Competitive research

Manage your all-field operations from anywhere with Rigor online or offline. Whether it's scheduling and 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 operation manager dashboards on your desktop or phone. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us. Link is in the show notes. 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 folks, we're back. Matt and I are live from the Energy Trading Week Americas at the JW Merritt Houston Galleria in combination. Who are we in combination with? Environmental markets week. Two different conferences, same hotel, same place, same book of great people bringing you great sales and marketing advice.

Mark, I would tell you that I have not seen a hotel this busy in a long time. Isn't it cool? It's pretty great. I was walking through, it's teaming with people and energy, and I just haven't felt this since before COVID. Leave it to the marketing guy to come up with a cool word like team, which it is. Today's subject is competitive research, but before we get there, we have not gotten a review. So come on, guys and girls, leave us a review. It takes a couple of seconds. Go on the show note, click on the link. If you love the show, give us a five-star

review. If you don't like the show, tell us what you would like us to change. If you want to promote yourself, put it in the review, tag yourself with a picture in it. Absolutely. And not only that, we just launched a couple of weeks ago our merch store. And so the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast has its own merchandise. If you buy a shirt with the Sales and Marketing podcast, post it on social and tag either Matt and I, and I will personally send you a blend of three bottles of our custom blended hot sauce. It's gourmet hot sauce for free. So grab a shirt off the

merch store, go to OGGN.com, hit merch, grab a shirt, take a picture, post it on social, tag us in it, and we will send you some custom gourmet hot sauce. I like that. I like that. Yeah, it's how you pay for social exposure. Instead of pay for click, it's pay with hot sauce. All right, so today we're talking about competitive research, which quite honestly, from a marketing point of view, I know almost zero about. So Matt, competitive research and where would somebody even start? Well, you know, we're talking about analytics, right? We're talking

about what you can see. We're at this energy trading conference. I walked around, right? And then look at this, SkyFi or something like that. They have drones up there. They're taking pictures of stuff, right? Right. That's analytics data that you could analyze. A lot of these trading companies are looking at analytics on where to trade. So analytics can be used for a lot of things. And then looking at things from a competitive standpoint is competitive research. Now, what kind of data, Mark, I'll kick it back to you. What kind of data would be helpful, right? If

you're a salesperson, and then we'll talk about what you can do on the marketing side, Mandy. So a couple of things. From a competition point of view, I would love to know price points. I'd also love to know if those price points are apples to apples or apples to oranges comparison. And if they're not a direct comparison, I'd like to know what the differences are. And then finally, I would love to understand things like customers, market share. Like, do you own the market, in which case maybe it would be a lot of work from a sales point of

view to take some of that market share from you? Or do you not own the market and it's kind of open and be much easier and cheaper and quicker for me to take market share? Okay, let's kind of start there. Google and all the different social media companies are trying to map what's going on in real life online. So if you have a good social presence, digital transformation, right, you're trying to map out what's happening in the real world online, okay? The companies that do that better are going to leave a bigger footprint. Like, if you're not doing anything online,

it's hard to see things. Right. But also, Google likes to see prices. We know that people are going 75% of the way down the customer journey before maybe they engage a salesperson. So putting prices online, depending if it's not like a custom code, if it's, you know, commoditized in some way, you can find that information. There's tools that you can use to scrape sites and search for that data and maybe even find downloadables, right, of like, here's the pricing this that the other thing, right? So that's one. Two is, if they're posting on

social media, if they're putting out blogs, if they're getting press and people are linking back to them, they're building content, etc., you can see in what they're doing and who they're connecting with and what they're putting out there. If they put out a portfolio, you're going to see who some of their clients are. If they got, you know, the writing article is about a certain thing, you know that that's what they're focused on or going after, right? So you tie that from the 10K reports to something like that. So you can see who's linking to them, what pressure leases they're

doing, where their portfolios are online, maybe customer testimonials. You should be able to get a sense of what they're doing online, of what they're doing in person, because it should mirror it, it should support it, right? Now, if they're not doing anything, you can't see anything, but you can use third party analytical tools, listening tools to see what other people are doing. And you can see that digital footprint, you can trace that back. So when we talk about a competitive analysis, we try to look at all the things that are happening online and understand

what they did to get where they are, maybe in Google ranking, for example, or, you know, how do they land this big client? You can sometimes reverse engineer what they're doing to add to your own strategy, or you could use it as competitive intelligence in a number of different ways. I think, you know, salespeople just, again, the whole reason we do this podcast is they don't rely on their marketing person that has so much analytics. Like, for example, this is used for if the satellite imagery, right? And there's all kinds of data you can buy on foot traffic,

