Coaching or managing your sales and marketing team? One is much better than the other!

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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. It's time to jump into the show. Before we jump in a show, we got a review, Matt. It's a five-star great resource and product reviews. I've been an account manager in Oil and Gas for 10 years and I've learned more by listening to this show than I thought possible. I'm now partnered with my marketing peer. Good for you. Thanks, Mark and Matt. The increase in

our sales is noticeable. I also love the product reviews. That's Chris from the United States. Everybody, thank you for the reviews. We'd love to have more of them. If you love the show, what five-star reviews, if you don't like the show, leave us a three-star review. Tell us what you like to change. It is cool to get some feedback on the product reviews because I'm never quite sure if people like that part of the show or not. Well, I'm definitely using the ring right now. He is actually using the ring that we reviewed a couple of weeks ago that's made a difference.

All right. Something a little bit different today. We have a guest. We have Bill Morrison, who's the EMEA Manager Director for Sandler. Bill, you and I have known each other for longer than I want to admit. It's been a long time. We worked together years ago and you've always been an incredible sales coach. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you taught me earlier in my career that I still use to this day and it's kind of nice catching up with you. But you've been doing the sales train for a long time, haven't you? Yeah, I have. I think I've been a sales trainer or sales

consultant sales coach now full time for about 18 years. And we've seen a lot of change in that time. But since you and I work together, a lot of things have changed. One thing has not changed is my charming Scottish accent. So just to let you know, this is as good as the accent gets. So catch up. Yeah. And I don't want to go into the past where at one point Bill had a doppelganger and had his same name that was on the wanted list that would cause issues at the airport. All right. So Bill, we have a lot of sales managers, sales VPs that listen to this show.

And one of the questions we get a lot is how do we coach our sales team? And especially these new younger sales professionals, you know, how do we coach? But before we get to the how, I want you to kind of talk about a little bit about what are the benefits of sales coaching? It's a great question. Most of last year, I spent a lot of my time asking myself one question over and over again, because apart from anything else, I am a sales leader. I have my own time. And my favorite question was this, what's my job? What's my job as a leader? What am I actually doing?

And time and time again, I was asked and I got to the one question. The one answer is this. My job as a sales leader is to make my team successful. That's it. If I make my team successful and I messed up everything else, I'm going to be okay. If I do everything else super good, but my team's not successful, then I failed. And what I see a lot of managers doing is we focus on the management. And management means we allocate resources and we do a lot of reporting and we shuffle data, but we don't lead. And looking at this way, coaching is leading. And that means we

dedicate our actual working time to making our people successful. And that's what coaching is. I love it. It's so true. And what's kind of advantage for us as sales professionals versus accountants or project managers is there's a way to measure our success. So it's black and white. So you know when you're doing a good job, you know when you're not. So the benefits, I love the fact that you put this in a leadership frame because it is true leadership. You know, each salesperson, people call them a sales team. But most of the time,

it's really not a team environment because each salesperson has their own individual goals. And so it's almost like having a bunch of individual contributors that you have to pull across the line. And some of those individual contributors will have different strengths and weaknesses than others. How do you figure out how to coach those? Yes, a simple question. And I agree with you on the use of the word team. We use the word team far too often. But in fact, a sales team is actually like a team of athletes in that they

all have to be individually successful. So you have to treat them as individuals. And again, it's like, I know America, I should live in the US, I know America a little bit. And if I look at American football, you say, okay, we've got a coach, you've got a quarterback, and you've got a cheerleader. Now, which of those are you? And when it comes to making the team successful, being a coach, it means you're not on, we call it a pitch, you've got a field. You're actually not on the field. You're one step back, making sure the right people are doing the right plays and that all your

individuals are contributing. Now, what that means is you can't just use a one size fits all. A manager's job is a checklist job. And there's nothing wrong with that. Have I done everything proper? Is everyone trained? Have they all done the programs? Have they done their product knowledge testing? All that stuff is good. That is a recipe for mediocrity. What you've got to do is to say, my job is to make each individual successful. Now, what that really means is you've got to use a bit of a toolbox. Now, when I say what is my job, my job is to make my people successful. As

