Mastering Sales Engagement Strategies

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.

And before Matt and I get to the subject, we're going to just say we're sorry. It's been a little while since we've released some episodes. We've just been busy. We've busy running our companies. Both of our companies are growing like crazy,

but we know audience that you've been missing us. I've had a lot of people reach out to me. So apologies. We're going to try to get back on track with weekly releases. How you doing, Matt? Doing well.

So today's subject, and it's an interesting story how it came up with this, is engaging prospects. I was interviewed on somebody else's podcast, and they were talking about sales tools that we have now, our sales technology stack. And it occurred to me, Matt, I started selling in 1997.

There were no computers. There was no CRM. There was no sales tech technology. There was no Google. You barely had email. And our problem back then was getting customers

to agree to talk to us, to meet with us, so that we could explain how we could help them and hopefully start a sales cycle. You fast forward now to 2025. And Matt, we still have the exact same problem. All the probably billions of dollars

I was put into sales technology, into sales training, into sales tools, into CRM systems, and we still have the same basic fundamental problem as sales and marketing people in engaging with prospects. So I thought we'd talk through what are some best practices on how to do that?

I would love that. I think people are people. I can tell you there's a lot of businesses that maybe started around that time that are still operating more or less in that fashion. It's so true.

People start companies with the most advanced technology at the time. And as I go into consult with companies, I can guess how they're operating. So there's very few companies that continue to move with that evolution that's happening

with the marketing stacks and the different tools available. And right now, which I don't know if we'll get into or not, AI is just exploding straight up vertical. There's so much you can do with it. There's so much on the sales train side. I mean, with the sales training company

of something that we've actually implemented for a client of his and he wanted to know how we did it. And I can just tell you this is a great timely conversation to talk about sales stacks. And you're hearing about AI all the time with what Salesforce is doing.

It's never a better time to reach prospects. I remember, Mark, when I was phone selling, where you would have to go get a directory of, here's a bunch of engineers or whatever, and you would call and you were just trying to figure out who was at what number and talk to him to figure out

what they actually did. And then you would build a map of who that was. And then that was IP that you had when you were doing seven. We've come so far from that. This was right when, for me, when LinkedIn was just launching and people were putting their information out there,

it's come so far. And if anybody's complaining about any of those things, they just need to reeducate themselves on what's available today because it's the same problems. Now it's about getting through all the noise. Like you can reach them.

Yeah. And I think that there's some of the fundamentals that we probably need to revisit. Matt, me too. So not only did I dial for dollars, at some point I had a team of 10 people that worked under me

that did nothing but outbound cold calls. And it worked. But the reason it worked back in the 90s is there was no internet. There was no voicemail. There was no caller ID. And the only business communication tool was the telephone.

And people were not as busy. So if you did it, if you cold call them on the telephone right, they would listen to you and you would engage them and educate them and they would want to be with you. However, to your point, technology has changed all that. I think cold calling still is a great technique,

just not on the telephone. I think you're bugging somebody, you're interrupting them. Most people, myself included, will not answer a call if they don't recognize the number because now we have... Voice memos. Yeah.

Voice memos crush it. I agree. I agree. If you're good on the telephone, you learn how to leave a good voicemail and you'll have people say you don't do that. If you don't do it, you'll never know if it works or not.

So Mark, I don't know if you caught the delineation. You may have, but I don't leave messages. And I also don't check my messages very often. But I text voice memos to people where they can hear my message in text. And I usually get why you get a 99 point, whatever, open rate. And then you get a response and it's a directed conversation

that speeds up the sales cycle because you're not talking about this or talking about that. And for a lot of people, it's a great way to communicate. Yeah. No, it's great. And there's a lot of new tools.

A video short is another good one that she's, but I want to go further back than that. Okay, let's do it. Some of the stuff that I had to learn in the 90s is still, I think, very relevant today. It's changed because of technology.

