Local Sales and Marketing, Plus Saving Marriages

Manage your all-field operations from anywhere with Rigor online or offline. Whether it's scheduling and dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment rentals, or inspections and maintenance, you can create, review, approve, and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operation manager dashboards on your desktop or phone. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us. Link is in the show notes. 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. All right, welcome back everybody. If Matt and I sound a little bit different, it's because we're not into the global OGGN studios. We are actually in Rogues barbecue on Katie, and unfortunately, we also said that we're going to be on the Voss Road location, so we're really hoping listeners, there's not a dozen of you sitting in Voss Road waiting us

to do this podcast. If so, our apologies. We just got the address wrong for a little bit. Matt, before we get the show, we actually got a review. All right. This is the first time ever I've heard this. So the title of her review is Thanks for Saving My Marriage. Oh, what? Just kidding, haha. But seriously, this is from Ruth Johnson. She's a Vice President, Strategic Accounts at National All Well Varco. I just started binge-listing to your All In Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, and I can't thank you enough for the marketing and sales advice.

All this makes tactical sense to me. I have an engineering and new product development background and then a new role in sales, trying to make sense out of this customer-facing world. My husband is into digital marketing, but not into All In Gas, so he speaks SEO and funnels and AI and all the fancy things. But for the life of me, I cannot connect those things to what I actually need to do to succeed in my role in sales. Your podcast has given me the fundamental building blocks, and finally, I feel like I have a starting place from which I can launch. And also, finally,

my husband has started to make sense to me. So thank you. Hope to meet you at some point. Look forward to continuing to learn from you. We're not known for saving marriages, but I'll take this. And, Rune, thank you so much for the great review. If you'd like to get a shout-out, feel free to leave us a review. You know, the show notes, and there's an easy way for us to do it. And today, since we're here at Rogel's Barbecue, which, by the way, Matt, do you know why we're here? Why are we here? Because I saw them on social media a couple years ago. It was actually Twitter.

And my girlfriend took page here. We ate. The food is fantastic. It's very fairly priced. The service is phenomenal. And so we eat near a whole bunch of times. And then eventually, I hit them back up on Twitter and said, hey, can we do a podcast there? And they go, yeah, sure. So that's the whole reason we're sitting here. So hats off to social media. All right. So our topic today is local sales and marketing. And this is something that changed a lot. You know, before the pandemic, we were all kind of used to going to our local restaurants,

walking in, if you live in a part of the world, a part of the country where it's easy to walk to stuff, unlike here in Houston. It was just kind of one of the things that you did. And then we all got shut down during the pandemic. And things have changed. You've had businesses stand up, like delivery services and eats and stuff. And it's harder for these brick and mortar to actually recruit and find people. So I thought maybe today we would talk through what some of that would look like. And not just for restaurants, but for any brick and mortar, you know, there's a lot of small,

family-operated businesses and oil and gas that are struggling with the same thing. You know, how do you get people into your store? How do you get people in front of your products and services so you can have conversations with them? And so I got a couple of places I want to start, if you're okay with it. Yeah, drive this thing. All right. So I told a story about how we're here. If you think about what I told, the story really was that they were easy to reach. So I think my first tip from a sales point of view is always be easy to reach. There's a bunch of different

social platforms out there. There's still people that like to pick up the phone and call. There's people that like to do research on you online before they reach out. Make sure you're every place that your buyers and your potential customers are so that you're easy to reach. And that includes things like making sure it's easy to contact someone. Make sure your phone number or your whatever your contact form that you use for your business is easy for people to find. Yeah. I mean, on your website, you might want to have a, like, check your website, see if it's

got a sticky menu. What a sticky menu is is basically the navigation stays as you scroll on it on mobile. It's really, really helpful when someone's ready to buy. Boom. They're right there or they can contact you. The thing that I would add to this though, is the way people search online has changed. And people go further down the sales process before they maybe pick up the phone, before they may become in the store. So your digital presence is so important to let people know what to expect. That's what I think people are looking for more than anything

