Oil and Gas Sales Basics. Not just for Newbies

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. All right. Welcome back, everybody.

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Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operation management and dashboards on your desktop or phone. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us. Link is in the show notes. What's up, Matt?

Boom. There it is. We're here. Boom. We are here. And you know what we were talking about today, Matt?

Entry-level sales basics at Oil and Gas. The industry is booming right now. There's been a lot of new hires, and we need to kind of talk about the basics. You get so flustered when you get a new hire, new sales position, you're drinking from the fire hose, you're trying to learn the company, the culture, the tools, your clients. And sometimes you forget the basics, and at the same time, if you've been selling Oil

and Gas for 8, 10, 15 years, times are good right now. Sometimes it's valuable to you to go back and kind of touch and remember the basics. Sounds good? Sounds good. All right. So the first one, here's one that people always lose track of.

Remember, when you're selling whatever product or service you are, it's not about the features and functionality of the product. It's about what is the benefit of the product. There's an old saying that people don't buy drills. They buy a tool that drills, that makes holes, right? And that's what you have to think.

Please take a step back from whatever your product or service does and understand what problem does it solve and how does solving that problem benefit your prospects? So one of the first things from Sales Basics 101 is just remember that the benefits come first. Yeah. I mean, features and benefits, it's how it starts and you've got to figure out, well,

why is it benefiting that person who's it solving? And typically, even with like startups, right, on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes people come up with a product and then figure out the market to sell it to. So you figure out the problem, you solve the problem, you figure out how it solves it, then that describes the benefits through the features, right? So you've got to work backwards.

Yep. Whether you're selling one inch ball valves or multi-million dollar blowout preventers or drilling fluids, it's always the benefit of that product, not the features and functionalities of it. Number two, and here's one that makes it's much easier today's world is much harder when I got started in sales 26 years ago, but research and understand your prospects.

And you have new clients you're going to talk to spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn online, see what their past is and don't be the sales guy that reads on their LinkedIn profile. They played high school football and you walk in his office and say, hey, I'm a high school football fan. That is so cheesy. But understand where they came from, what they do, what their challenges are.

Another really cool thing to do is connect not only with the people that you're meeting with, but connect with that management team. This way on social, when you post stuff, not only does your prospects see it, but the management team itself sees it. Understanding what your prospects have to deal with if they work for a public company, you can go to the company's website and pull down their 10K by law.

In that 10K each year, the CEO has to recognize and verbalize or articulate what are the challenges they're facing that year and those 10Ks are invaluable. If the CEO calls out the fact that one of the problems they're facing this year is their inability to recruit or retain talent, you know they're running a lean ship. So when you meet your prospect, if your product or solution helps do more with less people, that's what you want to talk about.

But you would know none of that unless you do some research and understand your prospects. Yeah. I mean, to add to that from the marketing side of things, I would even back up and say, your sales has a certain customer journey and you're developing a target persona, whether at sea level, it's in the field, you know, procurement, whoever you're trying to talk to, you need to understand going to the 10Ks is a great place to go, understand what the

goals are and what their KPIs are, what they're trying to achieve in their role is. And mostly why people buy at bigger companies is they buy from somebody that they're not going to look bad, right? They're not going to take a risk. And so you've got to be well-educated and well-versed and you've got to be speaking their language now today from a marketing standpoint at a high level and 10Ks all the

way down to the individual person you're talking to, there's so much information on social media online. You can look at their profiles and see kind of what they're posting, understand even what type of person that is, right? Like do you need to get right to the point? Like are they social?

Do they like data? Like you can tell so much information with currently what's currently online and you should take that time to do that. I actually talked to the sales guy today, I was a vendor getting on the phone with me to discover more of why I'm using their product. He acted like he was prepared and it was so surface level that it actually came across

as he was unprepared and it was so horribly bad because he didn't hit the nail on the head. He like hit in that direction and as he talked, like he was kind of flailing around and I'm sure that any buyers or even we've all probably bought and sold different things in some way or another, you deal with that and when people don't know what they're talking about, it's the most off-putting thing.

