to educate. And I know salespeople you're going to hate me for saying this, but use your marketing copy, not the copy that you want to write yourself. Because it's going to get passed up the chain, right? Whatever is going to get forward, it's going to get passed up the chain. And you got to remember whoever sees it is not as engaged or involved as you. And so they're going to skim it and they need to get like the gist of it, right? And then you can add always your notes on it,

but having that approved like marketing copy is really, really helpful for different scenarios. Yeah. So now you've educated your champion, you've helped him get the right information that he or she needs. The next thing is you need to have your champion explain internally how the company buys and who are the decision making team. Now be real careful here. You don't want to push them so that they give you a list of email addresses and they're worried that you're going to spam all these people. You need to be upfront and go, look, I'm not going to even reach out to these

people without your permission. I just need to understand if something happens to you, who are the people making this decision and how does your company normally buy? And if your champion trusts you and wants to work, he or she will explain that to you. This does two things. Number one, now you know what the universe is that you're dealing with. And number two, and I've had this happen personally, you could have a champion that gets a better offer and leaves. And if you don't know who the decision making team is, you're left high and dry. And

this way you sort of have a backup. You know what the buy-in group looks like and you know who they are. So make sure you get your champion to explain to you who are the decision making teams and how does their company buy. I think it's just important to know that like when we're talking about champions, that person's already decided that they want to work with you. They're on your team and now you need to go get the approvals or you need to go to the people that have the purse that can sign the deal, but you're now on the same team together. And so

they want to help you succeed. They want to work with you. So they're going to open up that landscape to you to help you do that. And getting that champion is absolutely key because now, okay, we're going to do this together. And then they know how it's going to benefit them. They're going to help push it for you. Like that's the whole point of having the champion is they're going to help push the deal through. They're going to get the conversations opened up. And so you got to trust them. Yeah, and they have to trust you. And literally last night

we were talking about the mixer. One of the people I was talking to just promoted one of their frontline salespeople to sales manager because of the performance that they had. And that performance was half because of his clients helping coaching him on how to buy in their company. So by having the right champion, the salesperson got a promotion. So I promise you it helps your career, but remember it has to be equally beneficial to your champion as well, not just to you. And here's an important part about that. Your champion is going to try to influence others in the company. And there's

nothing wrong with that. Your champions are going to try to help them make the right decision by suggesting your product or your company over other competitors. Do not ever overuse that. When your sales manager reaches out to you and says, have you called your champion today? And there's no reason for you to call your champion. And it would just bug your champion, but your sales manager wants you to do it. Tell your sales manager politely, I'm not calling my champion. He already has the information. We already know it's going to take two weeks

for him to get back to me. I don't want to push the fact that he has influence in his company because you will quickly lose that relationship. I've seen it happen literally in seconds. And you're going to have to learn how to manage your sales manager team because typically it's your sales manager's team that's pushing you for updates. And if it's not time for an update from a champion, they have to be okay with that and they have to trust you. And if they don't trust you, maybe you should go look for another sales job. So here's where marketing can come in to

support. We're all about pens and pads and staying in front of the customer. Well, in the digital world, if you don't need to have that conversation and you know that they're working through it or they're sharing it with people or whatever, you need to make sure you're well positioned in Google in the search rankings, like when people search for you. So that was like one of the big things Mark, when we started working together, if you type oil and gas marketing agency and actually anywhere globally, we're now on the first page, like that was important, right?

We had to get the trust there. Also retargeting ads, display ads, maybe even IP targeting ads, if it's a bigger company, to make sure that when your champion mentions the name of your company, that other people can see you around and they're familiar with your brand. And so I think that that's a good segue for marketing to step in. If the sales managers are pushing on the tools that they have, sales managers now leverage your marketing team, what can they do to support you? If things are in process and they're cooking, you don't need to always have those physical

touch points. That's when newsletters come in. That's when indirect marketing comes in, where you're staying in front of them, but not directly linked in social selling, go post something on LinkedIn, and then liking some of their stuff, it'll show up in their feed, there's ways to indirectly get your brand out there and stay top of mind without that physical connection. Yeah, I love this, because the overwhelming theme of this show is that Matt and I believe that sales and marketing should be joined at the hip, and that means everything. So I think

