More Than Just a Vendor – Be a Peer and Problem Solver

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. I am actually on the road today, Matt's back at EWR's corporate headquarters. And originally we were going to actually talk a little about traveling, but Matt came up with just a killer idea, which is talk about mindset and sales and marketing oil and gas industry. Before we get there, Matt, though, we have a review.

So I want to give a big shout to Hammer. I wonder if this is MC Hammer, it doesn't say just this hammer. Let me read the review. Mark and the team are second to none. Sales and marketing in this industry can be extremely difficult, especially with all the digital noise nowadays. But the team does an excellent job simplifying everything and providing all of the good stuff air quotes with none of the extra fluff.

Mark and Matt, y'all keep up the great work. So we will, Hammer, thank you for the review. If you'd like to get a shout out on the show, it's pretty simple. Click the link in the show notes. It doesn't matter what device you're on, it will help you simplify and quickly do a review. If you read it on the air, we will give you a big shout out.

And Matt, since you brought up this whole mindset thing, which I think is great, you want to kind of start and we're going to jump into it? Yeah, no, for sure. So I just think like mental health, like taking care of yourself, being in the right state of mind, the transfer of enthusiasm when you sell. I think you got to believe whatever it is you're selling and mindset is something that people don't think about. Well, certainly, I think you should get up and do whatever you need to do. And it shouldn't matter the way you feel or if you're motivated to do it, you need to take those actions.

But I think being in a good frame of mind when you're selling or when you're developing marketing is really, really important to put yourself in the right frame of mind to accomplish whatever it is. And, you know, I don't know, there's a lot there. So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there is that we can unpack it. Yeah, there is a lot there and you're 100% right. If you're not in the right mindset, if you're not in the game, your performance is going to be poor and your results are going to be poor. So for me, you know, I've been selling for a year or two.

There's some things that took me a long time to get to that are absolutely around the right mindset. I'm going to just rattle some stuff off. So the first one as a salesperson, you have to remember that you are a peer. You are an equal to the client that you're calling on. Don't think of yourself as less than you are there to help. In fact, a good salesperson is a problem solver and your customers are people that have problems.

And if you help them solve it, you end up becoming not a vendor, but a valuable part of team. So always remember that you need to see yourself as an equal to your prospect of your customers, not less than that. See a lot of young salespeople struggle with that. Well, okay. So Mark, in that kind of concept, I think that there's three components, right? So if you're treating yourself as a vendor and you want to just provide customer service, they're going to talk down to you as like, you know, hey, do this, do that, like whatever.

You're talking about being at the peer level. Okay. And I think being at the peer level collaborative, you know, that's why people are saying partnerships will partner with you will do this together. I think actually the thing to strive for is to be the, you know, trusted expert or trusted advisor in your space. That's where kind of thought leadership and all this is going is when you say we should do this, they're just kind of like, yes, right. And they're like, we trust you, we believe in you.

If you're saying we need to do this, we need to figure out how to make it happen. And so really evaluating when you're interacting with the account to know, you know, how they're viewing you and where you are on that ladder, I think is critically important. I wrote a book about that. Oh, you did write a book about that? Yeah, well, it's a concept that I've incorporated into a lot of books. I have two books out there on personal branding.

Kind of it was before thought leadership and content marketing were even hot. It's really something that as a salesperson, you're a brand and you want people to view you that way. And for small, if you're working with a small company, you know that you're the brand more than anything else. If you're working at a big company, you know, you kind of hide behind the logo. Right. To a degree.

And I'm not saying everybody does that, but certainly my career path when I was doing direct sales and phone sales, you know, I had a big logo behind me and it opened up a lot of doors. And like as the comp plans and everything got better and and you kind of went further out on that scale. You had you had to you had to drive the brand awareness, not not just through your marketing department, but but through yourself. You know, in one of the tips I just want to throw out there that this is like a million dollar tip. Okay, like literally it's like maybe millions dollars when you're talking to somebody on the phone. Smile.

Like people. People can see it way. I mean, phone sales and direct sales where you're in front of somebody. Those are whole different games and you got to play them differently. And there's different skill sets you need. And in today's market, you need both, right?

Like you need to be able to do social selling online. You need to be able to do phone sales. You need to do in person. And a lot with oil and gas is it's very hard if you don't know somebody to get in that building. Right. One of the craziest stories I tell you is when I was younger, I would go hang out in the parking lot of some of these some of these clients and get to know people that were coming out on their cigarette breaks.

