How to Sell Engineered Products

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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, Matt. Matt, you're actually doing this in person this time. I love it. And we have a guest. How you doing to your Chris? Very good. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. We're at the Canon, and if you don't know what the Canon is, it is the coolest co-working space in the Houston area.

If you need a place to go work for a day, go up to the front desk, tell them OGG and sent you, they'll give you a free desk pass, and they won't even try to sell you anything. Yeah, good people, great location. Chris, Penwell reached out to me and said, you wrote a book called How to Sell Engineered Products, and I reached out to Matt and go, we have to get you on the show, because this is the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, and that's like just a perfect fit. So before we get into it, just real quick, why did you write

this book? Well, I'm an engineer, and I've been working in sales and marketing, product development, and there really was not a sales book available to teach you how to do sales in that specific environment, because you're engineering your product while you're selling, and those techniques do not appear in any kind of how to sell books. None that I've ever seen, and I read your book, and it was really well written, and before we turn the microphone on, you were teasing me, saying, well, you have to say that. No, I don't. I wouldn't tell you it was well written. I just

wouldn't say anything, but I really like the approach that you took. So one of the things I want to start the whole conversation with is we have a lot of senior sales and market people listen to this show. What's different about selling engineer products versus other type of B2B sales? Right. So B2B traditionally is defined as a business between two businesses, usually in the context of e-commerce. I'm going to buy my supplies or simple machinery and just go after that. That assumes that your products are ready to be purchased on a website. Right. So engineered

products really should be engineered to order products, but we couldn't put that into title act. It's got a little too long, right? So there are a lot of business out there, a lot of large companies that engineer products specifically for project, and it changes all the time. So big names like Siemens and GE and whoever, when they're selling to the chemical industry or the power industry, constantly customize their products. So they engineer it specifically for the client's project. For the application. Yeah. So that's engineered to order, and that's a very important

difference to just B2B. Yeah. You know, it's interesting about that. I never thought about it, but when I look at the oil and gas industry, if you look at something like a blowout preventer or a tree that goes on a well, even though Exxon and Chevron may be operating in the Gulf of Mexico right next to each other, their engineers spec those blowout preventers and those trees differently. So the manufacturer can't make one size fits all because their customers don't want one size fits all. They engineer specifically to the specifications that Exxon or Chevron comes back with. I never

even thought about from a sales point of view because you're right in that you're selling a product that's in development. Right. That's a big deal because Exxon and Chevron or BP whoever else specified differently. And then on top of that, they'll probably engage in engineering company who then puts another 10 inches of specifications on top of that. So now before you even get an inquire, you have to go through 20 inches of specifications, comment on that, scope it, price it, deliver it. There's a huge effort to do a project like that. Yeah. And actually,

interestingly enough, I mentioned I just rattled off Exxon and Chevron. But to your point, they both approach that differently. For their subsea installs, Exxon has its own subsea engineers that design and spec everything. Chevron goes to the manufacturer like Technic PMC and uses their engineering, but they tell them what the wealth parameters are. So even between two competitors, it's two different processes. If you're trying to sell that, you have to understand the difference between company one and company two. Absolutely. So this does differ from company to company,

and it will differ from OEM to OEM, how they can respond to it, how much pre-engineering have they done, what they can adapt, have they supplied before to Exxon, do they have something similar they can use, and even which part of the world. I can tell you Exxon in Singapore is not going to behave the same way as Exxon in Houston. Oh boy, we could have that conversation all day long. Matt, you could jump in there. Well, I just swallowed some water, but what I would say is there's a lot of parallels here to actually selling big marketing packages, right? Because it's

very customized to whoever you're selling to, and they all have specific needs. It's not managed services out of a box. You have to do consultative selling. You've got to understand what their needs are, and then you're building a marketing program specific for them, and then that even dovetails into all the personalization. So there's actually, as you get into this, I can see there being a lot of parallels, and it's very hard. I mean, for everybody, it's very hard. It's very easy, I think, to just, here's my product, here's my widget, I sell it, buy it, right? You're focused

