Mastering Enterprise Sales: Overcoming Buyer Hesitation

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 to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast.

And Matt, we published two episodes in a row. All right, we're back on it, everybody. Our trend is going in the right direction, absolutely. Matt, our last conversation I thought was great. We did that at the Canon, and we talked to a company that, and Thomas, that was really making a difference for his clients.

And he said something that we didn't go down the rabbit hole with him there because we ran out of time, but I've heard it a lot this year, especially from enterprise sales and marketing teams. And basically, how do you overcome enterprise buyer hesitation and navigate those complex buying groups? So I thought we'd talk a little bit about that.

Actually, I don't know, fortunately or unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with this, even with what's going on with OGGM. I thought we'd just jump right into it. So the first thing is, in my experience, and I've sold to Fortune 100 companies, actually quite often,

the number one reason for that buyer hesitation is perceived risk. Now, whether that risk is real or not doesn't matter. It's the perception. And that perceived risk comes from a couple of different places. We've said this a bunch in Oil and Gas, and this applies to sales and marketing as well.

Our industry as a whole is risk-adverse because when we make a mistake in our industry, people die. And not only do people die, but you can have an environmental catastrophe which can destroy a company literally overnight. So if you have some process in place and nothing's leaked,

nothing's blown up, nobody's got hurt, nobody's died, you're hesitant to change the process. And it transfers right over to sales. The other thing is, you've got to remember that it used to be you literally had a decision maker. Or maybe that decision maker was one or two people,

but now the industry has learned that's not good for the company, that you have to have decision-making teams. When you think about all of that, it's like status quo, but it's status quo based upon keeping the business running properly and effectively. Then in today's world, 2026, especially with the proliferation of AI,

there's objections that are coming from everywhere. Trust me, when you engage with a new client, and whether that's Chevron or Halliburton or a smaller service company or whatever, somebody in that buy-in group has done some research on you and your company.

And there may be some things that come up that cause them to have in their head some unaddressed questions so far. So on your website and on your presentation, you may address some of these objections, but there's things that you don't know yet.

I want to stop there because I can see your face. I know you want to jump in right now. Okay, so there's like kind of two components of what I heard. First, addressing the old and the buyer hesitation and the risk-adverse component of it. There was, I think, I don't know if it was a commercial

or whatever it was, but it was like, no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. I've also heard that in the financial realm, is what does Goldman say? And then even in kind of change management, what does McKenzie say?

If you hired one of those companies and you dropped all this money, if they screwed up, you're like, they're McKenzie or they're Goldman. Like, so people rely on that institutional trust to protect their own backs.

And I think a lot of salespeople go from these big brands that open the door real easily, right? And then they get a great compensation package. They go to a smaller company. And then those doors don't open anymore or they don't open in the way that they thought.

It's this perceived level of trust, perceived level of risk. And in the last podcast, we talked about the 7-11-4 rule, which is really helpful to help overcome that concern, right? So that I can frame that and we can go down that path a little bit more. I know we've talked about that in the past.

We've got a lot of great podcasts about that. What I'm seeing and what you addressed on is maybe it's reputation management. Maybe it's how you're getting interpreted by the AI. That is really what EWR Digital does, right? And that is really what we're doing with modal point

is go to market, but also separating out that governance component. Because I think it was something like 46% of AI projects got canceled because of governance issues because things have gone off the rail. But what you're talking about is the interpretation.

So what's happening? How are you getting interpreted? Like you can ask AI, hey, where are they with the BBB? Or that might not be relevant to oil and gas, but to a lot of businesses that coming up or reviews on Glassdoor, okay?

If you're a smaller business or you had a situation in the past, like you have to manage all surfaces of your brand and AI is like a very intelligent person that's going to be doing hours of research in a couple seconds for someone presenting it. So understanding what those surfaces are

and how you're getting interpreted and how you want to be showing up for what questions and things is really what we've been working on for the last four years. So anything you want to ask related to this, Mark, I have even some case studies with publicly traded operators

that we've fixed some things with like the CEO, like a new CEO came in, AI was showing the old CEO, the acreage was wrong, they were making a purchase. Like when you get into publicly traded companies, you really need to make sure your data is correct out there and it's getting pushed out there.