individuals, there are four key things you've got to learn to master. Here's what the four key things are. Here's the four key things you've got to be able to do as a leader. Number one, you must pass on the skills you have to the next generation. You've got to give them the skills. The classic skill is this. Most salespeople love to talk. They love to show off. They love to deliver value. And that's just lovely. That's not their job. The job is to collect information. So you have to train your people and how to ask good questions. For example, if I'm talking to one of my salespeople and they

come back from a great customer call, I'm going to go, why is the customer doing anything at all? Why are they doing it now? And why would they do it with us? Now, the salesperson's job is to be able to answer those questions. And my job is to make sure that you know what questions to ask. So number one, you've got to train people. Number two, you've got to hold them accountable. Look at this way. You know the old thing about the wood chopper? The guy's cutting down trees and his axe is blunt. So why don't you stop and chop your axe? I say, no, I can't. I'm too busy chopping down trees

because you've got to stop and make sure people know what they should be doing. And that's accountability. And people don't enjoy doing that. Number three, coaching. And what coaching actually means is you don't solve your team's problems. You help them solve the problems with the tools you've already given them. And number four is you've got to be a mentor. You must be the best example possible of how it should be done. You do those four things. You're on a strong path. You've been a leadership coach. If you're doing, you're a manager. I love those analogies. That was really

well done. So let's focus just on that coaching part for a couple of minutes, if you don't mind. When do you start sales coaching an organization? Do you start it with your first rep or do you wait till you have 10? Like at what point do you coach? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to do one step before that. If you're listening to this and you're a salesperson and you intend to be a sales leader at some point, or you've got a team of 150 people, because I talked to both of those, you should be coaching now. Let's say for example, you're a salesperson and sometimes you

work with a subject matter expert, like an engineer or an artist person, something like on a marketing person or a product manager, you have to coach that person. Now coaching does not depend on management line responsibility. So you have to coach them and say, well, this is what we're going to do, why we're going to do it. This is my role. This is your role. And at the end of the conversation with the customer, let's do a little recap. That's coaching. So you have to have a coaching mentality as a salesperson, because if you are a salesperson, you are effectively a leader. You're

leading a complex bid for goodness sake. So straight away, you've got to do it. And the big thing you've got to do is get yourself off the field. You have to be a quarterback sometimes. Get yourself off the field and make good people do the work for them. Yeah. So here's one I personally struggle with, because we have a small sales team, in that I have no problem telling my salespeople what they need to accomplish and how we're going to measure it. But it bothers me, Bill, a little bit if they get there a different way than I would get there. Right? So from a coaching point of view, I've got

to be aware of that bias, because what I don't want to do is make my sales team replicas of me. In fact, some of them have bettered me in a lot of the skill sets, right? And I don't want to clamp that down. So when you're in a coaching environment, how do you balance your knowledge and experience with the fact that you're going to have to let your salespeople fail a little bit so that they can actually really learn what's best for them? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that there's two parts to that answer. The first part is to encourage courage. Selling and oil and gas and any other thing,

but selling is a non-fatal occupation. We have a zero fatality, but you're not going to die doing it, right? So one thing is you've got to be willing to be quite brave. Nobody's going to die. And until you've sold something, you've sold nothing. So it's okay to make mistakes so long as you're learning a lesson from it. So that's one big thing. And I'm super happy I've seen deals going south, which I know I could have saved, but I let the salesperson go down with it because I knew it was the best investment I could make. The second thing is this. I often know what I want them to do,

but I want them to find their own path to it. And I do that by questionings. What are we trying to achieve? What are our options? How can we tackle this? What do you think we should do? What's our options are here? Is there a different version of that? So I give myself a little toolbox of coaching questions to help people hopefully find their own way to the right path. But as you say, they'll often find a path that's different from mine. And that's a key thing to accept. Yeah. Especially with this new younger workforce, it has amazed me how much these younger sellers

are digital natives, right? And so they had that advantage over me. At the same time, they haven't negotiated five MSAs with Fortune 100 companies, right? And they need to learn how to pace themselves. So that's one of those things I can transfer to my sales team is that bit of knowledge and experience. At the same time, I'm learning from them around digital tools and technology. So it's kind of the coaching is kind of two ways, even though I'm the one that's a little bit more senior. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. We have a program manager in