So one of the first ones, and you know I complain about this all the time, is understand your prospects. The generic messages, whether it was done 30 years ago on the telephone or now it's done on LinkedIn, doesn't work. You haven't done any research. You're copying and pasting.

That just doesn't work and especially doesn't work today. You got to understand your prospects and their needs. And I think researching your prospects before you try to engage them is probably one of the most important things you can do in the very beginning of this whole process. It's funny you say that because I actually did a post today on Facebook,

which I need to move over to LinkedIn. And of course, you got to tweak it for different platforms. But you need to know it was about SEO and it was about how actually SEO is about understanding people and understanding search intent versus understanding keywords. Does that make sense? So there's a real delineation.

The conversions are happening at eight plus words now. Okay. And then you got now AI powered chat where these questions are almost whole paragraphs. It's really understanding what are they looking for? And that goes into sales. It goes into marketing.

And I did a post about it and it's just so incredible that people are trying to use templated messages, not personalized messages to reach people. And we've talked about that a lot of the kind of fails on LinkedIn and stuff like that. It's so important because there's so much noise to have a message that resonates and that cuts through the clutter and that is adding value or solving a problem for somebody because you don't have time for it unless it gets your attention.

And you got to know who you're talking to. 100% agree. Now here's a little thing that a lot of people miss, but whatever your message of the cold reach out after you do your research so that you can customize that message. Make sure you use the prospect's name. If his name is John, make sure you say, Hey, John, just that little bit of using their name

drives a little bit more people's attention to finish reading whatever message are here and wherever message you got there. And I get messages all the time where they don't even use my name. So I know they've done no research on me. So Mark, I want to add this. I'm going to throw in this fail here.

If you asked me one at the end, I'm not going to remember it, but I definitely have it now. Okay. So people are getting smarter with these tech stacks, right? You can add a field when you're sending an email list depending on how you capture it and you can add their name in there. Or if you're pulling a list from your LinkedIn contacts and you're putting it together,

you have their first name in a field, you can put that in a personalized email. What I get a lot of is people trying to do it good and they're trying to personalize it. So hats off to the intent. Okay. But if it says field first name, it really defeats that benefit that you're going to get. You really want to test those newsletters before you send them or those emails before

you do something like that. No, that's a great fail. And I get those too. And what that means is the person that's using whatever tool to automate it didn't check it. They sent 500 emails out, 300 emails, 50. They've ruined it.

Nobody's getting into that because we all know that it's automation at that point, no matter how well the message is crafted. The next thing I think is part of the basics when you're doing engage in prospects. When you first engage with the conversation, your first reach out there, first cold call, make sure that you share relevant insights. Don't reach out to me and talk to me about servicing my copiers.

We don't have copiers here. If you reach out to me and talk to me about how I can decrease the costs of my podcast editing or how I can capture better audio quality, that's engaging content. That's an insight that means that you research me. So when I reach out and by the way, people almost every Wednesday I have blocked out and I cold call, not because we need to because I enjoy it and I want to make sure that I keep

my cold call skills sharp because they've changed. It's a muscle for sure. Yeah. My first two sentences in email, if I cold call anybody, my first two sentences in email is very transparent and very relevant. My first sentence is, hey, you don't know me and then I put where it says me.

I create a hyperlink and I drop the link into my LinkedIn profile. I'll be honest, you don't know me. This is a cold call, but I'm giving them a chance to be able to click on that link to see who I am. My next sentence is what is the insight? So if I'm reaching out to a large technology company because I think they could sell more of their products on gas, I will literally say, I think you could sell more of your products

and I will be specific. I think you can sell more of your blade servers to the gas industry. This is how I think it should go. So the first two sentences I've established that we don't know each other, which means I'm transparent, which means hopefully is building trust for the first sentence. The second sentence is about them, about the relative insights about why I'm reaching out to them.

And if you do that, if you share those relevant insights in the very beginning, not try to sell anything, but say, this is why I'm reaching out, that probably quadruples your success rate of people wanting to engage with you further. I love that, Mark. I would add to that that when I target people, I think that there's that intuitive. I know what I'm selling helps you out.

