Leadership and Sales Success w/Guest Will Barron

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! Everybody, welcome back to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast,

and if you notice, we have a guest. Will Barrett, how are you doing today, Will? I'm doing good. I want to call out something immediately. You started the show very politely then, with a nice telephone voice that my dad does when he picks up the phone, and he'd be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, hello? You were much louder than a prompt two seconds ago before we clipped the card.

That's just me, and it's crazy, because I'll pull up in a drive-thru Starbucks or something, and through that crappy little speaker, they'll go, do you have a radio show? And it's like, how do you know a podcast is the voice? But before we get to reason, you're here real quick, we have a review. Obviously, I'm saying obviously, but it looks like this might be a salesperson who left this because their handle is Big Commission.

It's a five-star review in Apple Podcasts. Let's see. Mark and Matt really know their stuff when it comes to sales and marketing. Their podcast is not only fun to listen to, but it's also packed with useful tips and tricks. Whether you're in Oil and Gas or any other industry, if you're in sales and marketing, you've got to add the show to your playlist. Trust me, you'll pick up some great insights that will help you end your game. Thank you, Big Commission.

If you'd like to be like Big Commission, just leave us a review. We'll read it on the air and give you a big shout out. And the topic today, Will, is the title of your book, Selling Made Simple. I agree. I read your book. Thank you. And I agree that a lot of people that have not actually done sales very long think it's very complex, but it's not, is it?

Sales is simple to visualize, simple to implement. And because of that, it becomes complicated day to day. Yes. Typically, it's the feedback loop of getting a response, booking the meeting, closing the deal that people panic about, that then they try to overcomplicate the process to speed it up.

Sounds like off. When that is typically then a symptom of a lack of pipeline more than anything else. Yeah. Yeah, 100% right there with you, which by the way, I didn't even brief you on the premise of our show. The premise of our show is that Matt and I believe that at least in our industry, sales and marketing should be joined at the hip.

They should not be two separate organizations because they have a common goal. And we think that that's a cultural change that needs to have happened. But you're absolutely right. Anytime I hear, and I am a salesperson, I'm a recovering salesperson, but I still run the sales here at OGGN. Long history of doing it. But you're right. When salespeople start freaking out,

it's because they didn't do the work they were supposed to in the past. If you do the work you're supposed to, not only do you not freak out, but then you can actually be more selective in your opportunities. You've got predictability. You've got forecastability. You become the hero internally because you are then a safe bet for everyone. And you scale that across a team.

You can hire on the expected new revenue against it. And the whole of the organization becomes a lot more seamless. Obviously, it's simpler to say that than it is to perhaps make it happen in the real world. But that's the premise behind what we're trying to achieve. And so Will, in case people are wondering why Matt and I have you on the show, real quick, what's your background?

Are you some guy off the street that's used to carrying a bag? Or have you built a business helping other sellers? A bit of both. My background is in medical device sales. So I got a degree in chemistry. Originally, I got a degree in chemistry. Went into selling catalysts to the pharmaceutical industry.

So platinum and palladium. I got sacked from that first sales role because I put a decimal place in the wrong part of the invoice and sold 50 grams of a palladium for $5,000. So immediately straight out of the door, noticing the small things is not my forte with this kind of thing. Went from there, went into medical devices, worked for two of the biggest, most prestigious medical device companies in the space.

Selling endoscopic camera systems. And I, some of you guys started a podcast to scratch my own itch in that I googled how to get better at sales. There was literally no content out there at the time that was applicable for me to use to implement with the surgeons that I was selling to. Any of that old school, 80s, 90s, early 2000s nonsense

would have just got me kicked out of the operating room in a flash. And Will, you're quite modest as far as how big your podcast is. What you do, why don't you share some data around that if you could? So the podcast gets around 700,000 downloads a month. The YouTube channel has, I think, four or five million views at this point. 70,000 subscribers.

We've got 2,000 plus people come through our training program at this point. They've generated, I think it's over $2 billion in net new revenue, obviously themselves, but then on the back of some of our training as well. So yeah, so that's the other side of things. I love it. And the reason I love it, Matt, is not so much that he's a social sensation.

It's the fact that he walks the walk and talks the talk. You do not build an audience like that without putting out good information, quite frankly. I do want to back you up a little bit, Will. So two things. Have you ever made that decimal mistake again? I've not been in a position where there's been an opportunity to.

