Hitting the Ground Running for 2024

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. Welcome back, everybody. It's Matt and I.

Once again, recording in person. In this episode, we're going to talk about how do you hit the ground running in 2020? Yeah! Okay, I'm apologizing ahead of time. We bought a new piece of gear. Actually, a big shout-out to Zoom.

They're actually loaned us this. It's a Zoom P4, which is a digital recorder made for podcasting. And it has sound effects. And Matt is like an eight-year-old little boy playing with the sound effects. Thank you, Zoom. Okay, sound effects aside, hitting the ground running.

All right, so first thing is, if you have not developed a plan for your sales for 2024, you're too late. You should have developed it that last quarter at the very end of the year because it's hard to drive new sales, hard to make new relationships. You should have spent the time planning. However, if you didn't, we're here to help you.

So I know everybody's ready, right? Everybody's ready for the beginning of the year right now. Well, the top 1% is for sure. But if you're not ready, you need to get ready because I would even tell you if you're here in Houston, like this freeze this week,

next week it's like all systems fired, right? Well, there's a budget going on in all the gas, right? So new budgets have been released. Most companies' fiscal year runs along the calendar year. That money actually doesn't usually hit the bank account until February, which is just a couple of weeks away.

In fact, by the time you hear this, it'll probably be just maybe a week away. You need to get ahead of all of that couple of things from a sales point of view. If your territory is managing existing accounts, you need to put together a list of all your existing accounts and the contacts in that account. And I want you to go in your CRM and look at when's the last time

you had any contact with them. And I want you to turn that list on its head, flipping around. So the contacts that you have not reached out to lately are the first people you need to reach out to, the contacts that you reach out to just a month ago or the last people. You need to reach out and simply say,

I'm here, I'm here to help. I want to make sure that if you need anything, you're aware that we're here. You need to warm those relationships up. If your salesperson and your job is to bring in new accounts, you need to have a prospect list of people that can buy from you that are currently using either a similar product

or have a problem that you solve. And on that list of prospects, you need to have a dream client. So I'll be very honest with you, Matt. My dream client with OGGN is Apple. I want to close a deal with Apple. Now, will I do that?

Probably not. Does it keep me from trying? No, I've actually had sales conversations with Apple. I've actually talked to real people about working with OGGN. I would tell you that if you help them push their AI app store that they're about to develop, there might be an end.

Well, I love you, Apple. I really do. However, Matt, from a marketing point of view, they want to be associated with oil and gas in their name. At some point, I hope that to change. And when it does change, I'm going to be right there

with existing relationships already with Apple to go. Now it's time for us to work together. That's my dream client. Well, here's what I look at now from a marketing perspective. If you have that list, you have your CRM ready to go. Hopefully you have some tags.

Hopefully you built the CRM properly where you have some tags where you can put them on a re-engagement drip email if they're not already on it. Also, there's like fantastic tools. Like if you know that someone's somewhere in the sales cycle, I use some software that I can drop ship, basically, cards.

Like, hey, welcome to the new year. Hey, happy birthday. Hey, whatever. Where they're all in a database. I just hit a button, send it. It's like a dollar, like, or 50 cents or something like that,

where I can reach those people and create those touch points. Right now, yes, it's about warming up the list. It's about figuring out those pieces of content you want to push to your audience, putting dollars behind it, doing the email drip emails and automation. I call it like infinity drips.

But different drips, you can reach people. And then even crossing the border, because a lot of people are working from home, if you have any kind of address, like sending a physical thing to people is so powerful today. I did not realize that.

So we launched a merch store, by the way, people. If you want a shirt with Matt and I's podcasts on your chest, you can just go to the OGGN.com, hit merch. I want your face. I want a big one with your face. Well, the funny thing is,

when I look at all the shirts that have been sold with the podcasters' face on it, there's only one that's been sold over again. That's Paige Wilson. So more people are running around with her face on it. That is true.

That is true. But to your point, one of the things I learned about our merch store is that I can send our merch to our prospects, and they love it. To your point, something physical is different,

which is my next tip. Look at what your competitors are doing and do something different. If your competitors from a sales point of view are setting up preliminary calls via web, get in your car and go meet your clients at their office, right?

If your competitors are meeting their clients in the office, then you set up some type of automation to make sure that your group is constantly updated and informed. You can create a newsletter just for your prospects or just for your existing clients. Oh, yeah.

