Marketing and Comms. The Importance of Collaboration w/Guest Kevin Condron

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. Hey welcome back everybody today we're lucky enough Matt and I to have Kevin Condrom on. Kevin is in a small company you may have heard of before called IBM we have a long very successful relationship with IBM love the

people over there and I think your title is actually global marketing leader industrial distribution sectors but the biggest thing we want to talk about today is you would matter of getting to marketing and comms I'm going to contribute where I can but quite frankly audience I this is out of my my sweet spot so I'm gonna learn as much as you but Kevin welcome to the show. Thank you thanks Mark thanks for having me and Matt great to see you again as well so

delighted to be here. Matt I'm gonna let you see this thing up. Well you know we were we were having a quite a good conversation in the pre-recording here and so we decided to kind of stop that and bring everybody into the conversation so I'll kind of go back and outline or set the table for everybody of what we're talking about so we're really talking about the difference between marketing PR or public relations and then how communications

internally and externally at a larger organization function and so there's a lot of kind of key things to look at because marketing and is really about selling something right it's one way it's directional it's transactional it could be part of a longer sales cycle because you can you can keep talking about right sales is like you know a conversation broken up into small bits right and then Kevin was bringing up some good points about PR and really

sound bites and messaging and what are you trying to communicate where people are busy and hearing a lot of stuff what is the clear consistent message that you're trying to get out and then internal comms is like how you're managing that public crisis management which I know Mark brought into the conversation really falls in kind of PR and then like if there's any internal fallout of hiring or something like that like where you're communicating

internally to the team and so we're going to kind of break this apart it layers over each other there's different metrics there's different people you're speaking to with different messages there's a lot of important pieces that you need to know that if you are at a organization versus an agency for say you might be the only one that knows these things right and they're looking at you and I brought up the analogy of like IT I remember back and when the

internet was starting if you knew about computers or servers or like anything programming like you just knew about everything and I think that marketing is slowly starting to see that there's all these different disciplines there's all these different kind of ways they fit together and work together but it depends if you're at say an agency and you have a huge network of support or you're a bigger company there might be a team of people but if you're at a mid

size company a small company there's one generalist that's doing it all right and all these things get mixed together and so the goal of this podcast is to kind of start to pull those things apart and give examples so in your head you understand what's going on when you're communicating with people about these sort of things and Kevin kind of getting back to the conversation we were having right before we started recording you said that there were kind of four

key things that you were outlining sure so I think almost jumping forward to to the end of the discussion the same but what are the four things that I want you to take away from this discussion whether you're on the marketing side or the comms side or in some organizations this is going to be one one person as you said or it might make a marketing in comms function so the four things I would say is that first of all collaboration collaboration is critical between

marketing and communications but also between marketing communications and the rest of the organization this is not independent organizations of silos within an organization so collaboration is key second one is consistency you can't have the external comms talking one thing with one narrative and marketing talking something different so you've got to be in lockstep you've got to be in sync the third element is that preparation is everything so you've got

to think about what is the journey that you want to take your customer or the market on you've got to be deliberate about it you've got to plan it in advance this is something that you get three steps along the journey and then think oh what we're going to do now you've got to plan that out what is that journey whether it's a physical journey an emotional journey a digital journey but it's got to be clear who you're trying to get to in terms of your target

audience what they care about why they should listen to you what what the assets and the the content that you're bringing out and then the fourth thing would be that it's got to be client or customer centric you may have to think that what you've got to offer the market is fantastic and what you believe are the benefits and the value propositions for your offering may not be what the client or the customer sees it may not be what they value so you've got to be

able to articulate it in what's in it for them okay so four things collaboration consistency preparation and being customer focused and there's our sound bite right there no yeah I think I think that's one of the big key differences when you're talking about marketing right you're pushing out a message and it's one way and now with like well the advent of social media like I think social media is becoming quite important as a two-way conversation and you're

having to understand and interact with your target audience and what are they thinking whether saying and it opens up the lines of communication and you have to be strategic you really have to be strategic and and think through like how are they going to respond what is going to happen what's going to happen if we do this and then the great thing about like everything digital is the analytics component because you can start to see it in the data and so social media is a

great barometer to be able to throw stuff out see how people are responding look back at past data from a messaging standpoint you know and so Mark I want to I want to tee you up if there's anything that popped into your head from a sales standpoint right because we're we're talking kind of marketing communications and that sort of thing but sales can be a lot better involved in the conversation because they're on the front lines and they know what's happening and what

people are probably going to say and they probably run across these challenges obstacles questions and you go straight into like crisis management and you're on the front lines right something happens your clients calling you going what's up like what's the deal what's going on internally like give me the inside scoop right that's where your head goes yeah so from a sales point of view the first thing I think of and give a big shout out to Toyota for this