I've not other than the invoices for salesman.com. To be fair, now all get double checked by one of my assistants. So yeah, so I haven't made that mistake again. I'm right there with you. They took the keys of the bank away from me. They don't even allow me to kick out invoices anymore, right?

Because just like you, I don't have that type of attention to detail for financial stuff. I was joking with that question. So my bigger question is though, what a great example of how to be an asset to your client. So when you walk into a surgeon's office, he's thinking of one thing, I'm guessing he or she's thinking of one thing is, can this tool help me in what my job does? Bottom line.

And they don't have time for fluff. In fact, I suspect that if you don't approach that the right way, there's 30 other medical device sales reps right behind you that could do a better job than you. So you have to be almost perfect in your execution, don't you? Almost the inverse of that. There's only one or two medical device companies that are at the level to provide the service

to the surgeons I used to work with. So I used to work with very closely a local surgeon in a hospital near me. He's one of the world's leading colorectal surgeons. He would only ever work with, and I worked for both of them, Carl Stortz and Olympus. He'd only ever worked with either one of those and he worked with Stortz because we looked after him and he was one of my customers.

There wasn't 30 other competitors. It was either you deliver or I'm going to the other competitor is just as good. I don't care about price. I just want to increase my safety with the patients and the operation outcomes. Two things around that. That is our audience too.

So in our industry, if you make a mistake, people die. And now you do people die, but you can have an environmental catastrophe which can destroy a company overnight. So it's serious. When you're selling parts and pieces to this industry, it can be fun, but you're there to solve a problem.

But I heard something else there. Did you work for both of the only two companies that were in that space? Yeah. The trick of making selling simple is to work for a company that people want to buy from. So I went from the one owned, it might have changed at this point. This was seven or eight years ago, but one company owned 48% of the market.

The other company owned 48% of the market in the UK. So I moved from that side of the UK from one company up to the north to the other. If you look at what Silicon Valley does, they're like, go in, make a monopoly and then move on to the next vertical. I mean, that works really, really well, even in like eye care industry. There's one company that owns 50% of the whole market.

Will and I have done a podcast in the past and I can tell you that these pharma companies have the game figured out and they own that space so well. And I know that that's what happens in oil and gas as well. Yeah. Well, I was being selfish, throwing on my old bag carrier hat and thinking, man, if there's only two players in the market and I work for both of them, I have an inside intelligence

and both of them. And as a professional sales person, that's going to give me an advantage. And I don't want to spend too much time there, but it just triggered in my head. It's like, man, what a great place to be. All right, Will, went through your book, which by the way, people is free. You can go to Will's website and download it.

It's great for your individual sellers. It's actually really great for a team. One of the things that caught my eye is you said that the first most important rule of sales is what? That sales is a game. And I love how you broke that down.

Can we talk through that a little bit? Any game has, due to series of elements, there is inputs, there are outputs. There's a feedback loop. We can frame it up in different ways, but essentially that's what it is. You're playing on the Nintendo, you press the button, Mario moves on the screen, you die or you save the princess.

Your inputs directly influenced the response you've got from the computer. Now, in the marketplace, there's many more variables, right? But you still only have your inputs into the marketplace, the way that the market responds to those inputs and then the feedback loop of maybe you don't die or the princess gets saved, but maybe you do the deal, get the money and you buy the Porsche, whatever it is. All you need to do to win its sales is understand what does the market require?

Can you put the input into the markets to give the market what it wants? And if you don't hit success in the first time around, you look back at your performance and constantly try and improve it. And if you frame it up like that, there is then no emotion to sales. There is no ego involved in it. There's no reason to get down if something goes wrong.

You just keep plodding away, keep adding the right inputs to the marketplace as it is. Get that feedback loop going. And eventually, as long as you continually improve that process with the feedback, you're going to have some success. It's not rocket science. There's very little barrier to entry for most marketplaces.

And that feedback loop can be very quick. If you're cold calling and five people in a row tell you that you're an idiot, it's very clear that what you're communicating is not the message that the market wants to hear. And so that feedback loop can be quick. It can be slower. Even if you're doing a $15 million parts deal for an oil rig or wherever it is,

I'm sure it's a lot slower than that. You can then chop it up into different parts of the process to get feedback loops quicker. But that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to gamify it so that we can take the salesperson and everyone else's ego out of it, their emotion out of it. So it becomes a process.

You turn up, you do the process, and you win the game. That helps with the rejection, right? That helps like if it's a game, you don't take the rejection personal. Yeah, well, it's what we preach all the time. No emotional attachment to the deal. Which, let me be clear enough, said this a hundred times.