else is, okay, well, where is it located? What is it going to look like when I get there? Am I going to know that I'm there when I'm there? Like, what are the landmarks? You want to walk people through it as much as you can. And even like with reviews and everything else, you want them to know what to expect bottom line. Yeah. And if you don't have it figured us out, Matt and I almost never rehearse anything. So it's kind of cool. It's natural segue to my next talking point, which is attract the traffic. How many times have you went to go to a local

business and you're driving around in circles trying to find them and they're there? They're just inconspicuous. Imagine if they just had a banner out there or one of those blow up things or imagine on their website, they said, look for the orange mailbox. All that stuff makes it easy to find and makes it easy to attract traffic, especially when people they're in person. One of the things I like about this restaurant is literally on the corner. We have one of the biggest interstates in the world right across from us. And you can see this across 20 lanes of traffic.

It says barbecue. There's flat. It's easy to find. So it's an easy way to attract that type of traffic. The other thing is entice customers back, right? Well, attract the traffic. Okay. This is where we talk about SEO. Yes. All right. This is where we talk about paid ads. Okay. Local SEO mark for those listeners out there is actually a separate search engine than organic search like in Google. Also, YouTube is a completely different search engine and they have similar metrics, but they're completely different. They're basically divorced. You can rank in maps and not really receive any

traffic to your website. So maps is a whole separate platform and for businesses that are trying to drive people into their local store, there's all kinds of strategies to rank in Google. Basically, you take your existing location, draw a circle around it, and as the strength of that Google My Business or it's called Google Business Profile now grows and expands, you reach more people because it's trying to help you direct foot traffic. And not to go totally down a rabbit hole here, but there's four types of searches that Google is looking for. There's navigational. That's

really what matters the most right now. There's transactional. There's informational and there's commercial. If you're focused on the maps, you want to be focused on the navigational type searches. There's different kind of check boxes that you want to hit from the algorithmic standpoint. And there's things that you can do either single location or multi-location to help rank and show up in those first three search results in Google. And it's just kind of like Google year. If you don't show up in the maps, people don't find you. If you're not in the maps, people typically don't

find you. Just like if you're not on the top of the first page of Google, people don't find you. So I would tell you that local SEO or Google My Business, Google Business Profile kind of rankings, super, super important and different than national or organic SEO search, whatever you want to call it. Second thing is paid media. Paid media has gotten into the game. Facebook, you can target things on zip codes, you can do geofencing. Facebook even has a local search. If you have a local business, you just want to get your brand out there, your name out there, people in your

local area to know, especially if you're a restaurant. You could spend as little as a dollar a day, okay? Just showing it to people close to you. There's a lot of strategies that you want to use between paid and organic. Remember like search marketing, how do these platforms make money? Mark like, why do they let us on it for free? Yes, we're the product and they're selling our data, but they're advertising to us. They're trying to attract advertisers and they have such powerful technology to reach the exact kind of people. Like I'm running a campaign right now for the

Boy Scouts of America. We are getting really tight in the targeting and we're running on all different platforms. Like you said, we're on different platforms to reach different people and so you want to build a combination of these strategies online in addition to in-person, door-knocking sales related stuff. So I'm actually glad you brought that up because we were to get there eventually, but I'm glad we brought it up here. So Matt, not that long ago, I am pretty sure that local Google business was easier to rank for than organic rankings on the

page itself. We went through a spill where we almost had 20 salesmen call me trying to drop in on the OGG and offices, not understanding that it was actually a UPS PO box for that exact reason. Okay, don't say that publicly. Hopefully no one hurts you because that violates Google rules, but keep going. But what happened is we were raking organically in the local searches without even trying as opposed to when we were trying as we try to rank for stuff organically on Google the main search engine. So at that point, I don't know if it's still like that. It was actually easier,

