Disconnected Marketing w/guest Casey Cheshire

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

Unfortunately, Matt couldn't join us. Matt is either having issues or somehow Casey got him mad at him even though they've never met. We don't know, we'll have to ask Matt next time he comes on the show.

But Casey, dude, thanks for joining us. You had me on your podcast. We recorded that just recently. It went out, I think, at the beginning of this week. And I've gotten all kinds of accolades for you for having me on the show.

And it was fun. We had a great conversation. So I wanted you to bring on our show, especially since our senior marketing salespeople are really looking to learn. And you brought up something which I think is fascinating.

And you called it disconnected marketing. What is that? Yeah, if you're listening to this, you're probably suffering from this. I'll give you a test to see if you are. And I am not innocent of this either.

I was senior level marketer and organization and our best laid plans, our go-to channels, not the weird experiments, but the tried and true methods, whether that's that email marketing, the print, whatever that campaign was that was your tried and true, you slowly start to see it going down, going down.

This became what I realized was a symptom of disconnected marketing. And I do this fun quiz, right? Okay, here's the question mark. And it's a little bit of a cheat because you've got a podcast.

But if I were to ask you, or those listening, can you name seven of your customers by company name? Can you, right? And you think probably, and logos really help with that, right? Those big logos stand out in your mind.

Yeah, I remember that one, that one. Oh yeah, the cruise ship. Yeah, we went on that one, right? You have a couple logos, so seven, not too bad. By the way, if you can't pass that test, learn some logos. Yes.

But here's the real kicker, right? Here's the real question. Can you name seven of your customers by first and last name? And there's usually a difference. There's usually a delta between the answer

of the first one and the last one. And if you can, if you can't answer that, great, great. But there's some kind of hesitation. There's some kind of difference between the two. And that is indicating disconnected marketing. And this is just the surface, right?

Because really in marketing and sales, we're supposed to know, hey, can you name seven of the customer's pain points? Can you name not only their first and last name, but what are the challenges they're facing that you can solve?

We're supposed to know so much more, but I found this was an easy indication that something's happening here. We've got this disconnected marketing going on. Yeah, and you're 100% right. And when I think of our customer, listen to course,

because of what we do, we don't have thousands of customers. We have tens of customers, tens of sponsors. I can easily name seven. Casey, I don't think I can name seven of their first and last names. I could do four off the top of my head,

maybe five if we weren't recording this, so I failed this test as well, and I do this for a living. I failed it too, right? So I had added so much of that goodness software, right? Hey, I'm not anti-software,

but man, in my position, did I put so many of those new tools in between me and the customer. Tools, and it could be the software in front of them. It could be all the mail and all the different things you're sending them,

all the activities in between me and the customer. I realized, man, I haven't talked to one in a while. When's the last time you actually had a one-on-one conversation and not just over a quick beer at a networking event, but actually sat down and asked them,

and this happened to me the other day where I actually had coffee with a customer and in five minutes, I was able to clearly understand their problem. This particular customer, they're like B to B to C, and their customers are B to C,

and there is just kind of a dynamic challenge they had, but I was able to understand exactly where they're coming from and how my team could help them. I just needed five minutes. I needed a second over that Starbucks,

tall, venti, whatever we're calling it these days. I just needed a moment with them to ask them some questions and learn from them, and so this sort of got me all really thinking, man, I gotta get back to having these conversations. And you know, Casey, from a sales point of view

where equally as guilty, what happens in your client's world changes. It's like what happens in your world. What is something that's hurting your business now, may not be there. You may have more budget this year,

less budget this year, harder to sell, easier to sell, and if you don't have those frontline conversations, you don't know what's going on, and both from a sales and marketing point of view, you're starting to lose track from the important data that your customers happily give you.

If to your point, you just sit down and have a conversation with them. Yeah, you know what? And here's the thing, all the talk about AI, right? AI this, AI that, and then what happens? Inevitably there's this,

did you hear what AI said, right? We call it hallucination, right? Did you hear that AI app is hallucinating? Why does AI hallucinate? Well, who's late when it doesn't have enough information? But tell you what, in marketing and sales,

we are guilty of this, maybe even by far more than AI, we hallucinate. When we don't have these conversations, we make it up. We send that direct mail campaign, we send the email campaign, we do a whole road show to visit our customers

based on the wrong information, and then we're wondering why, now full circle, why does that campaign slowly have less and less results, slowly do worse and worse and worse? Why are we not converting nearly as much as we used to? Because this information's dying on the vine