on one side of the market. Now you're focused on selling, managing, and delivering it in real time, and there's so many different factors you've got to consider. Well, and you got that right, the words are filling exact specific needs, and that's different from project to project. So it's B2B on steroids. So we're talking about the sales process, but what you're also talking about is business strategy, and those two have to connect in order to make the customer happy, and for the sales team to get their commission check. What's that connection between the strategy

and the sales process? Well, they're very simple. So if you're just doing B2B, you're going to have a sales force, they already know what the bill of materials look like, the price, they don't have to go back to the organization to have any questions answered. If you're doing an engineer to order product, oh god, I need an engineer who can give me a bill of material that's specific for the project. I need an estimation engineer who can cost that. I need a project manager who can tell me when they can deliver that very specific product, supply chain, erection and commissioning. So there are a

lot of different departments that must be involved just to make a quote. So what does the sales cycle look like on that? And how do you control cost because you're still bidding at this point? The sales cycle can be very, very long, right? So we're talking oil and gas, we're talking power customers typically, but now even heavy industry manufacturing data centers are in there. So a multi-year sales cycle is very obvious. Sometimes multi-decades and end users and customers, they will go through many different phases, sometimes three or four gated processes. So basic

engineering, pre-feed engineering, feed engineering, et cetera. I've heard of one Kemple company that goes to 14 different gated processes before they make a purchase decision. On their RFP, on their OSH. That is. Yeah, and if you think about that, think about how complex and how many moving parts and all it takes is one moving part to fall out of place because thinking things like cash flow. So because it's a long complex sales and there's different checkpoints, you could probably have billing milestones, right? So you have to complete certain tasks and both parties have to

sign off on it. It's probably factory assurance testing. And so the parent organization is looking at cash flow for these large complex projects. And if you miss one thing, like the house of card tumbles down, right? Well, cash flow is very important. And now you have two people on the same contract playing that game in opposite directions because the client doesn't want to pay the money up front to protect his cash flow. But the original equipment manufacturer needs that money to finance a multi-million dollar project, right? And to get that right is very important

because the margins are not necessarily very large. Right. So cost of money, cost of project, then you have liquidated damages on delivery, perhaps. You have to be able to execute. It's a tug-of-war game. It's a tug-of-war game. But Matt, just think about all the different pieces of your own organization that's involved. Forget about the customer. Think if you're the delivering organization, all the different internal groups that have to come along and align to be able to deliver this in a way that's cost effective on time, on budget. It's amazing.

It's so nuanced. Right. Oh my gosh, yeah. The coordination is. The coordination is immense. Yeah. And you know, it's, you mentioned the difference between Exxon Singapore, Exxon Gulf of Mexico. I want to go down that rabbit hole too. It's basically differences in culture. Different parts of the world have differences in culture. And the same organization internally have usually multiple business units, but also geographic units, right? That don't often talk to each other. So if you're doing business in Brazil, let's say Exxon Mobile, you're probably dealing with

Brazilians, which is a different business culture than if you're doing business in Exxon Mobile in North Sea, which are probably Norwegians. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because now you have to understand culture if you're in the sales role. Oh, big time. And your examples are great because I've done business in all these worlds, actually lived there partially. And so first of all, an end user client is not monolithic, right? They don't hold traditionally in the central spot one P&L. Right. So every basin, every plant is at least one different P&L. Talk about a large

refinery. It could be 11 different P&Ls in one refinery. Yeah. So they're not monolithic. They can pick and choose different things and they will. Legal rules are there that make things different. And then their supply chain preferences. Yep. And even national laws, right? Local content. You mentioned Norwegians or the Brazilians. They're famous for that. I love Brazil. I love Norway. I do have to make a little comment here though. I don't know how those two countries work together. The Brazilians will be two hours late

for their own meeting. And if you're one minute late in Norway, it's an insult. And yet somehow they manage to work very well together. So just, what's to get two totally different cultures? Right, right. And I can relate to that because I was representing a German company in India. And India is one of those countries similar to Brazil where, you know, you don't have to be on time always, right? That culture doesn't exist. And there's a famous expression because India is its own time zone. No other country shares the same time zone.