especially if you had no competition to rank local than it was to rank on the Google as a whole. So if you fill out your Google business profile category, there are certain categories, right? It's based like an inventory. It's a directory. Are there a lot of people in that category or not in that category? They haven't put as much time or effort or resources into the maps as they have like the national SEO. So the algorithm is a little bit dated, maybe, right? And there are ways to maybe game it. But what I would tell you more than anything else is you want to put all the relevant

information to drive people into it. There's a way to do like little mini posts, FAQs, adding again, people want to understand that experience, pictures, images, videos. Google actually took this away, but they like to see external internal of the office pictures of your team pictures of you with customers. And then I would just tell you actually the biggest ranking factor certainly getting all the metadata correct is super important to let Google understand what you are. But they look at review count. Okay, they look at the frequency of reviews, the quality of reviews,

who's leaving the reviews. And reviews is something that gaming reviews do not do that. Okay, I don't know what the government body that's looking into it, but they're getting really, really tight on that. And Google could take down your whole profile. And if your profile is driving you a lot of business, which generates about one third of all the traffic, if you're doing SEO, you could lose it. And it's again, their platform, they can do whatever they want on their platform. It's not a public utility. Okay, so you're not going to go to jail, but you might not be on their platform anymore. So

yeah. So let me ask you this. So my local car dealership, every time I get my car services, offers me a discount coupon for a review on Google. Is that breaking the rules? There are things that a lot of companies do, even if you have somebody filling out your reviews in office on your Wi-Fi, I had a client that couldn't figure out why the reviews weren't sticking. And they had a kiosk that they were having people fill out reviews on their Wi-Fi, right? So everybody's going, like, there's things that the algorithms can see and understand. And

there's basically a standard deviation. They're looking based on that algorithm of things that either are suspect of violating their policy or not. And you want to ask for a genuine review, and you incentivize in it, there are some rules around that. So I guess people read the fine print before you go down that route, although it does work. Until it doesn't. So another thing, you see everybody has these loyalty proverbs, and you wonder what they're for. Two separate things, both of them are beneficial to a brick-and-mortar business. Number one,

you're enticing people to come back, right? You get that discount, you get that special perk. But now you're also as a business owner gathering data on your clients, speaking to Google, that is outside of any of the search engines that's directly between your client and you. And that data can be super valuable. We just launched a news newsletter, and Matt, one of the things I screwed up with the original newsletter, launched 14 years ago, because I didn't know anything, is I just asked their name and their email address. So I have this huge list of people,

I have no idea who they work for. For our new one, I'm asking not only what company they work for, but what segment of the market. And we're giving them a small discount on our newsletter for answering that. And that's now giving me data that I own myself about the people that sign up for the newsletters, which eventually will become hopefully some of them customers. Well, when you talk about email automation, or text automation, or outreach of some portion, or building a community or client base, your data is only as good as like the inputs. So

from a sales standpoint, if you have a sales CRM and you don't have the data organized, it's kind of crap in, crap out, right? You want to get as much information as possible. Also asking for full name versus name, first name, last name, like, so if you're not doing anything fancy, like you might be at one point with the data, you actually want to ask for full name, not first name, last name, because the number of fields that you have, there's data, and I've seen it personally, it makes a difference. Like if you cut from three fields, or four fields to three fields, actually

even down to like one field, like if you're asking for one piece of information like email, it will increase your conversion rates by so much, it's incredible. I've personally seen it, we had a sponsor years ago that created a form field mat with 13 fields in it. Oh my gosh. It had zero, literally zero. We took those 13 form fields and dropped it down to four, and we went up to about 40% of the people actually would sign up, just by deleting some of those form fields. So I had a client in the home building space or whatever, and they were a home

builder, and I didn't really look at how many homes they were built in, and I ranked them number one in Google for home whole remodeling, all the way to Louisiana, like New Orleans and everything, and they were getting so many calls, he was calling me, screaming at me, like turn it off, turn it off, like make it stop, like you had to hire people to handle all the phone calls, and we actually used form fills and maps to outline a way to vet people. So we were actually trying to turn them away because it wasn't in the geographic area where he's building, and with SEO,

it's kind of like podcasting, it's hard to totally direct where it goes, like there's certainly things and signals you can create, and local SEO, this was before local SEO, like it's really important to consider some of this stuff, but getting good data and understanding what you're going to do with that data is absolutely critical. All right, so another one for brick and mortars is make sure you include local elements in your merchandising, in your in-store merchandising. So Matt, if you notice, we have no OGG in pop-up. When I left the house today, I forgot it, right?

