How to Sell and Win Against Bigger Competitors

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All right, thank you, rigor. Yeah, so appreciate those guys and girls. They're doing some really great stuff. Bottom line, if you have a service company, you just need to talk to them. They'll make your life so much easier.

And Matt, we got a review, but I sort of think we've already read this. But maybe I'm wrong. So I'm going to go ahead and read it. And if this is the second time you all heard it, I'm sorry. It just popped up.

It's a five-star. The only podcast of its kind. I haven't been in the industry for 10 years now. I can say I've looked for this and been unable to find it until now. All I got is sales and marketing. These guys do a great job covering relevant topics

and giving helpful tips and tricks for those in sales and marketing. They also have a great understanding and respect for how to intertwine the two and how they can help one another when working together productively. So thank you, JBA0407 for the review. And then like I said, if we've read it twice, there must be a glitch in the service that we're using that feeds us the reviews.

If we haven't read it twice, we appreciate it twice as much anyway. Well, if not, it does sound similar to a previous review, but this podcast is answering a certain question and people are speaking to that, right? There's been a void there of marketing and sales and how they communicate and they're too siloed.

And I certainly know growing up as a salesperson, not how to access or leverage the marketing department. And so I'm glad that we're doing this. So yeah. Me too. And so of our listeners, we're getting a lot of really good feedback.

I was a little concerned about our impromptu style because we literally have no idea what we're talking about until two minutes before we jump on the microphone. But I've gotten a lot of compliments on the fact that it's so genuine and real and they like the back and forth between you and I. So we're going to keep doing it this way.

All right. Let's go. Let's do it. What are we talking about now, Mark? Our topic today is how to sell and win against bigger competitors. You know, you look at the oil and gas industry.

If you're a wire line provider through tubing services, if you do sandblasting and coating, if you provide general labor, if you do AI type of stuff, there's always bigger competitors out there. And sometimes the smaller people feel like they can't compete,

but that's just plain wrong. There's a lot of ways that you compete against bigger companies and in some ways you can actually out compete them if you know what you're doing. I thought today we'd have a conversation on what does that look like and how you actually compete against bigger competitors. Now, a couple of things you have to be very aware of and don't fool yourself.

A bigger competitor has much more resources to compete for sales dollars. They have more headcount. They have more money. They have bigger reach. They have name recognition. They can do things that smaller companies can't do

like in order to capture a new client, they can do a low margin or no margin deal. Smaller companies can't afford to do a no margin deal or even a negative margin deal. Bigger companies can. Then competing head on, blow for blow with your bigger competitors

is a really, really risky strategy. Matt, are you an MMA fan? Yeah, I've actually taken MMA and I've done marketing for MMA companies. I'm not like an avid follower of it, but I'm certainly familiar with it.

So one of the things that a lot of people understand about MMA is the Greeks figured this out thousands of years ago. In hand-to-hand, unarmed combat, there's basically three areas. There's the standing area and that's where you can throw very powerful kicks and punches. There's the clinch area.

That's where you're still standing, but you're clinched up so you can't throw the big looping kicks and punches, but you can throw elbows and knees. And then there's the ground phase. The ground phase is very popular in MMA with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Those three areas, the Greeks figured out a very long time ago. And if you ever compete in MMA, which I actually have done a little bit in the 90s, the big thing is you figure out where your opponent is weakest, is your opponent weaker standing up, is your opponent weaker in the clinch,

is your opponent weaker on the ground, and you try to bring them there where your strengths are and you keep them in the area of their weakness. That's the MMA strategy. And that same strategy, I think, applies to when you're competing with larger competitors.

You want to figure out where they're weak, where you are strong, and try to keep the deal in the area where you're strong and whether it's on the ground or in the clinch, it doesn't matter. And make sure you keep your competitor in the area where they're weak. Now, the first step in order to do that is you actually have to know your competitor.

And I've said this for years. You should know your competitor's business as good as they do, if not better. You should know how they do business. You should know if they do anything sneaky or play any dirty pool, if they're doing anything unethical. You should understand how they discount things.