And sometimes you don't have that control and there's some drift. And so that's really what we get into when you want to nerd out. Yeah, I want to go back because you mentioned McKenzie and there's other equivalent companies called Bain, two things. And McKenzie at Bain, if you'd like to come on the show

and have this discussion, so we would love this, we would relish this. Years ago, McKenzie and Bain both had solid books of talent. They had everything from experience, project analysts, project accounts, petroleum engineers, geoscientists, farmer CEOs of companies.

And when somebody needed help in a big company, big old company to help, they'd reach out to them and they would do really good work. That business model for all of those companies has changed. Now they can't afford to have a bunch of talent. Their sales team goes out and sells a gig to somebody

and then they have to staff up. But that staffing up is contractors and they don't have the best in the world. They have whoever they can grab. And their goal used to be to help their clients solve problems. And now from the outside,

it seems their goal is to increase their billable hours. I've heard this from hundreds of all-in-guess companies since the pandemic, that the work that those big research companies do is no longer as good as it used to be. So to your point, you used to be able to rely on those companies

to do stuff. And Matt, I got something funny. I don't know if I've ever told you this. Motile point for years, outright McKenzie, if you search for all-in-guess sales help,

all-in-guess sales experts, how to generate all-in-guess revenue. And I made the mistake on my early videos, it's still on YouTube, where I said publicly that we outrank McKenzie. I found out later that somebody McKenzie heard that

and they threw $150,000 worth of money at it to outrank me. And so I was watching the organic ratings. They weren't even on the first 10 pages. And over literally a period of six months, they went from not even being on there to the first page and they were catching up with me.

And at that point, I realized the mistake I had made. And then the budget ran out and nobody picked it up again and they disappeared again. So what I did was a risk to Motile Point's business. I didn't anticipate that McKenzie had more money to help drive content to outrank me on search engines.

So even something like that is something you have to be aware of. You have to look at what the competitors are doing. I would tell you what I know about McKenzie and these different companies, from what I've seen, and I've been on some multifunctional teams of clients

where everybody owns a different component of it, they have a sales group that comes in and wows clients. And they're good. And they're good. And then they swap it out with whoever's working on the account. And that's where a lot of questions I'm seeing are like,

who's going to be working on our project? Let me see their resume. I want to build a relationship with those people. And then also you have the issue of turnover of them rotating people out and you're switching out who they build the relationship with,

who understands their business, the knowledge transfer. There are a lot of issues with these business models. I'm not saying all the big companies are doing that, but I think that it's trust but verify in a lot of cases. And people are doing a lot more verification and they're asking some really hard questions.

And your brand presence, your entity graph across the internet needs to be cleaned up and addressed. We were even talking about this previously, something for me, I've been out there a long time. I've gone by Matt, I've gone by Matthew, AI, like I've been working to bring that together

because Google, the knowledge graph, if you search Matthew and Matt Bertram, I come up twice. So it's separating the authority. And if I can unify that, that will strengthen quite a bit. And so I've been going through a process to do that. But this is with companies that change their name, okay?

People that are dealing with a similar issue. If you have a product that you change the name or the service offering of it, like all this data is cleaned up. If you have old locations, if you move location, there's so many ways that there's dead and bad data

across the internet, not just externally but internally. So it's a lot about data hygiene to break it down really simply. But it can hurt you in a big way. If that information's outdated or there's not clarity on it, there's going to be a lack of trust

and you're not going to get the visibility you're looking for. 100%. Back to the buyer hesitation thing. Let me tell you something else I see a lot of sales people do. In the old days, you had your champion. You had your, what's the word I'm looking for?

Your decision maker. I'm sorry. And y'all know, if y'all listen to this show, I hate that word decision maker because it doesn't exist anymore. But now typically you have a champion. Even though you know there's a decision making team,

there's one person that's leading that project, leaving that sale. And what happens, a lot of sales people used to focus on that champion. And now in 2026, and I suspect moving forward, focus on that champion is a mistake. Because what happens when you focus on the champion,

you only have X amount of time in the day, X amount of energy, X amount of resources. When you focus on that champion, you're ignoring the other players that are in that decision making team. And let me tell you, those other players,

whether you know who they are or not, they may not be your champion, but they have a veto button. They can kill the deal. And that's important. So one of the first things you need to do

if you're having hesitation to complex enterprise sales is map out the buy-in group ecosystem. And I see this with us all the time. I'm actually dealing with one of the largest cloud providers in the world. We'll leave it at that right now.