And and that was like the only way I had access because I didn't have access to these buildings. And this was before LinkedIn. This is like when they're giving you like a directory or a phone book and they're like good luck. You know, you got to think about creative ways. Now it's so easy. Like the world is so easy today.

Yeah. Love it. So the next thing I want to talk about and I get a lot of pushback on this, listen, people listen to what I'm saying. So number one, no emotional attachment to the deal. Yeah. Think about sales mindsets.

No emotional attachment to the deal. You need to live in a world of abundance and you need to recognize that you don't need every single sale. Right. You want the right sales. Now, let me be very clear here. I'm not saying that you should not be excited about the deal.

I'm not saying you shouldn't put all your efforts into it. But what I don't want you to do is be emotionally attached to the point where you go. Well, you know, what if I call them one more time and they get mad at me or what if I, you know, what if my price is too high? So maybe I'm not going to discuss pricing in the meeting. Those are all emotional attachments that hurt the sale and is the wrong sales mindset. The right sales mindset is zero emotional attachment to the deal.

If the deal makes sense and if you can help them, then you want it to close because you want to help somebody. What you don't want to do is have the, you want the deal to close so you can make your commission because you're worried about paying your bills. Getting those emotions attached to the deal is a sure way to kill a deal 99% of time. So you still want to close the deal. Just no emotional attachment to the deal. Man, I would, I would tell you, Mark, anytime that you're too attached to the deal, it means you need to focus on your pipeline, right?

As soon as you get too attached to the deal and you're like, I need this deal or whatever, you're going to start behaving and acting differently and people are going to see it and see all the signals. If that is starting to happen and you're hanging on to stuff, you need to really look in the mirror and go, where can I dig in to build this pipeline? Because by the rule of large numbers, I guess, or something like that, I don't know what it is, but the more deals you have up, the more deals you're going to close, right? And so the funniest thing is when you have a lot of deals up, the deals that you don't think that you're going to close and the ones that you think are the sure things sometimes are the opposite. Like you just, you really never know. So it's like, hey, this makes sense.

Like I'm going to, I'm going to help them, like you said, and, and if they select me great, right? And if they don't, hey, like, who knows? One is it's a small world and people will circle back to you. Two is you're going to attract and engage with the right fit for you. Okay. And when people hire you, you know, when you have like the wrong client, like, and the relationship just, it doesn't work.

Like you don't want that deal anyway. So if there's something about the deal that doesn't happen, it's okay. But also you need to be in that world of abundance and, and know that, okay, what are the things I need to be doing to increase my visibility to get myself in front of the right people to have more deals being up because if I get more deals up, I, you know, if I got three deals, one was going to close, right? Or whatever it is based on, on your individual metrics and what can you do from a self development standpoint to improve that and then keep driving. You might not be ready to close that deal, right?

You might not be ready for that. Or you might not have the, like, I believe if you can close the deal, you can keep the deal and also you can keep the deal if you can close the deal. But if you can't articulate what it is you're offering or what it is you're doing or whatever it is, if you're a new salesperson, like, look in the mirror and say, hey, did I articulate everything that we're offering in the way if I know that this is going to help the client so well? And if there's any fuzziness or anything you can't handle anywhere in there, you need to reassess on yourself and go double down on, I need to learn the product better. Or I need to learn whatever we're offering better or what the needs are more or whatever because there, there's a reason why it potentially didn't close. Some are outside your control, but a lot are.

So a couple of things that Matt said that are really super important. So I talked about you need to live in the world of abundance. If you're worried about losing one deal because you won't make your number, won't make your quota, let me tell you what the problem is. You're too emotionally attached to that one deal and you don't have a good solid pipeline, which means you don't have that world of abundance. If you don't have 100 deals or 50 or 10, whatever works, fit your whatever you're selling and your time. Whatever your manager's metrics are, right?

Then lean on your marketing department, go work with them, partner with them and go, look, I don't have enough deals in my pipeline. By working with your marketing team and having them help you and you help them, you will increase the number of qualified leads in your pipeline and you won't be worried and fearful. Remember, if you're fearful about losing a deal, you're emotionally attached to it. So if you don't, if you're not living in that world of abundance, change something. And the first thing I would do if you don't have an abundant amount of qualified leads is go partner with your marketing team and get them to help you because that's what they're there for. They're there to help you build that pipeline of highly qualified leads so you're not fearful of losing one deal.