I didn't know that. It's called Indian Standard Time. And it's half hour different from anybody else. And the joke goes that that's why we're half an hour late all the time. But that's just a joke. I've done business in India. It really is a fascinating culture. I think they're going to pass up China both in GDP and population growth at some point in my lifetime. It's amazing how quick that country's growing. I love their digital strategy. You can go get, like, anything set up, a bank account with your thumbprint or your iris, I think, you know,

and they've rolled out this blockchain that's working, like, so the technology components, I've listened to a number of podcasts on what's going on. And even the two brothers, there was one that bought the telecom industry. And there's one that bought the oil and gas and the embodying. Yeah, fascinating story. I really think India is amazing. I've done some business in India with contractors and things of that nature. Now, it's actually really nice to do business in India, because the Indians will tell you exactly what they want.

It's a high end specification, but they also tell you how they will evaluate what's the cost of power, what's the cost of emissions, cost of delivery, what perks are there, right? So they're very specific and they give you a really good guideline, typically, like ONGC or Engineers India Limited. Whereas in North America, they'll say what they want, but it can change. Right. And they won't tell you how to evaluate. Fascinating stuff. So you got to think a little bit more on your feet, be a little bit more intuitive than, let's say, sometimes in Asia.

Yeah. Boy, we're going to go down. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, because actually I'm going to go down that rabbit hole a little bit. One of my little pet peas we're doing business in Asia is culturally, they don't like to say no. And so if you ask them, can you do this by Wednesday and they know they can't, they won't tell you. And it was so aggravating until I learned that. But just once again, difference in culture that if you're a salesperson, you need to understand that. Right. And that's very true, especially more towards the East Asian

side, saying no in Japan, even China is a big deal. South Asia a little bit less so. How do you navigate that though, if because all these things have to work in concert? And if you're not getting the facts on the side, you have to hedge in some way. And yeah, I was working once for a company did a lot of business in Japan. And our subsidiary in Japan was running into technical implementation problems all the time. So I went there specifically. And we asked, well, why is this happening? You do know that these are not good technical

solutions. Well, the customer told us and we can't say no. Okay, I said, let's have that conversation with the customer. I won't say no. But I will explain to them if we do this, and we fail and we make a bigger problem for the customer. That approach worked. Yeah, that's experience. I think maybe, Matt, to answer your question, you just have to have the experience of working in those different cultures. So in my career, I've worked every place there's oil. And I never really found like a book to like help me prep,

you know, for the culture was just make sure I had a partner that kept me from making bad mistakes and then doing it long enough and kind of learn the culture. Right, right. So like you ever drove in Mexico, Matt, where traffic laws are like just a suggestion. But after a while, you kind of get the hang of it. And then you come back to the US and you're like driving like a crazy person because you used to drive in Mexico. I drove in China one time and there's bikes going everywhere and oh my gosh, yeah, the lights are just a suggestion. Like it's

so it takes a lot of flexibility, calm down. Let's tackle it. This is different. I didn't see this coming and experience, like you said. Yeah, so let's bring this back to the book. So one of the things that you talked about that I love is the importance of marketing and product development. Let's talk a little bit about that. Right. So believe it or not, there are a lot of companies out there who do not define marketing correctly. We know that. This is why we have this podcast. So there are so many companies out there who think the proposal department is the marketing

department and we'll call it marketing. Well, no, that's not right. It's an engineering function. It's not a marketing function. Then they have communications, which may be marketing. And that seems to be completely divorced from sales, which is wrong, right? Because you have to do everything together. So there's a well known European company out there who thought marketing was we'll write a couple of ads and publish it. No, that's not adequate. Not in today's world. Not in today's world. So today you need to talk value propositions that need to synchronize

with the sales efforts, the sales territories and the customers and speak to the customers. There are quite a lot and not only bring the name out, but also bring out, okay, what problems can I solve? Right. So it's not enough just to spread your logo around. What does that do for you? And that's a compliment to sales you need. Yeah. That's the key reason we have this show is we believe marketing and sales in oil and gas should be joined at the hip or they're not effective.

