From CRM Chaos to Closed 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 the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing show by OGGN.

EWR Digital is now officially sponsoring the show. We are here at the CellWell conference and I have a friend of mine that has been on the podcast before, Michael Prive. Michael, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. Well, how have you liked CellWell so far?

I like the conference and seeing some faces that I haven't seen for a while, but also learn many things during yesterday's discussions and from the people in the conference. I think it's been great and there's scientific data around coaching on how it helps people improve and change and there's a massive amount of coaches here

and I haven't seen a conference where you have multiple coaches stacked non-stop like whole conference around. People are leaving the conference sessions to be in coaching and I haven't seen this kind of engagement. It's amazing. That's right. And you see the board where you are,

where you want to have a sessions with those coaches and they are all different and professional coaches so everyone participating in the conference, everyone will get something back, back home. And you're a sales trainer. Yeah, well, you know, that's what I do as well. So we're here talking about complex selling targeted towards oil and gas.

I would love to hear kind of you to set the table on what's going on in complex selling. How is buyer behavior changing in oil and gas? Well, what we're saying in oil and gas in other industries as well, the buyers are using the same tools that we are using in sales. It's artificial intelligence as well to streamline the suppliers that will be able to help them in their journey.

So we still have the relationship sales in oil and gas because the people very much matters. You want to be sure that you are on the top of the line but what we see is the up and down typical oil and gas when things goes well, everybody is busy. And since we go down, the projects are parked or eliminated.

So the change is the behavior of the buyers that were now a little bit more educated before selecting a supplier. Hence the importance to have your message online, absolutely, clearly, clearly. Clearly clear. I agree with that. You need to be clearly clear.

People need to know exactly where you're positioned with your brand. Brand building is so important before the sale and after the sale because people check you out. Absolutely. And especially how you help the clients. The buyers also evolve.

You continue to be the advisors. You have to add up some additional perspective that will be helping them not only to get what they are looking for immediately but also advice to help the company or to help the topics to have a different perspective like the traditional way those big oil and gas companies always been doing the same way over and over and over and over

and having the opportunity to learn to bring something additional and say, hey, what I've seen in this industry that worked very well could be also helping you in this particular case. Those are two things I've seen patterns in as well. Really getting crystal clear on your message. That clarity is so important because everybody is pulled in so many different directions.

Attention spans are like, we need sound bites. So you got to be clear. Your elevator pitch or whatever you're presenting online, people need to see it and get it is one step. And then I think the other thing that I've seen so much in oil and gas is they want to know the depth of your expertise.

They need a partner to help them through whatever they're trying to solve. And that's where I see a lot of probing and questions come in of how deep is your bench of technical experts? What kind of projects have you done that helped me solve a problem like this for me? Are you the right partner for me in this? Yes, you're absolutely right.

And you were talking about the brand and how you help. And that is digitally because as I was mentioning before, AI is trembling for them in fact which suppliers is happening. So you have to be always updated. And if you have testimonials, if you have referrals coming in, this is the first steps that will be making you in the room or not in the room.

So that's the number one. And then after that, you are in the room for what? And that is the additional things that makes you different if you are able to advise your customers from different perspective. Innovation, if you sell a technical product, that will make a successful audience. Audience, you hear Michelle baiting me on AI.

I tried to like wait to go into AI, but we did have a conversation previously and everyone knows I love talking about AI and we talked about it previously. So why don't you share with the audience and myself more about what's happening on how AI is getting integrated and enhancing the sales process? Well, where to start? Because in fact, historically sales guys or sales people,

no matter what you call them inside, outside business development, they don't spend more than 50% on selling time. There's a lot of work that is done for them to be successful. So those tasks which are not used in sales time could be automated from prospecting to fill up the CRM and preparing the documentation and so on. The messaging of, you see, preparing the agenda before a call, using AI to scream like,

I'm sharing what I'm doing, I'm using an AI to identify on LinkedIn their this profile, so I have their this profile so I know how to talk to someone before. I never met that person before and I asked AI to prepare an agenda according to what I would like to achieve with that person. If I have a fireflies going on during the call, I will know exactly how my discussion went and if I'm using Membrane,

one of the sponsors of this event today, I will have also an ability to have my own personal coach who tells me how to do those steps better. Sales people typically have not enough affinity but like opposite, whatever the opposite of affinity is, the word escapes me, it's early, but they don't like paperwork, they don't like busy work.