and we're not keeping it fresh and we're not staying connected and we're making it up. We're hallucinating as humans. And there's a couple of things here off the top of my head. Number one, you're probably wasting resources. And even if you're a big company,

you don't have unlimited resources. Number two, you may alienate somebody that was closer to being ready to buy from you than you thought because you put the wrong campaign in front of them, right? And then number three,

if your competitors are doing a better job of this thing, they're pulling ahead and they're taking business away from you. In case, this is amazing, the way you put this together, it's something that I think everybody should really look at

both from a sales and marketing side. Is there some tips you have on how to make sure you don't go down this kind of bad rabbit hole? Yeah, I know. Now that we brought everyone to a dark place and we're all second guessing our campaigns,

yeah, there is, there is. You know, there's a lot of talk out there about this thing called go to market. GTM, all these advisors, go to market advisors, this GTM, GTM is the thing, or ABM, there's all these acronyms, marketing sales,

we come up with a new acronym to try to solve a problem, but sometimes it just makes it worse and worse and worse. So the solution is not go to market, it's connect to market, CTM, connect to market. And the whole idea behind this is, what are those channels that we can actually reconnect

on a human to human basis? And there's three that stand out to me and this is not an all inclusive list, but the idea of podcasting, which we're doing right now, which is great to talk about.

So podcasting, community, and partnerships, these are relationship based channels and motions and ways of going about things. And what's interesting, they're the kernel, they're the core, and from there, all of your other campaigns,

you can still have your other campaigns, you can still send the things out, you can still deliver what you need to deliver and show up and knock on doors and make phone calls, but if your core is a connect to market, then it's gonna inform everything else,

you're gonna stop hallucinating. So do we wanna take each one of those and do a brief overview? Because we may have listeners that aren't quite sure what community is. Hopefully they know what a podcast is,

is they're listening to a podcast. But in my space, not that long ago, it was not uncommon that I had to explain what a podcast was. So start with one and kind of give a brief little overview. All right, let's talk about podcasting.

Podcasts take many shapes and sizes and forms. They're like a blank canvas. And I always joke with my team that you could do a podcast and you know what, Mark, maybe you and I should do this one day, just for next April Fools maybe,

we just missed it this time, but we need to eat some Lay's chips on a podcast and with our microphones and just hear those people that crunching. And I bet you we'd get more listeners than some of our other shows, right?

You could have a podcast all about anything, but that's not what we're talking about here. So particular kind of podcasting, I'm calling connection casting. That's where the guest is the most important part of the whole show.

For me, if you're listening to this and you're feeling disconnected marketing, consider a connection casting type podcast where you book your existing and maybe your future dream customers as guests on a show. This sets you up to then programmatically

and very organized in a fancy way. Just have a conversation, right? Now it gets them on there because no one says no to a podcast. They're excited by the idea. It gives you a chance to give a gift to your customer

and your prospect by saying, I love to give you a gift of my time and attention and focus in my platform and my audience. You have to learn from you and you make the show about them. This is not the me, me, me show.

This is not the KC show, the KC show. This is not the KC show. This is the show all about your customer and it's all about what they do best. And you just get them on there, you make it about them, you learn from them.

This is how we solve those gaps in these hallucination gaps. You learn from them and guess what ends up happening? Like what's happened with you? We've only been on two podcasts together and I'm ready to go hunting, fishing.

I'm ready to go on vacation with you and your family. Like let's make this thing, like you create relationships by having these conversations. So connection casting is all about connecting with other people and if you make that person

a potential partner or customer, all the better. It's so true. So one of the reasons our sponsors work with us is that exact reason. So two things, number one, when we record a podcast, if we get a prospect company on that podcast

that my sponsors interested in, we make a warm in-person introduction, which goes a very long way, much further than a cold call email or a pay-per-click campaign. So our sponsors literally get introduced

to the people that buy from there or could buy from them. So good, man, that's huge. And it's beautiful. And then the other part of that is for our sponsors, we don't talk about them at all or rarely. What we do is we bring their customers on

and their customers tell the stories of working with our sponsors, how our sponsors help them solve a problem, what that problem costs, the impact to the business, how the sponsors' company helped them fix it, the culture of working together

and it tells a very natural story, which once again drives people to the sponsor that have that problem that they solve, but it's done in a very organic, real, transparent way and people love it. And then the rest of the audience learns.

