Educating your buyers and reaching the decision-making team

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, we're back. Sales Marking podcast sponsored by Rigor. Manager all field operations from anywhere with Rigor online or offline. Whether it's scheduling dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment

rentals, or inspections and maintenance, you can create, review, approve and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operation management dashboards on your desktop or phone. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at Rigor.us links in the show notes. What's up Matt? What's up? Straight into the ad. We got to get paid guys. We got to get paid. Speaking of getting paid, you and I

were at NAPE last week and it was one hell of an event, wasn't it? That was a lot of fun. I really had a good time there. Yeah, speaking of sales and marketing, we set up a podcast Pavilion at NAPE, which is a all field conference based upon selling and leasing mineral rights. And we just not only had OGGN podcasters there, we actually invited other podcasters out of OGGN. And you might go, Mark, why would you do that? Well, think about all

the exposure that we got. We got exposure on other people's podcasts. The conference got exposure on our podcast and other podcasts. And our sponsor, which was Caterpillar for the NAPE Pavilion, got a ton of exposure for almost nothing. So once again, it's a good way to actually leverage the time and attendance at a conference instead of just wandering around trying to pick up swag. For everybody that came out, I think saw the value. I was there for two of the days

and I literally didn't have to leave our section. People kept coming through to us. It was one of the most active booths at NAPE. It was awesome. You know the secret of Pulled Matt? The Expresso Machine. The Expresso Machine. Right? We had not coffee. We had Expresso because last year at NAPE, I noticed a big line and a booth and I thought they must have had some cool swag and I went over there and they didn't. They just had Expresso. So we picked up the tab, had a barista there,

Expresso. People love that. But we also, once again, it was something different that people saw and they came and joined us and we're going to do it again next year bigger and better. This is the place where normally we would leave a review, but Matt, nobody's left us a review yet. Well, we just started. So we got to get it out there a little bit more. So anybody listening, anybody came by at NAPE, you know, thanks for listening. Check it out. Please leave us a review. Yeah, five star.

If you love it, what we're doing. If you don't love what we're doing, still give us a five star, but let us know what we could do differently. And today our topics is something that is slightly different. You and I talked about this over lunch yesterday and basically we were talking about how sales has changed, but also how to educate your buyer to purchase from you. It's something that a lot of sales people don't think about in that sometimes your buyer doesn't know all the

options of how they can actually buy from you, which by the way, lunch was cool. It was good. Yeah. Well, I think we should even start with what a chief revenue officer is because, you know, that's fairly new too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So in the old days, you had the VP of sales and the VP of marketing and you've heard me say this before, oftentimes they didn't talk. And so what's happening, especially in some of the larger companies is they've created a position called a chief

revenue officer. This chief revenue officer is over sales. So the VP or the directors of sales report directly to the chief revenue officer, but often the chief marketing officer and his staff have a dotted line reporting to the chief revenue officer because the chief revenue officer's responsibility is to drive revenue, which touches both sales and marketing. Yep. That's fairly new, right? That's not something when I started door knocking and cold call selling, that

wasn't even a title that was out there. And it makes a ton of sense to have sales and marketing talking because that's where there's been big gaps in the past, right? Yeah, 100%. It also reinforces you and I's personal belief that sales and marketing should be joined at the hip. Yes. That large Fortune 100 companies have realized that as well. We realized it first, but they've realized it as well and created a position for that. And it's interesting. So the skill sets of a

chief revenue officer bridge both sales and marketing and also think sometimes even like product development will have some insight there because the chief revenue officer's teams or the frontline people doing sales and marketing and know what the customers want. Yeah. No, I think it makes a ton of sense. You know, and one of the things we were talking about also yesterday was how it's changed, right? Like you can't identify, you can't put your finger on who it is. Now, well,

probably if you're hitting the chief revenue officer and you have a relationship there, I think you got it covered. But now it's getting a little bit harder with these committees to figure out who you need to be selling to, right, Mark? 100%. So for a very long time, you could form personal relationships and I started my selling career doing this 25 years ago. And those personal relationships led to sales and there's a reason for that. And the reason is if I'm an oil company,