like where to put a business. But this is saying, hey, are these guys building whatever they're saying they're building, or what is it on track, or whatever it is. That's really, really important real world information to make business decisions off of and not just rely on what someone's saying. So I think analytics is maybe even verification of what people are saying that they're doing. It's the proof, right? An audience, what you couldn't see since this is not video is holding up a placard, so an advertisement for a company called SkyFi here at the conference. So that's what he's

referencing. So I love everything you just rattled off. From a sales point of view, the better I understand my competition, the better I can sell, right? In fact, you know, Mark LaCour in his days when he was actually a bag-caron salesperson, I pride myself on understanding my competition's business as good as they did, right? Maybe even sometimes better. Of course, back then this was the early 90s. There was not an internet, it was not all these social tools, so gathering information was really hard. But you made me think of something. So here at OGGN, all our prices are proudly

displayed on our advertising page. And I do that specifically to help people understand where we fit in the price range so they can decide if they want to work with us or not. And it makes it easier for my sales team because once people see our pricing, if they move forward, they know what they're getting themselves into. If they can't afford us, then they know that it's not worth their time. But I never thought that our competitors could be gathering informationless because they have pricing on the website. Well, there's tons of data that you can collect, right? And yeah,

pricing is one of them. I don't think pricing, like people do business with people they know like and trust. Google's looking for expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, right? That is one factor, certainly if they're outside the bell curve, but most people don't buy on price, right? No, no. I mean, some people do, but if you are just buying on price, you're going to get into trouble. But when we talk about analytics, right, LinkedIn was not available. It came around when I was doing headhunting and oil and gas, right? Like it was starting up there,

they post their resume, I would do alert, right? Like alert up, they post their profile, hey, they're ready for a new job. Well, today you can see who they're connected to. You can see what they're posting about. You can see their backstory of the company, who they went to college with. Now you can start going, okay, you can start mapping out what's happening. Also from an analytic standpoint, you know, heat mapping, what people are doing when they get to your site, what are those IP addresses? Where are those people coming from? What are they looking at?

Like, so you can see buying interest, right? So I look at like a fog of war, right? Like, there's a fog of war. And what analytics is, is it gives you more visibility on what's happening with your assets, like your battleships or whatever, and then other people's stuff. And you can see where the moves are to incorporate that into your strategy. You shouldn't make all decisions based off. And also a lot of these third party tools, I will kind of caveat is we use a number of them to kind of triangulate the data because they use their own metrics and stuff like that. My other

podcast, like a number of them different sponsor it. But I've started to, if you're looking at like website data, so we can talk about different kinds of competitive intelligence analytics, Mark. But if you talk about like website traffic, you know, Google Analytics or GA4 and Search Console, what's actually happened on the website. So the difference is the pixel firing, like actually people being on the website long enough, but you get the true picture in Search Console, they don't give you everything, but they give you a lot. That is real data. So you want to,

you know, API plug that in to any of your third party tools. So they use their algorithms and their metrics and whatever in addition to the real data to then hypothesize it, right? And then, you know, there's other tools that you can see different things. And a lot of what we're doing right now is we have a company that's buying up, they're trying to know if they want to build their own business in that area, like drop a location there and build it from scratch, or if they want to buy somebody. Well, one of the things they're looking at, if they want to buy that location

or buy into that location or spot, because we all know, I think it's easier to buy than build, like from scratch, depending on what you're doing. So they're looking at the online reach, the online presence of that company in that area, because who you think are your competitors in real life, and who are your competitors online for certain different things, is rarely the same. And so looking at that data gives you a more holistic picture of, okay, in this area, in this market, at these conferences, here's my competition, because

they're always there. Online people come into my website searching for these things, this is my competition, right? Usually, the biggest enemy is yourself, because you need to look at how do I offer more value? What is the customer journey? Is this the best customer experience? How do I bring people to you? And analytics is going to provide that data of what maybe trends people are searching for, maybe Google trends, right? Like, what's spiked in search, and you know what's spiking and searching right now?