Why don't I have OGG shirt on right now? I have a Google shirt on, like you didn't give me an OGG shirt, I thought I was going to wear one. But what should be going on right now is we have an OGG in pop-up so that when people walk in to listen to us, they see our brand, they see our logo, and they make that connection with us doing the podcast. If you have a brick and mortar, you need to do the same thing. You can make sure your logo is included on stuff, and also think about it seasonally. It's kind of cool when it's Halloween time to maybe throw some

Halloween type of accents to your logo, same way with any other type of holiday. Also make sure that your contact information is there. One of the things that we do all the time is we have a QR code on our pop-ups, and we just ask people to take a picture of the QR code, and any modern smartphone is going to convert that to the information, which leads them right back to OGG in. Going back to what you were saying before, a tracking code is so important, and that's why a lot of people offer some kind of deal or coupon. And if you're running paid ads, you always want

to have some type of deal to be able to track that. But one of the really interesting kind of psychological sales things from a data standpoint is if you offer something to somebody of value, okay, monetary value or otherwise, that maybe is, it will expire, or you wonder in the mail why someone sends you an actual credit card, and then they're like, this is how much credit is on it if you turn on and use it. People don't want to waste credit or value. So if you're selling something and you want to connect that to money or discount or they take some kind of action,

there's a high likelihood that people will save that coupon if we're talking about restaurants or otherwise, or like even like consulting, we do a lot of consulting. So like a consulting session, they would rather go with us, even if we're a higher price than somebody else, just to not forgo that credit, right, that they acquired. You can extrapolate that out to other industries and other clients. And there's kind of the psychological value associated with that. And so if you have a coupon, and you're trying to drive activity of expiration date,

come do XYZ. If that's valuable to them, they'll most likely take action on it. And so there is a lot of value in offering something I would actually recommend like outside of maybe restaurants and something like that. I'm not a big fan of discounts. I really don't like discounts because it discounts the value of what you're offering. Right. I like to add something in like, hey, you buy this, and then we're going to throw this in, we're going to give you like an extra goodie or something like that to increase the value, but not decrease the price. I actually have a client

right now that all they do is run ads for specials and no one will buy the demand spikes are only when they run a special because everybody knows they're going to run a special and they don't want to buy in between there because they know a special is right around the corner. Right. They've trained people to seek out the value and that's kind of a race to the bottom or price. I guess price is component, but I think selling with value and adding to it and offering more to maybe increase that value level is a way to consider a way to go. 100% plus you keep your

margins. Another thing you could do is hold a promotional event like maybe invite a podcast to your restaurant. Right. I think it's a great idea. Well, in the promotional event, if you find local people, local people, social media, local people, the news, other business owners that are not competitors of yours, it's a great way to actually drive more foot traffic and new foot traffic. And if you want to do something really cool, when you do that promotional event, make sure you show support for local causes. So, you know, we support Red M, which fights human sex trafficking,

how cool it would have been if we would have thought ahead of time and maybe worked with Russell here at Rogels and said, look, for every hundred dollars that we generate for you, you donate 10 bucks to the charity. That would have driven then a lot of people who supported the charity, which we didn't think of doing. But promotional events are great ways to drive foot traffic and especially if you combine that promotional event with a local charity that you also support. Well, I would even say you should take pictures of the event of what you're doing