our company called the Zeta. And I said, the Zeta says, like, take two weeks, go away and learn AI, then come back and teach me, right? And that's what she does. She's going to wait for, she's going to charge GBT and Tom and a few other systems and come back and talk to me because she's going to learn it much faster than I do. So it's good to have this balance to use the strengths of your generation with the ones that we've got. So yeah, I agree with you totally. Bill, I want to jump in here and maybe social selling. Mark, you kind of touched on that. Bill, can you talk about your

perspective on that and how, because less people are answering the phone, right? Like, less people are answering the phone, you're sending more emails, you're using social media more, nurture to build that relationship, also capturing data intelligence on what the client might need. Just like, I've seen a huge shift in sales to more analytics, marketing automation, all that sort of thing, social selling. And I just kind of would love to take the conversation a little bit that direction. Sure, I agree with you totally. It's been really, because for me, I mean, Mark and I, you know,

have a similar generation. In a good old days, you could get an oil and gas direct train, pretty much pick up the phone and you could call people and say, hey, we're doing this thing. Do you want to find out more about it? You have a meeting to do that. That was great. Now that's less and less likely to happen. I've had people who called me apologize for calling me because for a certain generation, actually calling someone is not acceptable because it's such a new, because it's a generational thing. Here's look at this way. When you turn to social selling,

here's a model that we've developed locally here in Switzerland. It's four stages. It's part of social selling. One, evaluate. Who do I really want to talk to? And what do I want to say? And this comes right down to persona marketing. Specifically, who do I want to talk to? And what do I want to say? The first thing is spend a whole bunch of time not thinking about you and your marvellous product offering, but think about them. How are you going to change their world? You can't change the world. Why on earth would they want to talk to you? It's number one.

Two is the hard part. How do you engage with them? Starting the conversation, making them want to talk to you is the tough part. How do you engage? And that is to a large extent, contact and permission based. Now, we have a phrase, which I got from one of our PMs. We call it whims. Would it make sense? See, what we say is, we have this thing, we have that thing, we have that. Would it make sense for us to send this to you? We never send anything. We ask them if they want us to send it to them. So that whims permission approach is the key to engagement. Then after that, your mission

is not to pitch, but to exchange. What's going on in their world? What are their capabilities? How do those things match? And only then you can talk about execution and closing. So we're big fans of evaluate, engage, exchange and execute. And we build our com strategy based on that, but it's entirely content and permission based. And you've got to have the dialogue otherwise you're a broadcaster. I love it. The personas are interesting. That's right smack and Matt's world. And Matt before you

joined us, Bill and I were talking about how that's one of the new things that they focus on. I'd love to see y'all go down that rabbit hole a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Let me tell you a real beauty, right? As I heard this one, an oil and gas fund, right? An IT system, we call it ERP system, enterprise resource planning system. It's the system that most big organizations run. One of our clients has a specialist ERP system, which they use for oil and gas for transportation. So here's the thing. They sell to the head of operations for low

cost oil and natural gas transportation companies. They are the low cost supplier to low cost suppliers and they sell to heads of operations. They know exactly who they're talking to mid tier, low cost suppliers who've got a margin squeeze who don't have a big staff. So they know exactly who their persona is. They've got a lot of compliance issues. They've got a lot of dynamics issues and change. They've got a lot of traceability issues and they say, see those things, they have redo those things cheaper than anyone else that you can bring in. So they know exactly who they're

talking to. That's why I think it's so important to spend time doing persona understandings. Bill, the analogy, I like your analogies earlier, that come to my head are you got a fish where the fish are, right? And you got to know what type of fish you're going after and really part of that first planning stage. And a lot of times as people transition to more online selling, they don't have a clear understanding of that target persona and where those people hang out and how to speak to them online versus, I mean, selling online and selling face to face and then selling phone,

all different approaches, certainly the permission based piece of it. But figuring out who those target personas are having a campaign for each different target persona. And then you add into it, I call it like customer journey. What is that person going to see online? And what are they going to be searching for? What's that problem in their head that they're trying to figure out? And if you can, you can, when they Google or when they're on social media, get into that conversation on why it would make sense for them. And then they start seeing your stuff. It starts