And the group that I'm dealing with is four people, and they're very senior people. I have an executive champion in this sale. It's not the sales process yet. It's in the discovery process. But I know there's about six other people

that I have not met that don't come to the meetings that are part of that team, and each one of them has a veto button. So my job as the seller for OGGN is I need to figure out who those people are. Not in a farious way,

not in a way to go around the team that's engaged in me, but in a helpful way so that I can say, hey, I need to make sure everybody on the team that's making this decision has their concerns addressed. That's where that hesitation comes from. And like I said earlier,

some of those concerns maybe balance some of them or not. So a lot of times that core group that's engaged with you that's doing the calls, that's doing the meetings, they don't want to introduce everybody else. Typically, they're doing other things. They think they got it themselves.

And instead of trying to make them do it, which you can try, you can say, look, I'm not going any further. I've seen salespeople do this. Good salespeople. I can't go any further to process

unless everybody on the decision-making team is here in presence. That starts a bit of a conflict. And if the people you're dealing with have an ego, or if part of their procurement process is they don't make those introductions,

you've probably slowed down your deal and maybe even killed it. The way I deal with it is just the opposite, being helpful. I go, look, do you know all the other people that are helping you make this decision?

Do you know what their concerns are? And of course, you can watch their faces when you ask the question and somebody's eyes will drop. And you'll say, you know what, John, I don't think you know what the other people's, what their concerns are in the interest of your time.

So you don't waste time. Why don't we get everybody on one call? They don't even have to show themselves on the screen, right? I don't even have to know their names. Let's get everybody on one call so I can hear everybody's concern.

And most importantly, hear what they want to accomplish by working with OGGN. And 99% of the time, if you're genuine about that, genuine, it's not a sales tactic.

You really believe it in your heart. They'll invite those other people. And now you have at least for 30 minutes to an hour, every person on that decision-making team, you have their attention and you can go through discovery and learn

and make sure that you understand what they're trying to accomplish and what they're worried about. Once again, that perception of risk or even if it's real or not, is super important. That's what slows down

and causes that buyer hesitation. There's nothing to add to that. I think it's dead on, yeah. So when you map out that decision-making ecosystem, remember, everybody has a veto button, whether you know who they are or not.

So you're identifying the stakeholders. There's always a few people in the decision-making team that carry the most weight. That's usually the people that have the most knowledge about what they're doing.

In my case, it's actually the corporate comms group and the PR group because they want to work with me to help solve some PR issues, right? Or that's the whole reason they're reaching out to me. Then, and I've said this a million times,

I've done this my whole career, but don't forget this, just because you're at enterprise sales level and you're at the top of your game, don't forget the basics. You need to identify your message

and craft it person. Matt and I, you and I talked about this with Thomas on our last recording. If you sold paper clips, something is transactional as a paper clip. If you were selling it to the project management team,

your conversation basically would be something like, hey, by keeping all your papers together, it ensures that your projects are delivered on time and on budget. Makes sense, right? You're not looking for papers.

If you're talking to the CEO of the same company, you may go, hey, the paper clips will help guarantee your shareholder value. Because remember, in the news last year, one of your project managers lost an important piece of documents,

which delayed your permitting procedure, which mountains you went online later and you should have the public knew about it and it hurt your revenue and it affected shareholder value. So something as simple as a paper clip,

you have different conversations based upon the titles or the roles that you're talking to. And in this case, it's exactly the same. That decision making team is going to be made up of different subject matter experts,

typically around whatever problem they're trying to solve. And then usually there's a finance person. Now it may not be an accounting person or somebody from finance, but it's somebody that's looking at the numbers because they're looking at a hard ROI.

So when you have these conversations with the group, it's not the same message to each person. It's a structured message to what their concerns are. Now here is where AI tools like Claude and other ones are like amazing, useful. When you find out who these people are,

just tell the AI tool, I'm getting ready to have a sales meeting with them. I'm trying to sell them X. I want to know what their concerns are. And if it's a public company, your A2 will go read the 10K, the chairman's message,

look at their LinkedIn profile, see what they posted, see what else out there online, and it will come back with a reasonable degree of certainty of what probably their concerns will be.

And the concerns of person A is going to be different than concerns of person B. Years ago, that took months to figure out. Now with AI's help, you can literally figure it out in a minute. Yeah.