if I'm an operator, if I'm a pipeline operator, a refinery guy, whatever, and something bad happens, I need it to know I could depend on you, not your company, but you Matt. If something blew up in my pipeline company, I know I need it to depend on being able to reach out to Matt to help me with crisis communication, right? And so those personal relationships are very important in the early sales history of oil and gas because of the risk tolerance of our

industry. And what's happened is over the years, big companies and now medium and smaller companies are starting to realize that having sales tied into personal relationships may not always be good for the company. Just because I play golf with you, Mr. VP, maybe I'm not the best vendor for you to be buying from. And so companies have decided that there's no longer a decision maker, that it's a decision making team. And what's hard for salespeople is even when

you're brought into a meeting at the office and you have five people sitting in that room, that's probably not the entire decision making team. There's probably twice as many or just as many people that you haven't met that are part of that decision making team. So now it's almost impossible for you to develop personal relationships within the entire decision making team, which actually benefits the buyer because now the buyers can make the right buying decisions

not based on personal relationships. Well, that totally changes the game, right? I mean, that completely changes the game on what your approach is, what your marketing strategy is, how you reach these people. It almost sounds like to me to make a little bit of analogy to interviewing for a job, right? Like when you go in there and you're talking to a receptionist or something like that, she might, depending on the company, have a quote sheet, was this person

nice to me? How did they deal with that? When you take someone to lunch, like, how are you interacting? Like, I was reading something about, and I know that this is a marketing sales podcast, but man, we're focused on hiring right now. And it was talking about, well, is it Warren Buffett or something like that? Someone was salting a steak before they ate it versus not. And someone got hired and the other person didn't, even though they had the same background,

because they wanted you to try it before you salted the steak, right? And so I don't know, it's just this analogy, I guess, to hiring, and there's so many different people and there's so many different opinions of who you're going to work for and the CEO and all the people you interact with, that approach was a little bit different in sales because you could zero in on that right person and you knew who you had to close and you knew what you had to sell to,

right? Like, so it's certainly changed in that aspect as well. That's a great analogy. So a lot of companies, I'm not going to name names, super majors and big service companies, big red, but historically they hire from very specific universities, very specific grads, right? And it's a cultural thing. If you're an engineer from the right university, you had twice the chance of getting a job with the right service company or super major than if

you're from a different university, regardless of your engineering background. And even, and to your point, that's starting to change as well, where companies are now, once again, it's not who you know anymore when you get hired. It's how do you fit job qualifications, which then is better for the company. I mean, to even take this to another level, I was a headhunter annoying gas for about seven and a half years and there was specific companies where I

would recruit out of the majors to move to the independence and it was like a steady flow of certain companies of same kind of cultures and those channels were so strong that you knew you had that X higher likelihood to place somebody out of that. And so really, when you now apply what's changing there to apply what's changing on the marketing sales side, you have to develop new strategies to reach your ideal customer. You have to have a broader

approach. Your storytelling has to be different because you have to message differently to different people and you have to have a more 360 approach. And so I think in today's world, digital plus sales or marketing plus sales is absolutely critical to create all the right touch points. Yeah, I love what you brought up to storytelling because you're right. You could take the same product.

Let's take something like a bulldozer. OK, so if you're selling a bulldozer to a project manager, that story is I can help your project meet your deliverable dates on time and on budget, right? That bulldozer performs its job and it does it well so you complete your project on time on budget. You could be talking to the head of health safety environmental and the whole

story is this bulldozer keeps people safe. It's the most modern. It understands if there's limits. It automatically intervenes if the operator makes a mistake. So now your story is about how you're decreasing lost time incidents because you're talking to the HSD manager.

If you're talking to the CEO, you're talking about shareholder value. This bulldozer allows your company to hit the financial goals that your board put out for you. And so now we're affecting shareholder value. Same piece of equipment, a bulldozer, three different stories depending on who you're talking to in the organization. And that's me rattling off on the podcast.

When you look at it from a marketing point of view, now you have three different stories you have to craft and figure out how to get those different stories in front of the right people, which is what digital marketing is so good at. Target personas. So target personas, customer journey, that's what we typically start with with all clients.

Like, and here's the thing with a marketing funnel or even a marketing slash sales strategy, each target persona, just as you laid out, has different touch points, has different messaging. It's a different customer journey. And so we're not especially annoying gas, but we're not in a world anymore where mass marketing works.