Learning's always valuable. I love that. And I think you and I both do that almost automatically with our podcast. Yeah, that's how we get along. And that's how I felt when I was on your pod,

here on your pod and when you were on mine. Like, I didn't even know whose pod that was. We were just having a conversation. We were just connecting. We were learning from each other and it was an awesome, awesome conversation.

You just do that already. Like, you are good at that. So people listening to this show are smart because you're taking them in the direction they should be going. So what's next?

Podcasting, of course, we're gonna say yes. Yes, check. Right? And this, we found that there's a natural want and extension to carry that relationship further. Here's the deal, man.

I'm gonna foreshadow you and I. You've been on my pod, I'm gonna be on your pod. What after that? Is this just a two night stand? How do we maintain this relationship? I am the kind of guy that if I get your cell phone after,

I'll just hit you up and send you random memes and pictures of my kids being idiots or something like. So we can keep in touch, but like how do you keep in touch with a lot of people? At scale. Right, at scale.

How do you care at scale? Well, this is where community comes in handy. And so we found that community times podcast is exponentially more than you just combine them individually. Community, the way we're talking about it is getting all those people that were guests together

to meet and hang out with each other. The one-on-one relationship you and the guest is one thing or you and the guests in the sponsor, right? Those are some great relationships, but how do we keep getting together? And not in a weird way.

And how do you do that at scale, right? We do that with a community. And again, you make the community very selective. You do it all about them. And I just did this the other day. We had a whole group of VP and CMOs in this community

all logged in, this was on a Zoom call. And we had some fun, but we also highlighted some futuristic things in one particular breakout room. We're just sharing. Here's some of the challenges we're going through. And then the other CMOs in the room, we're just like,

yeah, me too, or here's one of the things I did. And one person shared a challenge. And then three other people, they all chimed in with, here's how they addressed it. It was just a great value add, but also relationship build. They're connecting with each other in LinkedIn.

Building community on a monthly basis. And here's the crazy thing. People inevitably ask me, what platform? Any guess what platform this was on? Like this community, what platform is this on? Dude, I can go everything from Discord to Zoom.

I have no idea. What did you use, Facebook? No platform. No platform. No platform. Good friend of mine, Paul Jones, brilliant community wizard.

He was the one that shared this with me. And he was like, man, no platform. And I've seen this happen time and time again. You want to launch a community? What's the first thing you think? Oh, is it going to be Slack?

Is it going to be LinkedIn? Is it going to be these other? Right. And then it dies. Right? And you have to keep it going.

Now a podcast can feed a community. That's why these things are great together, because you got to keep feeding them in this community. So to start with, no platform. It's a monthly call. They get to join in.

And you can make this bi-weekly. You can change the tempo as people are getting value. It's never recorded. And if you can't make it, we'll see you at the next one. Dude, that's so deep on so many different levels. Number one, you're building trust in that community

so that normally what may be seen as competitors, because they know each other, trust each other, can share vital information, helps both of them. If you're doing a install of, say, Salesforce and you're installing it over budget, over time, your peer at a competing company,

your other market would probably, that's useful information to them. However, if you were able to get it done under budget and on time, that's useful information. Well, but that's only if there's enough trust built. And I love the fact that you're not using a platform

because one of the problems with the platforms is all of the platforms, there's nothing wrong with this. All of the platforms have their own business motives for spending the money to build the platform. And it's usually not to make your life better. It's usually to generate revenue for them.

So there's changes in algorithms and who can see what and all that sort of stuff. And I love the fact that you're not recording it. Quite frankly, that would make me feel safe too. I may say stuff in a meeting or a call we're not being recorded that normally I wouldn't say.

There's a bit of a risk there. But Casey, we struggle with this. So some of our podcasts have a very small but extremely loyal and engaged community. It's beautiful. Some of our bigger podcasts, I mean, substantially bigger,

we can't build a community at all. Like if somebody's listening right now and they're going, this is a great idea. I'd love to build a community around drill bits or I'd love to build a community around pipeline picking or whatever.

Where do you start? Do you literally start with signing up for a service that allows you to do a group conference call and just inviting people in? It can be as simple as that. I think one step right before that

and this is the painful step and all the marketers can relate to this that are listening, idea of really finding a niche. Found the best community is not like you and your friends and then a couple of these guests and customers. It is like restricted.