I'm a little bit more systematic. I can use analytic data online to figure out, okay, if I have this target persona, what are the commonly asked questions in that area? Again, you can go to Google and you can go to people also ask is where you can do that. You can pull a lot of these things together and then you can build them in either a sequence of emails or think about it like a tree and you have branches of a tree and then you have topics or

leaves in that. And if you're hitting those areas of what they're talking about, even if you don't know them, these are the questions that are most likely going on in their head. If you've really dialed in that target persona and done that research first. Dude, you're so far ahead of me because eventually I was getting to both target personas and using automation, which both are super valuable if it's done right and not super valuable if it's done wrong. I do really love personas. I love sitting down and I do some sales training for

some of our clients just because I like to help them out. That's one of the things that work with their sales team on is who really buys from you and everybody thinks they know who it is. They don't. If you talk through it, they think they know who the buyer persona is and oftentimes it's they're wrong, right? And you really got to drill down to figure out who is it that actually benefits from working with you. The other thing though, the next thing is, and this over time, I've seen this happen because I started off doing this process that we're talking today.

Like I said, in the nineties, I started off using a telephone. Then for a while I was actually using faxes. Faxes for a little while were a great way to call call somebody. That got outlawed real quick. Yeah. Then eventually I moved to email and then email was great for a while and then it started to suffer. And now I do a lot of stuff on social. And my whole point around this, Matt, is use different formats to your point earlier for companies that were started a while ago and they had a certain format that worked for them. Then don't just keep doing it on that same format. Look at different

options. Look at different platforms. Engage with your marketing team. See what tools they have. If you experiment different formats, you can see that different ones work better at different times and with different groups of people in different companies. So I think using those different formats of getting your message out there is super important. I don't think I can add much to that, Mark. I think that's dead on. I think yet you want to own all the platforms or the major platforms, but each one of them you need to speak to it and

you got to start somewhere. You got to tackle the elephant one at a time. And so you got to get out there, especially if we're going to talk about social selling because the data, I actually went to one of the top SEO conferences in the world. It's called Brighton SEO. Email, the keynote speaker was talking about how email is still the best. And when you talk to other experts, and it depends who you talk to, right? There's debating thought out there. The data on this guy's presentation, Moz said that basically email is not dead. And email is actually the best form

of long-term communication, but you don't know how that data was grabbed. And then you got people like Gary Vaynerchuk and stuff like that saying you got to day trade a social attention and you got to be on all the different platforms. And it depends on your selling style. It depends who you are and what you're comfortable with. I know a lot of people that come on our network don't want to get in front of the camera. It's voice first and it goes through legal and we got to do a lot of editing or what have you depends on who it is and what it is.

And then some people like stream it live. It depends again, who you're talking to, who you're reaching, how that is, and what you feel comfortable with. But the number one thing that I would suggest is do something or you're going to fade into obscurity. As a salesperson, we know what's about activity. Now, if you're just flailing your arms out there and there's no strategy, that's problematic and you don't know who you're going after. But if you're on message and you're creating that activity, just like in cold call selling, you make this number of calls,

you get this number of people on the phone, you get this many appointments set up, you get this many proposals put out, you get this many follow ups, you get this many closes, it's math. The amount of volume that you actually have to do on social to mark, which I don't know if you want to go that angle, is massive. So you only have about six hours on Facebook. And I think a lot of people are knocking on Facebook. And I think it's a monster. I think everybody's on Facebook. Even the younger generation go on even once in a while because it's tied into the meta ecosystem.