building additional trust and value. And then you bring them on till they raise their hand or you get them on the phone. Exactly. And I think one of the things I know is very close to both of your hearts is the link between sales and marketing. And this is where it comes in. This isn't a sales person's job. It's just not their job. Now, here's the big issue for me. When you look at the social selling, interestingly enough, one of the biggest impacts is I think it's changed the definition of what marketing is. See, it used to be when I did my marketing studies many years ago,

used to say sales is one to one. Marketing is one to many. And the marketing, if you were put out some mass communications, some advertising, and do, do, do, do, do. Now we're getting to a place where marketing has got a split one. They've got the brand to manage. And that's a rare, mysterious thing. I'm never going to do the branding world. What I think marketing have got to do now is they accept the responsibility of not just the one to many, but its mass customization. And I think marketing was a persona and marketing was the leap nurturing journey before it goes to a sales

person. If you ask me, I think in a complex world that we've all chosen to live in, before a sales person picks up a lead, it should have two, three, or four touches from marketing. And I mean, two eight touches before it goes to sales. Well, yeah, I mean, we're not in mass selling anymore, right? Like everybody's got a TV, everybody's got a toaster. Like you, it doesn't work anymore, the traditional media. That's where digital came in to do that targeting and you're right, like managing the brand, getting that out there, communicating those objectives. But there's a

selling component of account based selling of nurturing specific candidates, the personalization, and the customization that's needed. And understanding again, that customer journey to get, to warm them up, right? Before they get on the phone, or before they submit, raise their hand in some way, they should be warmed up. And then I think the big piece too, is the connection between the salespeople to know that this person is not wrapped up with a bow on it, ready to buy. You know, it's a warm lead that you got to jump on and start working it.

Correct. And I think all the research shows that when the person wants to, okay, imagine you have a potential prospect to either who may want to buy what it is you're selling. All the research shows that when they make their first action, they want a super fast response. But that doesn't mean to say you throw a name and email across to the salespeople. Does that? What it means is that you should stay with marketing, with lead nurturing, as far as I'm concerned, until you, at the point where the company decides, and that's between sales and marketing, this thing's ready to be

transferred to sales. At that point, the salesperson has to wrap their heads around the previous dialogue and act, not on what you want to say about your product or service, but that brief set of dialogue touch points, so you know what the customer cares about. That's the big thing. And if I just want one thing I want to say in here, we always believe, if I say, here's exactly my target market, at any one point in time, roughly 85% of my target market have got something else they're going to do right now. They're acquiring a company, they're being acquired, they're growing,

they're shrinking, something's happening, they're too busy talking to me. That's fine. I want to find the 15% who I might buy from it, but the other 85% marketing's job is to keep that relationship going, because next year, the year after, five years time, I want them to come to me. That's not a salesperson's job, that's marketing's job. I think that that's really interesting, like setting triggers to put them in different buckets of email nurture or text nurture or sending them newsletters or what have you. Depending on the organization,

that's an interesting perspective that basically all things need to line up before sales is ready and engaged and marketing has to keep them warm. That conceptually is something that hasn't been at the forefront of my thought, so I got to think through that more. That's interesting. That's a key thing. We're quite lucky we worked with some venture capital companies. These guys tend to go in and private equity, they buy a company, triple it inside three, four years then go to a public offering, and they all follow exactly the same pattern. The exactly the same

pattern, who am I trying to sell to, what problem I'm trying to solve, find my 15% marketing to the rest, sales convert, and it's that conversion rate, which is how I would judge marketing. Yeah, so guys, let me kind of pull this back toward coaching a little bit. I love this conversation. I can tell right now we're going to have to build back on and go down these couple of rabbit holes. Pulling it back toward sales coaching specifically, how do you identify the right coach? You have internal coaches, you have external coaches, you have trained coaches, you have amateur coaches.