It has to be Israel and... What is the age for draft? Oh, I see, there's an effect there. Yeah, so there's huge spikes in that. And some of these tools incorporate that you can press a button, and based on maybe different keywords, you can see what is the trend value and what's the line of what those different things are searching for. You can also look at what other people are bidding for it, right? So there's a bid auction, there's a market for different phrases or keywords, that's PPC, pay per click. And so you can see what other keywords, like if I go into an industry,

help out a client, I don't know enough about their business, right? Like, I haven't done something like that before in a while. I don't use it as the key metric, but I use it as a good indicator of this keyword is bided at $40 a click, and there's other ones at $1 a click. Probably not for sure, because I have found little honey holes of no one's bidding on this keyword as converting. But this keyword, probably because people are bidding on it so high, is a high converting keyword. And we should look at that a little bit more. Look at that as maybe,

like, is that part of a parent, like understanding or a child? Like, is it part of like a major category or subtopic? And it's how to figure out how the pieces fit together. If you really understand, like, there's all these puzzle pieces, there's all these questions, you can use different analytical tools to figure out that question. So give me some more questions, Mark, that you might, as a salesperson, want to know the answer to. All right. So we talked about pricing, we talked about market share, buying cycles, right? Oh, yeah. Payment terms, all that sort of stuff helps me

determine who's an ideal prospect for us. Quite honestly, I don't want to sell to you if I find out your payment terms are net 60 or net 90. And if we do sell to you, I'm not going to accept those payment terms. I actually talked to somebody else in the industry that builds, like, big magento sites for clients, and they had to turn away because this was a great client, they won the RFP bid, and the payment terms, they're like, hey, we do net 15, you pay us in 15, we pay our people in 15. They extended net 30, they said, no, 60 days, they're like, no, no, no, no, no. And then I think they

get to like a solution. And then they're like, hey, we're going to give you the deposit in 60 days. And he's like, what part of deposit do you not understand? It's a deposit. And so they had to turn that job away. But guess how you can find that? It's called Boolean search. Okay, so this is maybe an or this is getting in some like, actually old mathematical terms. Yeah, if you search, what are some Boolean searches, you can do different searches like and or there's parentheses, there's all kinds of different things that you can create in Google to look for. Okay, one is at this conference,

we could find maybe if everybody filled it out, it got posted somewhere, someone maybe posted it somewhere and they didn't like unindexed it from Google, Google's indexed it, you can see all who the attendants are of this conference or I've been able to get company lists before when I was doing recruiting, you can get contracts to your point, you can get a lot of information that they thought was maybe behind a firewall of some sort that they have out there publicly. So there's actually a defensive mechanism to to understanding what's happening with your presence online,

because there might be, you know, really sensitive things that you don't want people to see that you're trying to make or offer even internal stuff might make it out. And I mean, like cyber security, I know we're going off topic a little bit, but is the number one thing that people are most concerned about as far as CMOs are concerned is, and so that's data protection. How do you do that? Well, understanding the analytics, being able to see that that competitive intelligence, all that fits into this kind of, I don't know what we're making a pie of some sort.

A competitive research pie. Yeah, there we go. That sounds good. Yes, this is great stuff. So, you know, another thing that I would look at from, especially if I was leading a sales team, is I'd want to understand how easy or hard is it to steal a client from a competitor. So is a client happy with their existing relationship with the vendor? Are they not happy? That would be worth a fortune. Yeah, what we find too is when people switch companies, they usually take their relationships with them. So there's definitely a kind of like best practices and things that you

learn. You know, if you understand how someone's searching, okay, so there's these data pools where IP addresses can get identified through hashing, right? And if that hashing comes to your site, you know that that person's looked at your site, even though they haven't given you the information. Some of these data pools will give you access. Okay, so even Facebook, these rules are getting tougher and tougher over in the UK, you know, tags, cookies, like becoming a real issue, even Facebook's extended the reach on targeting, which is ridiculous. I just ran a

campaign, 200,000 people in the data set, you can't get really, really tight targeting when you're talking about that. But some of these pools you opt in through terms of service on the website. And if they go to any site in the network, okay, you can see what they're doing. So the competitive intelligence is knowing that somebody is looking for a different solution online. In these forums, there's different places you can go to see what people are posting. You can see profiles that people are looking at on LinkedIn, like all this is competitive analytics. If someone's looking at

your site, mainly it's like salespeople trying to sell you stuff or to buy from you. But what if somebody from your client looks at your site, like, or looks at something that you posted, isn't that really valuable? Super valuable. I tell you what else that leads itself to, which I never even thought about until you started talking, is in the oil and gas space, procurement teams love to issue RFPs, right? Oh, there we go, yeah. There's two different buckets of RFPs, really three different buckets of RFPs. One is a fair RFP, where you stand at equal chance

compared to everybody else that's entering and winning or losing that. Those are usually worth your time and resources to enter. There's the RFPs where the company already knows who you're the fodder, right? But procurement's making them do an RFP, and that is a total waste of your time and resource to enter, right? And then there's the third one, where you have such a good relationship with the client that even though they go to RFP, they ask you to help them write it, right? So if I could differentiate between those three RFPs, my win rate would probably double or even triple.