One of my favorites is SAP, and I think the right point in the year will offer up to a 50% discount, right? Because they had it toward the end of their fiscal year in May. 50% discount, really SAP? By knowing that, if I was competing with SAP,

I'd know already what their lowest price point is, right? Is 50% whatever their list price is. So understanding your competitors is super important in order for you to understand how to pull them and bring them in that weak area. Any comments on that, Matt?

Write out them like a turtle, right? You run out like a turtle and you try to get behind them. You go to the ground. But I think that what the analogy really shows is in jujitsu, smaller people can take down much bigger people. I actually heard this story about,

I think it was like Gracie Family or something like that. Someone broke into their house, okay? And there was something, something like, or you can fight one of the guys, right? And there was like, yeah, I'm going to pick the smallest one to fight. I don't know if this is like a real story or not,

but I heard it when I was doing some MMA stuff. And you can take down bigger components. I think that, you know, like in business, businesses could be considered war. Business could be considered, you know, fighting. But I think certainly assessing who it is

is really quite important. And there's tons of tools to be able to do that. I don't know exactly where this conversation is going and how deep we can go on the analytics side of things. But knowing your competitor is 90% almost of the work. And then it's almost like, you know,

you figure exactly where to strike. And then it's like, boom, boom. And you like hit them and you can take them down. So. Yeah, I do have to give a little bit of a feedback there. So Brazilian jitsu is literally a sport built upon the sport judo,

which is built upon the mini martial arts of Japanese jitsu. But Brazilian jitsu is designed for a smaller person to be able to dominate a bigger person, right? However, that only works if the bigger person doesn't know Brazilian jitsu. Yeah.

So just be real careful with that. So anyway, so, you know, you're 100% right, Matt, in the fact that you actually can go head to head with a much bigger competitor if you know what you're doing. Part of that is making sure you create a unique selling proposition.

A USP is what everybody calls it. What makes your smaller company different than your competition, right? Are you able to deliver quicker? Do you have a history of making sure that the problems that you solve are a higher percentage

of solving them than your competitors? Is your pricing model different? What? You have to have something that's different than your bigger competitors, and you need to capitalize on that.

Once again, back to the MMA reference, you're trying to keep your competitors in their weaker area, and you're trying to stay where you're strong, but you have to know what your unique selling proposition is in order to do that. Well, you know, and unique selling propositions

are not great customer service, right? If that's something that everybody's saying, but also it's something that's expected, that's not a unique selling proposition. Now, if you're going above and beyond on the customer service level where you're doing X, Y, Z

that nobody else is doing, okay, maybe we're talking about unique selling proposition, but it's what sets you apart from everybody else. What's unexpected above and beyond that extra mile that you're going to do for your clients or that you're going to offer or that's unique.

I like to bundle this when we're talking about direct response marketing online with something called a irresistible offer, right? Like something that, like, hey, this might not apply to certain things, so please just throw it out if it doesn't make sense.

But hey, if you, like for some clients, we say, hey, if you could offer services for a year and provide a 50% money back guarantee if, you know, like X, Y, Z doesn't happen, right? Like where it's so good that it's hard for them to say no, you bundle that with what your unique selling proposition is

and that's what actually attracts you, right? Like you don't want all the customers. You want who your ideal client is and your USP is actually that fragrance that someone's going to gravitate to, right? Like if you're a veteran owned company

and you work with veterans, right? You're trying to attract that kind of like light, right? Like you're trying to showcase that and say, hey, I want to work with other veteran companies. Like you don't necessarily want to work with everyone. You figure out who your ideal client is

and then what is something that you do that responds well to them to make that connection that's unique from everyone else? Saying you have good customer service, right? Like everybody wants to have good customer service. That is not a unique selling proposition

unless again, you're going that extra mile. But again, you want to couple it with some reason why, like it's like a note brainer that they should work with you and certainly what you're trying to do is you're trying to get them in their head to commit going with you,

whether it's committing to a small consulting engagement, whether it's filling out some kind of paperwork, taking some kind of action investment to the path towards you so they're not in the thinking move mode but getting them to move.

It's kind of like you get some inertia. Like if you get a ball rolling, it'll continue to roll in that direction and then frictions, the only thing that's going to stop it. So if you can get the ball rolling in your direction and there's not other companies providing friction

and I think that we talked about this in the prequel, Mark, is that's why the big companies get the deals, right? They have the inertia from their brand already moving in that direction and if there's no friction provided by you or somebody else, they're going to go with the bigger company.