Going back to what you were saying before, to incorporate marketing in that when you have that buying committee, building a good leave behind is really important. And a leave behind for every ICP is really important because if you can't access those people,

stuff's going to get passed around eternally. So you want to make it easy and you want to make the message clear. I see a lot of presentations where you're throwing a lot of data or people that are not familiar with it

can't jump into what you're saying. And so it's simplify, simplify, executive summary. And then also throughout that process, different people are at different levels of engagement. So they are going to engage your company. There are ways and tools,

depending on privacy, that you can see who that is or they download something or they go to a certain page or they're part of a network. Or guess what?

If you friend them on social media or on LinkedIn, for the next 30 days and you post sequentially, they're going to see that post if they log in. So there's all these kind of air cover ways

from a account based selling standpoint and a social selling standpoint to keep getting in front of these people and to give your message more credence or tell that story. A lot of times I lived a different life

before I got into oil and gas. I was in the pharma industry and you got two minutes or less with a doctor and you would call on them every week

or every other week or whatever over the course of a year to share that message and to understand where they are and to move them forward just a little bit,

just a little bit, just a little bit. When you understand this buying cycle and like you talked about with the AI and understanding,

okay, here's what their possible needs are. Certainly the CFO is getting involved a lot more often and saying, this is an investment. What are we going to get out of this?

And if they don't know what that is, they're probably not going to fund it or they're probably not going to renew it, okay? And so you got to have a clear point

of what we do and how it impacts the bottom line and how to track it and that's where the case studies and what you've done it before are to build that trust

to get over that threshold to say, this is more of an investment than like a pilot when you're selling it. And so understanding that and taking all the data that you have

and then it's really about curating the right message to the right people and the distribution channels to get there. Yeah, love it. All right, we've talked about

don't focus on the champion, identify the stakeholders, personalize the message. Now, here's one where a lot of sales people let themselves be pushed around by their customer

or by procurement supply chain is create a master plan. I have, and I'm not bragging people, I have sold way more podcast sponsorships than any company has ever bought.

That makes me much more of an expert than them. So logically, who should control the sales process? Let me tell the story in a different way. Matthew, have you ever flown a commercial jet? I have.

Okay, how many times? How many times have I flown on a commercial jet? Not flown in, flown one, like feet on the broddle, pedals, hands. Oh, zero, zero. I've not flown a commercial jet.

Now imagine I'm a commercial airline pilot. I have flown a commercial airline hundreds of times more than you. If we asked the people sitting in the seats of the Boeing 747, who do they want to fly to plane?

Me or you? Who do they go pick? Yeah. Me, because I am the expert. It's the same thing in sales. You have to control the sales conversation.

This has nothing to do with ego. This has nothing to do with negotiation. Everything to do with servicing your client the best way possible. You have sold your solution way more times they have bought it,

so you have to help them understand how to buy it. Sometimes you got to push back on procurement and you have to have the same conversation I just had with all of y'all, but you do it behind closed doors. So what you do,

as soon as you get to the point where it looks like they're interested in buying, you co-create an action plan, a buying plan. What does that mean? If you try to shove your plan that you use with everybody down their throat,

number one, that's kind of rude because they're a different company than everybody else. Number two, they're going to have zero buying

and they're going to resist, right? Because you're now trying to control what they see you as trying to control the buying process, which you are, but you're doing it,

your intent is good, not trying to make sure you make the most revenue, whatever. So you sit down with them and say, same thing I just said, I have sold this a million times.

This is the first time or the third time you bought this. Here is how we typically sell. I want to co-create this with you and you sit down. This meeting is nothing to do

but to map out next steps, action plans, deliverable, go or no go date, even such things as finance. You've heard me talk about this on the show before. If they don't have CapEx budget,

rent it to them and hit their OpEx budget. A lot of senior people in our industry that lead multi-billion dollar business units have no idea they can do that. You do know that as a professional seller. So you co-create that buy-in plan

so you're all up on the same page and know what the next steps are. This includes counter invites, deliverables, and it's also a flag to you how much your client

or your prospect is into the game. They will agree to this because it makes sense to them because they help you co-create it. If they start missing deliverables, if they start missing meetings,

you know that their intent maybe is not 100% to solve this problem or at least not with you. And you can say, hey, look, we created this buy-in plan

so we could decide if we're a good fit for you and you make the best buy-in decision and you didn't show up to last Wednesday's meeting or you've rescheduled it four times.