Okay, so I have two things to share with you with this. I would actually add another category to that. So there's another category that if you're so uniquely different than somebody else, you can claim that you don't fall into that category, so therefore there doesn't need to be an RFP. Yep, I get it. I get it. Like so you provide so much uniqueness, there's certain kind of wording and legal terms that you can, if you get an RFP, like so, hey, like who reaches, who has 29 different podcasts that reaches the oil and gas space by XYZ? No one can say that,

so they can't put a comparable comp. So what you want to try to do if you get an RFP is put yourself in that category. Certainly if you're helping them craft it or they already know who they're going to select, I'll give you a perfect example. I'm not going to name the company, but I am on a subcommittee for a non-profit and they're bidding out the website, okay? And I am on the selection committee. I am also putting in a bid to build the website. The odds are pretty good. Like we're talking about everything after the fact. Like I know

what they need, what they want, what their price points are, what the hot buns are. I mean, I actually had the mistake of getting invited to a meeting and you know, I'm not like, I'm wearing agency hat right now. I had the agency hat, shook the guy's hand, took the hat off, put it in my back. I was just like, okay, like this guy kind of already is like, I'm working at a disadvantage and that happens so much more times than you think, right? And so RFPs are tough. Understanding who's on that selection committee, you know, like, I mean, it's really how you define competitive

intelligence and how you define analytics, but there's tools and things that you can use in every area. Again, I think focused on what you're offering focused on what you're doing and then differentiating yourself enough is kind of, I think my value at as far as RFPs go. Yeah, so let me give you one nugget of advice audience or this is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is something I learned early in my career, speaking RFPs. If you enter an RFP and you lose, instead of walking away and going to have a drink with your buddies because you're

depressed, ask the company if you can be the backup vendor, they will always say yes always because there's no risk to them. They've already picked somebody else besides you. From you, from a sales and a marketing point of view, you now have permission to stay in touch with them. It's implied and I'm telling you, especially in oil and gas, a lot of times the person that won that RFP intentionally underbid it and they want to make the money back on change orders. And as soon as the client figures out that what's going on, they throw them out and guess who's sitting

there waiting in second place is you. And yet your original price at your original margin, so there's a bit of advice that every sales person out there needs to take to heart, put in your toolbox, always ask to be the backup vendor if you lose an RFP. And there's many times that people don't win those bids or they get in and it gets messy. Okay, so on this opportunity right now, this guy came in way lower than me. Okay, I actually was like, I'm not going to do that price. I'm not going to touch that. And so this was funny. So I said, this is going to be bad.

This is going to turn out badly. You know, I've done this for 17 years, like this is going to go bad. Okay, maybe this guy knows something I don't know. And that's totally possible. But I'm like, no, no, no, no, I ran up past two other people. They're like, no, no, no. And I go, this is not going to be a good deal. I do not want this. And then you know what they said, well, we're going to hire you to manage them. And I was like, no, no, no, no, this is already bad. Let's not do this. It's going to be more expensive. There's going to be add on costs. But Mark, one of the things I

do want to say before we get out of here on this podcast, because we're talking about competitive intelligence, one of the things that has been most helpful for me is something along the lines of being connected to conduits or super connectors of people that are connected to a lot of people. And that's an old school kind of method. But man, I have people in every like industry that are kind of bird dogs for me. But yes, they'll send me referrals. But more so, they know what's going on. They talk to people, they hear the gist of things. I was able to hire so many people as

a recruiter before the contract even got to HR. And then I would find the person I would get with the manager, they would hire the person we would send the invoice to HR, they hated us. They hated me. It was all about getting competitive intelligence to have people know around the time of Oh, this is when reviews are coming out. This is when promotions are coming out. What are their projects? What are they doing? So the more knowledge you had in that industry for that specific thing, it empowered me to be able to go, Hey, Mark, like everybody hates