Technology is also kind of maybe a little bit of a hurdle. Sales people listening to this embrace technology so you don't have to do as much paperwork and as much busy work and as much data entry. So that's the whatever that hand sign is, you know, like this is greater than that technology, greater than busy work. So all this stuff, if it sounds a little foreign to you,

I would encourage you to invest in some time, learn some prompt engineering, learn how these tools are, reach out to people like Michelle, and find out how you could utilize it in your workflow, enriching your data on the prospecting side, recording the meeting notes and then you can even get summaries from that to then log into your CRM.

One of the biggest things is I see is the CRM data is just very messy and if you don't put good data and you don't get good data out and then it doesn't become useful with email drips. The first things I did when I really got my hands around this was made a tag that I built pre-built email drips for different types of prospects and in that CRM after I talked to that person, I put on that email drip

because I just don't have the time to remember to send the email and I can write a personalized email to reach that target persona that will work maybe 85% of the time and I can start to drip that to them, let them know about success stories, testimonials from other clients, maybe value, why value to them and also the values that I hold or the company holds, the ideals and communicating that message,

continuing that conversation at scale with people. Yes, exactly. It's also to jump on what you just said is that if you have your Fireflies, I'm just using Fireflies, it could be phantom, it could be any other one, but the AI will be listening carefully to your conversation and in other words, they might be picking up stuff that you have not picked up.

Sentiment, if you're talking too much like they can give you all kinds of feedback if you take that transcript and then run it through an LLM, that's where it gets really exciting. Yes, and in fact, one of my friends has put two things together, two pieces of AI together and they threw the calls that were recorded where we have salespeople understood the moment that, in fact,

AI understood the moment that they convinced the customer to buy what they were selling. It was impossible to be seen. They used that two or three times and they said, oh man, there's a pattern here. So we're going to be changing our speech and the way we approach it. Sales grew by 30% in a week time because of this

and it was things that was completely invisible and they modified the message, they modified the technology and the rhythm to introduce. If you think about sales, if anybody thinks about sales, there's an algorithmic pattern to the conversation, the arc of the flow of the conversation, the follow-up process,

the data entry on the back end to communicate that to the rest of the team. These are processes and LLMs are very good at recognizing processes and how people talk and how people buy. It's amazing on what it can tell you from an insight level. We're talking about a couple of different things for those of you listening. We're talking about the insights and analysis that can be done

and then we're also talking about the workflow integration. I'm not a big fan of the name but it's called Spinach.AI but it's memorable. I think there's going to be a bunch of different animals coming out.AI and a different bunch of different fruits.AI and vegetables. That's what I am potentially seeing in some of the patterns of new technologies

that are coming out. What I can tell you about Spinach and why we picked it is it has an agentic AI attached to it. We built the orchestration that based on the call, it also integrates with ClickUp, which is our CRM, and it assigns tasks inside that on the project management side.

We're using it for sales and for account management to remember what was said and it already gets put in the system and then it just has to be approved. Yeah, and that's big. Imagine that you extend that to the key account management. Now, you sold product A, you finally break in the door,

cross-selling, up-selling, and keep the account. Because attrition is what heating many companies there and because we keep forgetting that selling starts with the branding, then marketing, then sales, then customer service. The customer service role, making sure that you have the loyalty. That's where a lot of it stops.

And looking at that attrition and saying, okay, what can we do to reduce that? And that was really the issue for me is, okay, I'm involved maybe on the strategy on the front end with clients, but it gets handed off to account managers that are managing it. And the reporting on how this account is doing,

there's not much visibility. So I said, all right, we're going to do all video calls. You're going to record with the agent in there. It's going to grab the transcript. It's going to run it through some sentiment analysis and a few other things.

And then it's going to give me an input. And then I'm building composite scores to say, hey, how is this account doing? Hey, the account manager, hey, it's going great. Yeah, so like now I have metrics and data to measure. It's fantastic. We started to use this.

It was five or six years ago with Salesforce.com. They were the only one having it. And that was because one of my KPI as a sales leader, it was to be able to have an accurate forecast. The only way we had that is 80%, 50% chance that we're going to get the business. When we started to use the AI,

we started to read the email, to read the cadence and everything's there. It was plenty of BS that was in there. It was a sentiment that I'm going to get that order, but when will you get the order? And in fact, that helped us to streamline. This is for big companies.

I didn't think about that. To streamline in fact, when will you be closing? Because it's difficult when you read an email, the AI at the time, and it's of course is working now. Reading the content and the cadence, the way that the buyer or the influencers are responding back to you.

It will say that are they ready to buy or not? So sales managers, this is something I haven't thought about. I have Claude integrated with my email and some documents and stuff like that. I've been using it for personal recall. Now I've been using the agents to listen into the calls to hear what the conversation is. Why not?