How do you figure out what's the right coach for your sales organization? Yeah, that's a good point. Here's what I believe. On the word of coaching, by the way, coaching has got a mixed reputation. You have a lot of people out there who wanted coaches to be the best first of yourself, to make a million dollars, to have a helicopter, that's fine. That's not my world. Coach helps me be a better professional version of myself. That's the big thing. Now, if you're a manager, you better be developing your coaching skills,

or you're going to get munched, because you're going to be sacked one day. We don't need managers. If you're not there to improve the performance of your team, the stream is going to roll right over the top of you one day, because we don't need that level of management any longer. Mid-tier's gone. So one, you better be a manager. If you're looking to how do you find a coach for yourself, the good news is there's lots of great ways of doing it. The best way, one of my favorite ways of coaching is to coach yourself. Very conscious. It's a tough thing, man. You've got to buy

that. Accountability and coaching are two halves of the same coin. Look at this one. Imagine you say to yourself, okay, well, here's where I am. I'm pretty good, but maybe I don't ask you enough tough questions. Maybe I'm not so strong at relationship development. Maybe I'm not so strong with follow-up. Maybe I'm not very good at aligning my internal resources for the complex, but whatever. Be honest with yourself. Then hold yourself accountable. Now, give yourself a bit of a goal. Now, we all talk about smart objectives. I have a lot of problems with smart objectives,

because the research shows you that smart objectives companies underperform the segment median. They're actually companies who align themselves to smart objectives underperform their peers. Hey, Bill, in case our audience have never heard of smart, what does that stand for? Okay. Here's smart. In the good old days, we were said, an objective should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed. Say, well, that's fine. I will grow sales and blah, blah, blah, by 25% by the years end. Obviously, going to be true, right? Weirdly, those organizations

that use smart objectives very closely underperform. Now, I thought that was strange, because most of my business life have used smart objectives. How could that be? They're not realized. The reason why I was trying to use smart objectives was I did, but so many people do, who use them, was I lied. You would just lie, but your objectives, you would set your objectives too low. You would sandbag them. You would cover yourself with a lot of big masses of safety. So here's what I'm going to say to you in terms of coaching. When you're coaching yourself

and when you're coaching your teams, because I really want to talk to sales managers, that's who I really think that I care about right now. When you're coaching yourself and your sales managers, smart objectives are by understand that, but they're deceptive. Here's what I think you need. Any objective that you set for yourself or your team, one, it must be motivating. You've got to want to do it. If you don't want to do it, you're not going to do it. You'll find excuses. It's got to be motivating in here.

Second thing in here is it must be aligned to what the company wants you to do. Now, for example, say you have someone who's technically great, that you're all about the product, that you're all about the industry, but it just isn't working where they work. They're interpersonal skills. So one, got to motivate. Two, interpersonal skills is a critical skill set for us to develop. So it must be aligned to the company's objectives. Three, there's nothing beating people up because they fail because people tend not to know where

to start. So there must be a clear, practical first step. Now, last thing is got to be stretch. So it must be motivating. It must be aligned to the company's objectives. There must be a practical first stage so you can know if they've done this thing or not. And it's got to be a stretch. Now, when I'm coaching, personally, I use those four MAPS maps and all of the team have nice clear map objectives. If it's not stretch, it's not aligned, it doesn't motivate, I don't know my next step, you're wasting your time. So as a coach, that's a good tool to use.

I love that. I love that you have a process and a way to make that easy to understand. So tactically, if I'm a sales manager for an oil-filled service company and I'm looking for help for my sales team, can things have changed? What should I be looking for as far as finding a coach? What if I've identified that my culture has not changed so long that internally, I really don't have a coach that can help bring in new ideas or new ways of doing things, how would I go out and try to find that right coach for my sales team?

Yeah, I think you're right in the lobby of the culture because this is why I'm always cautious with the generic, let's find a coach, because a coach has to speak your language. Every culture has its own language. Now we live in a world of complex B2B sales and marketing. We love that complexity with subject matter experts, complex buying groups, so the coach has to breathe and live the same world that you do. If you don't see some level of reflection when you look at them, they look a little bit like me, then it's not the wrong coach. We don't want people to make

our people happy, we want people who make people happy because they'll be more successful. So spend time finding any external coach and find a coach who is driven by business impact. So if you're looking for an external coach, just say, can you tell me sometimes you've had business impact? Can you explain what you've done and why? So you've got to make sure you have someone who speaks your language and has a strong business focus if you're looking for an external coach. So you've done this for a very long time, but I know you work for some very, very large