But if you're on LinkedIn, you're post, if you're doing post, someone's got to engage with it in the first 45 minutes. And then you know that people log in about every other week, or a lot of people do, it depends. So there's a lot of different things that you got to consider when you're doing it. And you got to figure out what you can do. You got to build good habits. And you got to do something. And if you do something consistently, that's on message in the right direction, just like working out, right? We were talking about

that earlier of cold calling, you're going to work that muscle out. And it's not going to happen immediately. But over time, all of a sudden, good things are going to come out of it. And you're going to get bigger, stronger, faster, whatever you're looking to do better in some way. And roll it back to the different formats of different tools or platforms. In my experience, in oil and gas, if you're reaching out to a director level up to executives, so the upper half of the hierarchy, I think email is the best. These people tend to be older. They tend to live

in their inbox. Your messaging still has to be great. Your value proposition is still has to be great. You need to build trust quickly still. But what I'm finding matters, a lot of millennials. Now, remember the oldest millennial now is in their 40s. A lot of millennials, I do actually better with social. So I think having that blend and also looking at who you're targeting helps you figure out what platform or what format you want to do that reach out. And I love that you brought up social media because I was going there next, but I'm going at it from a totally different angle.

The next thing is to make sure when you're trying to really engage with prospects, make sure your social media is up to snuff. What I've noticed in the last probably six or seven years is when I reach out to somebody and I get everything right and I don't always get everything right. The subject has to be perfect because you have a second or two people looking at on their mobile device for the side hit delete. Your messaging has to be spot on. You have to have done research. But when I do it right, the first thing people do before they reply to me is they

go check me on a LinkedIn to make sure I'm a real person. So if you're LinkedIn, if you're working for a new company, you have an update on LinkedIn, they're not going to reply back to you because your URL of your email doesn't match up to who your employer says on LinkedIn. So make sure your social media is current and up to snuff. And also, if you're in sales, especially on your LinkedIn, don't put that you're a salesperson. There's nothing wrong with that. Sales is a great profession. However, put that you're a problem solver and be specific. If you're selling down-hole

tools, put that you solve down-hole tool problems. If you've solved pipeline problems, say that put some words together, some thought through it. And this is a great chance to use something like chat, GBT or Glawd to help you come up with ideas. Put something in the tagline of your LinkedIn profile saying what companies you help. And that's going to go a long way too. Because when they check out your LinkedIn profile, they say, oh, you help me or people like me and my peers. And then once again, that makes it much more likely that they're going to respond to you.

Man, there's a lot of nuances and training that can happen with all these different channels. I know you had a review you were talking to me about that. And before we got on, that was talking about certifications. Do you want to go ahead and read that review? Let's go ahead and read the review. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and read it. So the first thing is from Cameron Fontenot. Sounds good, Cajun. Cameron, thanks for reaching out. He says, good morning, Mark. My name is Cameron Fontenot and I'm an inside sales

and marketing representative for a nitrogen company in Broussard, Louisiana. See, I knew he was Cajun. I'll see you a ULL alumni, which I am. He, myself as well, graduate in marketing as past May, sent you a message about the same question. He just wants our thoughts. Do you have any good recommendations for certifications in marketing? We work through HubSpot. So I take advantage of this course. I also wanted to ask if there's any other articles, ideas, or certifications that could help me in my outreach in the oil and gas industry.

Where do you want to start with that, Matt? What we were talking about in the pre-interview is basically it depends what platform you're on. So he said he's on HubSpot's got a great academy. They coined the phrase inbound marketing. It depends what you're doing on HubSpot too, because a lot of people are just doing newsletters on HubSpot. Some people have their websites built, they're doing lead scoring. Like it depends how you're using the tool on what you need. And you need to know how are you leveraging your tech stack right now? What's your

outreach program look like? Is social a component of it? Is email a component of it? Every single platform has a free course, because they want you to use the tool better. They want to get you so ingrained that you don't leave it. HubSpot gives away the free CRM for small companies. You start using it and you start adding it. It's like cost money and you don't want to lose your data. Active campaign for emails is also fantastic. I know the thing that helped me the most when I was coming into the space, there was a Google digital sales course. So Google puts out

some of the best training and they want you to sell AdWords of course, but they teach you how to reach people and how to talk about solutions. And it looked most like the Fortune 500 training that I went through in online courses, but there's a plethora of stuff. You just got to figure out where do you want to go in time and where are you today and what skills don't you have and look for those tools. I'm doing certifications right now on AI and prompt engineering and stuff like that because that's something for me that I want to get better at. I'm about to move over to