It doesn't mean that you don't want the deal to close. What it means is your personality, your internal net worth. What makes you happy is not connected emotionally to that deal. And if you do that, that's when it's easy to walk away from the deals that are not a good fit. So you can go spend your limited resources on the deals that are a good fit. So Will, you've done this for a lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of sales teams.

When you talk about the game part of it and you break it down, where do you see most organizations suffer? I'm just curious in that process that you rattled off. So not the individual sellers, but if you have an established sales team for a company that's been there for 10 or 15 years, where does it break down for the team? It breaks down for the team for leadership, typically, because they refuse to accept.

Because it's not really a fact. It's a way of looking at it, right? They refuse to look at it that way that the team's performance then is perhaps lacking understanding of the marketplace, which should come from the top down. Obviously, you can go bottom up, but the big broad swaves of this should come top down and also that the inputs into the marketplace are incorrect. And again, that's the leadership should be dealing with of what's working,

what isn't across the entire team, and that skill up the entire team based upon the one or two people that are having lots of success. That's not what happens. Leadership get emotional. They sack the bottom percentile. They double down on the top percentile. And it's the middle, typically, that moves the real revenue needle when it comes to the end of a quarter and end of the year.

And I promise you, I did not tee him up. Will has no idea what I'm about to say next. But Will, this fits in perfectly with one of the things we struggle with in our industry is that sales leadership have always put a lot of money and effort into trade shows and conferences. And Matt and I have been saying for years, they don't have the same value they used to have. But I hear it from the sales leaders in the industry all the time,

well, we've always done it that way. And it's the biggest gripe. It's like, that's why you're suffering. It's not your people. I mean, it could be. But it's the fact that you're still trying to do the things that worked in 1987 and it's 2024. That's exactly what you rattled off just now. I've got a workshop in the training program on trade shows and events and conferences. And the thing is just try and book the meetings before you show up.

That's the biggest leverage point. Just do some cold outreach, do that networking before you show up so that you've got a day of meetings. So there's nothing to do with the trade show conference. That's just the location where all your buyers are. And it's the quickest way to get in front of them and have that face to face communication. And that is typically a game changer for anyone who isn't implementing that

and is spending all day just stood at a booth like an idiot or running around trying to track people down like an idiot. The quickest way to get a really strong ROI on a trade show conference. Just book those meetings ahead of time. Dude, you're singing our song. It's almost like you listen to our show, which I know you haven't. Maybe you will after this, but it doesn't matter.

All right. The next thing is your second rule of sales. And I love this. You're not selling a product. What are you selling? Well, it depends what version of the book you've read because I've just updated this, right? I'm not holding you to your own text, but it's the idea that I want you to rattle off. I'll give you the updated version of this. You're not selling a product. You're selling the solution to a problem.

But then that could be more nuanced of you're selling the bridge from one reality to another. You're selling the bridge between the gap of where people are, the current status quo, the current reality, the pains, the problems, and the bigger, brighter, bolder future reality that they can move towards. And the premise of this is that you're not the hero. They're the hero. You are holding their hand to get them from one side to the other.

So they look great internally. They get the bonus. And when you frame it up from that perspective, it becomes very difficult for them to turn it down because they want all those things. And you're just going, hey, for the Lord of the Rings analogy, I'm Sam. I'm going to hang out with Frodo. Frodo is the hero. Everyone loves Frodo. Frodo goes off to the magical place at the end of the film.

And I don't know. I can't remember where Sam goes. But Sam is just going to plot along with Frodo and help him get from one place to the other. That as the sales function, whether it's an individual or an organization, that's what we should be doing. I agree. You're literally the guide, right? Even to the point that you may have to help your buyer buy inside his own company.

They may not know their own procurement rules and regulations. They may not know the difference between the CapEx budget and OpEx budget. So you're literally the guide to make this whole process as easy on your prospect as possible. And what does that do? Number one, you help solve a problem immediately. Number two, they remember how they feel in working with you. And soon you're not a vendor anymore. You're part of their team.

The people outside of our profession, outside of sales, often looked at sales as something that's negative or it's a group of people trying to make others buy stuff they don't want and force something. That's not what sales is. Sales is ultimately, I think, becoming an asset to your client's team. Where they look at you as something that's valuable to them and you do that by guiding them. I love this, Will. I swear you listened to Matt and I. You had to listen to this before.