Now, product development is often left out of the conversation. And I've seen product development people literally just twiddle their thumbs and guess at what the client wants, because sales and marketing are not communicating back to product development. And that's crucial for these large, complex, heavy steel transactions. Oh, yeah, that's a disaster just waiting to happen, right? Because there's so much variability in the products you want to offer the requirements that customers come back with you. So if you're not feeding that information back to

engineering and product development, right, or product management, then how are you going to prepare and how are you going to position yourself against the competition? Right. Right. Only if you know the customer's requirements well, can you position yourself better with that product than your competitor? And with those value propositions, you can then be more successful. Yeah. And your buyers will tell you, your buyers will tell you, I want that switch to be green and not red, right? I'd like this to be an analog dial instead of a digital dial. And if the front

line sales people will just report that to product development, product development's really good at integrating those changes to make the client happy. But there has to be communication. Right. And then you have the next step, then there are a lot of people who do some kind of product development. And it really turns out to be an internal engineering function, not a marketing product development function. And so then all of a sudden, there's no real control. There are a thousand variants of the product out there. That's what some people

call product development. And you can't sustain that. Right. Right. Somebody has to be there who condenses that variation into a reasonable matrix. And the other role of product development, so we talked about trees. And I talked about how there's two fields in the Gulf of Mexico from two different super majors, and they both spec the trees differently. However, if somebody from product development really looked at those two different specs, because a tree is a million bucks and takes 18 months to build, they probably could come up with a spec that would satisfy both

of them and allow the manufacturer to make one tree instead of two different trees, which would drive better margins. But some life in product development has to kind of sit at a higher level and look at all that and make those decisions. Well, and this is key to what a lot of companies should be doing is modularization. Yeah. Okay. Let's not think of the tree as one item. Let's think of the tree as 12 different modules, right? Pre-engineer different modules, right? And if you have to change out one of the modules to something more specific,

you still got 11 that don't have to re-engineer it, right? So almost a modular type of design. You should aim for that. The standards are so important. I think a lot of this comes from, and I don't know in this specific instance in the Gulf of Mexico, but I've seen it when companies acquire other companies, and they still run like that company just with a different like tent cover, right? You know, like all underneath the tent cover. So you're really dealing with people, of course, in these smaller companies inside this bigger brand. And it takes

so long to like seven plus years for alignment to really happen. And a lot of times the standardization gets missed. Well, and guess what happens when you're busy engineering each and every project? You don't have time for standardization. Right. And then you're making mistakes. You're putting out fires. So you can have less time for standardization, but that's a trap. Yeah. Because if you had done that beforehand, or new, or you had a road map that says, this is what I will standardize on. I like that. Then you would avoid some of these

costly errors and you wouldn't run out of time and capacity. Now, you know who does it really good as automotive? They work hand in hand with their suppliers to try to standardize as much as possible. You're going to laugh at this, Chris. A while back, one of the big service companies brought me out to West Texas to show me their just-in-time inventory delivery. And it was a C-CAN full of spare parts. And I go, that is not just-in-time inventory. Just-in-time is when your system talks to your supplier system and when you run out of bolts, the next day you have them show

up. So we talk about culture in all gas industries, some of our own cultures preventing us from looking at other industries and copying what they're doing to drive efficiencies from a sales point of view. We're up from a sales point of view, but what you're alluding to is actually a very well-known trap for engineer-to-order manufacturers. Somebody comes in, they've been merged or acquired, or there's a new management team, which happens every couple of years. And then they say, let's do lean. Let's do just-in-time. Well, that's okay if you're building a Toyota, because you have a limited

number of variations and you're going to make a million of them, right? But what happens if your series is one-off individual? Oh, you're right. You can't implement a pure lean concept because you can't repeat whatever you do. Right, right, right, right, right. And you can't make the process more efficient because each time the process is slightly different. Right. So there are some people out there who will argue flex lean is a more appropriate operations module. So you train people to be able to do different things, and you know, you can switch the focus around depending on which

product seems to be the most popular. All right. So something that is a big deal in this industry last couple of years is business consultants. There's extremely large business consulting firms. There's a lot of people that have on their business card business consultant. When you're looking at it from a large, heavy steel marketing and sales point of view, is there value in bringing an outside business consultants? And if there is value, where is it? Well, you see me chuckling already, right? So on the plus side, it's good to get different ideas from business consultants. So maybe you work