It's a wonderful tool to stay in front of them on a regular basis so they remember you. And how do you know what your competitors are doing? Well, they post it on social media. There's digital intelligence, right? You should know your competitors' business

as good as they do, if not better. And if you do, they're no longer competitors. The other thing from a sales point of view, make sure you have budget to get stuff done. It's a new year. There's a bunch of conferences, trade shows,

a lot of which will be a waste of your money, don't waste money, and a lot of them, but a lot of them will be valuable if your clients are going to be there. Set up the meetings ahead of time. Yep, they have a conference strategy, right?

Oh, yeah. Set up meetings ahead of time. Look at doing small social gatherings adjacent to the conference. Yes. So maybe you don't go to OTC and spend a million dollars on a booth.

However, maybe you set up a cocktail event at a hotel while everybody's here for OTC. The conference is an excuse to get in-person meetings. Yep. And if you set that up, I mean, conferences are so valuable,

but not just going and attending. You already know the conference is going to be successful prior to that, and then what you can do to just kind of cover the conference, and even when I can't go to conferences, but there's a conference I want our presence at,

sometimes you can utilize their Twitter handle and get visibility there for people that are engaged. You can geofence the location. You can even use like Facebook and Twitter. Anybody that mentions these words or in this geographic area that has like this demographic,

you can run those ads. So you can do that to get that support. I think the people, unless you're, well, have a podcast booth and everybody's coming to you all the time at the conference, sometimes you're anchored to that table.

Like sometimes it's better to walk that floor, but really any conference I've been to, it's the meetings I made outside or a meeting up with somebody that I hadn't met before and I want to make that like face-to-face connection. There is so much pre-work that goes into conferences

to make him successful. From a sales point of view, the next thing you should do this early year to make sure this year's successful, get out of your cube, go walk over to the marketing department,

make your friends, buddy, up. This is the whole reason that I do this podcast is that we think marketing sales should be joined to the hit. We don't think we know it should be. If you haven't done that yet, this is the time to do it. And especially if you're a salesperson

that's bringing in the bucks for the company, you have a little bit of leverage internally, a little political leverage, go talk to a head of marketing and go, I'd like to bring your marketing person with me on a sales call. Now, you're going to get a little bit of pushback

because the head of marketing is going to go, well, then she's not doing her job. The truth is she is doing her job because she's learning what the clients are saying because she's with you on a sales call. Super, super important.

Matt's got his finger on the side of the back. Well, I just want to acknowledge what Mark said. Cheers, cheers. Great point, Mark. And also I do have the tipper fail of the week. It came to me as you were talking.

And really, you just hit it. Sales and marketing need to be working together. Your marketing team is desperate. No, I mean, I'm desperate. I'm not going to say that, but they want to work with you. Well, no, sometimes they are desperate.

They could be. They could be. If you're in an organization, especially a big organization, and you're number one complaint about marketing is the quality of their leads, that is your fault, not their fault. Marketing is doing the work, but they have to have the direction from you

and the input from your clients. And if you let your marketing person just listen in on sales call, they'll gather information and the quality of the leads, their feed, you will go up exponentially. I promise you. You want to take them with you.

You want them to be your friend. You want them to understand the stories. And they're going to shine a spotlight on you with the rest of the organization. And they're going to use you as kind of a content creator for them because marketing is only as good as what they understand

and what they have access to. And then you got legal issues if you're a bigger company to get stuff pushed through. But well, that's why the CRO position, right, created to bring these two together. And it's so funny because, you know,

I've talked to a number of like sales managers that don't think marketing works or don't think the leads are good. Going back to what I said in the last podcast, it's a mirror. Okay. You're putting bait in the water.

And if you're not getting the right kind of fish, there's a reason for that. Maybe you're not going deep enough. You're just getting spam. Maybe you don't have enough hooks in there. But I can tell you that every person that I've ever interacted with

in some form or fashion is on social media, on the internet somewhere. And if you get them at the right time and you show them the right information, they will take action and raise their hand. 100%, which brings me to my next point.

This is always funny to me because Matt and I literally don't rehearse any of this. So my next point is if you're not utilizing social media as a salesperson, this is your year to do it. Pick up your phone, shoot some video,

go ahead, push, publish. You've never done it before. But look at all of your peers. We'll take LinkedIn, for example. I don't care what piece of the oil and gas industry you're selling into, upstream, midstream,

downstream service companies, I guarantee you you have competitors that are on LinkedIn posting videos that's showing them as a thought leader. Guess what happens if you don't do it? You're going to disappear.