Yeah, let me give you a couple of real examples of unique selling propositions. First, I'll use one from OGGN in that our contracts for OGGN are written on both sides. So both our side and the client side

has a 30-day out for any reason or no reason. That means that when you sign a contract with OGGN, if for some reason you want to get out of the contract or you have to do a send an email and 30 days later you're out of the contract, no questions asked, it doesn't matter what it is.

Nobody else offers that, right? That's a unique selling proposition that OGGN has. I'll tell you one that I really like is Apple. If you ever bought an Apple product, just unwrapping it, unboxing it is an experience. Why?

Because Apple spends money engineering their packaging to make it an enjoyable, high-touch, exquisite feeling. So something as simple as a box when Apple sends you something is a unique selling proposition. So there's something that you do that your competitors don't that sets you apart.

And to Matt's point, you want to capitalize on that and really understand in detail why that's unique and valuable to your buyers. All right, next one. Be nimble in your pricing. When you're competing against large companies,

let's say you're competing against Haliburton, they are not nimble in their pricing. In fact, if they need to get some type of discount or some type of payment terms that aren't the norm accepted, they have to get it improved internally and it could take months for all the right people inside of Haliburton

to approve a different pricing model they normally use. You, as a small company, don't need to do all that. You can change your pricing model literally in that moment as a smaller company. And that's something that is different than your larger competitors. Now, let me be clear here.

I'm not saying to be the cheapest person. You never want to be the low-cost leader. Even if you are the low-cost leader and you win, it's not a happy place to be because all it takes is for the job to go an extra day over or you miss something in a quote and all of a sudden you're upside down.

What I'm saying is being nimble. If you're selling a $100,000 gig and your competitor requires $100,000 of that $100,000 gig to be paid in the first 60 days, tell them you can split it up. Tell them you can take 50 grand up front and 50 grand 60 days later.

Have a payment program where you finance the work yourself internally and since you are financing internally, you can add a markup to it because that's what any finance company would do, which will actually increase your margins if you have the cash flow to support that sort of stuff. We talked about this before.

Rent your solution to them instead of sell it to them so it's their OPEX budget, not their CAPEX budget. Your bigger competitors can't do any of this stuff without a bunch of internal approval, which takes months. So just be nimble in your pricing. I love the creativity and certainly calling it being nimble is great.

The things that pop into my head, Mark, are all time kills deals. All time kills deals. If you have someone that wants to buy, you let them buy, you find some way to, again, get that ball moving. I also hit on this as far as don't be the low-cost leader. You never want to be in that position.

It's a race to the bottom. I believe you want to sell on value. I believe if the deal's not sweet enough, you don't lower your pricing. You add stuff to it. You can throw in extra add-ons. You can give them more to create more value,

but you don't want to bring that pricing down. I have a client right now that was always run on promotions and they've trained their customers to not buy unless a promotion is being run. So it's been a hard switch to elevate the brand to get their core users against that because they know that they're going to run once a quarter a really huge special and people just wait.

They just unload the demand then and they're missing out on huge margins. Really, the promotions are not meant to sustain the business because the margins aren't healthy. It's just meant to maybe be an entry point to get new clients involved. So you really want to sell on value. You really want to throw stuff in.

You really don't want to offer discounts if you can at all help it. So those are my insights to that. Back to Apple. Go to Apple and ask them for a discount on an iPhone. It doesn't happen, right? But they'll finance it for you, right?

They'll do all kinds of stuff. But you're going to pay a crazy amount for your new iPhone or whatever. To Matt's point, the value is there so intrinsically they don't need to offer discounts and that's where you want your business to be. We do the same thing at OGG and our pricing is on our website for everybody to see but we don't negotiate.

It's our pricing. Sorry, that's what it is because the value is there. All right, then when you compete against bigger guys, focus on quality over quantity. So focus on quality over quantity. Make sure everything that you do, every interaction that you have that client is world class. Make sure you follow up.

Make sure if you commit that you're going to get them something by a certain date, you get it a day earlier. So always build some lag time into your commitment so you can always over deliver. Make sure that when you roll a truck to a job site, that truck has been through the car wash and it's clean. Make sure that your guys in the field have clean uniforms.