10, 20 years in one company. You don't have the latest business thinking yet or the latest business model. But one thing to be very careful about is the business consultant is not responsible for the implementation of their ideas. What they're interested in is maxing out the number of hours they can work on the project, right? So not everything will track well, because A, they haven't spent a lot of time in your specific business. And B, well, those are the ideas really work for your execution. Like we hit with the Toyota lean model, that's not always going to work if you're

producing one offs. Yeah. So I mentioned earlier that one of our last episodes is around coaching salespeople and it's a different breed of salespeople that handle these large complex, heavy steel sales. We mentioned this earlier, so they have to have heightened time awareness because the deal can take two or three years between a time you engage. Decades? Yeah, a decade. Let's talk a little bit about how do you coach salespeople and also engineers. And we made a joke about the engineers not having people skills. There's some truth to that. But in this

type of complex sales, these two groups have to work together. In fact, some of the large subsea surface companies that I know of manufacturers, their sales team is really their delivery people, because their delivery people are so embedded with their customers and understand their engineering specs so well that when another opportunity comes by, their delivery people spot it and actually generate probably as much sales as not more sales than their actual sales team. So how do you coach this complex group? That's a very legitimate approach actually,

if you can do that, right? Yeah. No, I think we're saying the same thing. I think that that's the absolute best way to do it. But let's look at the approach. So how is the client organized to actually buy engineer to order the equipment? It's no longer just a procurement function. No, there's a whole decision making team involved. Precurement cannot write the specification. They cannot judge the proposal. So it goes to the end users engineering company or the EPC, the engineering procurement construction company. So now you have the engineer who's probably taking

nine out of 10 decisions. Who do you set opposite that engineer in MBA who went to Harvard Business School but has no knowledge of engineering? Or do you train an engineer to be socially more adept but has the right knowledge to solve the problems the end user engineer needs to have solved? Right. So it's probably a combination here. Either you have somebody commercially well-trained but technically knowledgeable and experienced in projects, right? Or you have an engineer who you train to communicate and commercially sensitive. So let me tell you this much. We have

companies reach out to us to help them hire that exact person, that engineer that has a sales background. And I tell all of them there's four of them in the world. And you can't afford any of the four of them. That's a rare, rare breed with somebody that has mechanical engineering background, electrical engineering background, trolley engineering background that also understands the sales process, people, empathy, problem solving that's not black and white in an excel spreadsheet. So I think, I mean, when thinking about my experience, I think the team part approach

probably works way better than trying to find that engineer with sales background. Well, you're going to actually need both. But that's why I wrote this book, because it's no longer traditional sales, that you can just grab off the Barnes and Noble bookshelf. So the sales person himself has to be special. But the proposal engineer is part of sales. The marketing person, the engineer, becomes part of sales. So if you want to be successful, that whole team would want to be remunerated and trained specifically together. And it can be very specific, hugely specific.

So there's an old adage and rotating machinery saying, and sales engineers know of use for the first five years of his career. I can see that. And it's only really useful after 10. Yeah. Right. And you wouldn't move those skill sets, those engineering, those project skill sets on one type of product to a vastly different type of product. And I did sort of intentionally tease you up on that one, because that's the whole premise of the book. So if you're a large company out there and you have good engineers that are customer facing, whether you consider them a

sales role or not by this book, give them the skills they need to actually understand what the customer's requirements even pass the engineering requirements, because all it does is help you generate revenue, right? When your engineering team understands how to have those conversations, and maybe they get help from sales and marketing, right? At the same time, your sales and marketing team, bring them with you in these conversations, let them understand the technical part, let them hear how the conversations go, and it makes both the sales and the marketing people even better