It makes perfect sense to extend it to the emails because now you can have it hooked into the emails. You can feed it in the instructions to tell you impact and it can tie it to the deal flow and tell you based on the email exchanges, what is the sentiment and what is the conversation going on? Are they talking about you could even put in the cross-selling of different products? Did you mention this?

You can start to get a lot of visibility and sales people are now going, oh no, AI overlords, but it could help you too. Absolutely. You want to make more deals. For the sales people, this is suddenly you have a roadmap. Yes.

You have a place of discussions, a roadmap showing you according to the other party, the buyers, what are they looking for at the time, at this time, the next step. And you have to respect that because obviously if you try to go too fast, too far, you might run the relationship, you run out the relationship that you start to build. And this is respect. One is out of sales acceleration or no, it was rent training.

The statistics is that more than 80% of the buyers are telling the sellers you don't listen. So if you take AI and you have AI helping you to listen more carefully for you to build up your deal process or your account management process, it will help you to give a clear roadmap that will be in fact helping you to deliver what the buyers asking from you to be not only a supplier, but an advisor, bring innovation at the right moment. And this is like opening up the roadmap.

I know that a lot of sales people don't like to role play. I actually like to role play. It actually lets me know how good I am with the information. If I can pivot, if I can change. So I was taught to role play and there was big sessions around that. We recorded with a video camera and then we would review it back.

Now with AI, AI can be a mirror or a sounding board for you to practice your sales pitch with a tuned LLM or a custom LLM to help you give you better feedback based on the training models that you want to follow. And now I'm starting to see it like we're not just following this framework. We can blend a couple different frameworks. We can pull it together.

How are you utilizing that in the training setting? It's all over the place, obviously, because I'm an engineer to start with. You need data to be able to have a good evaluation of the situation, the people, when they are at the moment. You have different aspects of it. And when you are using the tools to measure, to be able to help the individual to be successful

because we all want everyone to be successful. And you tied it up with training modules that you would have. I was mentioning rain training to help the individuals to succeed. And then after that, you measure over the time with role play past the training. And you measure if that task of where they keep failing on that deal proposal, they were not comfortable, for example, not comfortable to talk about the money.

And now they are comfortable to talk about the money. How it changed the, let's say, the ability to be successful. We want everybody to be successful. AI is your frame in sales. So let's zoom out from AI for a second because hopefully everybody is falling along. And if you're not, reach out to Michelle, reach out to myself.

We can help guide you in the right direction. It is a new world. There is a lot of different apps and tools. And like building that tech stack to figure out what would work for your organization. You probably need some help or a consultant or you're going to be trying a lot of different things. And also things keep changing.

So we've had an AI answer our phone for a year and a half, maybe two years. But the tool that we were using, we got grew that tool and also the AI got better, but the tool didn't get better. So then there's this constant upgrade. Absolutely. But I want to zoom out to talking about, we haven't talked about this.

Sales people sometimes are afraid to talk about money too soon in the conversation or not at all. They just might have a fear of that. I think it comes back to you tell me, and this is a personal frame of reference, but it's a fear of not connecting in their mind, the sales person's mind, the value of what they're selling and the price they're selling it for.

And once there's congruency in that, there's no shame in talking about price at all because you know what it's going to do for that organization. Exactly. And this is all about part of what is missing I think in organization is to put the focus on the value of what they do. And you have to always to look at from the customer's perspective what the customers

will gain when they use our product or services. What will it change? And it's not only about the money, the time savings, the governance, the ability to grow, the value of the company, I can go on and on. So many people, many organizations stops after two or three things that might be bringing the value to the company.

If you teach each one of the sales people about the value and you bring the value, goes along with the buyer persona. A buyer's target might be to save money only. The engineers' targets may be that to stop being bothered during the weekend because you need reliable things. Each one of the buyer personas have value that you have to identify and you have to

teach yourselves. People, when they speak to an engineer, the value of what the offer will be and the speech will be different than, it's the same clients. When they speak to the engineer, when they speak to the CFO, when they speak to the buyers, your company, the company of the sellers, the same things, but you put perspective to each one of those buyers and that's when you have the value, the money question doesn't

come here. You put a good case for return on investment, it's in your mind and you will be able to, when you speak about the money, is that if you have a pushback on the money here, it has, when the moment you introduce the money, you have to put it in perspectives with the value and what brings for the return on investment for the company. Everyone, I can talk to Michelle for hours and I have, actually, we have two other podcasts

we've done together, so if you just search our names, you'll find it and I can maybe put some links in the show notes as well. Michelle, I know I had prepared questions for everyone and everybody did prep and I haven't asked any of those questions. Throughout any of these interviews, I've just had some great conversations. Is there anything that maybe you had prepared for this interview or that you think is valuable

that you would like to share with the audience? I prepared for the questions that were there, but we talked a little bit about AI quite a lot there about AI. One of the things, because I used to be a business owner and I'm a business owner here, you have to protect your company and before introducing tools in your company, you have to have an AI policy, a clear policy.