I mean, you want to find a mentor, like it could be your manager, it could be somebody else in the company and you also want that tie into marketing. I mean, I can tell you the reason I am where I'm at is because I saw leverage. Marketing is leverage, like peer and simple. If you are trying to grow or you're trying to contact more people or you're trying to stay customer-centric and generate referrals, I don't know, I don't know, grow that account. Whatever it is, if you understand where your head's at and what you need to do, you have all the tools in front of you to be successful. I guarantee you that, right?

And certainly you can search online, you can find things and whatever, but it's really going to come down to what you're doing. And making sure that you have accountability over that, like record yourself talking, you know, get somebody else that you respect to give you true feedback. Learn what you need to learn. Like, you've got to be in this mindset of like, okay, well, that didn't happen or whatever. How do I become better? How do I learn from this?

And how do I drive forward? Because maybe you weren't ready for that yet. Like, I mean, you don't know what your plan is, but you should control the things you want to control. But if you're in this mindset of not abundance, like, or, you know, there's a term out there, like, below the dot, above the dot. I don't want to say another word because someone, uh, trademarked it or whatever. But are you thinking positively about what you can do to improve, you know, help, whatever?

Or is it like fearfulness and blame and this and that? Like, where are you on the spectrum and figure out what you want to focus on? And then control what you can control and know that golly sales is so awesome and marketing is so awesome. It's like math. It's almost like, it's like formulas and the better you get at putting those formulas together and the faster you get that flywheel spinning, the more you're going to grow that. And a lot of these companies have spent a lot of money to figure out how they can help make people successful.

And if they have a marketing department, man, that, that's like one of my go to, uh, places. And that's what we do. We do a lot of training to help out marketing departments to help leverage the sales stories, bring them in and then share them across, uh, the sales organization. I always like how you set me up for my next thing I'm going to bring up, even though you and I have not discussed this at all. Matt and I do no preparation. We just show up and start talking.

Um, so, but perfect segway. So the next thing I want you to be very clear as far as a sales mindset is you absolutely 100% bring value to the table. Right. Even if you're selling something that's a commodity, even if you're selling paper clips, guess what? You sold way more paper clips than the buyers have bought paper clips, which means you have more experience around paper clips in the oil and gas space. A lot of times you get caught up in procurement and supply chain.

Uh, when you're in a sales process, remember this, the sales person is the only person that's bringing value to the conversation. You know, your product or solution, you know, the problems it solves, you have relevant stories of how you helped other companies solve the same problem. Supply chain and procurement is not bringing value. And I'm sorry, guys, I know there's a lot of supply chain people that listen to our show. I'm not saying you're not valuable, but I'm saying in the sales process, you don't actually bring the value that the sales person brings because you haven't built. You know, 100, uh, fracked trees with, uh, you know, two inch ball valves or whatever, but the sales person, his company has.

So remember, you always bring value. And by demonstrating that value, that's how you help articulate whether the client should work with you or not. So remember from a sales mindset, the sales person is the person that always brings value to the conversation. Yeah. I mean, the thing that my mom was like one of the first employees of Microsoft and she was a salesperson and she always told me nothing happens. Tell something gets sold, right?

So you're, you're the first piece of getting the whole machine going, um, to talk a little bit about just, uh, the right mindset and kind of mindfulness. And I think that self care and mental health is, is super important. Certainly, I think, uh, as we're going to the fourth of July and, um, you know, there's a lot of people in one gas that have come over from, uh, the military services, like taking care of yourself. Like, think about it like this. You have to strap on if you're in an airline, right? And the plane's going down or whatever.

They tell you to put your mask on first before you put the mask on the person next to you. So, so, so one, having like, um, a peer group like that you can lean on and have support with and share those kind of war stories or, um, sales stories to show the craziness and the positivity that's out there. But, but taking care of yourself and making sure you're, you're in that right mental state. Because if you can't help yourself and you don't believe and you're, you don't are operating on that frequency with that positive energy. Like where you, because that's what sales, I think is to a lot of extent is the transfer of enthusiasm. Is it like, oh, you believe this that much?

Like you believe it's going to help me? Like I need to pay attention to that, right? People key in on that. And so if you can't do that, well, one, maybe you're in the wrong organization. I don't know. But, but two is if, if you believe that, like it's got to embody in you when embody, I don't know what I'm using, but what, what I'm using.