Everything that you do to focus on quality is going to make you stand out and allow you to compete against the bigger guys. I don't know how many times we've closed deals at OGGN because people appreciate the quality of our audio. That's such a simple thing but the quality of our podcast audio is so good and by the way, people wasn't always that good.

It took us a long time to get there but that when people listen to our podcast to go, man, this is what I want to represent my brand is this quality of audio. So always focus on quality over quantity. Yeah. I don't have a lot to add there but I do want to take one step back or a few steps back to talking about competitive intelligence.

I think we didn't really hit on that or is that something we're going to cover? We're getting to. We're getting there. Yeah. I have a lot to share there. I would just say follow through on your commitments.

I mean, that's like the most common thing in business but like if I say, hey, I'm going to send you an email tonight, I'm going to send them an email tonight. Doesn't matter what, right? Do what you say you're going to do. I'll get you something by money. I would always say end of day versus like into the business day but the end of the day

EOD but whatever you commit to, whatever you do, you really just need to do what you say you're going to do and if people can rely on that, they'll trust anything else you say because they need to know what's true and untrue when they're trying to make a decision and so if they just know that if they talk to you, you're going to give them the straight deal, how it is and they can make good decisions based on good data. Everything else falls into place but like being prepared, being put together, like taking

care of your stuff, all of that goes into this person is going to follow through and this person is going to deliver and this person is reliable and consistent and I want to work with this type of person. Yeah, and to Matt's point, even if that news is bad news, share it as soon as you know it, right? You will get respect for that.

Your competitors are going to try to sales-wash everything. You make sure that you respectively tell your buyers the truth and I promise you, they may not be happy but they'll respect you and it gives you a competitive edge. Oh my gosh, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that is so important, like you don't want to cover anything up. You're dealing with big equipment, you're dealing with big contracts, like if something's

going wrong, it's better to say it upfront and it's better to let them know because you don't want to have to ever backtrack on what you're saying. You never want to, like it's always harder later to deal with it. So deal with like the molehill, not the mountain, right? Yep. Okay.

Now, here's the next thing you can do that's different for bigger competitors. Stay up to date with industry trends and make sure that you do market research continuously and incorporate that research and that data in your business. Your bigger competitors are so used to being the bigger person, they don't do this. They don't know what trends are happening this week. They may know the trends from last year or three years ago, right?

Or whatever their outside consultants have told them but they're not up to date and doing market research and staying up to date with industry trends and incorporate that in your business is going to set you eons ahead of your competitors. There we go, Matt. There's your layup for the market research. Well, yeah.

Okay. So definitely you want to be a consultant. You want to be like a sales consultant, a marketing consultant versus just a sales person, right? And the thing that's going to differentiate you, I was in the pharma industry prior to this, like I had to compete against a bunch of beautiful girls, right?

Like then they don't want to talk to some young boy. I mean, and the thing that I had to use to compete, I mean, this is just reality. Like, okay, HR me all you want. But it was like a reality of a fact of, you know, out of 10 people on our team that had a different buckets of five and five, there was four girls and there was two guys. Well, there was actually eight women and two guys like on the whole team, right?

Like that was just the consistent breakout. Well, me early in my sales career, marketing career, how did I compete? Like what kind of value did I have to offer, right? What I had to offer was knowledge. I read everything. I knew everything.

I was a resource. They would call me. They would tap me for information. So I think that that's super valuable and right when a lot of people, hopefully, well, I don't know this, but a lot of people that are listening, they might have started before something called Google, something before the internet, right?

It is the most powerful tool. Everything that you want to know is online. If you want to go do the research, you want to put in the time, you can figure it out. Certainly there's trade journals, but staying up to date with what's going on. And then, you know, I don't know if this is a direct lead into analytics, but there are a ton of tools when you're doing competitor research to figure out traffic that is coming

to the website. Certainly the trends, there's blogs, there's resources, there's influencers. We talked about this in the past. Only 5% of people, 5.3% of people are actually posting online din, right? So everybody's consuming that information, but finding the right people to listen to. So this is more of like, we're talking about listening, social listening.