YouTube and so I'm doing trainings on that. And that's also what I read books on. That's also what I find certifications on. So it's got to be in alignment with what you have, but there's fantastic stuff out there. If you want to learn SEO, I can give you a bunch of platforms that are how to look at data and analytical tools that are gold standards in SEO. They have fantastic trains. It depends. If you're wanting to run ads, if you're running LinkedIn, there's LinkedIn train courses that are awesome. Okay. And there's a lot of free seminars. There's a lot of workshops. There's a

lot of, I like webinars the most. They always pitch you something at the end, but they give you a ton of free value. And if you also find influencers that you like online and start following their stuff, you can learn so much. The information's out there and the information's for free. It's really about getting your mindset right to take action, to get you to create that atomic habit, to do it over and over again. So I don't think it's about the training. I think it's about the desire to want to go and change and move from point A to point B spatially. And I think it's

in your head. I think the first place to start is make sure that your mind's right. Sales, you cannot sell if you're not in a good state of mind. People just see it. People read it. And I think we've talked about it a little bit, but it's so under indexed of how important it is to be in the right mind space to do that and to believe that you can. I think that a lot of times they hire new salespeople is because there's no preconceived idea of what's possible, and they want them to just break through those walls because they don't know they're there.

And there's all kinds of studies of the elephant, right, that you put in the ground and doesn't leave or the little flea that doesn't jump out of the cup. It's all about where do you want to go, who do you want to be, identifying that, going in that direction, and you'll find the resources and the people and everything else along the way. to respond to you, not the other 99. So recognize that and think them for that. Next thing is be brutally honest. If they need help with something that you cannot help them with,

tell them. I don't know how many times I have told companies that we don't do that or we can't help them. And a month or three months or six months or a year later, they come back and they remember that I was honest with them and they respect me for that and they end up doing business. This is going to be another episode where we talk about how to make sure you stay in front of them during that time, right? But brutally honest. Then build rapport. This is sales 101. You were taught years ago, if you walk to somebody's office and they had a picture of them playing tennis,

that you start talking about tennis, you can do the same thing online. You can do the same thing virtually. They've responded to you, which means they're interested. They're curious if you can help them. Learn a little bit about them. Don't immediately jump to the discovery questions. That's so 1995. Ask them what they do. Ask them if they have family. What else do they do in the oil and gas industry? Their charities they support. Then after you've finished building that rapport, make sure that you're always approachable. Let them know. Hey, and I use this line all the time and

I mean it. I let people know you can call me, text me, email me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And if I'm busy, I won't respond. That way you don't have to have any guilt about reaching out to me, but I want you to know that I'm that approachable. That goes a long way. In the oil and gas space, bottom line is people are doing business with you, not your company. And they want to know if something bad happens, that if they reach out to you, you're there to help them. Make sure that you're approachable, that you build that rapport, and then over time be consistent with staying in

touch with them. Whether you close the deal or not, I'm telling you, if you offered things of value, bits of content, maybe they don't have anywhere else. If you see that their daughter is graduating college on LinkedIn, go congratulations. You finally got her out of the house. Be a real person. And all of that together is going to build you a relationship with a person that will be a long time buyer from you. Remember in oil and gas, people change companies. You may sell X to your prospect that you successfully cold called on, and you may not have another sale again for a while.