But essentially you need to feel that when you're in front of somebody or I mean, and even through the computer or through the phone, people can see the smiles. People can feel the energy. Like there, there's a lot more that's communicated than just words and you got to have that. And if you, if you don't have that, you, you got to figure out how to get that. And, and there's all these things that you can do to take care of yourself. I mean, a lot of outbound or outside salespeople, they create their own environment, right?

Like you don't have your manager breathing over your back. You, you need to make sure that you have the structure and you have the routine and you know how to put yourself in the productivity space. I mean, that was one of the things at the core of Texas A&M that I learned so much about is putting yourself in that mental state. I mean, the bed's only for a couple of things, right? Like sleeping is one of them, right? And so you should really figure out whatever it is that makes the most sense for you and create that space for you and do the same thing.

When you're making your calls, when you're reaching out to people, but man, getting in the right state of mind is, is super important. Yeah, and all that self care topic. Remember this people, get your workout in, get enough sleep, don't live on junk food. You know, watch your alcohol intake. It's what Steven Covey called sharpening the saw. And it's super important.

And especially in today's only gas high pressure sales and marketing world. If you don't take care of yourself to Matt's point, you're going to come off your A game. Your performance is going to suffer. Your health may suffer. You have other people that are relying on you. So to Matt's point, always, always, always take care of yourself first. No matter where I go, I mean, I've been traveling a lot the last month or so.

I always find a gym, always try to get my workout in. I don't always eat right, but I try to write as close as you can and just do the best you can. But that self care thing is huge and 100% to Matt's point. If you don't take care of yourself, your performance is going to suffer. So make sure you take care of yourself, people. I mean, Mark, the last really big thing that I want to communicate and share,

at least from a personal journey standpoint is eating the right food is, I feel different, right? I feel different when I eat. You know, getting in 30, 45 minutes, an hour of workout, like even walking outside, like walking outside for 30 minutes a day makes a huge difference in your mental health. And, you know, alcohol, like alcohol throws me off.

It changes like the way I feel and stuff like that. Like I know alcohol is super big in the oil and gas space, you know, like alcohol, but not when I'm selling, not before I have a big talk, not like I don't like to bring that involved. It kills my productivity. Not a big fan of that.

I would just tell you to a coach, a mentor, that self development piece, the personal development at a lot of like Fortune 500 companies, you know, you have a scorecard, right? And it's like, what are you trying to achieve in the next three months, six months for the company? And then there's the personal side, right?

As an individual, because the job, the job of the company is to prepare you to do your job that you're currently in well. It's your job to prepare yourself to do the next job that you want well. Like if you're wanting to move forward in the organization or wherever you want to take your career, it's your job to put that in. No one's going to give it to you.

So finding the right coaches, finding the right mentors, finding the right resources, there's everything online, right? And investing in yourself, I think investing in yourself is one of the biggest things that you can do. And if you're, again, in that scarcity mindset going back to it, like invest in yourself, like have yourself to be more prepared

to when you encounter that situation. And Mark, one of the most interesting things, procrastination. I heard this from, gosh, I wish I could cite the source, but procrastination is a fear of potentially doing something wrong or not at the level that you want to do it at. And what I mean by that is maybe it's hard.

You don't know how to do it. You just got to get into it, right? And you get into it and it becomes easier. But also procrastination falls into, well, you're fearful of like, maybe I don't, I'm not going to do it at the level I believe I'm at. And so if I procrastinate and then I do it and I do awesome,

then it supports my ego that I've done it awesome. And guess what? If I don't do it well, okay, I can blame that I didn't have enough time to do it. And then I can save my ego. And so like procrastination is, you know, is just kind of like an excuse of fear from what I heard.

I'm not saying that you could put everything into that box, but I thought about that and I don't know, it resonated with me. So I agree. I'll tell you this much. I've coached a lot of salespeople in my career. And one of the things that separates the low performers from the high performers

is that exact word procrastination. They know they need to do it and they put it off to the last minute and then they don't do it well because they put it off because of fear. And I think one of the things that separates the higher performers is they go ahead and eat the frog first, right? If it's something they don't want to do, they get it done.

And it's a valuable lesson, people. And everybody suffers from that. We have this rig tour coming up and I've been needing to put together an Excel spreadsheet. Everybody's names and shoe size and shirt sizes. And I've been putting it off and putting it off. And Matt, I got up this morning, I did it in 21 minutes.