like we just did and post those on social media. And you can repurpose that for other things to extend the community reach of people that might not be able to make it. They could feel like they're participating or what's going on, certainly even broadcasting live as a way to go if you have good sound quality. But being all over social media is valuable. You beat me to the going live. We're going to get to that, darn it. But let's talk about being all over social media. So, you've heard us say this before, pick the platforms that your buyers are on. That's

really important. You can't be everywhere. And even if you can be everywhere, you wouldn't want to be. But some of the things you could do on social, you may not think of is think about things like company milestones or anniversaries, human interest stories, events and promotions. When you walk into ruggles, I don't know if you noticed, but one of the signs says veteran own. I love that. That's huge. Let's talk about that. Where did you serve? What branch? How did that change your outlook on life? Why are you running a barbecue restaurant now?

And then making sure that you talk about your business from a human element point of view always drives engagement. So, don't just talk about products and services and how you can help solve business problems. Also, talk about how you hire minorities, how you make sure that you give back to once again, like your local Boy Scout troops, right? That sort of stuff. Those human interest stories are an enormous way to drive good engagement on social. Well, what I would tell you too is when I think social, I immediately think paid social. A lot of times people shy away from

YouTube and maybe TikTok and some of these other platforms. You should really look, they're now showing you what their audience demographic is. And they really let you segment really well. Facebook has increased it to like 200,000 have to be in that data set. So, you can't really niche down and target so much. But people shy away from those platforms. I see more than anything else because they're like, I can't get on TikTok or whatever. Okay, maybe they're Chinese owned and that could be a reason. But like Snapchat, okay, let's talk about Snapchat.

You don't have to actually make videos. You can run a static ad. This is like a pro tip on some of these platforms. So, you can target those people and you come up in their feed. And the image is basically a video of the image. And it works exceedingly well if you have brand recognition, right? So, if you have any kind of text messaging, even the text messaging and the logo, if you're increasing the hit rate, because you got to think about how much noise is going on out there. So, what is the frequency that they're going to see it? Certainly you want to

worry about ad fatigue to a degree. But you also want to be in the market enough. I mean, Google recommends about 85% if you're running like display ads for people to actually remember and recognize your brand. Facebook has different kind of metrics to tell you, hey, how much mind share do you have on some of this stuff? But I would tell you running ads on platforms where your customers are, you can run static ads you don't have to make an elaborate video. And I think that is something that a lot of people don't think about. They think about, I got to go make videos

and post them online and be interesting and all that sort of thing as a brand. And you certainly should do those things. But start with the basics. Start with running ads in front of your target customers and sharing your value proposition. I do want to back you up. Especially in the oil and gas industry, there's a lot of marketing professionals that believe if you're going to put videos on social, they need to be perfect. So commercially shot, commercially edited stuff that is theater quality. And I disagree with that now 2023. I think that sort of stuff myself personally,

when I see something that's overproduced, I automatically think somebody's trying to sell me something, right? It's marketing. I think a lot of marketing people on gas, if they would kind of relax a little bit and let customer level, consumer level video be in their social, I think it's more real. Shout out to Dixon Directional Drilling. They shoot on iPhones, their team out there wrapping boxes full of tools, right? And it's just, I see real guys that I can relate to sweating, doing work. You can see they're proud of the work they do, right? Yeah. So that's

sort of stuff. I think the oil and gas industry needs to do more from a sales point of view to show what's really going on, show the people side. You don't need to spend a ton of money in theater quality editing and production of videos. Okay, you do need strategy. User generated content is absolutely phenomenal. You get about three times more engagement rate. You want to mix it in. People like to see behind the scenes stuff. People don't want to see a faceless brand. I think that understanding what you're trying to communicate when you're shooting videos

is really, really important, but leverage your sales team, leverage the people at your company, the experts to create content, create it with the direction of the sales team to understand what are the things in different regions where people are having success? I guarantee you, I can guarantee you that there are a lot of sales people out there that are doing really well that are using what I call quote unquote homemade content that it's content that they've kind of developed that's maybe not marketing approved or a story that they tell