Governance is governance. Huge data governance. Absolutely. Because so you have to protect your assets and before to release at large tools and the very large company has done that. They have the policies, they limit the tools.

Don't use the public AI is what you're saying. You need to put it on a separate server or you need to upgrade to the enterprise level where they don't train the LOMs, they don't share the data. So you have to train the people who are using it. Very unfortunately, I got some very sad stories about salespeople wanted to use AI to see if their bills were good.

It ended up into the web. It was hidden, but when you use the right AI and you want to do competition as this, I was able to find that bid. It was not good good. So it was not recently, but it's still recent enough to be. Yeah.

And I think that some of the people that were on the frontier, a lot of big mistakes were made. I've seen some internal access issues as well. When you give it all the information without the proper permissions, I think that the road map is not cutting through the jungle at this point. There's a clear kind of path.

And so I think it's now the right time to start getting involved with it because you don't want to be the last person to use in this, these kind of tools. But if you're getting comfortable with it and you were waiting, I think that times past. I think you're able to see and navigate and build out a lot of that framework and a lot of these tools are starting to take shape. There's a lot of tools that are adding AI to what they're doing, which is not always

perfect but helpful. And so I knew, I know a lot of people based on Salesforce now has a integration, co-pilot of course is integrated into things, but that's touching the surface of what's possible. Yes, because those tools are generalist tools. Obviously, there was one thing in the questions that you prepared that we like to have the audience to talk about is that selling to big companies.

If you are a small consulting firm, a smaller consulting firm, because big companies, they like to work with big companies or big firms here is to be able to... So what my advice to the audience when you sell these days is always keep surprising the clients with new things, they're new idea, you have to carefully listening to what they expect from you, but always come up with a surprise, especially on big companies. They go with the flow, everyone is aligned and they always did the same thing.

So you give them what they want, you satisfy the beast. And then after that, in addition to to say, I've just prepared something, this is on me, you know, about the alternative and potential alternative outcome. And I keep doing this for those companies. So this is like a big ship, the ship is not turning dramatically, but it... This is the innovation and that's the value that as a seller, the value that you are bringing

to the company as well, it's a different perspective. This is also what buyers have expressed through the rain training survey we've done. They are looking at people to bring additional ideas. It might not jump immediately, but you plant things, look at different ways to do the way you were doing things before. So be generous, not give only what they have been asked you to do this.

Be generous, surprise them with alternative way to do this and it might not be interesting to them or not. But they will be recognizing the effort and the willingness for you to help them to get better. If I think about when we've landed clients, like big clients, there was always a delightful surprise that we did.

But it's not built into our workflow, building it into your workflow of come up with some interesting perspective or go over the top in some way to delightfully surprise. I think that's the term that's used to do that really can make a difference. That's awesome. In my case, what I'm doing when I'm speaking to the company that I never spoke before, ask them which account do you would like to get and who's your competitors.

And I'm offering for free competitive analysis. And they receive the dinas for it, they receive it and the very detail about what needs to happen in sequences. And that makes a massive difference in terms of the confidence building between the target, the prospect and me. Michelle, we got to get out of here.

I would love to hear LinkedIn tipper fail of the week as well as the best way to follow you and get in contact with you. The best way to follow me, what you get in contact is LinkedIn. And the best, the failure, I'm sure that everybody is that you prepare a post and you can hear from my voice. I'm not English and my grammar is not the best one.

And I use wrong words in the posting and everybody is saying this is a failure. But I've also helped my referral partners when I believe that what they do on LinkedIn should be changed a little bit. I tell them because they are good friends and the success was using themes that are when I'm posting is that I try to be the most relevant, it's not about me, it's about them, the people or what I heard from the market and that I found quite insightful.

I'll have to share my own fail recently. I forgot to hit submit on the post. So I'll build the post and then I forget to hit submit when it's a timely post and then I missed the event and I'm like, should I post that or not? I put in some work to put this together. Just with podcasts, sometimes you have to make sure you're hitting record.

So I look at it a few times and said, those kind of things, Michelle, thanks so much for coming on. You're welcome. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and to be on the OGGN podcast and say good hi to our friend Mark. Yeah.

Absolutely. Remember, make a difference, not a sale.