companies. When you look at a sales organization in the hierarchy, on one end you have frontline sales people and on the other end you have a senior VP of sales or chief revenue officer. In that range of hierarchy, where is sales coaching making the biggest difference in the organization? So if I had a budget, where do I spend that budget to drive the most results from my coaching engagement? Okay, classic question. Here's how most organizations look. You've got your CRO, your VP sales up the top and they report into the CEO and they care about EBIT and margin

and anything that sales people and they particularly care about hitting target. Then you get sales managers in the middle, but here's the magic spot. If your sales managers are not coaching, everything else will hit the sand. So if you're going to spend money on coaching, make sure you're transforming your managers into people who can manage using more coaching techniques, because in any complex organization, the frontline manager, that's your change agent. You know, we talked earlier about how Matt and I believe that sales and marketing people should

be joined at the hip. I think it's a great validation that you think the same even though we haven't talked in 10 years, however long it's been. But so we've been talking about coaching sales people. At what point, Bill, would you expand that coaching to the marketing people to make sure that you're driving common goals? That's a great question. Now, remember, a large part of coaching is getting people to adopt processes. We apply processes in different ways, but we must have a common process. And one thing we love to do is to say, look, like Matt mentioned,

the customer journey earlier on. Well, the customer journey is always pretty much the same. Every buying decision in the history of humanity goes through the four same process steps, awareness, interest, desire, action. So what you've got to do is get everyone aligned, a sales process or a customer journey process that hits awareness, interest, desire, action. One of the things we love to do is we love to have, call it marketing, lead generation, client nurturing, customer journey management, PMs, call me like, get those people training with salespeople. Because once that are

all on the same core process, I'm going to work on the basis that marketing people should be smart enough to say, how do I apply that to my thinking? You see what I mean? So we get them all in the same block and tackle training, get the same basic, how to ask value questions, how to form relationships, how to qualify, give everyone the same basic training. Salespeople will use it directly. So marketing people go, okay, and they can nearly always transfer that to their own world. So get everyone and some bootcamp training, get them all running through the month together

and get the same basics and drill. No, I think that that's really, really valuable because specifically most marketing people come up as marketing people, they don't come up as salespeople like I did. And so, you know, in my opinion, marketing is just the extension of that sales conversation forward, right? And so it's the presale component of it, right? And so a lot of those marketing people are looking at things from different objectives and they're not looking at like salespeople. So I think training them together, getting them in the same room, having

sales understand marketing, marketing understand sales, because there's a lot of really smart marketing people, they just haven't been brought up through those concepts and even AIDA concepts to salespeople, right? Like when I was in sales, that wasn't front and center from a training standpoint. And so blending those two worlds, I think just extends it, right? Sales is one long conversation is what I was always told. And so that's what we're doing here is just extending that conversation instead of being two separate conversations.

Exactly. And I think we'll have to work on the basis that let's leave brand marketing to one side, but when it comes to the actual practice or practical fuel marketing in here, it's exactly the same objective. The fastest path to money. That's the gig. That's why we're welcome to work with you. What's the fastest path to money? And the fastest path to money is happy customers. You can't make them happy until you know the problem that you solve. Now, if we can just go to one quick thing here, and it's classic hardcore marketing, there's a very,

very famous American academic called Philip Kotler. Kotler pretty much invented marketing, but Mr. Kotler invented the four P's of marketing. Now, he also did one other thing and he says, what am I selling? There's three component parts to your product. There is your core product, which is the physical thing you're selling. You're writing a data sheet. There's the augmented product where you're adding all your services and nice things to it to make it all look lovely. And then there is the whole product. People buy the whole product. Sales people sell the core product.

So very often what sales people are selling and customers are buying are not the same thing. Marketing's job is to join those two things together. What's the whole problem we're solving? This is why marketing people should co-pilot with sales people as often as possible to look for what problem we're really solving. That's what I think is where the magic comes. Well, one of the things that we might want to say this for another podcast, Mark, but marketing in customer retention, I think has a really core place to play. And a lot of people

don't think about that, right? You're just getting people in the door and you expect there's going to be this much churn. Marketing can really help with that attrition rate. Customer service and marketing could work more closely together to extend the life of those clients and also referrals, right, Bill? Maybe you could talk a little bit about generating referrals from existing clients and how maybe marketing would play into that. That's brilliant. And that's a great thing because the marketing is all about the long-term

relationship between two organizations, right? It's all about the long-term. And we often think in sales and we're guilty of this because although we are attractive, witty and good-looking, we tend to be a little bit short-term sometimes. Selling is not about the deal. It's about the customer. That's the big thing. Now, we're salespeople. We like to do the deal and go and do something else because we're short attention span people, right? Oh, what's next? And off we go. Somebody has to do the rest. Now, the customer experience is delivered by customer service.