Toyota had a problem with a certain model certain years of trucks that were very easy for bad guys to steal the catalytic converters in fact some people would say that the trucks are engineered to make it quick for somebody to take a saw saw and slice off the catalytic converters and run with it and I watched this happen from outside so I don't know anybody at Toyota feel free Toyota if you want to reach out to me I'd love to get to know the insider story but I watch it from the

outside and that would have been a marketing nightmare and it actually became a PR nightmare right where your brand which is so well established in the US where you're driving a lot of sales all of a sudden has something happened to it and Toyota's marketing team was genius they basically took that which was a PR nightmare and they flipped around to an opportunity so what they started doing is I saw this first on tiktok is they started interviewing people who had

their catalytic converters stolen and not only did they replace them no no questions no fees but they then helped the crowd source a guard that you could build on that the Toyota dealerships would build on to make it impossible to steal the catalytic converters so they took something that was in my mind a crisis right that would hurt their shareholder value that hurt their sales and they turned it into this beautiful marketing opportunity

and they even their leadership even came on tiktok go look we messed up messed up from the engineer point of view but we're Toyota we you're not our customer you're our family we're going to take care of you so it's amazing to watch a company take something that a lot of companies especially in oil and gas just would have put out a quick PR statement that was very generic and they not only did they own it but they owned the fact they made a mistake and they

fixed it and they used it as a way to generate sales that was genius by them and I would like to see our industry do more of that unfortunately when you think about what the oil and gas industry does inherently it's dangerous inherently there could be negative impacts to the environment and we work really hard as an industry to keep everybody safe we work really hard to keep our planet clean and healthy but like other industries sometimes we

make a mistake and I would love to see our industry not only step in and own it but talk about how they fix it because we don't something as big as like the BP Macondo disaster have you heard of anything about how they recovered that how they took control of that well how they cleaned it up no all you've heard is all the damage that it was done so I'm once again I'm sitting down here for kind of from the outside because

this PR corporate comm things is new to me but from a sales point of view a company can take something that's negative and if they're if they own it and if they're transparent and they're genuine they can turn it into a way to help market and not only to help market Toyota's own fans on social media marketed this solution it wasn't Toyota buying ads it was their own user generated content genius

I want to tease something up for Kevin to to to run with this and we can go back to the beginning and I think it it plays into what Mark said in there statistic okay so I don't have where I can cite it from exactly but there was a study that was done and or a survey I think it was more of a survey and and basically it came out that 63 percent of a company's value people associate with the brand

okay and so we're talking about reputation management we're talking about brand building we're talking about thought leadership and we've done other podcasts about some of those things yeah but I think what we're doing now is really defining what that means and what that looks like before it actually happens right and like you're like oh we need to I need to build my brand

I need to you know make sure like everything's like an onion as you peel it back you point find out more stuff but again that comes down to you got to think about what you want people to find and it's very strategic about how you message and position your brand in the marketplace and and so Kevin I'll I'll turn it over to you with that discuss because you're driving it globally for IBM and so I would

love to hear kind of the things you think about and kind of what you're talking to your team about and even if there's any kind of case studies or scenarios you can share to further articulate some of these points yeah I think it's a great point Matt and when you think that when you talk about the value of the brand that that's everything it's from what people read about you it's the sellers that go face to face with the

client it's about the advertising you do the literature that you create how you turn up at things your relationship with journalists and industry influencers and analysts what you look like online offline in person so your brand is everything it's within the marketing and comms function maybe the custodians of it but in reality everyone's a

custodian of the brand everyone is responsible because everyone contributes to what that brand actually means in reality and I think coming back to something you said a few minutes ago which was key is especially when we're looking in the business to business side marketing's about building up relationships and it's about having those relationships over time