recruiters and tell like, you need one, right? But when do you know that you need one? And it's spam until then. It's having that ear to the ground. How do you have that ear to the ground? There's analytical tools. There's boots on the ground. You know, for me, okay, I have small kids, I have young kids, like I can't go to all the conferences like this. This is fun. I can't always be out there. I can't be always meeting people. Also, I like the one to many like, right? So all you sales managers out there, you know, and marketing people, like I can reach you all

through this podcast, not one on one, right? And that was again, that shift. That's where email automation comes in. Like, it's all about like one to many reach, but also on the flip side, on the competitive intelligence side, I have people in every industry that tell me what's going on, what's going on with companies, like I can't keep up with everything, right? And even news, right? Like getting little newsfeed clippets of, there's a lot of news sites. This is last story. This is so funny. I think it's called like the skinny or something like that. But it was

basically for women, like a news site, so that they could talk about things that like the guys were talking about. And this was before, you know, all the, you know, DEA, you know, DEI stuff, right? But I subscribed to that because it would tell me what was going on in sports. It was telling me what was going on in politics, business, and then you could select the industry. And it would give me basically a recap. So then I could read that going into my sales calls. I was prepared to have whatever conversation people wanted to have. And I loved it. It was one of the best tools

that I use. And that's competitive intelligence of a sort. Yeah, it is. And I want to leave this conversation with one thing. We talked a lot about sales and marketing and its connection to competitive research. The other thing that competitive research does allows you to do an excellent job of servicing your client, right? You know what they need. Sometimes they don't know what they need, right? And by doing that research, you can do a better job of delivering good products of service to your clients. So it's not just a competitive sales thing. It's a way to

do really good business. Looking at data across the spectrum from the buying cycle to maintaining the customer, to re-upping the customer, buying referrals, like managers are looking at all that data on the top line, like you can listen to calls. There's a lot of things we didn't cover in this podcast that is part of analytics. But being able to get that map of important data, and I'll also say those CRMs are important in putting in the right information. I know in the past podcast we talked about this, but bad data in is bad data out. So if you're putting

bad data in and you're not taking the extra couple minutes or whatever, or at the end of the day entering in your call notes, like the data that the manager's seeing or what they're seeing is not as effective. So all these tools only work with data input. So that's why it's better to pull data and APIs and stuff like that, because you have a single source of truth or a baseline. But also that competitive intelligence data, when you enter that in there, makes those tools and those CRMs so much more powerful. Yeah. All right, we got to shut it down there. One thing I want to bring

up speaking of good marketing is, you know, folks, we launched a new newsletter. We don't call it a newsletter. It's called the Sunday Update. It comes out every Sunday late morning. And Matt, the marketing team has taken that newsletter and taken it from zero to subscribers to 21,000 subscribers in five weeks. It's also a very inexpensive way for you to advertise and get your product or service from the only gas industry. It's literally $500 a month for a banner ad, and that's four weeks. It's too cheap. It's too cheap. Yeah. And $700 a month for video. If you

want to check it out, go to OGGN.com, hit advertising, scroll to the bottom, you'll see the newsletter. It is a very inexpensive way to get a lot of tons of oil and gas exposure. We also still have oil and gas events newsletter. It's in the same spot. Matt and I, links to all our social channels are in the show notes along with the way to leave us a review, hint, hint, leave us a review. Please. Please. Our Insiders Group, we're just talking about it. We're hard at work on that. It is going to be the best sales and marketing Insiders Group in the world. Just give us time to get this thing

built out. We will have the website up in a month or so. So we're already started on it. All right. LinkedIn fail or tip of the week? Do you have something off the top of your head? Off the top of my head, no. I can tell you, and I might have used this tip before, but man, I am connecting with a lot of new people through relationships. The market is kind of shifted and people are only doing business with referrals that they know. And you can kind of kick up dirt, like if there's opportunities that you see kind of being flexible and taking advantage of that.

I'm on LinkedIn messaging them on LinkedIn, like maybe using it as a chat. Like I have it pulled up at all times and I'm seeing what's going on and I can just make connections super fast. I mean, we're also, I'm starting to send a lot of messages on Snapchat as funny as it is to chat with people, but it's all about having that instant communication and taking advantage of opportunities in the right time. Like sales, I was always taught, Mark, was all time kills deals. Yep. Right? And so you want to move fast. There's an opportunity. Someone's looking for something.

Some people just go down the list, right? And they're going to grab the first thing and that's like staying in front with pens and pads. But I can just tell you, LinkedIn is a great way to reach people really quickly. It's tied to their phone. It's tied to whatever. I use it as my AOL and some messenger. Great tip. All right, folks, we got to get out of here. 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.