Harnessing Conferences for Business Growth

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 the Oil and Gas Sales

and Marketing podcast. And I got Matt sitting next to me and we're at OTC 2025. If you don't know what OTC is, why are you listening to the show? Just joking.

All short technology conference. You know, Matt, earlier in my career in the 80s and 90s, this was the premier place in the world to close deals in the oil and gas industry, but times has changed. Well, advent social media.

No, no. And so I thought today we'd talk through, literally the process of using conferences to form deals and then close deals and what has changed and why it's changed. And I want to use OTC as an example.

Love the show. Back in my early bell days, I'd spend $80,000 on my company's money. I'd come here for a week and I'd walk away $2 or $3 million worth of sales and it was great. But the reason that worked is back then,

there was no internet. So. But you come with order sheets to the conference. I have not seen that. Yeah, so companies would come here literally with PO's in their hands

because it was the only place that Chevron or Shell or BP or Halliburton could go and talk to every valve manufacturer, every choke manufacturer, every nut and bolt manufacturer, every process control manufacturer. And they would do deals here.

As time went on, the internet happened and now Shell and Chevron and Halliburton doesn't need to come here to talk to every manufacturer. They can go online and do all that work online without spending money or time here. So that's why the attendance has changed.

If you've come to OTC for any length of time, you notice that now there's no major operators here. However, just because it's changed, doesn't mean that the opportunity isn't here. The opportunity just has changed. Now, instead of a hundred or so very large company,

there's probably hundreds, if not a thousand smaller companies here. And you go, what does that mean? Well, who would you rather sell to? A big company like Exxon or Chevron that takes months to negotiate everything

and get a PO or a small company where you may be talking to the president in the booth and he can write you a check right then and there. The red tape aspect of big companies is something that I think people shy away from. That's why they focus on the mid markets.

And you can connect with people at conferences that you'll never get on LinkedIn, that you can get in front and build relationships with people that carry forward from the conference. So the conference is a piece of the sales funnel. It's a great way to build brand.

It's a great way to create content, okay? But it's not where this point of sale happens. I don't think. Yeah, not anymore. However, you can start that process. You can meet the right people, meet the companies.

And then I want to make this very clear distinction. So you heard me say that technology has changed the ability to close big deals at the conference, which is true. However, there's a group of people in all guests, especially that are older, that are not tech savvy,

that aren't on LinkedIn. Let's be honest here, but they're here. That's true. And they're in the booth, and they're shaking hands and kissing babies. So that older group, which now are either very close

to retirement, or maybe even some of them are retired and they've come back as consultants, they're very senior people. So even though they're not tech savvy, even though you may not be able to connect with them on LinkedIn, they still have the keys to the checkbook.

Well, I can tell you, I ran into at the Houstonian, the former head of Morgan Stanley for alternative investments, right? He was doing some really cool stuff with solar panels, whatever. He wasn't online at all.

He wasn't connecting with people online. And he was still selling, or he was doing it face to face, okay? And he was two years older than I was. Oh, wow. Depending on where your skill sets developed,

depends on what you're having to do. So we started having a side conversation about how to run stuff to a webinar, right? And I was like, you're doing the same pitch with these heavy hitters one after one. Why don't you do a one-to-many sell?

Yeah, I'm always amazed when I meet somebody that's younger, that it's not all over social. One of our sponsors, they're CMO. Now this is the CMO of a multi-billion dollar company, is not on social, and he's probably 40, 45 years old. But the reason he's not on social

is that he calls it a big distraction. So it's interesting. A lot of really smart or successful people have focused on a vertical, and they've gone way down in that vertical, and everything else is a distraction, okay?

And I would tell you also, social media and technology, online marketing, whatever you wanna call it, is moving so quickly. I was just at this conference in New York with AI, okay? And LLMs and how everything's absolutely changing, entity-based, it is mind-blowing how quickly

information retrieval and machine learning is coming at an intersection. And you gotta stay on top of it. Changes are happening monthly, quarterly. If you're not on top of what's going on on social media, SEO, digital marketing, whatever it is,

it's moving so fast, it's gonna pass you up, and then it's gonna be so far gone that you're like, forget it. And I think so many people are burnt out with all the different social media platforms. What is this one for?

How do I use this? I mean, TikTok's a great platform today, and I think people are coming around to it, but everybody was like, oh, that's for my kids. Let me say this, the algorithm of TikTok, influence meta, influence Instagram and influence YouTube.

Content now finds the right person, okay? The machine learning knows if you pump out enough content and you train it, basically you're training it, it will go find the right person for you. So if you're running ads and you turn them off, you lose all the training, okay?