Not really competitive intelligence, but there's a lot of third-party tools that aggregate different data points and you can see what keywords they're ranking, where they're located, where clicks are coming to their website. So that will give you data on assuming what their clients might be, where they're kind of doing business, what content they're producing. So what they might be going after with their strategy.

There's a lot of digital footprints online of things that you can see. There's free tools out there. There's free trial kind of tools out there. And then there's more expensive enterprise tools. A lot of people actually that trade stocks use a lot of these analytical tools to figure out, well, how is the company doing, right?

Because you can see, I can tell you, Mark, pretty close to home, but there was a client you had referred me that ended up not working out for reasons untold, but are public. And the first thing I said was, Mark, I looked at the analytics and everybody is going to their investor page on their website. And their stock price, like those signals gave me to look at their stock price, their stock price dropped by 90% or something like that.

And I didn't have any idea what was going on in their business or I wasn't looking at their 10Ks or anything like that. It was coming to me as a marketing client. And so I was looking at the analytics of the traffic and I could see what the visitors were doing and understand that there was an issue and then dig into it more and realize what was happening with the client, right?

So what people are doing online and if you don't think that what you're doing online can be tracked, you know, in the UK, they're trying to get away from some pixels and there's ways to track you. But if you have an app on your phone, the name of the Google phone is called Pixel and engineers are funny and a pixel is what you use to retarget and track people. And they basically are like, this is a marketing device.

Like for anybody that has the Google phone, it's just a very advanced way to target you. This is the most advanced surveillance tool on the planet. And it's mainly being used for marketing, you know, marketing things right now. Any apps that you have that free look Facebook, anything that you're on that you're not paying for, you got to understand what the product is and the product is you, right? And so you can take all that data, roll it into all these different things and dashboards

and spreadsheets and see all this stuff. Sales people, I think if you understood some of this stuff, it could really help you figure out what those pain points are and maybe how to pitch it. There's certainly a lot of avenues we could go with this conversation. And everything Matt just rattled off as a smaller company, you can implement quickly. Yes.

Whereas a larger company is going to have to get the IT approval, legal approval and it may never happen. So at OGG and we use a tool called Wincher. And basically we have in there all the search phrases, long tail key phrases that we're ranking for. And every day it updates me on where we rank and also where we rank against our competitors.

So each day I get an automated email with a snapshot of things that we intentionally want to rank for. So imagine if you sold one inch ball valves and you wanted to rank for one inch ball valve. So when people search for it online, you would come up first, they'd buy from you. This tool, this very simple tool shows you where you rank and where your competitors rank.

That type of intelligence is super invaluable. And if you really want to get deep into it, reach out to Matt directly and pull his company in. The amount of competitive intelligence that he can give you with your competitors is amazing, which is something that I don't care how large your competitor is, they're probably not doing and it gives you a huge head start over them, huge head start.

All decisions should be based on data, marketing has changed a lot. I deal with people that are dealing in the traditional space and they're buying print media billboards and they're like, oh, we bought it. It's not working, I guess, right? You can change stuff on the fly with digital, but really building a strategy of understanding, okay, here's our competitors, here's our market, here's how we sit in that market and understand

Google is people searching for a particular answer or something. It is the closest point from point A to point B. Okay. There are differences between paid and organic, right? People that want paid, want a deal or they need something really quickly like, A, something blew up, I need something right now, SEO is that deeper research showing up in the organic space.

You're getting like 30 extra turns on SEO and if you incorporate this into a full-on branding marketing strategy where your sales piece are actually closing the deal, but everything's teeing it up, it's a really beautiful process and that's what this whole podcast is about, merging marketing and sales and building that funnel together and the very first step in all this is looking at the analytics and designing a strategy and then it's the execution and the integration and what tools and some of the free tools that are out there that you can try.