it's kind of cool, instead of your sales manager breathing down your neck for an update, your sales manager goes breathing and marketing, neck for an update. That's really awesome. All right, so hopefully this will help you understand how to find a champion, how to qualify, how to develop that relationship, how to best use them for a sales. And Matt, I've seen this hundreds of times where when you develop a great relationship with a champion, when they move companies, they bring you with them, they bring your company with them. And so it's not just one

deal in one company, you may sincerely close a dozen deals with six different companies, because this one person trust and believes you and sees you as an asset to the team, no matter who they're working for. Well, even their peer group, right? Like I've many times gotten into one company or even missed out on whatever it was, but they liked me so much, they hooked me up with somebody else. People do business with people, and you've got to remember that you're not doing business with a company, you're doing business with a person and a company.

Yeah, especially in this industry. All right, Matt, put you on the spot, where you're speaking and when? I'm glad I had that pulled up. I'm working on the sales deck today. It's Friday anyway. It's called the HPAC conference, and it's put on by Knowledgevine. And I am actually talking at 1.50 central time on Tuesday and Wednesday. And essentially, we're talking about ways that you can use social media to support HSE people. So this is really like a HSE conference. I'll let you pitch the company, Mark, because they're doing some great stuff, they're branching into oil and gas,

but I'm bringing kind of the digital aspect of it on how you can sell internally, and you can get people to start following guidelines using creative pieces and things of that nature. What a great use for marketing to increase safety measures. Yeah, this is the Human Performance conference here in Houston, put on by Knowledgevine. I'll tell you what, Matt, for our listeners, we're going to put a link in the show notes, and we're going to give you a 10% discount to the show if you touch operations, not just HSE people, if you touch operations and you want to make

sure that you run a clean, safe operation so that you get your bonuses. You can go check out this conference in Houston. Like I said, Matt will be doing a session there. That's going to be awesome. Look in the show notes. We'll have a link both to the conference and we'll give you a discount just for being a listener. This is the point where we typically do our product reviews. This time we have no product. So people, if you have something that's small that you want review by Matt and I, especially anything that's gadgety or having to do with marketing or travel or sales,

let us know. We happy to give you a review. If it's great, we'll say it's great. And if it sucks, we'll say it sucks, although we won't say the word sucks. Matt and I's social links are in the show notes as well. So you can find us there. We have our insiders group where we're still working on hoping to launch that in the fall. Now it's time for the LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. And Matt, I didn't prepare. I hope you have a tip because I don't have a fail. I can certainly give a tip. I just want to say it's April 17th through the 19th is when the conference is at the Hyatt

Regency in Houston and Human Performance and Action Conference. I would go check it out. It's actually it's got some really, really cool stuff. So I'm excited to go. As far as LinkedIn tip of the week, one of the things that is really working well to get people on the phone is to offer a little something of value. I have a couple of books out there and some people that I met at some conferences that I wanted to get in front of, I was actually saying, hey, we'd love to reconnect with you. But maybe I didn't have like a strong enough rapport in the few seconds that we met,

but I engaged with the right person. And I was like, hey, I'll send you a free book. And literally, like, I got all these responses back. What a great idea. So offering something of value in addition to like, hey, let's talk because you're giving your agenda of what you want. And so offering something of value to them, it becomes a win-win situation. And for me, it just seemed to flow a lot better and certainly more genuine. I love giving away stuff and giving away value and like with on this podcast. And so I don't know how many salespeople are doing that, but the salespeople

that send books or gifts or whatever, they certainly take up a different space in your brain than just a bunch of like LinkedIn spam messages, right? Hey, Matt, whatever episodes I'm going to let you take lead on it. Let's talk through how you visualize and create a book to give away. Because I think that'd be super valuable to our audience is both the sales and marketing people. All right, we got to get out of here. So folks, remember, make a difference and not a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of Oil and Gas Sales and

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