So if you're running ads in a particular, over a particular amount of time, you can't see it in who you're targeting or the keywords, but the machine learning's knowing exactly who's gonna buy, and it's like a heat-sinking missile. And content and social media and online marketing

is absolutely so powerful, as just a tool in the art arsenal, just like conferences are. And the content you create here helps build that authority. Yeah, and audience, I hope you paid attention to what he just said. Do you realize that what Matt just said

is that the content itself in combination with the algorithms will go find your prospects? Yes. That's powerful, and if you wanna go down that rabbit hole really deeply and understand how to do it, reach out to Matt directly, not me.

But I kinda wanna bring this back to actually selling at a conference. Yes. So this one's different, it's changed over the years, a bunch of smaller vendors. So you know what, one of the things that we did?

So we have some of our clients here today, or this week, we also have some prospects here. So one of the things I did is I reached out, I literally went to the OTC website, and I went to the exhibitor list, and I reached out to different exhibitors saying,

hey, we're setting up a podcast booth, we're recording podcasts, why don't you come over and get a free podcast interview? Now, those two companies I reached out to were also the exact company that our prospects wanted to talk to.

Yeah. So what did Mark do? That's really interesting, yeah. Mark had a prospect for OGG and show up at our booth at the same time that one of their prospects showed up, I made a warm in-person handshake introduction.

So now my prospect has walked away with an introduction to a prospect of theirs, but I didn't get them together, the conference did it. So see how you can take that conference if you do a little pre-workup here up front. And you may not have a podcast network,

but I tell you what, you have a company and a team, you could do the exact same thing that I just did, just take the podcast part out of it. So doing that pre-conference research is vital, and that was vital in the 90s, and now it's vital now, but what you're researching is different.

Yeah, there's so much data at your fingertips. There's no reason not to do this. I mean, I remember oil and gas pre-linked in. Me too. And trying to figure out who was who and what was what, and you're looking at name badges,

like now you can do the research, you can go really amplify your impact by connecting with all the right people, and I've seen people do this so well. So the post and the pre-research is what's new. The conference though, there's something,

especially after COVID, okay, and we're five years out, and I feel like OTC is starting to come back. Like last year there wasn't as many people, here before that it was like nobody was here, and I would tell you that there is something about meeting somebody in person and shaking their hand.

Like you know they're a real person because you look at them on Zoom or Teams or Google Meet or whatever, but there's something about meeting a person and doing business with somebody, and that is all throughout oil and gas.

Like there's really something about trust and knowing the person and connecting with them, good luck doing a big deal without meeting the person. It's not gonna happen, right? Two things I wanna cover there. So first thing, I think I've said this before,

I'll say it again, the reason in person is so important in this industry is that what we do is so dangerous, I mean literally if you make a mistake, people can die, and you can have an environmental catastrophe which can destroy a company literally overnight.

So what's really happening is the people that you're meeting wanna know if they can trust Matt, they wanna know if they can trust Mark, they don't wanna know if they can trust the company, OGGN, because if something really bad happens, they wanna know if they pick up the phone

and call Matt at market three o'clock in the morning because they need help that we won't answer and we will go help. You don't get that any other way, but in person, you build that type of trust, but here's something that occurred to me

while you were saying this. Matt, isn't that authenticity? When you're meeting somebody in person shaking hand but you only knew them online before, is it more authentic when you have that in-person conversation?

I also think all those social cues, or I don't know what the right term is, but all the different language that comes out not just through the voice. And we've started a launch video first podcast because you get to connect with the audience better,

they get to connect with you better, you get to see more of those social cues. So I know you're listening and hopefully Mark and I sound like nice guys, cause I think we are. We are. But when you meet us in person and you shake our hand,

you're gonna know who we are so much better than just listening to us. And it's been cool. There's been a number of people that have come up and said, hey, I listened to the podcast, y'all are doing great, blah, blah, blah.

I don't know who those people are. Me neither. Okay. But if you're listening and you came by and said, hi, thank you. Well, no, no, I mean, I know who they are now.

I don't know who they were before because we're one to many broadcasting, but it's having an impact. But now that they're coming back, they're connecting, now I can know who they are. Now we connect on LinkedIn.