That's telling me that maybe this isn't as important to you as I thought it was and have an open conversation, but creating that mutual buy-in plan is super important

so that you can guide the conversation and guide the sale to the point where you can help them. Read, when I say help them, read, close the sale. I have seen so many times

the client welcomes that conversation. They do. And many times they are like, okay, we want to buy from you and then they don't know how

and then the deal stalls because no one is taking the lead. So the salesperson thinks the client's going to take the lead, but really the seller should take the lead because they've done it before,

like you said, and then lead it through and make sure it's the right fit for them and then they're co-creating it so they're putting energy into it and it's helping them

become part of the creation process that they can take ownership of and they own the sale, they own the process, they own the implementation because they know that their names on it

and they feel good about it and there's not going to be as much buyers remorse if there's any. Yep. And let me tell you what else it does. Number one, it gives them ammunition internally

to go back to their management and say, we got this. Here's the steps. They didn't do the steps. They didn't do the work. They're busy.

You did it for them. Number two, what kills a lot of deals when your champion gets hired by another company or retires, right?

If you have the process in place and you know the entire team, it doesn't matter if you lose your champion, right? The process is what controls everything, not you having to play in golf with the right VP.

I've seen the save deals over and over again. And by the way, guys, this does not have to be complex. For us, it's literally five steps. It's simple. It's common sense type of stuff,

but you need to control the buying conversation, but your intent needs to be pure. That means that during that process, that buying process, you may uncover that you are not a good fit for them.

And at that moment, you stop and you say, you know what, we're not a good fit for you. And if you really want extra brownie points, introduce them to another company,

even if it's a competitor, that is a good fit for them. That goes a long way. And I know I'm going to have a lot of sales managers say, I will fire my first rep that does that. Don't you dare.

Your first rep that does that is probably going to take your job so we're in the future, because that's the right way to sell in 2026. One of the last things that I wanted to add to this is, you said understand, like co-create the process,

but understand their process. So if your champion leaves, and I have a specific example of a client that hired us, and then things weren't going the way they needed to go. And so I met with the partners and I said,

okay, how do we fix this? And I had them hire me as a fractional CMO for about a six month period to get everything back on track. What I realized was the person that hired us was not even in the business unit

that we were reporting to. So we weren't getting the feedback loop of what we needed. And there was no way this was going to get fixed because he didn't have access to the information. They were just like, hey, you know about this,

go find this somebody, whatever. And it didn't really get plugged in the right way. But if we would have known that buying process and known who those people are, and now that I've gone in-house, I've met all the right people,

I know what's happening, now I understand the problem and I can work through it in the right way. And having that roadmap and understand that landscape is incredibly critical

because yeah, if you have a buddy, they take care of it all for you, but you don't know what's happening. But if you understand that process, you can plug and play and he can make introductions

or she can make introductions for you. But if you don't know that, you're flying blind and you're just at the whim of someone else. So the co-creation and also understanding

when are the buying gates, what is the buying process inside the company? I think it's a good thing that you hit on. Dude, you're so right. Let me tell you what we used to run into all the times I've figured it out.

We typically engage with sales. Sales sees the value with OGG in almost instantly. However, usually the budget for us comes out of marketing. And we would have deals that I thought were fantastic

where the sales seems hell yeah, how quick can we get started? And it would stop and stall. Why? Because nobody from marketing was included in the conversations

that was their budget. And typically in the oil and gas space, marketing has a very small budget compared to sales. So they were risk it first because they didn't know what's going on.

Now that I know this, I make sure that everybody that has skin in the game. And remember, we're talking about Fortune 100 companies, but huge companies

is there at the table. Now, one of the side effects of this is I've had a dozen companies, maybe more, once I got sales and marketing in the room together

to talk about working with us as a side conversation, it basically goes something like this. While they're in a conversation with OGGM, sales goes, or market goes,

hey, we threw y'all 300 leads last month and y'all didn't close any. And the sales leader turns around and goes, they all sucked. This is the first time they've ever talked, even though it's a huge

and multi global Fortune 100 company. So the marketing leader goes, what do you mean they sucked? And in that conversation, the marketing leader learns what they need to do

to generate qualified sales leads. They didn't know they were just reading from a playbook or what they used to do in the past and what constitute a sales-qualified lead changes every,

not even every year, every six months, maybe even every quarter. Then the sales team gets the benefit of having a marketing team that actually generates good leads

and they hit their number. And that all happens as a side project of me just getting them in the room and talking to each other. And guys,

I wish I could name names. It's some of the biggest companies in the world this has happened with. So don't think just because you work with a mature organization that sales and marketing talk.