So I've got a bunch of marketing friends and whatnot. They weren't invited to the community because they didn't fit the model. We were working particular kind of senior marketing leader and that's who we invited and they showed up. You need a certain number

and not everyone's schedule can make it. But we had a good 20 people on the first one ever and then it grew from there. It's almost like they didn't even matter. Doesn't even matter. But like we had to go super, super niche

and then not even invite outsiders. Hey, this person, can we invite them? Well, are they at this? No, because you want everyone in that breakout room to relate to each other. And to be able to give advice to each other

and you can't have any vendors in their pitching. You have the person who sponsored the community, moderator, everyone else, they're all peers, right? That was a little bit of a hard part for me because I just want to invite everybody and now I'm sure they'll all show up

and nope, we got to get really restrictive. And then, man, we kick out all the note takers and everything so it is in a day and age where, hey, send me your webinar recording. I'm not going to go to your webinar. Send me your recording.

Guess what? There's no recording. So show up for the value or not, but we're not pandering to this and that and this. It's very clear. Hey, this is a unique thing

and there's no pitching involved. Just show up and get some value. Yeah, the reason this is so great, you don't know this because I haven't talked to you about this, but this show itself, this one podcast itself,

the only guy sales and marketing podcast is building what I call a mastermind group. And everything you just rattled off is literally word for word what we're doing. It's exclusive, you have to meet a certain criteria, it's Chatham House rules, nothing is recorded,

everything that's discussed behind those doors are not discussed outside of those doors. And it's going to be a small group of people that are peers. So I get it now. I totally get it, this is great.

In audience, if you're listening, what he's talking about is not hard to do. However, if you're a people pleaser like I am, and I think Casey is, probably the hard part is not inviting everybody to the group,

because you want everybody to get benefit from it, but they won't get benefit from it if you have different people that aren't a group of peers mixed together. And the other thing is 100% vendors pitching stuff to your group.

Come on, sales people. If you manage to sneak your way into a group, which is hard to do, but if you manage to do it, don't ruin it for everybody else. Don't be that sales person. In the middle of everybody having deep conversations

about budget planning for 2026, you throw out the fact that you have this copier replacement, whatever. Don't be that sales person. Nobody likes that, and you're going to get kicked out, which means you're going to miss the benefit

of the group you weaseled your way into. I've seen that before myself. So I love that no pitching. Yeah, brilliant man. You got the round table going. This is why we get along.

Yeah, well, it's not there yet. We have a minimal threshold because we think it's to take 30 members to provide value. We have, I think, 11 now, and we're trying to get to that 30. So we're not going to launch it till we get to that 30.

Now here, Casey's a real world problem. What do Matt and I do if we have this group that wants to get together that's willing to pay for it, but we don't hit our number 30? What if we're stuck at 11? Matt and I are trying to figure this out right now.

Yeah, I would say 20. 20 is my thought. And really the number's 30 or 40, right? And you've seen this with marketing. With any kind of free event, oftentimes I just assume there's 50% attendance rate.

40 people say they'll be there. 20 will actually be there. In this particular case, it was higher than that. So that was a good sign to me. I think we had 30 people signed up and then whatnot. And then like 24 came and then 20

were able to stay the entire time. And they totally had value because that ended up being something like three people to a breakout. So there was a decent amount. There was like a seven breakout room.

So everyone got some real value to that, even at that 20. So I'd even say like 30 mark. And one of the reasons we're able to get to that mark is we are constantly inviting people to it. Even a bigger amount. And not everyone's all about learning

and not everyone understands the round table concept to wanna show up to the thing. And some people are probably rightly skeptical because of all the craziness on LinkedIn. But you get enough invites out there, at least to seed the thing.

And then eventually they're all inviting other people. But yeah, and also some groups are really good about like, if you come in and pitch, you're out. Those people, we're just not even inviting them. So it's a very manual process.

So a lot of this is like, get off the automation world and get into that manual thing. And we even have a calendar invite and we're putting their email. So it's not even like, here's a mass email.

We don't even need 1,000 people. We just want the core group. Right. Yeah, it's funny the pitch thing came up again. The whole purpose of this show is Matt and I firmly believe in oil and gas sales and marketing

should be joined at the hip. There should not be two disparaged organizations. They depend on each other to be successful. Our mastermind groups be sales and marketing people. So you can see my quandary of keeping people from pitching stuff,

because we're intentionally inviting sales people. Now, we're inviting sales leaders who know better, which is a big difference. Back to your point, if we would have went too far down, we would have had much more trouble with the pitching. 100%.

Yeah, when you go higher up that type of maturity, sales maturity leadership knows to not try to sell shit. I love this. Okay, so what's the third thing? Partnerships. Okay.

