From Committee to Close: Winning Complex O&G Deals

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. Howdy. Welcome back to another episode of Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing.

I am your host, Matt Bertram. We're here at the CellWell conference and fantastic agenda, fantastic coaches. And I have another one here right in front of me. I have Michael Wright. He's a trusted advisor and sales coach

and does a lot of change management. And we've had an amazing conversation that I just was like, I need to hit the record button and we can continue this so you all can get the benefit of what I am hearing. So, Michael, if you don't mind to share a little bit more

about your background, I feel like it really credentializes you. Sure, I'd be happy to do that. Thanks for having me. So, I spent 44 years in the technology consulting arena and various kinds of technologies. Sales, sales leadership and management, executive management

and operational management. So, a lot of different roles over the year, but I'm a sales guy at heart. Yeah, and you've sold a couple of companies. I did a couple of early-stage startup boutiques that we sold one to HP and one to Accenture.

And you even worked for Capgemini back in the day. Worked for Capgemini for 16 years back many, many years ago. Started my career there 44 years ago, almost 45. So, everyone listening, pay attention. Michael's going to drop some value on us today. So, we're talking about complex selling into oil and gas.

When you think of that, when that just kind of hits your brain, what are the things that come to mind? Long process, very long process, very complex process. Challenges around buyer networks, decision making and getting to the right people, getting people to make decisions throughout a process.

Regulatory compliance is a giant issue. It seems like my experience anyways, they take on too much at one time and then end up doing nothing. Yeah, and then the process stalls out. And you have too many people that are stakeholders talking to each other, but not really.

It's kind of fragmented on the communication depending on the organization. I was involved with a couple of years ago at the top 10 oil and gas firm looking to replace not just their ERP system, but it's kind of the extended ERP system. It's HR and payroll, it's finance, it's spend, it's ops and maintenance.

It's like the architecture was ungodly. And the number of people involved was ungodly. And it was a three-year process. And I don't know that they've ever really started. And you couldn't find one person who's going to stand up and say, okay, I'm ready to go.

I'm going to start no matter what everybody else wants to do because it's very much by committee decision. How do you work around that when you're trying to sell in knowing that this is the kind of environment that you're going to have to transverse? Yeah, ideally, you leverage some relationships you have.

And in this case, we had some relationships, but probably not in the right areas. And all the major competitors had relationships as well. So it was difficult. But you've got to get through the buyers and find out where's the inertia, where's the biggest pain or challenge,

and who's willing to step up and say, I'm going to just get started with this thing. One of the things I heard that I thought was great is internal clinics where you bring together maybe two different departments and have them talk to each other because they might not be even talking internally to solve that problem.

And if you can be the conduit to help make that happen, you're adding value on both ends. You're helping to understand what maybe procurement wants. And then whoever's buying it, they can get solved what they're trying to deal with. Because there might be issues that are outside of you

that you're trying to operate in an environment that already maybe... Yeah, I think that's a good point. These people don't even know each other a lot of times, and they don't know what their issues and challenges are. So I think it's an excellent point. But you've got to find that inertia,

and that we used to say people buy when they're in trouble or in growth mode. And if they're laissez-faire, they're not going to do anything. And a lot of times with the ups and downs in the oil and gas industry, you just got to find them at the right time too. But you've got to have that network, that relationship. What are maybe some things to think about if someone...

Let's talk about maybe an outside company. A lot of people that listen to this podcast are, well, right cyclically, oh, oil and gas is doing well. Oil and gas is hot. Let me step into it. And they don't understand the long sales cycle

and the deep relationships. And they're trying to step into this arena where they're like, yeah, this is our focus. And it's not really their focus. What are maybe some tips on... I feel like it is really good to partner and find somebody

that can help guide you and introduce you to people and know that this is not an overnight sale as in other industries. Yeah, I think a couple things. It's not state and local or federal government where you can hire lobbyists necessarily to do that for you. But yeah, I think number one for me is having the industry knowledge on your team,

whether your team is you or part of your company or a partner, especially in oil and gas, you need to demonstrate that knowledge. So I think the days of generic selling of show up, throw up kind of stuff without the depth of knowledge and the impact and implications and experience in that industry, you might as well not spend the time. I hear that.

I hear that. I would love for you to go into maybe some other kind of use cases of this complex. Sales is almost consulting. Sales today is not consulted of selling. Okay, but you have to really understand the problem

and how what you're doing solves it and showcase that to all the stakeholders to even have a chance. And that's what you were alluding to before. I'd love for you to maybe drop some different kind of use cases that you've seen. From the perspective of team selling, we used to use this concept years ago, team selling, team buying.

It was one process and there were teams on both sides and you had to align those teams. And we use a couple of different roles. We had industry experts that we brought onto our team. Again, whether it was a partner or somebody in our firm, bigger firms typically tend to have more industry focus or the very niche specialist firms that are really small might have one or two.