And let's be quite frank, customer service, engineering, they actually deliver the thing we've sold. The relationship has to be maintained by marketing. Now, you're talking about social selling. Some of our clients and typically maybe 20% of the people do this, they will really go on and put their presence out there typically on LinkedIn or quite often YouTube. This is the individuals who do this because they know what they're doing is they're putting a message out there all the time. And the people that are saying that aren't necessarily new prospects, it's existing

customers. Now, those existing customers, let's just say you sell to someone now here in 2023 and they buy your thing. Five years time, guess what? They've moved company. And when they move company, if you've maintained your relationship with them, which is marketing's job, when they move, they take you with them. And my little team here in Switzerland, we have a team of seven full-time sales staff in here. We have a 91% retention rate by revenue. 91% revenue comes from last year's customers. We have an eight-year average customer lifecycle. So we do pretty good at keeping customers.

Not because salespeople are spending their time drinking cups of coffee with their happy customers because we're pretty darn good at making, keeping ourselves up there on LinkedIn and it super works. All right. So guys, let's stop this conversation now. Matt, you saw me write it down. I think customer retention is going to be another episode and we'll invite Bill back and go deep down that rabbit hole. That's a huge thing for both sales and marketing. Unfortunately, guys, we've just about actually ran over our time. So Bill, if people want to get in touch with you, I think I'm

going to put your LinkedIn profile and also the link to your Sandler page if you're okay, but you also volunteered an ebook on actual coaching. And so we'll make that available as well. But if people wanted to get in touch with you and learn more, is that the two best ways, LinkedIn and your contact page on Sandler? Yeah. Well, the very best thing to do is, by good luck, I'm the only Bill Morrison in all of Switzerland. It's not a common name. There's no Bill, except me. You just type in Bill Morrison, Switzerland on LinkedIn, you'll find me. And

obviously we have some people that won't have my LinkedIn page as well as I do. Pingas, no problem at all. Mention the OG, mention the podcast down here. We'll like you and we put content out too, not anything like yours, but we put some stuff out there. And if you want to talk to us, we're always happy to talk to you. Anything to mark, it's a friend of mine. Yeah. And for our oil and gas lists, especially our service companies, get a little bit of coaching for your sales team. The ROI is immediate and very obvious.

You just drive good revenue and Bill's one of the best out there. This is the place where we do our product review. We actually don't have a product. That's actually not true. We actually do have products, Matt, that we have to get distributed because somebody sent us something to review. So just stay tuned. Connect with Matt and I on all our social channels. Those are also in the show notes along with Bill's contact information. We're still working on our insider's group. LinkedIn, fail or tip of the week. And Bill, it seems like you have one.

Well, we do have a fail. Now, despite my charm in Scottish accent, I live in Switzerland. Now, it's supposed to be a very strange country that we have three major languages, French, English and Italian. The thing is, multinational organizations can't cope with that. So they assume we're all German. Now, the problem with that is that a lot of us don't speak German. So basically all the multinational communication that we get from major global companies goes straight in the trash. And the big fail for that is are you in any way culturally attuned to who

you're talking to? So that's a major fail for me, I would say. Yeah. That's a major fail to actually approach somebody with the message that's not even in their language. That takes just a few minutes to sort that one out. All right, Bill, this has been great. In fact, it's been so great. I can tell already we have you back on the show. Bill's contact information is in the show note to everybody. Great conversation. Thanks again, Bill, for your time. I know it's an afternoon over there, but just this is great. Really appreciate you coming on. No problem at all. It's

great meeting both of you and I'm always happy to come back and talk to you from fellow professionals, okay? All right, guys, 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 Marketing podcast, a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. Learn more at oggn.com.