Some of them have like a free and then a paid option, keywords everywhere, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, which is sponsored by other podcasts, AHS, which is sponsored by other podcasts, SE Ranking, there's SEO Clarity, there's Bright Edge, there's tons of different tools out there at different kind of tiers that you can use to get that competitive diligence to make good business decisions to even see what the market looks like and if you can leverage online to do that and then again, it all feeds in to the bigger funnel. Yep. And everything, once again,

everything Matt just rattled off, your larger competitor is going to be very limited in their use of these if they can even use them at all because of their size and they have legacy policies, right, that their IT buy and use policies are written in the 80s, not today. So for one of these larger competitors to try to use a social tool to look at what's going on in social, they're probably not going to ever get approval and yet you can so you can capitalize on everything Matt just rattled off and you can do it quickly. And this gives you a huge advantage over

your competitors and it's something you should be doing no matter what. I think the thing that's most visible is like chat GBT. Chat GBT from sales can be used for everything from writing emails to drip campaigns to anything like that. And these big companies are going like, you can't use this, right? And if you can't use this, like, and you're competing against somebody that can, like, you're just going to lose, right? Like, and so if you're a more nimble competitor, if you're still in the sales mode for your company, you should be leveraging

all the automation, all the AI, all the digital marketing strategies you can to get ahead and to grow a lot quicker. These big companies have big motes, big brands, they move slower, you can run circles around them, you can run circles around their sales teams, you can move fast, you can use data, you can close deals, you don't have as much integration at these big companies across the board to be able to synchronize all this stuff. And the more of these things that you can use together will just absolutely launch what you're doing. Yep. All right, my final piece,

and this is something that Matt and I both have is out hustle the competitor, literally just out hustle them, get to the sales first, try to lock up the sale before the competitor gets in the business, try to lock up the sale before it goes to RFP, give a better presentation, don't have a generic slide deck, practice your presentations, make it customizable, not just to the company you're presenting to, but literally the people that are in that room. Not only get the people in that room in your presentations, get them involved with the presentation, have them help you craft the

presentation. Your competitor will never deal this. Build more value than your competitor, don't just claim your product is better, freaking prove it, right? In front of everybody in that room and then close the deal. Try to close the deal as soon as it makes fiscal sense. Like Matt said, any delay just invites the deal to linger out there, but literally out hustle your bigger competitor and I'm telling you, you will bring these big deals in much, much faster, much, much quicker than they will and get yourself a nice fact commission check. Well, what I'll add on the

marketing side of that is use your marketing department from a graphic design standpoint if you have time or get them to help you build templates that you can use. Most of communication is visual or audio. It's not just like what's written on the paper. You a lot of times are going to leave that with them as a quasi sales piece to get that to convert. It has to be professional. It has to look nice. Again, depending on what you're trying to do, but I see so many companies not using professional graphic design and like in today's age, if you're like three people

and a dog out of a garage, right, but you have the knowledge in your head, you can look like a professional company online in your backdrop and in your collateral. And what you need to do that is you need to have a really good graphic design person agency like us or something else. We just won an award at the AMAs for a graphic design for a company that did a Series A and one of the biggest contributors to the Series A is we built them a landing page and we built them a deck and that deck made them look really presentable. It helped them tell that story and it showed

them to be the company they aspired to be and they looked a lot bigger than they did, right? And there's a lot of opportunity from a professionalism standpoint to put something together. Presentation matters, professional quality graphic design, custom graphics, so powerful. I see so many businesses like when they show me their sales process of like what they're showing people and like, oh, I have this photocopied like newspaper article in black and white. You can't even read it and they're like hand it out. I'm like, oh my gosh, okay. So there's better ways to do that and build

into your sales process quality graphic design to answer the frequently asked questions, to overcome objections and to help your salespeople better tell the story and get them through to those gates, to those next pieces. And when you close the deal or when you're about to close the deal, there's going to be potential buyer remorse. You want to follow through with the testimonials, with the reviews, with the awards, with the trust to make them feel good that they bought it. You want to show the value and you want to package it just like you talked about to bring it full

circle to Apple. Packaging is so important. So your salespeople, your graphic design, how your proposals are also easy to use. So we use technology that you can e-sign from a mobile phone and you don't have to like use your fingers to make it bigger. And most times people sign it really, really quickly. There's data behind this, payments. You want to make everything super easy to use so you can focus on delivering a great product or experience or service and not get in the minutiae, the billing or whatever. You want to have as little friction as possible. You want

it to be a great experience. You want it to look great. You want them to feel good about what they're doing. So that's how we're going to end the how to sell and win against bigger competitors. Actually though, you brought up product and Matt, check this out. I don't know if you can see it in the camera. I do. This is the Amateur Bluetooth Wireless Presenter. Thanks Amateur for sending me this. I've been using it for about a week. It is incredible. So you can't see this because we're not on video, but imagine a big ring. It literally is a ring that sits on your finger

and it controls your presentations on your laptop. But here's what's really cool about it besides just being a ring that fits on your finger is that it's Bluetooth besides having a USB dongle. So if you're a Windows user, you're used to plugging in the USB dongle for your presenter and controlling your slide. If you're an Apple user, you probably don't have USB ports on your Mac, right? Because Apple's gotten away from that. I can connect this directly to my Mac with using Bluetooth. I don't have to use the USB dongle and I can control the presentations on my Mac.