That's really what I think the biggest key takeaways. Everybody has a phone, everybody has a TV, everybody has a toaster. You can't just do this blank at marketing. You have to, and there's so much value in like, I call it long tail keys phrases. That's maybe a more of an SEO term, but very, very niche pockets, just like our podcast, right?

We're targeting a very specific group of people and those people are typically more engaged. They're more of the target audience. There's a higher likelihood that there's going to be some follow through in what they do and you can't compare that versus the broader market. And so target persona customer journey is something that I've heard a lot of

people talk about, but I've met with businesses in strategy workshops that that's what we're doing. And I'm like, you've been around how long and we don't even have this identified. It's just this mass marketing. We're going to throw stuff on billboards. We're going to put stuff in papers.

We're going to run on the radio. You're blowing so much money. That's the great thing about digital specifically is the analytics piece, the data, you can test things out, you can change mid-stream, you can tie things together and see data in a way that gives you a feedback loop to make better decisions and certainly it's more targeted.

So you don't waste as much. What was that quote? It was, I know the marketing's working, but I don't know which half I'm using and which half I'm wasting or something like that. Right? Yeah.

You, that ties right in to account based sales. It's the exact same thing on the sales side. You no longer have one elevator pitch. You no longer have one way to show the problems that you can help them solve. It's based upon the job roles of the individuals themselves. So once again, you're selling the same whatever, the same widget, the same service,

but how you sell it and it depends on who you're selling it to. It's just not a one size fits all, which by the way, there's so much noise online now that the broad based marketing, not only does I believe it doesn't work at all and you're wasting money, it's aggravating. I am tired of being served generic ads for stuff I don't even need. I'm tired of people calling me or connecting me on LinkedIn, trying to

sell me copy or service. We don't have copiers. We're a podcasting company, right? However, the salespeople out there that reach out to me on LinkedIn that spend the time to do the research and start talking to me about editing and about using the right tools to grow your podcast on is they capture my attention

versus the ones that are trying to sell me stuff that I have no interest in. Well, yeah, now you're branching into like personalized marketing, right? And you've started to see that and you can even do personalized marketing at scale where you can. Now, this is when you use your CRM properly, right? So so many people out there have really expensive CRMs that they're not

lead scoring, they're not categorizing things, they're not setting up triggers, they're not doing what they need to do. But you can put in, if you fill in a first name, last name, you can have it say their first name, you can, if you put their job title and you can fill in their job title, you can put description of the company title of the company. You can actually craft a very personalized message and then you can build

a very targeted list and you can hit them with email automation or automation on different social media platforms that resonates. Like the key is it's spam. When I was a recruiter, it was like, no one needs a recruiter and it's spam until they need somebody and then like they're all about talking to you. The same thing is very apparent in sales online as well is you're getting hit

with all these spams that are not these messages that are not relevant to you. So it really comes off as spam. But when you have that very targeted message on the right persona and it's hitting a pain point that you need and the copies crafted direct response copies crafted in a way that you're going to take some kind of action, then it's like valuable, right?

So there's it's a razor's edge on is it spam or is it extreme value? And it's really typically the salespeople that take a little bit longer to craft the pitch to try to get into that conversation in someone's head of the problem they're trying to deal with. And then you'll be surprised how open and responsive people will be. That's another quick thing.

And I started to go on about this, but I think it's really incredible is that the amount of people that actually read all these spam emails and just don't respond or emails or Clinton or whatever it is. Most people read most of the messages, but because it's just so spammy, it's not relevant or it's not compelling. They don't respond, but they do see it.

That's the funny thing is the salespeople say, Oh, like, I can't reach these people. No, you're reaching them. You're just not giving the right message. Yeah, I love this. So we're going to do a whole separate episode on CRM switch. By the way, if you work for a large service company and you open up your CRM

and you search for Chevron and in that CRM fields, there's not a business unit field. So you have no idea if that Chevron employee works for Chevron, EMP or Chevron pipeline or Chevron aviation, your data is junk, right? But we're going to do a whole separate thing on CRM, how to properly use it. I do love what you just talked about people reading it and either looking at

it as spam and hit and delete or take an action. So every Wednesday, I cold call. Now, a lot of salespeople don't like cold calling. And I think the reason they don't like cold calling is they're doing it the wrong way and they know they're being invasive and they're aggravate people. If you do it right, people appreciate you.