And I don't know about you, I've been on hundreds, 100 partner calls. I don't know, I've lost track because inevitably most of them sound good at the moment and are complete and under bullshit. And then secondary layer to that,

going down the partnership funnel is a whole another set of calls you do. And you're even writing up contracts or you're getting things signed for percentages and this and that. And inevitably nothing happens from those either.

And it's even worse because you spent all that time on them. And then maybe even further and then nothing happens, right? So we've even got disconnected with our partnerships, almost like transactional. I'm very much B2B-minded and relationship-minded. When we get those friends who come in

from the B2C world, they just wanna sell a, we're not selling $30 boots here. This is like a long-term relationship that can be worth millions of dollars but to treat it differently. There are a lot of things around here

but one of the big tips comes from the idea like how can you prepare for a mutual partnership to be where it needs to be? What does that look like? How do you prepare for a mutual partnership? I'm forgetting this guy's name, I gotta look him up.

Yeah, so while you're doing that, we've failed at most of the partnerships and you literally route off exactly what happens. We get excited, we find a company that's not a competitor that has a similar audience or similar business outcomes. We put an NDA in place, talk about percentages,

all that and nothing ever comes from it. The only partnerships we've been successful with is conferences and trade shows. It's got to the point now that in our energy space, all the conferences around the world knows who we are and most of them have worked with us at least once

and saw very good results. So basically, they give us free boost space so we can record at the conference, they give us press passings and then in return, we promote their conference to our audiences and since these conferences

are oil gas energy conferences, our audiences are interested in them and we drive sponsorship dollars to the conference, we drive exhibitors to the conference and we drive attendees to the point that now we have a monthly oil gas conference email

that goes out to consumers, to frontline people that are interested in the conferences, but we monetize that. But if you're on that list because you signed up because you want it to be notified of events, you don't unsubscribe when I send you a 20% discount coupon

for this conference and that benefits them, that benefits us and it benefits the conference. So we figured that out and it works really well but every other time we've ever tried to partner, it's that exact scenario you described where we're excited and it fizzles away and nothing happens.

Two things come to mind with partnerships. The first is it doesn't have to be everyone. It doesn't have to be the quantity. I was able to build millions of dollars worth of partnership with Salesforce, which is a giant organization.

Pardot was one of the organizations as a part of that and it was amazing. A shout out to all the guys from OG Pardot. They renamed it something now but it was an amazing partnership with my last company. So cool, awesome.

And guess what? I was not able to build that exact same partnership with any of their competitors. Not for lack of trying, I initially tried for but hey, how can we have more than one,

nope, different culture, different kind of people, different motives, different approach to how they wanted to serve or not serve their customers. So we were just not aligned with anybody else. Not aligned at all. And also how they saw us.

Pardot, we were. And there were a lot of things that went into it but the big takeaway for me was, doesn't have to be everyone. So I'm not looking to partner with everyone. I'm looking to partner with a select few.

So that was a big shift in my mentality. This is not starting with the scale. The scale can come from a deep partnership and then they send you thousands and millions of deals and dollars and all of that kind of goodness. So that was the first thing for me.

The second thing actually came from, I found his name, Zach Pines. Shout out to Zach, had him on the show, had him on hardcore marketing, just like you. And Zach is the head of partnerships at Formstack which is also a Salesforce partner.

And when I first heard about Formstack, they do forms for Salesforce. And I thought, well, Salesforce has its own forms and even Pardot, all these other things do forms for Salesforce, but not nearly as well as Formstack.

But I thought that they would fizzle out. No, no, no. Decades later, is it decades plural? I don't know. At least 10 years later, they're still going and largely in part to their partnerships

and Zach runs partnerships at Formstack and he's a super cool guy. Like him as a person, but also his business savvy is amazing and he taught me this thing about partnerships. He calls it the three for three. And the idea is, okay,

when you're having your initial conversation with people and you think there might be a fit, you propose the three for three. And what that means is, once I've explained what we do and you've explained what you do,

let's go back to our list, go back to our customer database and look for three customers that we could co-sell the joint services or software or whatever products together, right? And you'll go back to your side

and find three of your customers that we could joint sell this thing together. And we're gonna come back on a call and we're gonna go through all six together and we're gonna make a plan for how we build value. Again, it's all about serving that customer.

We're gonna build even more value for that customer doing this thing together and how we might approach that. And that has been the realest thing. Like when he proposed it, it made total sense. I started using that and I realized everything else is hot air.

It's bullshit. Like everything else is just nice to meet you, nice to meet you. I'll see you at the next event. Yeah, we should work together, right? Of course.