at their job. Oh, I'm a big fan of bringing people out towards customer and face the music personally. Yeah. Because nine out of 10 times that immediately transforms that person's attitude how we should do or she should do the work. Absolutely. And the buyers appreciate that that you're bringing more people in. You have more voices, more ears. So don't think that your buyers can be scared because you're bringing a marketing person. They will appreciate another person being involved in this conversation, because they don't want to make a $50 million

mistake. And those $50 million mistakes actually happen. Don't even get me started on that. Yes, they do happen. I've seen products that were over engineered for weight, carrying capacity. I've seen doors and then nobody could open the door because it was too heavy. Now, it met the 25%, you know, safety factors that somebody wanted onshore, but offshore nobody could pick the door up. Yeah. Yep. Unfortunately, those stories are legend right there all over the place. But that's why it's complex. And that's why a company really should invest a lot of training in their people

in all sorts of different departments. And here's one fatal crime. So there's a lot of mergers and acquisitions happening, right? So how do you justify a merchant's acquisition? Well, very often, you'll say, I need to create synergy, which usually means I'm going to combine sales, combine engineering, combine legal, combine finance, let a lot of people go who have that experience. And then the rump of what you acquired is not as effective as the company was before. Yeah, I see that a lot. And I also see the opposite. I'm not sure which one's worse,

where a company acquires another one, but they never try to integrate it. And so they run like two different organizations. I could name some very large companies that have acquired so many other companies through the years, and each one of them has their own supply chain. And you look at it from the outside and go, why have you not combined your, at least your supply chain, so you have the leverage, but it's just the culture of the company. Well, and there's a very famous market leading company out there who makes reciprocating engines, and they own a division

that makes gas turbine centrifugal compressors for the very same applications, but they keep them completely separate, that only the ownership is the same. And that has worked out really well for them, because they preserved in both departments the personnel who are experts, and they micro focus on their specific product and application. Product excellence. I love it. I love it. It is actually very much product excellence. They do so well that they refuse the major oil and gas specifications. Say, here's our spec.

I love it. That's the Apple approach. Like, this is the best. Take it or leave it. This is the way it's going to work. And if you change my spec, you're introducing risk. Yeah. So Chris, it's getting time to wind down the show. My last question is actually just kind of funny, but I would just have to ask you, what's easier, teaching an engineer to sell or teaching a sales person engineering? I've done it both ways, and both ways can work. But you really need to have the right mindset and the right training. So if you're more of the R&D type engineer,

then probably customer facing is not your thing to do. But if you're an applications engineer, and there are a lot of good people in that, then customer facing can work very, very well. If you're taught how to present, how to read a room, how to negotiate. Now, being purely commercial, you need to have at least a strong technical affinity at the very minimum. Or you get pushed aside. You really need to be that resource to the client. You can't just be an order taker. Because it's not a commercial

preparation. It's a technical preparation for that final decision. Absolutely. Yeah, if you've always listened that is siloed, one of those two positions, go to your peer. So if you're an engineer, go to your sales team and say, look, I'd like to follow you around and learn from you. They'll bring you in and let you sit with them and go to meetings. If you're a salesperson and you have an engineering team, go out there and say, look, I'd like to understand better how y'all engineer these products and they will bring you in and show

you. If you're a young salesperson, that's the number one thing you can do is just learn as much as you can to be a resource that people want to pick up the phone and ask you for help. And I remember when I was in my 20s, that's all I did. I took a mentorship, mentee role, right? And tried to learn as much as I could from everybody so I could become that authority in that area. And it was a lot harder to do with not getting the standard training. But man, you could see a difference when I would go up against other

sales and marketing people. And that's certainly a way to do it. In other words, training is often misused, especially in the States. It's more familiarization. Hey, hello. One hour discussion. This is who you talk to. That doesn't work. I was fortunate to be trained in Europe. And I had a two year trainee program. Nice. Where it's half for multiple months in every different department. I love it. And after that, okay, I still needed some experience, but I knew absolutely what I was doing. That's that old apprenticeship program that has