So when I get it right, and by the way, folks, I don't always get it right. When I get it right, I get about 80 percent conversion, which means eight out of 10 emails that I send people reply back and want to learn more. Now, when I get it wrong, it's zero and there's a whole. We're going to do a whole other episode on how to do this right versus how to do this wrong, but that personalized message that's well researched, that is

talking about a very specific problem that you know that person has. People respond to that. Like I said, I do it all the time. So I love the fact that we have to come back to CRM because I don't know a single company that I've ever interviewed in the oil and gas industry that has their CRM strategy done well.

Some of them have done it OK. Some of them, it's horrible. And then it's not useful to the salespeople. And then what happens is the salespeople get pushed really hard to fill out CRM because it's not useful. It's a waste of time for the salespeople.

So what happens is the salespeople either gain the system and put in what they think you want or they put in the least amount of information they can to get away with, which is not valuable. If you make your CRM valuable, so it basically helps your sales team close sales so it drives revenue in their pocket, I promise you sales management, they will jump all over themselves to fill out all those fields.

You won't have to push on them to update their forecast and all be done automatically, but it's only if the CRM provides value to the salespeople. Most CRM only provides value to upper management for reporting. And trust me, I started my career as a frontline salesperson. I moved into sales management, have a small sales team myself. Your sales team is gaming your CRM.

If it doesn't show them, if it doesn't give them value, if it doesn't put money in their pocket, the reporting that you're using for your management is maybe 50% accurate. And you know that you see deals in your CRM that are at 0% of closing. If they close next week, that's somebody saying back and you know that. So Mark, I'm excited.

We're going to do a whole podcast about this because I have so much to say in this area. One of the things that I did want to make sure that we covered on this podcast and it was something that you actually taught me is buying from the CapEx budget versus the operational budget. And I was hoping that maybe you could explain that because I think is really

brilliant. I hadn't heard it before. And I think there's some other people that listen to this podcast that could get a lot of value out of that. Yeah, especially if you're selling expensive items. So basically all industries have this and the only guys in the industry have this, you basically have two budgets.

You have a capital expenditure budget, a CapEx budget that you need to improve along by management. And that's typically if your business runs on the calendar year, typically in the fall around October, your management starts asking you to fill an Excel spreadsheet and want you to spend money on next year. All that is rolled up.

Somebody goes through it and approves or doesn't approve it. And that money is set for the next year. So if you don't have a line item in that CapEx budget, it's really hard to spend CapEx money. So if you're a salesperson that's selling something that's expensive, that would typically hit the CapEx budget.

If you didn't get in there early enough, so it was in their planning cycle the year before, you'll hear this all the time. It's like, man, I would love to buy from you. I just don't have any money in my budget. What you do is you stop them right there and you say, do you mean you don't have any money in your CapEx budget?

Cause it wasn't in the approval process last year. And most of the time they say yes. When they say yes, you let them know that you can take the same thing that normally they would buy and you can lease it to them and it will hit their operational budget. And most probably they don't even know what their OpEx budget is.

Your operational budget is the budget that keeps the lights on. It's the budget that pays for the rent, for the electricity, for any maintenance on HVAC, for the people that come in and clean up at night, sometimes even payroll for contractors. And so if you go from selling it to leasing it, according to the financial laws here in the U S that now is a OpEx budget item, not a CapEx budget.

And the person you're talking to may not even know they can do that. And there's companies out there. There's hundreds of companies out there that will take your product that normally you sell at a lump price and will turn it to lease payments. So we'll hit their OpEx budget. I did this for years, Matt, for years selling stuff to oil and gas where I'd

find a new company that wanted to work with us, but they didn't have budget. And as a salesperson that wanted to make a commission, I didn't want to wait till next year for them to buy it, even though they would put it in their budget. So I would lease it to them. And sometimes my company, if you find the right partner to work with that does the lease, and sometimes they'll mark it up so much that you're making

even more money, more margin than you would have if you would have just sold it to them directly and you get your commission earlier. So it's just, it's one of those little sales tips that you have about understanding finance. And I think all salespeople in 2023 moving forward should have fantastic financial acronym.