And there's literally no excuse. I know it's scary. You have to do it. I'm going to balance that statement by saying, I want to consume you. There are pieces of content that you need to create and that you can

outline and that you can create. But guess what? You can take that one piece of content and you can... All right, I'm going to put a dollar a day towards having this reach more people. I sat with a realtor over the holidays

that had 400 Instagram videos on her phone. And I said, some of these are evergreen, which you could reuse. Why don't you post them on YouTube or other people can find these

if you're targeting like out of state, for example. Like her mind was like blown. You know, I didn't really look at it as like a friend, but I was like, she is grinding creating all these videos and she's working, I think,

way harder than you have to. Again, if you develop that strategy and you lay out what you're trying to do, you definitely do want to turn over content and you can see even in like Facebook ads and stuff like that, you got to freshen it up.

You don't have to be producing content every day, but you do need to take the step and cross the threshold to become a content creator because here's one data point for you and I said last podcast, you need like one data point. Okay. I think it's

95% or 96, something crazy. I don't know the exact number of people on content consumers. Only 5% or content creators. Yeah, that's LinkedIn. That's the numbers of LinkedIn. Only 5% are actually creating content.

Is that on insane? Yes. And sale. You don't want to do video. There's other formats you can use. You can actually write it. It could be a print. You can actually record audio like a podcast.

You have to start creating a content, educating your buyers or your future buyers and the problems you can help them solve. It is not an option in 2024. You have to be there. Now, here's my next thing for sales professionals.

What have you done to develop yourself and your sales skills? I just mentioned how you have to be online. You have to be producing content to show off your thought leadership. If you're scared of doing that, there's hundreds of courses out there. There's books. There's videos.

What have you done to up your sales game? When is the last time you read a modern sales book? Sales techniques have changed over the years because the way people buy have changed. Some of the old sales books from the classics

still have a lot of value in them, but things have changed. Look at some of the more modern authors that are online. They're talking about sales effectiveness, sales implementation. Go to seminars. Take courses.

If you don't invest into yourself as a professional sales person, once again, you get left behind. I really want to do this joke one, but I can't quite get there with this. Whatever Gary, the always-be-selling,

the car, I'm sure at Boiler Room, ringing the phone still works and there's businesses that use that. That's not what we're talking about here. Oil and gas,

just like a number of other industries, are still operating 30 years behind all this technological advancement. We're the last to go. But you know, that's more of another good point.

Do you have a prospecting strategy? That prospecting strategy should not be calling people you don't know on the telephone. Honestly, that worked really great in the 80s. I was in the middle of that.

I had a whole team of inside sales people that had nothing but dial for dollars. And in today's world, it's the process I know still works, but back when it was very effective, there was no voicemail,

there was no e-mail. The only business communication tool was a telephone and people answered it. And if you were good on the telephone and you could capture their attention quickly, they would engage with the conversation.

Now, we had Michael Perdone on last year who still is a big champion of actually dialing for dollars or cold calling. But even he will be the first one to say that you do your research up front, whereas in old days, you just had a list that you went down.

I think we talked about direct mail earlier and I think picking up the phone is different because people don't do it. But I would tell you what those pre-call appointment schedules, which does still work, have been replaced with

is people out there warming up prospects on social media as the company or whatever following certain people, making comments, posting appropriate things in groups,

getting that brand out there, warming people up to it because one of the things that I think a lot of people don't see and sales is, I'm not going to do it. There's another statistic on how many times you have to actually

touch a prospect to close them on the sales side. It's around eight times. Yeah, and people stop after three. You know this data and you don't take advantage of it. On marketing, you have to touch people so many times

to get them to one, they have an issue. Two, are you the one to solve that issue if you've even identified that issue? And then also, I want to work with this person because there's a barrier

there of like, I don't know this company. I don't know who I want to talk to. Maybe this is a delicate situation for my company or whatever. But guess what? If there is a personality or on social media, they look you up

and they've seen your stuff and they're familiar with you, there's so much higher chance they're going to engage you. Yep, 100%. So the next thing to be successful is here in my book is Matt and I just talked about a whole bunch of things.

Put it in your calendar. If you don't put it in your calendar, like most people, it won't happen. If you look in my calendar, everything goes in my calendar. Literally when I work out, when I cold call so I have Wednesdays blocked out to cold call

because I love it. People think I'm crazy. Take everything we just talked about, figure out how to work in your life and put it in your calendar. The other thing is, and this comes straight from old Stephen Covey, in habit of sharpening the saw, take care

of yourself as a sales professional. Oh my gosh. It's beginning of the new year, you just came out of the holidays, you probably put on a few pounds. Self-care. Self-care. Clean up your diet a little bit, make sure you get enough sleep, watch the alcohol consumption,

try to get to a gym or whatever makes you happy from a physical activity point of view. Martin, that is what I think we should talk about next is mindset. If we haven't already covered that because it's the beginning of the year, I believe you can't sell anything