So you have the industry expert, then you need a solution architect, client that I referenced from a couple of years ago. Their technical architecture was so complex. The challenge there was you ended up with 20 people on your side to cover the basis of the entire architecture. You've got to have an orchestrated effort.

And over the years, I've used concepts of delivering while selling. There's other Patrick Linceotti wrote a book called Getting Naked, which is all about just dropping your fears and spending the solutioning. That's a good book. I got recommended by a private equity guy. One of the boutiques we sold, that was our sales process.

And our mantra, everybody in the whole company read the book, went through training and we used it and we were wildly successful at it. And it just adds value throughout the sales process. If you have one meeting or one conversation where you don't add any value, it's going to hurt your chances of winning. And it elongates the process.

I feel like just the rescheduling of a meeting that's supposed to happen pushes everything out. And so even on the production side, if you're trying to deliver a solution, the coordination is critical because a week turnaround time, if they don't get to it to a week, they turn around a week later, you keep pushing this out.

And so when salespeople are promising like, I'm going to deliver here, there's so much that can't be controlled. Yeah. And there's other great sales methodologies from lots of different companies over the years that help you define the process and the timeline and not only the decision making process, but who those decision makers are.

And I'm a big believer in when you get to the point of having a detailed closed plan that enables you to sit down with your customer and jointly define what needs to happen when to get signature. Let's go into that more. That's something we haven't covered a lot, like a detailed closed plan. I'd love for you to break that apart.

And sure, I'm pretty anal about that over the years. You can ask them on my team. It's really about understanding, like I said, who's kind of your main buyer contact, who's got the authority to make things happen. And your coach could be your coach, but they have to have credibility internally. Otherwise, they're not going to be a good coach for you.

But it's about outlining every step in the process. It goes from the CIO to the COO to the CEO. And then it's got to go to the board. And the board only meets every other month to talk about technology. And then what happens if you miss that meeting, what happens when you get to the CEO to sign and he's out on his boat in the middle of the lake in some remote place and doesn't have

cell coverage to sign the contract? Who's his backup? It's that level of detail. Are they on vacation? Are they going to be around so that you can follow every step through the process? And it's outlined.

It's agreed upon. And not that things still can't slip. They will. You know why it happened because you've got it all clearly defined. And I feel like you've got to angle that in with when they want to get started, right? And it's like, we want this product or whatever, this implementation to be done by X.

Yeah. They start with the end in mind, as they say. Like working back, you're like, we got to get this signed like real quick. So what are some other things that come to mind just with complex selling that you think would be important for people to focus on or pay attention to? At first, it starts with the firm you're representing.

If it's yourself or if it's a big firm, you have to know the why. Why should they engage you? What do you do that's different? What results can you commit to? And if you don't understand your why and can't articulate it, you're going to be challenged for success.

So I can give you a story on it. Yeah, I'd love to. Sorry. So very large beverage company. I won't say where their headquartered that it would give it away. And they were looking to replace their HR system.

And they were very structured, very procurement oriented. And they said, here's the agenda. We want you to follow. So we showed up and we said, we threw out their agenda. We fear we can't lose something you don't have. We were a boutique.

We were going against the big four and we had one shot. So we said, we can't give you. They wanted to hear our pitch. We don't give pitches. We help you come to solutions. So we said, we suck at giving pitches.

We're just going to tell stories about what we've done for other companies and allow you to ask questions. And we put our best guy up there. And we were waiting for the get out. It didn't come. They started firing questions at the guy.

You get him engaged. Get him talking. We eventually we won the deal. Nice. And it was because of that. We challenged the status quo.

We offered them solutions. We told them how we're going to solve their problems and where we've done it in other places. Okay. So I want to zoom that out. Big picture because this is the sales and marketing podcast.

It comes down to brand positioning. People are going to check you out before you can even get in the room. So what are the things if you're a boutique firm or also I feel like the big brands have really leaned on their logo for a long time. I believe today that's starting to get eroded and they haven't had to keep up as much.

They haven't had to do as much because they're big brands established. Big brands as well as boutique firms from an online positioning standpoint before you can even get in the room to make the sale. What are the things that you think are important that they need to be doing? That's certainly changed over the years

from the smile, leaving and dialing from 40 years ago. And I'm probably a little more old school than most but in the last 10 years, very heavy social media presence, conference conferences where you speak and you speak with clients and others are attending that demonstrates your knowledge without you speaking much about it.

And now with AI, it's just it's totally changed the game on how you represent yourself, how you present yourself, how you present solutions and how you sell. That's a game changer from my perspective that we're just scratching the surface on. And this beverage company I referenced,

we actually got a referral from a guy that we worked with 20 years prior who had been meeting with the chief administrative officer and said, oh, you're doing that, you need to call these guys. And that's how we got in. I think that seven touch marketing concept is still very much out there. The numbers that just came out from, I believe,

forest or research are 30 touches. 30 touches, wow. I think it's a good time to mention our sponsor, EWR Digital, agency that I am the architect strategist for behind the scenes. We help you with that brand positioning and a lot of other issues, including LL and visibility.