or a way that they communicate something that absolutely crushes it. If you can bring that in and we've talked about this in the past to the marketing team or the sales leadership, you might be able to expand that and then push that out in other areas and replicate that value. But user generated content, you have an army of people that work for you, utilize them, and it doesn't have to be perfect, but you want to make sure that the message is correct. And again, it's you want to have some high quality stuff. We do videography, so I don't

want to like put myself out of business here, but you want to represent like the first impression and the buttoned up collared suit tie all that. And then you want the relaxed fit too. And it's also who you're speaking to like if you're speaking to investors, you want to have a different strategy and a different type of content potentially, right versus maybe recruitment of recruiting field guys, right? But people want to feel connected. And that's the absolute best way to do that is give people the behind the scenes look the real look of what's going on. That's actually what

all the social media platforms are trying to do is trying to map what's happening in the real world and duplicate it online. Yeah, love it. So another one, sponsor a local event. So you know, I'm on the board of directors of the API Houston chapter. You keep reminding me. Imagine if you sold all filled tools of some sort. And you came in sponsored API three gun challenge. Who do you think that audience is that's gonna show up and compete that event? This will be a bunch of people who work in the oil and gas industry. It's gonna be your clients. So look at local events, a charity

event, sporting events, chamber commerce type stuff, cultural celebrations, school events, local arts, some music and sponsor them. But not only sponsor it, volunteer to work. So don't just write a check, go and actually volunteer and work that event. This way you're meeting the people that are there. And if you think through what these events are, you can pick the ones that have a high percentage of your potential buyers in that event. And at the same time, you're giving back, you're making the world a better place. So I think it's a win-win all the way around.

You get out of it what you put in. And personal connections, especially post COVID are absolutely critical. So get engaged, get your team engaged, go to those events. If you can't make it to the events, geofence the event, you can start using their hashtag all the time, you can hijack their hashtag. We used to do that to like local conferences that we couldn't be at. We would show a presence there by running ads, by geofencing it, and really on social media, engaging with the post. So you can always build a presence online with someone back at the office. But it's a combination,

just like if you use a military as a reference, you have an air force and you have boots on the ground and army, right? Like you have the Marines and special forces, right? They're all like different tools in the tool belt. And when you use them together, you maximize the amplification or the return. So we're getting close to winding this down. I got a couple more. Partner with other businesses that are in your space, in your neighborhood, if you have a brick and mortar. So let me give you a perfect example of something we just did. So we partnered with Ox hunting

ranch, one of the largest exotic hunting ranches in Texas, actually one of the largest ones in the world. You want to guess who most of their clients are? All in gas guys, right? So we're basically doing a trade. It's costing us no money. And we're promoting their business and they're going to promote ours. And it's going to be a win-win situation all the way around. So think about partnering with other businesses that are in your space that are not competitors and that are in your neighborhood. So the spin on this online is really affiliate marketing using other

people's good one, right? You can actually promote something for somebody else that's adjacent business or a good client of yours or something that works together well with you. You can promote that to your email list or your customer base without giving away any of that data to anybody else. But put in that brand out there for them, have a clickable trackable link which we talked about and drive traffic for them, help them sell their product or service if it's non-competitive them. And that's something I don't see as much as well should be happening in my opinion because

there's so much opportunity from the relationships and the brand equity that a company's built to have a partner brand to co-promote together and co-promotion online with digital. There's so many different ways to do it. Putting your logos together. People do business with people and people want to be part of a community. You're checking a lot of boxes when you do stuff like that. Yeah, here's my last one except you mentioned it halfway through the show. Sorry.

That's okay. Livestream. Livestream has become so easy. It used to be that you had to get approved by platforms like LinkedIn. Now they approve everybody. You can do it from your cell phone. Just make sure you have decent audio and decent lighting. It's quick. It's very in the moment and it's a very effective way to show what your business is doing. How cool would it be if we'd be live streaming right now? People could be asking questions for you and I while we sit here eating some of the best barbecue I've ever had, right?