if you're in a bad space, period. Like I think the full stop, like that's the most important thing before all of this is mindset and we're at the beginning of the year so we need to come in the year so we need to cover that soon. So I just put it in the show notes for our next episode,

our next episode we will talk about mindset because I agree with you 100%. Alright, next thing from a sales point of view to have a killer 2024, make sure you have a stretch goal. Especially if you work for a medium to large company,

go talk to whoever handles your compensation and go, hey, normally I get whatever 15% commission or a bonus doubt on hitting certain metrics and everything. I want a stretch goal. What if instead of hitting my goal,

what if I do 150% of my goal? I want a multiplier in there. Give yourself an incentive for this year financial incentive because look, salespeople, we know what motivates you. One of the things that motivates you is the money

that you make, your W2s. Give yourself a financial incentive to knock it out of the park. One of the ladies that we interviewed previously, I did a deep dive with her on her tool and I don't want to dissuade you on the money thing

because money is always helpful but that's not the biggest motivator. It's so crazy. There's so many different factors. No, I agree. Not everybody's motivated by money but I would think most successful salespeople,

one of the things that do motivate them is money and the whole reason I throw this in there is to give yourself a stretch goal, a prize. Regardless, and if you're not motivated by money, if you're motivated by money. Figure out what it is. Figure out what it is

and grow in that direction. If you want to take an extra week off and go to the Bahamas, talk to your management. If I do 150% of my number, that internal motivation of having that stretch goal in front of you

will drive behavior like you have no idea. So I would tell you, even involved in like the self-development and stretch goal, what I would add from the marketing side is there's been a lot of conversations and talks and people like, that's one of the most

interested topics when I do stuff on my other podcast is about AI. Learn to use AI. Learn how to leverage it. Learn how to make it more efficient because AI is not going to replace you in the next 18 months but people using AI will.

Yep, all right. We use a tool called Clawed AI, which is fantastic. If you need to, the thing I love about it is you can upload documents to it. So I can upload a PDF that's very technical and I can ask Clawed, can you break this down

for an eighth grader, which is like my reading level? Okay, another thing to make sure that you just kill it this year in sales is get out of your comfort zone. If you normally deal with engineers from a sales point of view, if you normally deal with accounts

payable people from a sales point of view, go to your same client companies and just make friends and introduce yourself to different business use that you don't normally sell to. I've seen this over and over and over again where you think

your buyer is, let's say, engineers come to find out there's actually people in health, safety and environmental, HS&E that also have an interest in what you do but you won't know that unless you get out there. So expand your reach and sales people.

How many times in your career have you had this killer account, this killer deal and all of a sudden it goes dark and you have one contact left. Oh my gosh, having that champion. The way to prevent that is to go

wide into your existing accounts and most sales people don't. Myself included, it took me a long time to learn this. Most sales people go into an account, you have the person that's going to buy from you, that's where you spend all your energy and time

and then you close the deals and you move on to the next one. However, long term wise if you lose that one relationship, your hose, make a goal that you're going to go deeper and wider in your accounts this year. It's the same company but if something happens

you have other connections so you can continue the process. Mark, I lost one of my biggest accounts in like the last 18 months that I've had for so many years and it was because of that one reason the top person left

and then somebody else came in and we kind of onboarded that person then that person, I don't know why all of a sudden quit and then someone else came in and had their whole team and I was like I'll fly up to Seattle like whatever.

Nope, they're like I got my own people like bye-bye and I got the 30 day or whatever the contract notice and it happens and I should

have over those years and let's defend like not traveling during COVID or whatever but I had one very, very, very strong connection and I didn't build out the network and this is what happened.

Yeah, I got two more tips and then I'm done. So the next thing is and you've heard me say this on this show for years that you should know your competition better than they know themselves and then they're not competition. However, I know most sales people

don't spend the time to learn their competition because you're busy and I'm telling you that's a mistake. So make it a goal this year. Put time in your calendar to learn your competition. Go to their lunch and learns. If you need to,

make a fake email address so they don't know that you're a competitor. Study their literature on their website. Talk to their clients. If you're in a competitive situation and your client or your prospect is buying

from your competitor, take that prospect after lunch and ask them why. Don't try to change their mind because you're not and that's not the right situation. Do it. What you're doing is gathering intelligence. Learn your competitors. I cannot reinforce this enough.