Now, okay, if the algorithm's gonna show me their stuff, they're gonna show them my stuff for the next 30 days and we're gonna build some rapport. So it all works together. It's so funny how Matt and I do this. We do no prep, literally no prep

before we jump on the microphone. So what you just rattled off, so earlier I tied in what you were talking about to authenticity, what you just rattled off to me is an engaging interaction. Now, Matt and I have it lucky in some ways

in that we're able to get our messaging out to many because of this podcast. But still, when you walk up in person because you're a listener podcast and you meet us and we shake our hands, that's an engaging interaction,

which from a sales point of view is what you're always looking for. Where somebody's excited, where they smile, where they stick their hand out first and that's what we did. And I would say leave us a review

and I would say also now I am getting unsolicited text messages from people, which I wonder how they got my number. But it's okay, I reach back out to them on LinkedIn and I wanna connect with them before but I can tell you, you don't know the impact, okay?

If you're thinking about should I go to the conference, should I not, you should always err on the side to go because every little thing that you do and impact that you made in person that you meet is gonna have kind of a butterfly effect to what you're doing and you don't know that.

But there's people I've been following online that I will go to a conference, I'll go meet the speaker, I'll connect with them, now I know a little bit more who they are, I'll engage with their content, they'll respond, things happen that way.

I think it's the right move. Reach out to these people, people are more accessible today than they've ever been. Reach out to them, reach out to them on the right channels, if someone introduced you, group texts are better, okay? When you're reaching out to somebody cold,

but I can tell you, it makes a difference because this person, who I'm not gonna put on blast, that I know listens, but he reached out to me and now I know who he is and he needs some help and I'm happy to help him. See, I love that.

Now let me tell you one thing has changed at conferences in my opinion, in the sales point of view. Many, many years ago, I literally would sometimes close deals at the conference, right? So lock, stock and barrel, get it done, actually print the contract and the FedEx print booth here

at OTC, go have them sign it and done. Now, I don't think a sales person should even try to close a deal at the conference. The conference is to start the conversation, spell it right, but then don't try to rush it, don't try to push it, especially if you're a little bit older

and you have experience of closing deals at conferences, I think that's gone now. But form those relationships, making yourself memorable to your prospects so that you're no longer a vendor that at some point, you know, you're an addition to their team,

engaging with them, making sure you're authentic. I think it's all the stuff that you need to do at conferences now, if you do the pre-work. But here's the other thing that I think is really cool. So we talked about people coming up to us because they listen to the show.

All of you out there have things that are valuable to other people. So you may not have a podcast, but I bet you have a smartphone and I bet you could spend 15 minutes. I think if you're a salesperson,

think of the top 10 questions that your clients ask you over and over again. You know what they are, you live and breathe them. Right, because you've heard them so many times. You can take each one of those questions and make it a small social media post

using your phone, post it on your social platform or choice for us, it's usually linked in because that's where most of our prospects and our network is and where our audience is. But you can do the same thing that Matt and I are doing on this podcast yourself.

You don't need to spend a lot of money on gear, you don't need a whole team, you literally can pick up your phone and do it. Okay, so speaking of that, Mark, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. I'm gonna show you, I just set up

a creator profile on Facebook, okay? And I wasn't a big poster on Facebook, you know, I'm bigger on LinkedIn. I wanna show you, so I have no followers on Facebook. I want you to read that. Wow, so 19,785 views,

up almost 6%, almost 6,000 from the previous 28 days. It's amazing. I just posted once a day on Facebook. Previous 28 days, 348 people saw my stuff, okay? In the last 28 days, 19,000 people saw my stuff in 28 days. That's not even a full month, okay?

If you equate that to Facebook ads, even targeted ads at like a 30% rate, it's five grand in free advertising, okay? Right there that you can build a relationship with so anybody can do it, anybody can do it. The one thing I do wanna ask you about

because I think it's a big deal is after-party events at conferences. I feel like that's where the business really gets done and getting invited to those after-party events. What are some tips there? And I know I've come to some with OGGN,

not everybody has that, but what do you think about after-party events? How do you view it and what would you recommend to people? I agree, 100% after-conference events can be very lucrative for form-nose relationships that will turn to sales. It's one of the things that OGGN does,

we don't advertise this, but for our sponsors, when there's some big conference, and we're literally doing this tonight with Ericsson, I'm gonna go ahead and tell you who the company is. So Ericsson got some space, I got the food and drinks paid for,

they wanna get in front of a bunch of senior technology people because they're one of our sponsors. We worked our own internal network and we have about 45 senior CTOs and CIOs from the all-in-gas industry that are coming to this event tonight.