So showing up in the AI when you're searching chat, GBT is becoming very hot. And we're getting a lot of cutting edge companies that want to stay on the frontier reaching out as for that. But go check out EWR Digital. Anybody, if you're listening and want to add that marketing layer

to what you're doing with sales, back to our regular schedule program. So, Michael, what are some other things that you think are important that you want to highlight to people that are selling in oil and gas? Yeah, I think there's certain things in oil and gas that are similar with other large enterprises and things that are different.

The differences, the challenging things. We talked about the regulatory compliance. That's a big one, I think. Let's dig into that a little bit more. What are the things that people need to be considering when they're selling a solution in?

Because safety is such a big issue and compliance is such a big issue in a regulated industry like oil and gas. And I feel like a lot of people, if you're not in oil and gas, but you want to sell into it, don't have their head wrapped around it. It's not like other industries. That's a great point.

We built an app on top of one of the applications we were selling, Focus on Safety, a safety solution when we started selling to oil and gas because it was that important to those people. And they begin and or end every meeting with a story on safety. That's a great example. There's environmental, there's land materials,

there's even data mining kinds of things on wellheads or whatever that are, they're just different and they're unique. Some are regulatory because they change all the time. I was doing little research before we got on and there's a new regulation around methane emissions from the EPA that just came out. And that will create other challenges, which in the technology business,

technology impacts everything. So you have to be prepared to talk about how you're going to handle that. And that again, it demonstrates value and that you have the industry experience and that you're going to mitigate their risk. That's another big thing I think for oil and gas companies, but a lot of companies mitigating risk.

How do I know we're going to be successful with this program? And I think that this is an opportunity for anyone listening for like thought leadership. When something new like this comes out, everybody hasn't wrapped their head around it yet. So if you can be the one to position how this should be viewed, and maybe this is a framework that you need to follow to use this,

you can move into that thought leadership position to be the one that helps solve whatever problem that this arises. And regulations become a navigating path for a lot. Is there a LinkedIn tip or fail of the week that just, that's what we do on every podcast is we try to talk about LinkedIn seems to be the premier channel.

And now with the video that's been added to it, it's like the TikTok for business. Okay, like I don't know that they want to be known as that, but that's what it's becoming. Everything's centered around LinkedIn. There's only actually from the data I saw it,

maybe a little dated, this was maybe last year, 4% of people globally on LinkedIn produce all the content, I believe. And that's like once a week or something, a post once a week. When you get on LinkedIn, or we were talking about connected on LinkedIn prior to this, when you're on there, what are the things that you see that are happening done really well?

And then some of the things that you're just like, close your eyes and just like to get your take on what you're seeing. Yeah, there's some really great videos. I was looking at one recently on the definition and the role of a chief revenue officer. And it had a very detailed review platform framework, I guess is probably the best term for what a chief revenue officer does,

what skills they have, what role they have. I found that interesting selling to chief revenue officers. Going back to when LinkedIn first started, it was as simple as understanding your buyer network. Yeah. And what relationships did you have?

I used to have to dial and dial one up and one down and then put in an excel spreadsheet of who it was, where it was horrible. Yeah, so it certainly evolved a lot from that. But if it's 30 touch points now, you can get multiple touch points, whether it's a video, whether you're pointing them to a speaking engagement, a conference, an event you're hosting,

but it needs to be part of an overall integrated plan. And that's why CROs are over sales and marketing, and that's why sales and marketing need to talk. Yeah, I'm probably more of a sales guy. I've had marketing responsibility, but probably more experience on the sales side,

and relied on very strong marketing people over the years. Yeah, marketing technology is just phenomenal to make a good salesperson great and a great salesperson phenomenal. They can be your best friend along with the solution guys. Yeah, awesome. Michael, how do people get in touch with you if they want to find out more?

You can find me on LinkedIn with 400 other Michael writes. We were just going through that process. That's probably the best way I'll post periodically. You can message me on LinkedIn. Find the Michael Wright that worked at Capgemi, worked at Accenture, IBM. And your new venture.

And I'm now starting my own little LLC action advisors. I retired about 10 and 11 months ago, and now I'm ready to get back, do something else, and get back in the game a little bit and do some advising and coaching and share those lessons learned. That was my favorite part of sales leadership

over the last 20 years anyway. Awesome. I just want to remind everybody, I've dealt with this personally. I've written some blogs about it. Your entity of who you are online, go buy your domain name,

make sure that there's not other people publicly out there that are public that are doing something you're doing or something similar because I'm dealing with that issue. There's a lot of Matt and Matthew Bertrams. Matthew Bertram is my name and my alias or my nickname is Matthew Bertram. Understanding your online presence

and unifying all your social media accounts so that the LLMs and Google and the Knowledge Graph knows who you are and gives you credit for your work is really critical. Everyone, hope you enjoyed this. Remember, make a difference, 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 of the Oil and Gas Global Network.