There's a pretty good chance that he's going to tell people how great you were to work with. There's also a pretty good chance that he or she will change companies and they will remember you. I don't know how many podcast sponsorships I have sold to the same person who just changed companies. So each company sold something different, which means they were fit for a different podcast. So that's very good. I think that's the basics of engaging with prospects. There's another whole world around this about how to use current technology to make that easier or

give you bigger reach. Matt, anything else you want to talk about? I actually was a guest. I've started a guest on some podcasts and I'm trying to get back out there. I've been heads down and that's some of why we haven't done the podcast. I've been super busy, but I've been hiring some great people and we're getting trained up and we're growing. But I was on another podcast and I got a question and I will give you the answer I gave, Mark, but I want to see the answer you have because you have just a breath of experience. A lot of the salespeople start off typically

at a bigger company with a big logo behind them. They get great sales training and then they get offered a job to go with a smaller company with a great comp plan and it's just so lucrative and so they make the jump and then they start making the calls and they can't get in the door. They didn't know if it was them that got in the door or the logo that got in the door and that starts to happen. To really crystallize what I think it is, some of these bigger companies have a safe harbor policy. Basically, we're only going to use these companies that are tried and

true and trusted, the term like no one ever got fired from hiring IBM, something that I've heard before, but if you're at one of these smaller companies and you're trying to sell and you're hitting a brick wall, what kind of advice do you give to them? Because I know that there's a lot of people out there that are in that scenario that are in a new role and they can't seem to get the traction because they don't have that big logo behind them anymore because they're at a company that maybe no one's heard of, not to say that they have a bad solution, but they're beating up against

the established group of companies that have always been used in the past. There's two answers and I've lived through this myself. I went from working for a very large telecom provider that the whole country knew to a Norwegian startup and I had the exact problem. I thought that all of my customers would just naturally take my calls, my emails and I would do business and I was 100% wrong. So there's two parts of this and let's be brutally honest here people. If you work for a big service company in oil and gas, most of your time you're not selling,

you're an order taker. People reach out to Halliburton, Weatherford, Slumberjee, Technife, FMC, Baker Hughes because they know they have certain products and services that their company has bought for years to Matt's point. If you need wire line services, you'll reach out to Slumberjee because you're an operator and you've been doing, anytime you need wire line, you reach out to Slumberjee and they do a good work for a fair price. So you're not really selling, you're an order taker, which means you haven't built the relationship, that high trust relationship with

your customer, you're transactional. Now you still make a commission, your title still says sales in it somewhere. Every now and then you do get to play the salesperson when you bring in a new client from scratch, but most of the time you're taking orders and because you've never built that relationship with the client at that high trust level, the client does business with your company, not you. As a salesperson, you need to be honest with yourself and own that. The flip side of that is you can still work for that big company, but if you go the extra mile, if you

practice cold calling, if you reach out to companies you normally don't talk to, if when your customer is in a bind, you help them out. Maybe they can't pay your 90 days. So you go to accounting and say, do me a favor, let's do them net 120. They can't pay us until 120. Maybe they need a discount because the job they just took, they're upside down in the deal and you go to your management and go, look, this is a long time customer. I want to help them out. Maybe something bad happens and you just go to hell with it. You jump in your truck at three in the morning

and you drive out to West Texas to help them with this problem. If you're that salesperson, I promise you, when you change companies that has no brand recognition, your past clients will take your calls, they'll take your emails because they trust you. That's the deal Matt and I lived it myself and I had to learn it myself. When I was at Bell, a lot of what I did, I was an order taker. I thought I was a salesperson. I really was an order taker and when I went to work for the Norwegian startup, none of my past clients and I had huge clients, Shell, Exxon, BP, Chevron,

none of them would take my calls. I learned my lesson. I built my relationship with my customer and to this day, it still serves me well. I can still pick up the phone and call a senior executive Exxon mobile that I've known for 20 years. If it makes business sense, he will listen to me and help me out with stuff because he trusts me. That's the deal. Be real here. Are you a salesperson or your order taker? I love that and I love the old school connection. I think that's the direction that the future of sales is going and marketing sales is fusing together, I believe. It's either

going to go back to old school. They know who you are. You're shaking the hand. You're doing it old school way of business because that's a value to a lot of people. I think on the other end of it, I believe in that. I do. COVID just changed the game so much. I go, okay, now your company doesn't have brand and now you understand how important brand is. You need to build brand. You need to build that consultative sale, but you understand what the needs are. If you can do that for clients that are maybe not at that level, maybe you're punching above your weight, maybe you've got to