You need to understand how you're held to help your customers buy better than they do. And there's a perfect example. Well, you know, so the example I can give, and then I think we're probably close to the time of wrapping up. But I would tell you that one of the things that we've done a lot of is, you

know, well, depending on the size of business we work with, if it's the bigger business, hey, a lot of times they're trying to spend all their money by the end of the year, right? So they keep the same budget for next year. And so I've run across that a lot in November, December. Hey, we need to spend all our money.

Well, we've sold marketing to them in advance, right? So we say, hey, we can do marketing for you for the next six months or whatever. And you can pay for it all in a lump sum versus month to month. And then for the smaller clients, we've said, hey, maybe you've made too much money and you might need to revamp your brand or your corporate image online. And I'm talking to a lot of people right now, a lot of businesses that have

come a long way and since COVID, it's so acceptable to not to have not in-person meetings and it's gone to more of a remote setting. And so guess what? Your showroom, your office is your website. And if your business has advanced beyond where it is, you need to update your brand because your brand might not update what you're doing.

Like I was at a happy hour, actually two nights ago, and there's these guys that have come a long way in the last five years. They're trying to hire new employees. The new employees are excited about working at the company. They're doing some really cool stuff. They're showing, these are like maybe some people from overseas.

They're showing their parents where they work. And it's like, well, this is not really reflective of what we're doing. They're having all these like conversations. And so I have a meeting next week to help revamp their brand, their personal identity online and to make it reflexive to what's in-person. And one of the ways at the end of the year that we pitched that is, hey,

maybe you don't need to redo it right now or maybe you have other stuff or maybe you've made a bunch of money this year and you want to kind of bring those costs down, we'll sell you the website all up front now and we'll build it in like three months or four months. And then we just put it on our, you know, our project plan. And then we have a backlog in which we work.

And so again, big company, small company, how we're selling it, it's a little bit different and I love how to position that storytelling to the right person in the right way to have them buy today, right? Yeah, I love that. So what Matt said, basically, if you didn't understand is that at the end of the year, if companies still have budget, if they don't spin it, they lose it.

So Matt's selling them future work for money now, which then only helps your cashflow today. So it's a win-win all the way around. Yeah. And then that reverse side of it is if they've made a ton of money and they're trying to pare it down for them the year to not look as profitable, you can do a

full-on rebrand, buy it now, and then do the work later, right? And so that has worked really well with smaller business owners and people that want to run big marketing campaigns. A lot of times you might need two years of budget to do what you're trying to do and not one year of budget. And you might have some, like you said, leftovers.

So it's a great approach. Yeah. And you're all right. We have to wind down the show. Before we do, we have our first product review. If you listen to the All Yes Tech show for any length of time, companies used to

send in products and out of nowhere, one adapter sent us a product to review. It's called the One World 65. And what's cool about it, so it looks like a universal adapter. And if you travel anywhere in the world, you have some type of adapter so you can plug your American power devices into the UK or to Norway and Brazil. Well, this adapts to every single power outlet in the world, but it's small form

factor, so it looks like it's a USB adapter, but it actually has 65 watts. So it can actually charge your laptop. So instead of having to bring your big brick for your laptop, you'd have one charger. Now, Matt hasn't used it yet. Matt travels all over the place. So Matt is going to use it and come back and report on it.

And if it's great, we're going to give it five stars. And if it's not great, we're going to let you know it's not great and why. Also, you want to connect with us on LinkedIn, go to show notes. All of our LinkedIn links are there. And then you heard him talk about this earlier this year. We're starting an insider group for select group of people, sales and marketing

people that want to be on the inside and learn how to do things that are faster, more efficiently and also to form a peer networking group. So stay tuned for that. And then get ready to close out the show. And you know, we always have a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. And Matt, it seems like you have a LinkedIn tip for this week.

Yeah, the LinkedIn tip is do not put a link in the regular post to take people off site. The whole point of what these platforms, social media platforms want to do is keep people on there and keep them engaged. So if you're putting a link that goes off page to take them away from it, that's against what the goals of are of the platform. So if you think about the goals of the platform, you don't want to put those

links or those call to actions in the regular post. You want to put it in the comments and you typically want to put it in the comments after you've already had another comment or it looks like spam. Yeah, great tip. Actually, when we use ourself that actually learned from you. All right, everybody, remember, make a difference, 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.