All right. Your third rule of sales. I mean, nothing happens until something gets sold. And I think that I would love to interject at some of these steps. How marketing helps support that and certainly marketing helps automate certain processes of the sales online as well as move it forward in a capacity like it speeds up the sales cycle because it answers some of those questions. It helps keep prospects warm.

There's a lot of functions on how sales and marketing marry together as we're going through these points. So back to you, Will. I just, I'm here. If I think about what Will just said, Matt, marketing is that asset to help you make that bridge. So marketing in a lot of ways are the timbers and the cement and the bolts and the nuts to build that bridge to tell that story from where you are now presently to where you want to be. Actually, without marketing, I don't know if salespeople could do that.

Salespeople tend to be more concerned about getting you to that point, not telling you the story about what it's going to look like when you get there. I think that marketing, when I looked at it from a sales perspective, automation, the retargeting, like all these things made a good salesperson great. My thought process was always, okay, if you have a sales team and you took maybe the worst performing salesperson, which a lot of organizations cut the bottom 10% or whatever

and reinvested that in account-based selling or marketing to make your great salespeople even better, make your good salespeople great, the leverage that you get off of that is incredible because you can reach so many people, the one to many, just like in a podcasting, through all these different tools that marketing is supporting sales. Interesting. If I really kind of think through this, really the conversation we're having now,

marketing is involved in every one of these steps in some shape, fashion. And back to our point earlier is this is why sales marketing should work together. If you're not bringing your marketing team in on these different steps, they don't know and they're trying to do their best, but without the information that's in the salesperson's head, they're going to struggle to hit it on the mark. So great point. I'm trying to think of a good analogy of a show because we got Lord of the Rings in here.

I like Will's analogies. How I think about marketing is, okay, you have like this awesome warrior, the salesperson. I mean, you're making cold calls, you're carrying a bag, you're going to conferences, you're getting in front of these people and you're making it happen. I feel like marketing and when I was doing sales, marketing was the armor that was all kinds of the technology to make you more powerful,

to make you a super warrior in a sense. It was all the equipment that you used and to do all kinds of things. I mean, email automation, so powerful, text automation. You can create experiences for people in a way that supports what you're trying to do to give every prospect the same kind of experience or to reach different people. I mean, even think about the automation in a CRM, like, I need to follow up these people

or the analytics that you get when you're about to talk to that prospect because it pulls all the data online. It's the armor that great salespeople have to make them even more successful. And I think that from a B2B standpoint, that's how it should be leveraged. I think there's two levels to marketing where there's only one level to sales. Sales' role is to help the buyer progress the buying journey,

help them make that decision to move to the next step and facilitate that next step. Marketing has an internal and an external function. Internal of all the analytics to build the content, to refine the messaging, to take all the feedback from what sales are giving them, to help them refine a value proposition, to put on events, whatever it is. That's the kind of internal, which is facing element of marketing.

The external facing element of marketing is if salespeople are building trust one to one, marketing are building trust corporation to corporation or one to many. And that's the difference. Salespeople shouldn't be doing their own email campaigns to 5,000 people on an email list. There are some salespeople who could probably do it better than some marketers because they're actually in the trenches and they know what buyers are wanting,

what they don't want and how to communicate it. They should be working together to kind of get it out there. But marketing as a function, I think, is internal data analytics feeding the machine that generates these meetings that allows you to have intelligent conversations. Then externally facing, they are building the trust of the brand, trust of the corporation because at a certain level, you might like the salesperson,

but if it's a terrible company and they've got terrible reputation, you're never going to work with them anyway. I love that. And the reason I laugh when you said about salespeople shouldn't be doing their own email campaigns, 90% of the salespeople that have LinkedIn Navigator quit using it, quit searching and finding me because I have oil in my title and try to sell me stuff.

I'm a podcaster, people. So to your point, Will, most marketing people would not make the mistake. Salespeople are the one that when you give them the shiny new tool, go, oh, great, I can spam 300,000 people at the same time. No, stop doing that. But this is a perfect segue to the third rule of sales, which is you need a book of meeting.

And the most important thing, and I agree with you, Will, is the messaging there. And once again, Matt, this is where marketing shines. Sales qualified lead, marketing qualified lead. Will, talk about both of those and how like, I know we've talked about this in the past, how those could be kind of the same thing and you can merge those. They should not be different.