Like, why was I putting this thing off? And you've burned so much mental energy on that for how long, right? Yeah. All right. So the next thing for mental health for salespeople, especially, probably applies to marketing people too, is control the process,

control the sales process, right? Yes. And the only way you can control the sales process is guess what? You have to have a sales process. So let me give you a great example. How many deals does a salesperson have you worked on

and your contact at the buyer's company leaves and goes to work for somewhere else and all of a sudden that deal is just dead? Yeah. And you blame them. Oh, well, they left. I didn't know they were leaving.

If you would have had your own sales process and step three in that sales process is the moment that you meet a prospect, you ask them to introduce you to their peers in case something happens in the future, which they always gladly will do. Well, that situation where your contact goes to another company and you lose a deal just won't happen. Something that simple, which by the way, I have a sales process.

It's six bullet points of how I control the conversation from the very beginning with the prospect until we close the deal and then what happens after. It's not complex. It's not 30 sheets of, you know, word number 10 font. It's very short, six simple bullet points, but you need to control the sales process. And what you tell your prospect is like, look, I've done this.

I've sold this a lot more times than you've bought it over the years. I've developed the right process to make sure it's efficient and that we don't overlook anything. And nine times out of 10, your prospect will agree to go along with your sales process. Same thing with having a part of your sales process to set up follow-up meetings. You don't wait for them to say, okay, we're ready to move the next step.

Whenever you have that last conversation, you get there by and you ask them if it's okay to set the next meeting and then you lay out what the goal of that meeting is, right? So having a sales process is super important, but following it is even more important for your sales mindset because when you have a sales process and that your client buys into and that follows it,

you're not worried about the unknowns. Even if something unknowns happens, you've worked that into your risk management into your sales process. So one of the most important things from a sales mindset is have your own sales process and make sure you follow it. When you do that, it takes a lot of weight off your shoulders. And even things like talking about finance.

So for me, the very first conversation I have with the prospect, we talk numbers. We talk dollars. Why? Number one, I'm not scared to talk dollars. Number two, I believe I'm helping people and I believe that what we charge is fair. Number three, if for some reason that's a deal killer,

not so much for my interest, but for my client's interest, I don't want them to waste three months of meetings with me to find out if they can't afford to buy from me. I want them to find out first, see how I'm helping the client. I'm not emotionally attached to that deal. I'm not scared to talk numbers. And the reason I'm not scared is I'm trying to help the client.

Whether that means that by my help of them, we don't do business together. That takes them off of my plate and frees up time. So make sure you have a sales process and make sure you follow it. See, Mark's talking a lot about emotional intelligence and you could apply that to a lot of areas. I think that's because that's one of the things in our mastermind group that we're going to be focused on and talking about. And I mean, that's one of the biggest things that we get asked, Mark, is like,

Hey, how do I make my sales team more productive? Right? How do I help them close better deals? And, you know, you can give them all the fanciest tools in the world and you can show them everything, but they got to have the will and the drive and the belief to get it over the line, right? And they're the ones, like I said, at the front lines.

And so that is going to be something that we're going to be incorporating in that I think is critically important in our mastermind group. Super, super, super important. The next thing I want to talk about when you talk about sales mental health. I'm sorry, not sales, but sales mindset is remember rejection is just part of the process. You're going to engage with companies that for whatever reason you're not a good fit for. Be okay with that.

Not only be okay with it, relish it as an accomplishment. A learning process. This is the best way to kind of look in that mirror or have someone else tell you what they're seeing and then look at it as a way to improve. Yeah. And so let me tell you, when you're that open and transparent with your clients, when you say, you know what? I cannot help you.

However, if you happen to know somebody can make the introduction, the reaction I get 99% of the time is I've never had somebody tell me they can't help me, right? And they remember that and they start seeing you to Matt's point as a trusted advisor. And I've had many, many prospects come back to me one month, six months, a year or two or three years later. And they came back to me because they remembered when I told them that I couldn't help them. And then something changes in their world and the first person they reach out to is me, right? Because they trust me.

So just remember rejection is just part of the process. Once again, no emotional attachment to the rejection. They're not rejecting you as the salesperson. They're rejecting your product or solutions not being the best fit for what they need in that moment. It doesn't mean it won't be a good fit somewhere down the road. So just remember rejection is just part of the process.