If you learn your competitors, they're no longer competitors. You know how to sell against them and you know where there might be weak points with what's going on and usually getting that lay of the land just kind of helps

you approximate what you should be doing or serious about your... And in a competitive situation, your competitors may have some clients that you don't want to take. It may be the margins are so low that your business strategy from a

blocketing tackling point of view is to make sure your competitors only have the low margin deals and you take the less number of deals that are higher margin. Let me tell you what happens after a while. Your competitor goes bankrupt if they continue

to go after the low margin deals. It doesn't mean you have to try to take business away, but you would never know if they're doing that. How about just go to lunch with your competitor and sit down because you never know

that's not necessarily adversarial like meeting other people in the industry. I've had some of the most productive meetings sitting down with people that would consider them competitors and great things have always come out of it.

I used to do that when I was at Forrester Research. I would intentionally reach out to my competitors and engage them and try to take them to lunch. I would tell you this much, most of them won't because they're scared, but to your point, Matt, the one or two that did

are now lifelong friends of mine to this day. Even though we were competitors, we had so much in common. Think about it. We had the same clients. We're selling the same product. We use a lot of the same techniques.

Of course, we became buds. This didn't make us do anything unethical. We still compete it and then when they change companies or I change companies, now I have this lifelong sales probe money of mine. That knows what you went through.

It's just like the military, right? I have eight hours a month that is in my calendar that is sacred. I never override it and all it's there for is to learn. Now, don't use as an excuse to go to cocktail events

and saying that you're learning. Not that you can't learn from a cocktail event, right? You should have time to go interact with people. That should be on your calendar too. But go learn. Do research on trends. Do research on what's changing,

what's new in marketing. Do research on different sales, enable it tools, different technologies. Ask your marketing peers, hey, what tech stacker y'all use it and learn it. You don't have to learn as good as they do,

but I tell you what, like Matt's talks, you don't know how to implement a drip campaign on your own. Well, guess what? Guess how much more powerful you are than other salespeople that depend on somebody else to do that for them.

Build the skill sets that you need. I'll tell you, Mark, I have read so many books. I used to read like a book a week before I had kids and got married and all that, but I can tell you all my books for a particular thing.

What's value based selling, or how to build a team, or whatever it is. Titles are super important. Those are important to Google, but essentially I would find books and then I would get like two or three of them

that were all on that topic and then I would read them, I would highlight them, I would figure it out, and then I would acquire that skill that I needed and then I would try to go implement it and learn from that and now you have YouTube and certainly like the Forbes articles and whatnot,

like they're not very valuable, they don't let the deeper stuff. Sorry, Forbes. I don't like Forbes, I don't write for them anymore. They rejected a lot of my content saying it was like too long and it was too complicated,

so I'm not a huge fan. I used to be a content creator for them, but essentially figure out, again, mindset, I almost think that you need to figure out where you want to go and what are the skills that you need to have to get there

and then picture that in your mind and we'll go into this more, but to get to that point, and that's how you're going to grow and get better and to become that person you want to be.

Again, I think it's super important. Yeah, so we're getting to mindset in our next episode, which I'm actually looking for that. I think it's about time to wrap this thing up. You know the drill, two links for our two newsletter and the show notes, the links from Matt and I,

social profiles are in there. Soon I'll be adding TikTok to that. Our Insiders group, we're frantically working on that. It is going to be the schnizzle. We're not frantically working on that. We need the community for sales

and marketing people in the oil and gas industry really looking forward to that. All right, now it's time for our LinkedIn failure tip of the week. Yeah, okay, so you were talking about conferences and something that we just did earlier here

at the Canon, pull out LinkedIn. You click on your network, I think it is, and then it opens up an option which you can scroll with your hand where it creates a QR code. And I don't know if we've used this in the past,

but certainly right now, but your business card needs to have a QR code on it. But man, that LinkedIn thing to connect with people, I use LinkedIn as literally my instant messenger, whatever, or Slack or whatever you want to call it,

for anybody that's not at my company. And I always have LinkedIn pulled up that builds that bridge and that connection. And so you need to be connected with them on LinkedIn. So that's a great place and then it tracks who you connected with last

and like in your network so you can find them again. So if you go to a conference, but I think understanding how to use that because most people don't, and I just open it up and I say, use your phone, grab it. If you have the LinkedIn app, it opens it up, blah, blah, blah.

But that is a great, great business card if you're not using it. It really is. And so what Matt is basically telling you is that you can open up a QR code inside of LinkedIn that other people can put their phone's camera on

and it automatically transfers their contact information. It is a great tool. LinkedIn is a great tool, as much as we make fun of that. Okay, sorry. I'm going to take that away from you.

Actually, this is probably the point you get out of here. All right, remember folks, make a difference and 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.