Now imagine Matt, if you're sell technology in all-in-gas, you would sell your mother, probably, to be able to come to this event. However, you don't know where it is and you weren't invited. The secret is getting that invitation

and the best way to do that is the secret to almost everything in this industry, which is to network. Get to know the right people, make sure they trust you. I've invited some people to this event that aren't part of the Ericsson team,

that are companies that are not competition with Ericsson, but I trust them so much because I know that the people I invited are not gonna try to sell to anybody. When I fill a room with CIOs, because Mark LaCour sent them an email and they show up,

what I don't want for them to do is have a bad experience. I don't want them to come to a bit where there's a bunch of salespeople selling them stuff. I want them to come to learn and network which is what they're doing. In those situations, the more people you know

that trust you, if you're a salesperson, they'll understand that they can trust you not to try to sell to the people who put in the room, the more you'll get invited to it. But the other thing, Matt, is the whole reason that I'm doing this is because of this, the podcast.

So if you have a good social media presence and you're in that part of the industry that does these type of events, just the fact that you have a strong media presence means that you probably would get an invite. So it's just, once again,

it's networking, getting to know the right people. But I do agree. Now, there's another type of after-event parties that are the opposite. They're really more for, quite frankly, networking and drinking.

It's not very strategic. All the ones that have an open invite list that are public are those. And those are great, right? Those are for, yeah. Those are massive amounts of people.

A lot of fun. Think of it as a huge party after the conference. There's nothing wrong with that. But the real value ones are the invitation. The only ones, the ones you don't know about that are extremely targeted.

But yeah, I agree with you. And like I said, it's one of those things that OGGN does with our sponsors and it's super valuable. But it's also super valuable to us, Matt. So that tonight, fingers crossed, everything goes well.

I now have 40 or 50 senior technology leaders in all gas that are gonna look at OGGN in a positive light. Oh, you brought us to something we didn't know about. We didn't get sold to. We got to learn something new. In this case, private 5G networks from the experts.

This is super valuable to me because of what I do for a living. I would tell you to empower you that are listening. You can do this too. 100%. You have a list on your LinkedIn,

people that you've met, people in your company that you could organize something like this. And you wanna be viewed as an expert, an authority, maybe a rock star, I don't know, in your space. And by getting people together

and making the connection to valuable people. Every time I have the ability to introduce somebody to somebody else that I think that that is a good match, I do it. Some people don't wanna share their network. I don't understand that.

I think it's a win, win, win, because it makes you look good as a connector. It helps them because you know that you're making a good match. And we all know referrals are the best type of business we can get.

And you could organize this. If you're at this event, there's hundreds, if not thousands of people that have walked by us here since we've been doing this. And every single one of these people has a network and has people that they know here.

And if they didn't, they could have done the prep work that we talked about previously to go meet these people, organize these people, put together a event. And guess what? Now everybody knows who they are.

You just have to take action. And from a tactical point of view, I'm gonna keep using OTC as an example because we're here, but we have people from all over the world. Yeah.

There's no way, I don't care how big your company is, that you could get this many people in the oil and gas industry from all the different countries in one place at one time. Why not take advantage of the work that OTC did

now that this global audience is here and do your own event outside of OTC. A little bit of money, a little bit of time, a little work ahead of time. And now you got a room full of high-value prospects. And 100% agree with you, Matt,

it has to be valuable for the people that show up in that room, which means you're not trying to sell to them. You're usually providing some type of education. And don't fool yourself because you can't fool your prospects.

Don't disguise your sales pitch as an educational, in fact, I don't even want your company's people talking unless they're part of a parallel. You just need your logo. Everybody knows what you do, typically, or you could put a QR code,

but you don't need to pitch. No, and I want the discussion, the education discussion, be put on experts outside of your company. It's okay if one of the panel members is your company if they're an expert,

but get other experts. Once again, that goes back to authenticity. If I go to a private event like that, and it's all the company's people speaking, I know they're trying to sell me shit. However, if they took the time to find other experts

that don't work in that company, they're really trying to help educate, which ultimately leads to sales. You just got to map that out. And that's a lot of what we do at OGGN is you map out that storytelling

of where you want to take the conversation. There's different people like, for me, anything AI, I'm super interested. I'll be at a number of the talks tomorrow afternoon because that's what I'm interested in. So if you're selling something,

you know what people in that space are super interested in and you can design a high value conversation around that. And even if you don't want to even plan out a presentation, everybody likes fireside chats. Everybody likes panel discussions and bringing in a bunch of different people

that helps build their brand. And then it makes for a valuable discussion. I would record that and then use that on social media later. How valuable will that content be when you have a bunch of experts talking about something

that's important and relative in that point in time to your industry? In regardless of what your industry is, that is so valuable. Instead of you trying to script content or coming up with yourself,

have an expert to get around and talk about the real issues. I love that. We're getting toward the end of the show. I wanted to bring this up in the beginning, but I was so excited that we actually could do it in person.