your sellers may be the face-to-face embodiment of that relationship but the decision-making unit especially within a business to business environment has become increasingly complex and there's various studies that say is the decision-making unit 14 people is it 20 people the thing is it's big okay it's much bigger than it used to be it's much more complex but also that the

the sales cycles are longer as well so what we're trying to do is make sure that this isn't just let me go in and sell you something and get out the way and you'll see me in another year's time when I want to sell you the same thing again but it's how do you maintain a relationship because at the end of the day people buy from people and there are some transactions that you can do online

but it's about building that empathy that trust that customer understanding that's impatical so I think marketing has a critical role to play within that as well and to what Mark was saying and the sales teams become part of the the way that you take that to the client ambassadors they're ambassadors at the brand right yeah so and that's why I was saying collaboration

is is critical because you need your sales teams on side you need them to understand what you believe are the key points and selling points but there are also a great acid test in terms of being able to say this is what we're thinking about you're not just turning around to them and saying here you go there's the message there's the presentation go and take it out it should be a

iterative process this is what we're thinking about does this resonate this so we're not acting in in isolation yes we bring different skills and different things to the table but we've got to work together when you then look at it from the PR side or the external comms your key audience there becomes journalists and analysts yeah and especially in the journalist side

they're looking at it from is this news or is it not news how do I take this from what you're selling okay you may have the 25 50 page white paper that goes into the technical detail of your offering I'm not going to put that in my newspaper column or in my online article so how do I get that down to the real net net how do I distill it into something that

that the journalist or the the analyzer it's helping them like serve it up to them on on a silver platter so that they can achieve their KPIs and their views and what they're trying to do and and they're moving quick you know like they're looking for something or a quote or something like that they need they need a media kit to be able to pull from to build their story and you got to be thinking

like the with them what's in it for them sort of thing and if you help them and you build a relationship with them you start being able to guide some of the the things that are important to you become important to them and they they're included in it to their community because this is a lot of one to many communication and that's why I just found from the sales transition to marketing the power of the one to many

and taking that message and crafting and customizing it for that individual and now even with AI and different kind of personalization things you you can speak to somebody that's how you can connect well someone can connect the brand or B2B or B2C it doesn't matter like you said humans or humans how do you get that message of someone searching for a problem online

going through that customer journey finding what what what it is you're offering and you're giving value and then building that relationship with them and ultimately having them contact you and then you know of course there's other support functions and outreach and sales that are happening but you know that connection directly from the heart of the company or the brain of the company from internal

comms is directing that and making sure that that messaging is right and and looking at all that data and it it's it's it's very very cool to have somebody that doesn't even know about your brand but they have a problem and they come to their own understanding that you are the right choice for them you are the solution

and everything along the way is just helping out yeah I think you touched on a great point as well Matt because with social media the way that it is today before a client or a customer comes and actually starts to engage with you they've done a lot of research yeah yes so that it's not so it's a completely greenfield site they're coming

knowing about you knowing what they're looking for and the other thing to bear in mind is especially with as you're looking more at more senior roles within a your customer's organization they don't buy product they really don't buy product they buy a solution to a business challenge yeah yeah you're singing our song Kevin I do want to back I want to back Kevin up

this I think is super important so as editor-in-chief at all gas global network we are considered press we're journalists we have journalist credentials we go to every conference in the world as press and I get no kidding probably a hundred pr agencies every day reach out to me and try to pitch me a story of one of their clients and Kevin you are spot-on when I get these

generic copy and paste emails from PR companies I don't even skim them they're just deleted however of those hundreds that I get every day there's always two or three where somebody took the time to understand what's important to us so the energy industry and to take a sentence and highlight it hey our person said this we think that would be a great quote and when the PR agencies do that and send it to the

journalists which are us we engage with those people we they actually make our job easier because we're constantly looking for content which is what all journalists are looking for good content based on the programming that our different podcasts are trying to perceive so if people do the research and they figure out what podcast and where that message is and how their story fits in

there's a lot higher likelihood and the key thing I think about the PR component versus the marketing right and so I look at it like comms is going what are the assets we need to tell our story marketing is like okay how do I push that out there how do I create demand how do I harvest that demand PR PR is the the the trust building the proof it's the third party verification