Really, I should be doing that. I have like no power on my phone. It'll die. But I have a couple events that we do that all the time. You actually do it from different angles and you can live stream on Instagram and Facebook and if you get approved, now LinkedIn is pretty standard. People really like it. I think that the peak of it has kind of died down a little bit, but you still get the notifications. You still get great content. You just want to make sure you have like good quality so you're on the Wi-Fi or something like that. I would even say just a little bit

even more kind of pro tip that outside of this where I've seen everything move to from live broadcasting is actually like syndicated articles on like LinkedIn. For example, I think you're allowed to do like one newsletter and when you set it up and you hit the like, all right, distribute or syndicate button, it will go out to every one of your LinkedIn contacts. Pretty powerful to get them to sign up for your newsletter. Yeah, let me reinforce that. So we just launched a new Sunday update newsletter

three weeks ago and we also have it on LinkedIn. Matt, we went from zero subscribers to 14,000 subscribers in three weeks. So that's the power of what Matt's talking about. It is amazing and it goes straight to their email. It does not go to their LinkedIn message. It goes to their email they used to sign up with LinkedIn. So you're now reaching to them in their inbox directly. All over the place. It's amazing. There is so much technology at your fingertips. The game has changed and you can compete against bigger brands. The motes are shrinking if you do it right with

the right strategy and digital and start leveraging these tools. I mean, the iPhone or whatever smartphone has more technology on it than they went to the moon with, right? And you have it at your fingertips and you have access to more information than you've ever had before and you can be connected to more people than ever before. I would encourage you to, if you haven't, to start looking into it, to start investing, to start trying it out and to see the power of it for yourself. Yeah. Well, speaking of technology, I screwed up. So I did bring the wireless mic in case

I had any questions. We're not recording. What? Oh my gosh. We got this again. In case I had any questions, but because I already pressed record, I can't now turn on the wireless mic. So if we have a question, I want you to walk up here and just speak it into the microphone. All right. Or you can shout it out loud and we can repeat it. All right. So one question I got. I know we talked about on a couple of topics with oil and gas and how to advertise somebody else's brand that you're doing. And I'm actually about to implement that because we're going to an

NOV clay shoot every month to support veterans and everything. So to expand on that, like just kind of go there and network within those, like what would be the goals of that, you know, of course, to make contacts, but also to have those conversations and like expand how we could service other departments within like a bigger organization. Yeah, great question. And National All Well is a great example. National All Well over the last 100 years has grown by acquisition. So they keep buying businesses and they don't advertise it. So if you don't know the company very well,

they just buy companies left and right. At the clay shoot, my suggestion to you would be a couple of things. First thing is get to meet as many people as you can, have zero intention of selling anything, have zero intention of educating anybody. You just want to make an introduction, collect their business cards, give your business cards, and now you have a place to start. Having those relationships over time will allow you to go wider inside of National All Well, which is really important. Every salesperson I know in this industry has had this happen,

where you have a great connection in the company, you have a great relationship, you've been doing business for five, six, ten years, and your contact leaves. He gets hired, he retires, all of a sudden what was your biggest customer you lose, and that's really the sales person's fault. It's not going wider while they had the chance. The other thing I would do is find out who the organizing committee is for National All Well for the clay shoot and meet all of those people, then volunteer. How cool would it be instead of you being one of the vendors that's

participating or is sponsoring, you become part of the team that organizes it, right? Long term wise, from a sales point of view, that is going to be worth a gazillion dollars to you. Be yourself, be transparent, but in the beginning, don't worry about selling anything, don't worry about educating anybody, and what you do, just worry about making those initial connections. I would even piggyback on that and say not just make that initial connection, but make genuine connections. So what the data says online and in person is people do business

with people they know, like, and trust, okay? And also there's a magic threshold of seven hours, okay? So the thing about conferences, and we talked about this in an old podcast episode, you want to not just connect everybody and spray and pray with business cards, right? You want to find the group of people that you think you could do business with, they have a genuine need, and you want to invest in those relationships and make those connections, and then you want to use digital advertising, marketing, organic,