And in Matt's case, make sure that whoever has the budget is in on the conversation. Whether it's a different business or not, because if not the deal,

if it even goes through, it's not going to be close enough to solving the problem and you probably won't renew. And most probably it won't go through. Absolutely.

So I know we got to get out of here. No, I know we're getting close, but I got to go through how OGG does this. All right. So just real quick,

I think this applies to anybody selling into the oil and gas industry. Anytime you have that buyer hesitation, control that process. The process is basically like this.

Number one, focus on the small victories. Take your buying process and make it into smaller chunks. So for instance, once there's agreement that they want to learn more,

go ahead and set out the calendar invite. When they accept, that's a victory. That's a smaller piece, right? And you build that momentum. Number two,

you always have to leverage proof. For us, we interview our clients. You can go to OGGN website and you see some very big names talking about how we help them

generate revenue, brand awareness. Ask them up front. Hey, can I shoot a quick 30-second testimonial video? Don't spend a lot of time shooting on your damn cell phone.

Just try to get good audio. But leverage those customer testimonials, case studies, ROI calculators, all that sort of stuff to maximize your value

and minimize that perceived risk. Then, uncovered deal breakers early. This is one we run into all the time. We have companies that reach out to us that want to work with us,

yet they really don't know what they want to accomplish. They see OGGN. They see our sponsors. They see our sponsors and aim Placid everywhere

on the podcast on YouTube. And somebody goes, go work with OGGN. They don't know what they want to accomplish. So, that's a deal breaker. You have to know what you want to accomplish with.

Now, if you're not sure, myself and my sales team can help you qualify that. You want brand awareness. You want lead generation, right? Do you want to grab market share?

Are you trying to sell your company so you want more orders on the books? You don't care about revenue. You have to uncover those deal breakers really early. Then, align roles. So, I have a sales team, right?

My sales team is really good. You know what though? When they get stuck, they need to bring in the experts. And who in the company is the expert? I'm not bragging.

I've just done this long ago. Me. I'm not in every sales conversation. However, when I'm brought in, I know they need help. In your case, whatever you're selling,

you may need technical experts, sales engineers. You may need to bring executives. You may need to bring, I don't know, IT security people. But make sure you align the roles to the perceived or not perceived pushback

from your client in that sales process. Then, most important thing, your champion, even though I told you to make sure you know who's who, every else is working with,

your champion, enable him or her, give them what they need to sell what they sell you to their own company internally. Remember, they didn't reach out. Hopefully they didn't reach out to you

because you're cute. They most probably reached out to you because they know you can help them. But maybe they have a hard time articulating that. So in our case, one of the things that helps our internal

champions sell all the time, if you go to OGGN website, go to the media page, we pay and it's not cheap people. We pay an independent third party company to stack rank our podcast

against every other podcast in our industry. You can go right now and you can see where the OGGN podcast rank as far as download listeners, social media, compared to our competitors,

not that we have any or very many. Now, a lot of sales people go, there's no way I'm putting my competitors stack ranked against me. You know what that is? That enables my internal champion

to go to his team, his budget holders and go, look, we're spending money with the top all you guys podcast network in the world, not in Texas,

not in the US, in the world. So enable your internal champions. So that's basically the process we use. And what I do is I sit down with our prospects or honestly,

I don't do it much anymore, my sales team does, but they sit down with the prospects and they go through this and they say, this is how we sell,

are you okay with it? And they always say yes, because you're helping them, you're making their job easier. So there you go. Overcoming buyer hesitation

at the enterprise sales, that's how we do it. It's my suggestion how you do it. We actually, Matt and I could have another whole call, another whole podcast episode about this from a marketing angle

because there's a lot of marketing stuff that comes into here that helps the salesperson do all of this. In fact, Matt, if you want to, maybe our next episode is we take the same problem

that sales seems to happen and let's talk about from a marketing point of view. Yeah, we could definitely have that conversation. Man, I think having a conversation or a panel discussion between the marketing person

and a salesperson, maybe even at different organizations, but how they approach it, what they deal with, what the culture is internally, I think that would uncover a lot of stuff

that would be pretty interesting. That's freaking genius. Hey, listeners, if you work for an organization that's selling and marketing to oil and gas, I don't care what side of the fence you are,

if your sales are marketing, go grab your peer and see if they'd like to come on this show as a guest. Let me tell you a couple of things. So first thing is you can't screw it up. It's not live.