because if if someone pitches something to mark mark likes it he knows everything that he knows and then he talks about it it's coming from him not the company right and so that's where the influencers this is where the journalism this is where the news organizations should be evolving they are they are meant to filter the information because they're experts and to give a fair representation of what's going on

and so if someone in that capacity endorses you gives so much credibility it's like so if we run ads for example for a company or a podcast that we're pushing on our LinkedIn right so if we're running those ads and it reaches our fifty hundred thousand people there's a level of credibility before so it's it's basically um uh what is it

called like you're kind of teeing up there's a specific word for it your your brand before someone gets it so they're they're you're already putting them into the state of if they trust this person they're going to trust that message and so like it's a position anything there's a specific word it escapes me right now but it's so important um to to get that third party verification because everybody doesn't

know anything there's so much information online so it's like where are the trusted sources that i know to get an orientation on where i should think about this product in in my in in my head or in the prospects head that's what you're trying to figure out is what do you want them thinking um before they start before you start giving them your message right

so i think what you what you and mark have just discussed is my third and fourth points it's about preparation being key and about being customer focused and what you do rather than yeah we've all got examples i'm sure in their own history of features and functions of a specific thing that we think is fantastic and the client says don't don't get it not really that

important but i think the other element that i'd like to come back to which is linked to this is a lot of the times around marketing and comms what we're what we're anchoring on is specific moments in time so that becomes moments in time now that moment in time could be a major event so for example it could be an activity like sero week for example it could be something like a new offering that you're launching

it could be a piece of thought leadership it could be a news announcement but very rarely should those things happen is just what i refer to a lot is fireworks you get this burst of noise and light and energy and then it goes dark again you've got to maintain that on a journey you've got to take your customers on a journey and think about how are you going to evolve them from in marketing and comms we talk

a lot about wearing the funnel or wearing the sales cycle essentially so at the beginning you may be talking about things in more general terms getting people enthused getting the people engaged but as you go through that or down through that sales funnel things become a bit more detailed this is where you're going through that sales cycle

or okay i got the message i understand the excitement i can see what you're doing okay tell me some more tell me some more let's go deeper then you start getting into the the details and marketing and comms still works hand in hand with with sales as we go through that because that's where you start getting into different assets Kevin i got to ask you this you don't work for a small company

i know IBM well how do you manage to keep everybody on a common focus and a common mission in the different roles in marketing pr and comms in a company that is as large as you i mean internally it has to be sometimes a challenge is it just you being clear in your communication to everybody else i think it's being clear is being transparent but again my second point was about

consistency and collaboration so making sure that the sales teams know what you're planning people knowing what you may be bringing to market in terms of offerings and solutions having clarity from the very top of the organization about what our key mission and focus areas are because yeah we've got hundreds and thousands of offerings but what is it we're trying to achieve and i've always

throughout the the different roles that i've had i've always tried to keep one thing very clear in my mind i should be able to articulate and convince our sales teams our leadership teams what i'm trying to achieve from a marketing and comms strategy and i should be able to do that within a couple of minutes if i can and they don't get it then i've got no chance of them being able to

articulate it and take it forward i need to make sure that they can understand it agree with it but then take it out and carry it with them and articulate it in the same way to their customers now into the market you are singing our songs the whole reason for that and i start this podcast is we think an oil and gas sales and marketing should be joined at the hip they should be partners on everything

and what you just rattled off is that same thing just on a much bigger scale right i love that i know that you want to jump in so i'll be yeah i know the the one thing i really want to add and this this has had me thinking kevin since our last conversation and and you brought it up again today is you were talking about a shared experience okay and and and a moment in time

a shared experience that's what you're trying to do you're trying to take somebody on a journey or get them caught up to kind of how you view the world and then present them how you're seeing things forward and kind of walking them down that path and i think you know for big brands you're talking about bigger experiences and i think that that's why the super bowl is just so powerful right

everybody's having the same experience at the same time and people entertain you with ads like i watched the super bowl for the ads like why don't they do that all the time like i think i think that you know if you get good at what your message is and the story and what you're trying to communicate and you can get them to have a same experience whether it's the whole company whether it's like client base

whether it's like the the public um if you can get people into that shared experience at that same moment people come together yeah yeah right and people do business with people they know i can trust and if you can solidify and codify that that that establishes your place as a brand in in one person's eyes or in a millions people's eyes yeah we've just had one of those exact experiences over the last couple of