I mean, that's what we were talking about one of the last podcasts on. You want to be that expert buyer, you want to help them buy versus just selling very surface level and that knowledge. The one tip I can get on the sales side because I was never a huge, huge like sports person, news person, whatever. A lot of people I called on were, there was something called like the skinny or something

like that, I think women and basically it would give you the sports and news like the bullet points that were the top bullet points so I could stay abreast of what was going on in the market. I was leveraging a newsletter, a daily newsletter to give me that kind of information, like technology is helpful, it helps automate and increase productivity of what people are doing.

Back to your earlier point, so one of the things is if you're that sales guy that's not prepared, it's okay to say, hey, I'm not prepared. Being open and transparent is okay, say you had a busy week, I'm not quite sure what you're struggling with. The other thing is we use a tool internally called Zoom Info which is not the web conferencing tool.

This one's called Zoom Info and with Zoom Info, if I go look at your company, I can see not only their entire tech stack, what they're running the back office with and everything, I can see if any of our competitors are in there. I know going into the call or into the meeting if they're working with any of our competitors, so doing that background research on your prospect is invaluable and if you don't do it to Matt's point, it's going to be apparent.

If you find yourself in a situation where you didn't have time to do it, just be open and honest and say, look, I was busy, sick child, I had to get kids to work or whatever, I had no time to look at your website, I do this all the time. When you're open and transparent, people will stop and they'll give you the high level overview that you don't know just to help you, but if you try to wing it, you're going to get caught every time.

Yeah, no, I mean, being genuine, making that genuine connection, you can connect on kids, you can connect on being busy, you can connect on those things and you're just looking for some common ground to break the ice to get the conversation started. Just don't talk from a place that you don't have that expert knowledge from because it just, it looks so bad. I mean-

And you're wasting their time, which is the most valuable thing in a sales conversation. For sure. All right, the next basic is target smaller pieces of the business. So if you're doing business, if you want to do business with Chevron and you're calling on Chevron, you need to understand that Chevron is 17 different business units. Each one of them has their own president, their own budget.

A lot of times their own CIO, their own CMO, and they don't talk to each other. So Chevron A&P doesn't talk or even know the people in Chevron pipeline who don't talk or even know the people in Chevron refining and so on and so on. So narrow down, don't cast a wide net. Narrow down and understand the specific part of the business that you're talking to and what their specific problems are.

So niching down allows you to have those one-on-one conversations around the business problems instead of trying to cast a wide net. I see this all the time that where people come to Motelpoint, my old company, and they want to sell an oil and gas. The first thing comes out of their mouth is they want to sell the Exxon and they have to stop them and say, number one, Exxon is not one big company.

It's a bunch of individual companies. So you got to pick which one. And quite frankly, the hardest, lowest margin deal you will ever pull off in your company's history will be with Exxon Mobile. They're experts at buying stuff, right? So if you go sell to a smaller company, it will be a higher margin, easier sales process.

So don't always look at the huge companies. And if you are looking at a huge company like a lot of the industries, a lot of companies on all gas, niche it down to the business unit. Once again, you can go to their website. They have their business units laid out every year or every couple of years. They reorg, you know, Chevron, Exxon, both have shrunk the number of business units to

drive efficiencies, but still there's multiple business units and each one has a different culture and a different set of business problems. So my next, you know, basic sales recommendation is make sure you're niching and targeting down. Yeah, I would just say with bigger companies, it's so true that they all, like, especially companies that buy other companies, like the integration takes like seven

something years on average to integrate. And it's all these smaller business units that may or may not be communicating, not knowing what the left end and the right arm is doing. And if you know that from a marketing standpoint, you have to tailor those messages to those different people. Like one of the things I was going to bring up, and maybe we'll get into it of how

like email automation can really enhance what you're doing. But you can't have this general drip. You have to have a customized drip to that target persona for that issue to resonate with them and to nurture them in the right way to be spoken to their whole that thought, Matt, hold that thought that comes in a bit later, right, but it is a great, fantastic idea.

So next basic tip every day when you get up in your, when you're selling, start the specific goals, don't just say, I'm going to go out and sell. That means nothing, right? So depending on how your personality is and how you schedule your workflow, myself, I'm very organized person. So I have specific days that do specific things.