I kind of skipped over this. I want to pause speaking of accolades. Matt and I actually won, not one, but two awards. We won the Top 100 B2B Marketing and Sales Podcast. How cool is that? Yeah, it's cool.

And we also won the Top 70 Enterprise Sales Podcast. So audience, without you listening to this, Matt and I would not have won these two awards. We want to thank millionpodcast.com, which is the agency that bespoke these two awards upon us. We appreciate each and every one of you listening.

I hope you continue to listen. Our mastermind group is not growing as fast as we want it to grow. We need about 30 more people to sign up. We're not going to pull the trigger on it unless we have the right number,

because it takes the right number of people to make this valuable. So if you're on the fence about it, get off the fence and go ahead and go to the website and sign up the links in the show notes. We'll keep you updated as that progresses.

I've been building out a ton of content for this. So I'm excited to share it and I'll share it some way. And I know that this content is super valuable for people. We've been mapping stuff out. We've done a lot of work. Guys, go check out the website,

see if it's something for you. Check it out and we hope to make it come true. Yeah, regardless, we're going to help y'all. We're going to get this information out to you. Hopefully in a mastermind group, but if it may come out some other ways,

so kind of stay tuned for that. Just awesome that we won these two awards. So Matt, this is the point where we get to our LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. I have an incredible success LinkedIn story. I have an incredible conference fail.

Okay, you go first, I'll go second. No, it's not that, but I can tell you that many times people go network and talk to people and they don't make sure that their name tag is around. And then they leave after they shake people's hand, that happened a couple of times here.

Somebody didn't even have their name badge on, it was in their pop pick, people look at that. When people walk up, they look and go, who is this, who are they associated with, especially when you're meeting to the first time? I think everybody should wear a name tag all the time.

Matt, I'm right there with you. But seriously, so if you're at a conference, check your name tag and let me tell you one of the things I learned from Paige that she does. So she actually takes a little single piece of double-sided tape and she sticks on the back

of her name tag and whatever she's wearing, she sticks it so it doesn't accidentally twirl around. And it's- Turn the fail into a win right there. That's actually really good. So my LinkedIn success story is I had this young woman

reach out to me on LinkedIn, she's very transparent. She's getting ready to graduate college, actually in marketing. Awesome. And she was looking for her first job. And she literally listened to our podcast.

She had actually run across it, listened to it. And in the LinkedIn message she sent me, she referenced just enough stuff in our podcast for me to tell she really listened to it. So I responded back to her, I learned she's trying to do, I made a connection, she got a job.

That's so cool. People don't reach out to me for me to get you marketing job. A lot of this was luck, the timing was just right. But once again, to authenticity, the fact that she was able in her message to show me that she really was a listener,

not that that mattered. But what it did is it showed me that she was not spammed, she's not trying to sell me something, she wasn't a bot. So I engaged with her because she was real. I think we should put Easter eggs in our podcast towards the end.

If people are gonna reach out to us, there's like a special keyword or something like that that they have to call out. You have to listen to this podcast to hear one of the words. We didn't say it at the beginning.

Okay, audience, that's such a damn good idea, Matt, that we're gonna do it. And actually, let me tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna give away something cool, maybe not every show, but on at least one show a month, but in order to win the something that's really cool,

which may be a free interview for one of our podcasts for your company, it may be an OGG and temporary tattoo or sticker, but you're gonna have to listen to the show. We're gonna do that, Matt. I'm gonna put it in the show,

that's where we start having Easter eggs. For the audience, you've been warned, if you wanna win the free stuff, Matt, as we've given away, you have to listen to the show till the very end. I think it's gotta be,

you gotta listen to four shows. So you wanna get four Easter eggs that come together? And we put it in different places, so you actually have to listen to the whole podcast to know. You get stickers for like the small ones, and then if you have them all,

the first person gets like a bigger one or something like that. All right, you know what we could do, Matt? We could give them something free off our merch store. Okay, audience, so game on, audience, we're gonna challenge you,

but we're gonna give you away something of value because we appreciate you listening. Anyway, all of Matt's and I are social links in the show notes, sign up for our two newsletters. Like Matt said, we have some new podcasts coming out that are video first, so stay tuned for that.

They'll be all over YouTube. That's it, dude, you ready to get out of here? Let's do it. 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. Don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.