They should be the same thing. Does this organization have a need for a product? Are they likely to have budget? Are we speaking to the person who has authority to make this change, et cetera, et cetera? Insert analogy or kind of sales qualification metaphor out of the gazillion that are out there. The reality is marketing creates a lot of marketing qualified leads that are solely downloaded a white paper

and then sales waste a lot of time trying to qualify those leads when there's been no qualification done ahead of time. And it annoys salespeople where marketers get a pat on the back for creating content and leads that are just absolutely useless because they've not been nurtured. They've just been thrown out salespeople. Maybe there's a bit of a bias here from, as I say this out loud, there may be a bit of bias from previous situations I've been involved with. But they should be the same thing.

They should be qualified. There should be a need. There should be the budget. There should be the right authority. There's over qualification criteria that we can add to this. But they're not.

And this is then a problem from marketing leadership where they're trying to put numbers on a board and salespeople where they don't want to use those leads. They'd rather spam LinkedIn to try and generate their own because they know that they can qualify them up front and save a load of time. So most organizations, the gap between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead is so vast that it causes just so much friction between the two silos of the organization if you want to frame it up like that. Yeah. And that's why we believe that marketing sales should be joined at hip. And let's not hide from it.

I've talked to a ton of sales leaders in my career and they basically all say the same thing. These leads come from marketing suck. And the marketing team goes, we're working our ass off. If you tell us what we need to do, we'll do it. We just need the information that's in your head. And to your point, Will, if they're siloed, that communication never happens.

I even think that marketing people should be compensated along the lines of closing deals that they participated in. So the compensation drives the right behavior and marketing people hate when I say that. I'm not saying I want to take money away from you. I'm saying that you should enjoy the success, the financial success that you help contribute to when you understand what sales needs. Well, guys, we're in the middle of this conversation and unfortunately we're starting to run out of time. I know Will has a time constraint on there.

Will, we have to get you back on because we just scratched the surface. But I love what you're doing. People and companies, if they want to reach out to you to learn more about how you can help their sales organization, where's the best place for them to go? Everything that I do teach train is over at salesman.com. All the content is completely free. As you mentioned, the book is there.

There's two books on those. There's free assessments as a community. All I charge for is the implementation of it. Most people should be able to get pretty far via the content on their own. So head over to salesman.com, check that out. It'll be obvious if you want to contact me to get any implementation done.

Yeah, and people download his book and give it to your sales team. It's a quick, easy read, but it's really, really good. Will didn't regurgitate other people's sales teaching from Laura Knowswhere. He actually put this together himself, I can tell. And it's just a quick, easy read, especially if you have more junior level salespeople that haven't figured out their own process yet. It's a valuable tool.

Will will also put a link to your business, put a link to your LinkedIn profile. People want to reach out there. But dude, this has been absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate your time. We got to get you back on, but I didn't realize you have a time constraint. Guys, you know the deal.

Sign up for our two newsletters. The links are in the show notes. All of Matt and our social links are also in the show notes. Matt, our insiders group, we took another big step. I finally got you what you needed after four months. So the insiders groups coming together.

Will, we didn't even talk about this earlier, so I'm going to put you on the spot. But at the end of the show, we ask our guests for a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Something they've noticed on LinkedIn that was either really well done or really not well done. Do you have a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week for our audience? Sure. So I might be going around the houses with this example, but I think people will get a value for it.

People on LinkedIn right now focus on impressions rather than results, which is dumb. You don't get paid on impressions. For example, I had a post that I did as an experiment because I knew it would get a lot of impressions. It's in February this year. It got 750,000 impressions in about 10 hours. I posted who is better at sales, men or women?

That's controversial. And it's a stupid question. Got loads of angry people of maybe you missed out other genders or however you want to frame it up. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole at this point. And it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments every 10 minutes. It was insane.

Did I get any business from it? No. I got way more business from probably the post that was automated that went out two days ago that actually talked about a problem that people have in the marketplace and give the high level of resolving it. And then at the end of the post, it very likely said, hey, if you need help implementing this or there's a gap in your expertise, drop me a message.

That's right. Tons and tons of messages every day from people who want to resolve the kind of problems. So yeah, so a fail is chasing impressions and the clout and a big audience. When what you're on LinkedIn for, if you're a salesperson, if you're marketing a large organization on that, slightly different, might be going for brands, you might be going for reach. But if you're an individual trying to book meetings, trying to get deals done,

you just need conversations. You don't need a big audience. You don't need anything else. That is golden will it is gold. That was amazing. All right, guys, we got to get out here.

So remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGN, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.