weeks from the ibm perspective so we're a long-standing technology partner at the Wimbledon tennis championships so what we do with them we we cover everything from on-court statistics we analyze the data we work with them on their commerce side so there's there's a whole range this partnership's over 20 years old but what it allows us to do is show

ibm's capabilities in action apply to something that everyone can is aware of that they can access and okay in that case it may be being able to provide a consistent experience whether you are watching the match on center court watching it on tv following it on your phone or your device through an app the

experience is consistent but the other side we're feeding different things to different people so the the data that we would and the analysis we'd be able to give to the coaches and the players after their performance and that they can access about their competitors performance it's different from they're getting something different from the tv channels who are taking

some of the stats and then putting it in as part of the commentary that they give on the match which is different again from the fans who are just wanting the information or watching it so so again this is a bit like coming back to that understanding what journey you're taking your client on within the sales and marketing and commerce cycle

you're feeding different things to different audiences at different times but there is a golden thread of consistency that goes through the whole thing which is that shared experience and i'm just loving this conversation i i i feel like mark that this is exactly an extended conversation that we should have in our mastermind group okay and you know i want to turn that over to you

to talk about that but also we're we were talking about doing a panel discussion to continue this conversation i didn't know kevin if there's anything that you wanted to make sure to to get out in this podcast but i'm just loving this conversation wanted to keep going and would love to have you back to oh yeah oh we're gonna have kevin back a bunch like i think we've just scratched the surface with this this is and first

thing i also appreciate your time kevin i know you're busy you got a business to run but this has just been incredible but matt you're right we're getting close to end of time we are absolutely gonna have kevin back on we're gonna have kevin involved in some panels so stay tuned for that and then kevin what matt is mentioning our mastermind group is that matt and i believe so

strongly that sales and marketing should be connected to hip that we're gonna form a a organization or we actually are already doing it where we're inviting everybody from the sales side everybody from the marketing side in oligas to join this mastermind group to learn with their peers and to understand what is new and helpful out there and at the same time creating a safe space so that you can vet your concerns you can talk

about your failures in in a in an area where nothing's going to get out everything's going to be safe and we're doing this just to try to help the marketing sales people in our industry so we're definitely going to make sure we include you in that as that's developing but we do need to wind down the show our podcast link so um oil and gas sales and marketing podcast.com

is where we're going to put it up by the time this gets published it will be live um so if anybody isn't putting out there because we've been talking about it for a year so you put a line in the same day it's going to be published today so tomorrow if this goes out uh it's going to be live so please go check it out this will go out actually next week so you got a little bit of time matt anyway we need to wind stuff down um i want to let's make sure we uh get some

the stuff out there to pay the bills uh if you want to sign up for our two newsletters most of the links in the show notes are oligas events newsletter where we take all the oligas conferences put them together put them in your inbox once a month for free that's useful especially if you're in sales and marketing and then our sunday update um all of matt and i's uh links for our social channels are also in the show

notes we just talked about our insiders group now it's time uh for a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week kevin you have a LinkedIn fail or tip for our audience do you want to share i i've got a tip i'll give you two tips in fact so first of all reposting if you're reposting add some value please add some value don't just repost and say i like that

add some value and some opinion the other thing that i'd say is 70 2010 70 2010 so when you're posting content 70 percent should be about the industry or the function of the role that you have non-specific to your company 20 percent should be about what your company's doing so yeah broadcast what you're doing what your company's doing what you think's great 10 percent should be about you

be human be original be authentic somebody wants to just listen or or follow somebody who's just posting about what the company told them or yeah my my company's great we all of our companies are fantastic but so 70 percent about the market and how you add value 20 about what your organization's doing 10 about you you as an individual you as a human that is some of the best tips i think we've ever gotten

um i'm now i have to go back and look at my own content see if i can fits in that 70 2010 box that is fantastic and that's great and then like i said we're gonna have you back on this is there's so much we need to unpack here and we really appreciate you coming on helping to share this with our audiences and audience if you want to reach out to kevin uh his linkedin profile link will actually be in the show notes as well

and we'll have a backlink to to ibm um so uh like as unfortunately got to wind this thing down so everybody 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

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