social to continue to build that relationship. What I see more than anything else is people make great connections, that initial connection, that initial content, that business card, and they either, they don't follow up with it or they don't take any action and the lead goes stale or they forget who you are. If you spend enough time with them and you invest in them and then you follow up through a variety of different things, like on LinkedIn, if you're targeting a certain type of customer, you can run ads to everybody at that company

in that position. You want to stay in front of them. And so you want to understand what your sales cycle is and you want to create those touch points. But if you don't have that genuine connection on the front end, it's just like them just seeing you're at. So you want to be memorable, you want to make that connection. I see a lot of people getting pictures of people, right? They take a picture with somebody. Yeah, great thing to do. Right? There's a lot of other things, but you want to connect with them on LinkedIn. There's even, I think it's called Pulse on

LinkedIn where you can connect with people around you. There's all kinds of ways that you can kind of survey the marketplace and look for who you're trying to connect with. I would even tell you when you're networking in person, tell the person that you're meeting what you're looking for and who you're trying to connect with. And if you make a good genuine connection with them, they will actually, when they meet that person that's fit for you, if you're really niche down on what you're looking for, will bring that person over to you and make that warm introduction.

So there's just a lot of things that you can do, but you want to look at it more of a three-dimensional standpoint of not, hey, we're going to go there, we're going to get a bunch of business cards, and then we're going to leave, right? And that's what I see happening at a lot of these big conferences. If you find like a small group of people and you hang out with them the whole conference, that's not a bad thing. That's probably going to produce a sale more than if you just connected with all these people. And all these people literally, if you do your research, you can find

it on lists online of who's going to be there potentially, even before you go or who was there last year, or even who's speaking it. So you could leverage in person and digital by looking at, like this is more conference stuff. I know you're talking about like a clay shoot. Yeah, yeah. So what I would say is though, you can look at who those speakers are and who you might want to be connected with, and then make it part of your route to go make that conference the most valuable possible and connect with those right people. So that research component is the digital side of it.

Yeah. And for the conferences, once again, if you have something that's unique, if you solve a certain problem in the industry, think about getting on the speaking circuit. So instead of being a vendor and spending the money and time to have a booth, if you solve some downhole problem and you get on the speaking circuits, you have to apply a deliberate abstract like an OTC or ATCE or whatever. Well, now you got a room full of people that show up because they have the problem that you solve. So it's like having a one to 500 sales meeting, right? So that's another strategy for the conference,

get on the speaking circuit first, be an exhibitor later. Yeah, well, if you're an exhibitor, you're kind of stuck at your booth, right? I've actually found going to conferences to be able to network and walk around as much better, certainly being a speaker. I would even say those private invite meetings is where I think all the stuff is done. So connecting with people ahead of time to understand where they're going to be or what they're going to do or what's happening. I just think people go to conferences so unprepared, they don't do the marketing going into them. And then they say,

oh, this didn't work. But they work and they have worked for many years for a reason. It's just maybe changed how you need to do that because you're not doing deals on the conference room floor like at NAPE anymore or whatever. And come look for us. We're at most of the conferences. Great way to reach people. We'll have a booth set up and you'll have people crowded around the booth. Happy to have you come. Thanks for showing up, by the way. Yeah, everybody. All right. We need to get out of here a couple of things. We shut things down. I mentioned the new newsletter Sunday update. So

both that newsletter and the oil and gas events newsletter, both the links in the show notes go signed up. We never spam you. We do not sell our list. All of Matt and I are social links are also in the show notes. Matt and I are still working on the insiders group. We launch in next year. So if you're a leader in either sales or marketing, oil and gas pay really close attention because we're making a basically a community just for you. LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. I may have a fail. I haven't read it yet though. Oh, well, I think I gave the tip already like was the

newsletter. Good one. Yes. We'll close with that one. So 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.