And it's just beautiful. It's rechargeable. You have to worry about batteries. It lets you know when you're down to 25% of the battery, so you have time to recharge it. It fits on your finger, so you're not going to lose it. It works seamlessly with your Mac, but also with your Windows. And it's just a great tool. Matt, it's $29. Like, it's amazing. They have all this technology. It does all this cool stuff for $20 and it has a built-in laser pointer. So we'll have a link in the show notes. Like I said, I've been using this for a couple of weeks.

I actually highly recommend this. The only thing is I don't know anything about the long-term durability. So give me a couple of months and I'll come back and let you know. But for $30, this thing is like just super awesome. Mark, you always have the coolest little tech gadgets. Well, if you're out there and you have a gadget that you want Matt and I to review, let me know. All you have to do is send us one or two of them. Actually, probably better off you send us two, so Matt and I. Yeah, like what is it? Yeah, I feel a little

left out here. Yeah, but you got the cool charger thing too that you took to the Bahamas or wherever. But yeah, actually, you know what? Yeah, send us two instead of just one or whatever it is. Nothing big and heavy. We only want to review stuff that sales and marketing people use, think of gadgets like this presenter. And we're going to tell you the truth. If it's great, we're going to tell you it's great. And if it's not great, we're going to tell you that as well. But big shout out to Amateur for sending me this. I'm actually putting this in my backpack. This

is part of my toolkit now. Like I said, link in the show notes, well worth the money. Also, in the show notes is Matt and I's social links. If you want to connect us on all of our social, it's there. Our Insiders group, we're still working on it. We're hoping to now set this fall. That is going to be super awesome. And then LinkedIn fail or tip of the week, Matt, you're going to love this fail. So I had somebody reach out to me on LinkedIn that wrote a custom introduction, right? So it wasn't just generic connect with me.

It seemed reasonable. They mentioned all the gas global network, which means they at least read a little bit of my LinkedIn. And I went to their main page on LinkedIn and I was looking at the image and I clicked on the image to expand it. And it said Getty on the bottom. And if you don't know what I'm talking about people, Getty is a company you could buy images from. So this was a fake profile that almost fooled me, except they made the mistake that when you zoomed in on the image, you could see the Getty labeling, which is what Getty places on their image. If you don't

pay for it so that you could tell that it came from them and it wasn't somebody else. So they almost got me, Matt, except they didn't think about removing the Getty from the watermark. It's called a watermark, moving the Getty watermark from the image. So that's the LinkedIn fail of the week is if you create a fake profile, don't use a picture that people can identify that it's fake. AI, you can create endless people. There's actually a lot of really interesting data we're exploring on that as far as talent goes. Like you can use AI generated talent and

images to merge images and all kinds of stuff that's rolling out. But I can't wait honestly. Facebook just launched like a verified option. I think a lot of people have been really down about that shift, but that means we're shifting from advertising to utility, right? Where you pay to use it, even if you charged a dollar, like I'm not saying that they're going to do that. I wish it wouldn't be as high as it is, but I like that they're charging because then people can't build all these fake bot farms and do all kinds of craziness online because it's just spam, right?

Like, I mean, I feel like LinkedIn, like it's just so spammy and like all these people screw up all my analytics all the time because they submit forms or they schedule calls and appointments. And it's just people that want to like send me information, you know what I mean? Like in hopes that I might buy their spammy thing. And I'm like, buy how you're introducing yourself to me. I already don't want to do business with you. So just stop doing that because you're messing up data analytics for a ton of people. People don't like it. Like don't be a spammer. That's my tip.

Yeah, that's a good one. All right, let's get out of here. Remember, 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.