prove out at companies that are maybe a tear down from where you're targeting at, prove it you can do for them, do some storytelling, build some case studies, get some testimonials. You're going to get enough of those that someone's going to give you a shot. You can get that story out to so many people through social media. It's so absolutely powerful to reach people and to connect with people. The way content works today is it finds the right person. It's not like email marketing and you're building up your audience and all that. You can put out one piece of content that answers a

specific question. If you send the right signals, so I do some corporate training, but you send the right signals, that content could go viral, but more importantly on the B2B setting, it doesn't need to go viral. It just needs to reach the right person and you need to be trustworthy in that video and over time, roughly it's seven hours and I know I've said this before, but if you're producing enough content in that area, there's going to be a time between now and seven hours that they're going to flip and you're going to be viewed as a trusted advisor or person that may be able to help

them with their problem. If you're using from a military standpoint some air cover to soften up what's going on with social media and they've heard of you before, they need to hear of you about 11 times, you come in with a really good message, they're going to listen to you, but you can't just leave this company, go to another and go straight to the top of the food chain and say, hey, let me in because they don't know who you are, what you do, anything like that. You got to open that up. You got to tell that story. You're going to have to earn it and

you got to prove it. You got to be able to create that story online, capture that case study and your marketing department, if you have one, should be able to help you do it or if you're looking for an outsourced marketing department. I know a few good ones, but that is how you reach people today. It's a bifurcation. You go one of two ways. You go super old school or you go super new school, but if you're in the middle, you're going to get crushed. Everything I rattled off is totally separate that your company needs to build brand awareness, especially in oil and

gas. That's something that should be going on all the time. I know some very large Fortune 100 companies that are losing market share in oil and gas today because they haven't spent time building brand awareness on some of the new stuff they offer because they're too lazy and they're just sitting on their past successes and they're losing market share and they don't know what to do about it because they quit building brand awareness. Great point, Matt. That moat, everybody's eating off the brand and it's just eroding, eroding, eroding. There's going to be some disruptors that

come in and are going to knock them off with a great product that does XYZ and is that much better. If they can tell that story, I've seen it in oil and gas, someone picks someone up and then, boom, everybody's talking about it and it gets picked up and we're talking a lot of money here that could move hands of market share. I think a lot of the older companies, when I talk to them, they're like, we got it, our brand. I'm seeing it in the retail space too. Some of these big brands are just getting smoked online and I think that people need to be aware of the future

that's coming over the next five years, how people search and check is changing online, how to be able to reach people and start to leverage some of these tools and to take action to actually start using 90% of their tech stack that they already probably have while they're currently maybe using 10. If you're feeling like this message is to you, you should probably reach out to us is what I do. Reach out to Matt. He's the one that can help you with that. This does sound like we probably should do an episode very soon on AI,

but we need to wind this thing down. Speaking of bad marketing apologies, if you follow our two newsletters, we went about two months with them not coming out at all. I had a change in my marketing team and I finally got things. I got a good marketing leader. Shout out to Daniel. The newsletters are going back out and they're better than they've ever been. The links are in the show note, our Sunday update, which is fun and funky and they keep sticking my face on other people's bodies and for some reason people love that. And then if you're in either marketing or sales,

we put out a monthly, all I got is events newsletter. It's a great resource. All the trade shows, conferences and one place in your inbox, we never spam you. Connect with Matt and I on all the social channels. All those links are also in the show notes. Our Insiders group is filling up. We have a minimum threshold. I think it's 30 people. We're not going to launch this thing until we have 30 members because we need that size group to make it worthwhile. So you still have a chance to get in there as a link for that as well. Matt already did the LinkedIn fail.

It was a great one because we've all seen that hello first name in parentheses, right? Don't do that. People test your automation before you send it out. All right, Matt, time to get out of here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the oil and gas global network.