We should go on a yacht together in the Maldives. You could propose anything. This is where the rubber meets the road and you go back and you find the three and you go back and you find it. And if you can't, guess what?

It probably shouldn't have been from the beginning. And that maybe is a way to help vet it for yourself too. But man, I love the three for three. Dude, I love that too. Couple of reasons. Number one, you can prove the model quickly.

Number two, almost as valuable. You may fail in which case you realize what you're doing wrong together and you're gonna learn from it. But the other thing I love about it is that it's very actionable.

That's one of the things that me personally, I gotta be very aware of. I'm a big picture thinker, always have been. And I love the idea of big projects. But that takes time and resources and everybody's busy.

And when you have a partner, they have their own customers, their own business to run. And if you eat up too much of their time and they're not getting a return for that time, they're naturally not gonna give you that much time anymore.

You and I could jump on a call right now and go through three customers each. It would take us 15 minutes. So it's actionable. It's kind of rubber hit the road. And then you can prove the model.

I love that too. Dude, these are some words of wisdom. So I'm gonna put you on a spot here, Casey. When Matt and I launched this mastermind, I would love if you wanted to come, have you be one of our instructors

and talk about some of this stuff. Cause I think our marketing leaders and our sales leaders could learn from you. So we can work out the business details later on this podcast, but are you open to that? To come present?

Oh yeah. Okay, love it. Love it, love it. I'm just on a mission. I just wanna reconnect people with their buyers, reconnect. Life's too short to just be selling to digits

and pixels on a screen. Yeah, agreed. Also agreed is that we managed to run out of time rather quickly. I could spend hours talking to you, but we need to wind this thing down.

So if people wanna learn more about you and what you do, where should they go? You know what? On that same note, skip all of the BS. Email me, Casey at ringmaster.com.

Reconnect with your buyers. If you have a quick question, you have a long question, I'll send you a ranty video back. Like however I can help you reconnect with your buyer, I'm in, or you just wanna connect to LinkedIn

and stay in the loop on some of the research we're doing. Hit me up there, but otherwise I'd love to hear from you. All right, so audience in the show notes will be a link to Casey's LinkedIn profile. I will put his email address. However, I'm going to not put the at symbol.

I'm gonna put a space there and this way the spam box can't harvest his email address and fill his inbox up with worthless offers of stuff he doesn't want. So when you copy his email address, when you drop it in the email,

you have to find that space and just delete it to make it whole. I'm doing that to save Casey from the spam box. You know what happens when spam reaches out? You know what I do? What?

I reply and tell them they need to reconnect with their customer. So there's two things I do. When I get those really horrible cold calls, I mean, horrible, like you wanna stop and go, dude, you don't know what you're doing.

I direct them to this podcast and go, you need to understand sales market a little bit better. We have a podcast that will help you. So I send you this. Yes. And then the other thing I do

if they won't take me off their email list, if you unsubscribe, is I just set a rule and I forward their emails to the CEO of their own company and 99% of the time those spam emails stop within a day or two. So I just gave away my two secrets.

I have a deal with unwanted emails. My tip on that is you invoke the California law. They have a anti-spam law that's a little more scary for marketers. And you don't have to mention you don't live in California. You just say, you know what, per California law,

I need you to remove me. Yeah. And companies out there listening to have a list, make damn sure you have a very easy, very transparent way for people to unsubscribe. If you want to piss off a buyer more than anything,

keep sending them emails when they say no. Just because they unsubscribe doesn't mean that you may not do business with them later. But if you make it hard for them to unsubscribe, I promise you, they'll never do business with you. All right, we gotta wind this thing down.

It's time for a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. So do you have a fail or tip for our audience? I do, I do. If you're sending out, especially if it's automated, I don't actually recommend the automation, but here's my tip.

We are not in Victorian England, and we do not write Victorian Edwardian love letters to each other. A message that comes from a human, typically a short suite to the point, oh my gosh, maybe didn't capitalize every word,

didn't have every keyword in it. So if you're sending a message and you want to look like, ideally you are a human, but if you want it to look a little bit better and get a better response rate, make it more human. Make it more human, make it shorter.

Make it a couple sentences and please leave out the marketing call to action. Nothing says this is a marketing message, email, LinkedIn, like having a blatant call to action. We don't walk around meeting people going, hey, please click on my link, nice to meet you.

No, just make it personal to start with, make it human to start with, connect with your buyer. Love it, what a great tip. All right guys, we gotta get out of here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGN,

the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production

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