So if you mess up, nobody will ever know we edit out. Matt and I are not perfect. Our editors are good. Matt and I are not. Number two,

it will give your sales and marketing team free promotion to our millions of listeners and your company. And if you work for a big company that has investor relations,

corporate comms, HR, legal that may worry about what you say, we can let them listen and approve the episode before it goes out. We're the only company in the world that ExxonMobil Corporate Coms

allows us to interview their executives with their vendors and publish it. Go to a YouTube channel to find it right now. We make sure that your company's safe from a risk point of view, speaking of risk.

But yeah, that would be great, Matt, for you to have a sales and marketing counterparts from a company join us on this show and kind of talk through this. I think it's a genius idea.

Yeah. All right, guys, we got to get out of here. Remember, sign up for our LinkedIn page. You're not going to do your LinkedIn fail? Oh, I got to do.

Oh, you're absolutely right. I got to do my LinkedIn fail. And this is so funny. And what's funny about this LinkedIn fail is that it's really happened. Y'all are going to think I made this up.

This is 100% true. Let me read this. Hold on. So this is a cold call. I get cold called 100 times a day. This is on the bottom of being effective.

I've blurred out the name. This is, by the way, it's on my personal LinkedIn profile. You can go see this right now. Hi there, Mark. I saw your speech on Future of the Oil and Gas,

and it was great. Curious, have you ever considered starting your own podcast on similar topics to build more thought leadership in oil and gas? We can create 20-minute bi-weekly podcasts for you

to help build further thought leadership in the oil and gas space. We manage the planning, production, and promotions. All you have to do is record and hand us a footage. Mind if I send you over more information on how it works?

Take care. I'm not going to mention his name, but the company is called Team Podcast. Then they go PS. We implemented this for, I'm not going to say the name, a speaker similar to you.

Now, her podcast made it into the top 10 most popular shows in her industry on Apple Podcasts. People literally 30 seconds worth of research on me would have said, don't send this. I run and own the largest oil and gas podcast

network in the world. This is a perfect example of a LinkedIn fail where they did zero research. Now, in this sales person's defense, I don't know this. I suspect they use AI to find the targets,

inspect their fine professional speakers in oil and gas, or maybe just professional speakers that get paid to do it. And they help craft this message, tailor it to me,

because the AI probably did some research for me. For some reason, the AI and the person didn't pick up that I am already the number one oil and gas podcaster in the world. This was an epic fail. So a Team Podcast, shame on you.

It could have been like leads that are populated for somebody or a drip campaign where they don't have enough context, right? So it was probably mass sent out. And there wasn't an additional layer of vetting before they took those names.

And that could have probably saved some humiliation. Not only humiliation. Imagine if they would have reached out to me and flipped it just a little bit. Hey, we see that you're a podcaster.

You have a bunch of shows. It could have been great. You saw you spoke. Do you ever need extra help with editing when your editors get overloaded? I would have said yes.

Let's engage. I would have talked because I have that problem. Don't do this, people, if you're sales and marketing. And if you do it to me and it's this bad, I'm going to put it on LinkedIn.

Now, I will blur out your name because I don't want to embarrass you. But I have to show our audiences what works and what doesn't work so they don't make the same mistakes. Don't do this, people, please.

Yeah, just take some extra time. There needs to be a human in the loop when you're running some of these automations. You need to think through and clean your data. And I would just say that this is a perfect example of how you can create a gate

and this is something you can address before. But if you're targeting a niche industry, there's not a lot of people that are speakers in oil and gas, Mark. No. So take some time and slow down

because you could have built a really positive relationship. Like you said, there could be some subcontracting or something like that where there would be needs. But here's the thing

that I'll leave everyone with on my side. Marketing is the first thing that people typically see to make an impression of the company or whatever they searched in Google. Make sure you make a good first impression

because you can only make one. Spend some time making sure that's a good first impression because it's hard to recover. Yeah, let's leave it at that. Remember, folks, make a difference, not a sale.

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