disappeared here in the years that is so valuable where you work with a senior person and you learn from the senior person. And then when you walk away, you have the tools that you need to get stuff done. Right. So I'm obviously biased, but I do believe it brings better results. Yeah, I would agree. All right, we got to get out here. How to sell the engineer products. Chris's book, go pick it up. There'll be a link in the show notes. Actually, buy it for your team. Buy it for your sales team. Buy it for your engineering team. It's a great book. And I

would not say it was a great book. It wasn't a great book. This is the point where we do our product review. And I want to give a shout out to Gaga King. That's a funny name, Gaga King. They sent us two portable chargers for Apple watches. Unfortunately, Matt doesn't have an Apple watch. So Paige Wilson and I are going to review this product. So Paige, I really appreciate you joining Matt and I to do the product review. Like I said, Matt doesn't have an Apple watch. Shame on Matt. But you do as well as I and we are going to review the Gaga King portable charger

for the Apple watch. What did you think of it? It's pretty powerful. It's convenient, slightly bulky, but I get it's carrying a battery. When I opened it, probably had like one level of charging. There's like four lights. And so it took me about an hour and a half to charge the charger. But I put my watch on the charger at like 50%. It took like an hour and a half to charge to 100. So with three levels left. So it's pretty good. It's convenient to have. But my charger itself that's plugged into the wall is faster. Well, yeah, for obvious reasons, because it's Apple.

So I actually think it's very convenient too. It's not something I would use to charge it every day. It's good for travel, for sure. 100% for travel. And then we do a lot of conferences. And when you're at a conference for eight or 10 hours, and you use your watch, this is a great tool for that. It was also extremely inexpensive. So if you're looking for maybe a backup way to keep your Apple watch charged, I recommend this. We'll put a link in the show notes. And then, you know, thank you, Garga King, for sending a couple of these out for Matt and I to review.

If you would like us to review your product, remember, it can't be heavy steel. We're not reviewing backhoes and... I don't know if you want me to come out there. I'll totally do it. Okay. Well, if you want to do that, reach out first before you send us anything. But if you want to review your product, we're looking for Gadgety travel type of stuff, something that we could do a quick review on that maybe professionals use. Send us two of them, not one. And we're happy to give you a review. Just know that we're going to tell the truth. If it's great,

we're going to say it's great. If it sucks, we're going to say it sucks. Page, thanks for the help today. Sure. Then if you want to connect with us on LinkedIn or any of our social channels, all those links are in the show notes, like I said, along with Chris's link to pick up his book. Matt and I are working on the Insiders group. Now it's time for the LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Chris, do you have one? Yeah. So I have about 7,000 contacts on LinkedIn, mainly in the oil and gas industry. And I think a big fail is having too many political posts out there.

I'm right there with you. I am so sick of political posts on all of social. It's got me to the point where I don't even want to talk about it, right? Which is sad because as Americans, we should be able to discuss with people have different views and learn and understand. But now it's just become this and it's just a mess. Yeah, it is just too much infighting. Then you see 10,000 comments. So going back a little bit to the marketing and the algorithms, it was designed that way to create polarization and to create engagement.

Like it's intentional by these big companies how they wrote the algorithms to do that, to show you because they know you're going to engage. And that's what they're looking for. They're trying to keep you on the platform. You know, Matt, I believe 100% right. So everybody, let's not give LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and TikTok. Let's fight the algorithms. Let's not talk politics. Let's talk really good stuff. Chris, I literally could talk to you for two more hours and you have another book, don't you? I have another book that's just been published,

not yet available, Masala Joint Venture. And it describes how I set up a joint venture company in India for engineer to order products. Yeah. So we'll put the name of his new book in the show note since it's not available yet. Give it what a month or two. Probably about two months, right? About two months. But Chris, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Love having you on the show. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And it was a lot of fun. You ready to get out of here, Matt? Let's do it. All right. 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.