No emotional attachment to being rejected, just like no emotional attachment to actually closing the deal. And I think we should end on that because I'll tell you like being able to get that no. Like I remember phone sales specifically, right? We're talking like 60 to 80 calls a day, whatever you can really hit. Now, if you get good conversations, it's going to slow you down. But I liked getting the nose because it was kind of a metric that I knew if I was going to get the nose or you want to buy a chicken,

you want to buy a chicken, but you found somebody that was interested. And again, we didn't have all the tools that we have with social selling today. And again, that's what I gravitated to. And that's why I'm where I'm at is because I mean sales enablement is key and account based selling is key to leverage the digital components of this. But man, like the more knows that mean I was that much closer to a yes. And so and and also if you're learning from each no, and you're able to build the network and add them to it and learn from it,

you're moving forward. And I think it's such a positive thing. It is. And I think that we will end the show on that note. A lot of stuff that we talked here, we talked about a very high level. A lot of this stuff, we're going to very detailed in our mastermind group, which I know you hear us keep saying coming soon, really is coming soon.

And that's going to be a peer to peer group. It's going to be a limited number of people that we invite. It's we're trying to intentionally keep it small so we have good value. So stay tuned. We'll have more information that pretty soon. As always, sign up for our newsletters.

Speaking of sign up for a newsletter, Matt, there's a huge off field service company is known as Big Red, who I have told no three times that I couldn't help them with something they wanted. And they came back the fourth time and they actually want to market one of their people to answer questions around some of the work that they're doing in the digitalization of the off field. And they bought an ad in our Sunday update newsletter. There's a real world example of how when I told a very large company no,

I couldn't help them that they remembered me and respected that. And eventually they came to me with the problem that we could help them with. And now we're going to do business together. If you want to see who that Big Red company is, by the way, it's Halliburton. Check out our Sunday update. That's a weekly update.

And if you need a place to advertise to our all gas audiences is dirt cheap. Great, great, great newsletter. And then we also have all gas events newsletter. That's where we take all the all gas conferences put them in your inbox once a month for free. All of Matt's and I social links are also in the show notes besides the newsletter. We talked about the insider group that's coming up.

Well, Matt, we did not discuss a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Do you have one? Well, I mean, I would tell you that creating high value content and posting that on LinkedIn is what I'm seeing in the data. Right. So like with the time of the clients we're working with, if you're not putting value out there first and you're just running ads. So think about like the ads that your company you might be running and go, are we just running ads?

Maybe, you know, maybe there comes just showing the logo. There's there's there's brand equity in that. But, you know, you got to have some kind of offer. You got to give something because there's so much noise right now. And I think that's was causing a lot of this mental stress, right? Because like there's information overload, too many decisions.

You want to find that trusted advisor, the person you know, I can trust that you want to do business with. Become that person to your clients and your prospects. Put out that information in a way that you're going to add value to them first and start the cycle of reciprocity. Yeah, I love that. I got actually a little bit of tips from our own marketing people. So you've probably heard this before where if you post original content of LinkedIn and you add a link that takes you outside of LinkedIn,

that LinkedIn doesn't give you as much exposure. You put it in the comments. Yeah. And I was just curious if that was actually true. Well, it is. So my marketing team did some A-B testing.

If you follow OGGN on LinkedIn, you've noticed we've been putting out shorts Monday through Friday on the OGGN page. And the first set of shorts, they added a description of what it was and they added a link to the actual podcast the short came from. And then we did that for an entire week. The next week we did the shorts, different shorts, but the shorts from the same podcast in the same order without the link with the same description. And they performed about twice as good. So I can confirm that if you drop a link that takes you outside of LinkedIn today in July 2024,

that LinkedIn absolutely doesn't give you the exposures when you don't have a link. Well, why is that, Mark? The reason that is, is because they don't want you to go off the platform. They're going to de-list anything or not de-list, but downplay anything that's going to take you off the platform. So the trick is with LinkedIn is to put it in the comments. First comment.

And yeah, you can put it in the comments. And also there's a difference between a point, there's actually a point system. There's a lot to the LinkedIn algorithm, but long comments versus short comments versus likes or emojis all have different values. And so there's a lot of things that play into this algorithm that if you understand it, that's really what SEO is. Like search engine optimization is how do you manipulate these search engines, at least give them more of what they want. You feed the beast what they want and they'll help bring that back your way.

It's reflexive. And if you need some help with that, Matt is the guy to reach out to. Just reach out to him directly, him and his company are experts at that. All right, ready to get out of here, Matt? Yeah, let's do it. Remember, make a difference and not a sale.

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