I have specific days that cold call has specific days that I reach out to existing clients to make sure they're happy, have specific days I block out to be creative, have specific days that I block out to actually do paperwork administrative stuff. If your personality isn't like that, you can carve out different times of the day.

So from this time to this time, I'm a cold call from this time. This time I'm due paperwork. I'm going to fill out my serum, whatever, but make sure you break up your workflow into very specific goals. And if you need to write them down, write them down, because if you just show up to sell, you're going to be inefficient.

We all know this, you come into the office at eight o'clock, you grab a cup of coffee, you go talk to your buddy in the next cube. Then it's time you go to the bathroom, you go check a couple emails, then it's lunchtime, then you go talk to somebody else. You maybe make a customer call or two and it's time to go home. You've wasted that day.

If you could have broken up specific goals, it draws much more efficiencies. And if you're in sales, I suggest that your goals are worked backwards for whatever your yearly number is. If you have a quota, work that backwards to actual day and monthly goals. If you have a certain number of deals that you need to call, I mean, you need to close a quarter or a certain number of calls that you make a day, work that

backwards, but always start your sales day with specific goals. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's great at any time that you prep ahead of it or even the week before or the day before you're so much more effective. I think also you hit on mindset, having that positive mindset and being prepared helps with that.

And then having a list, having a checklist. Like these are the things that I want to get done. Like I don't know what the data supports it, but it's so much higher if you actually have a list and you go down that list, do you check it off? Having that prep, having that right mindset is critical. Yep.

The next basic. And we talked with this on the last podcast a little bit about how the actual decision maker doesn't exist in oil and gas, that you have decision making teams, but still they're in that decision making team. There's a guy or a guy or girl that has more influence than the others. There's the person that actually has to use and implement the product, whereas

the rest of the people are just advising. So make sure my tip is make sure you connect with the right people. One of the things that I do a lot, especially if I'm cold calling a new company is I typically come in at the senior sales level because I'm selling podcast sponsorships and the sales people get it almost immediately, even though my budget comes out of marketing.

So what I do is I target the senior sales people in the company. But they also start forming relationships at the same time with the senior marketing, because I know ahead of time that the sales leadership buys into wanting to sponsor a podcast that I'm going to have a conversation with marketing. And that conversation is much more productive if they already know who I am. I've already started a conversation with them online.

So, you know, make sure you connect with the right people, not just the person that's going to sign the PO for whatever you're selling. Yeah. No, when you're catacombing, I call it catacombing a company. Like you get into a company and you're trying to branch out into those different business units and you're trying to get in front of them.

You're doing a lot of something. I don't know. I'm kind of coining this phrase like on the spot. I'm sure it's already been coined, but like you're kind of doing some micro marketing, right? You're like pens and pads, right?

Dropping off pens and pads is a form of marketing, trying to stay in front of that person when that person's ready to buy. Even online, there's certain things like we make lists of, hey, is this person active on LinkedIn, right? Can we engage with them on LinkedIn or are they on other platforms? And that factors into our prospecting of developing new business.

Like, how are we going to get access to them? How are we going to engage with them? How are we going to understand what they're doing? And you got to figure that out and figure out, how can I stay in front of this person if you've identified them as your top 50 or 100 target list? And then what you're doing is you're doing marketing on your own.

And then hopefully getting with your marketing department to figure out how to tie into broader campaigns. Matt, this is perfect segue. And folks, we don't rehearse this. We don't know what the subject is we're going to talk about until five minutes before we record the show.

But my next tip, my basic tip was embrace and learn storytelling. In the old days, you were taught to have an elevator pitch, right? A 30 second pitch of what your product or service does, who you are, who's your company is sold to, so that if somebody asks you, you could pitch that. That doesn't work. It doesn't work anymore.

I'm not sure I even worked in the 80s and 90s when it was really popular. But storytelling connects to people's emotions. And no matter what anybody tells you, when you have a buyer that's going to purchase something, a lot of their buying decision was based on emotions. So learn how to be a good storyteller. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a 30 second story, right?

If you run into somebody that's a senior person and you're in the elevator with them and you only got a few minutes of time, you can have a 30 second story, but not a 30 second elevator pitch. So just make sure that as you're selling, especially if you're new, go hang out with the existing salespeople and listen to them. What you'll hear them do 90% of the time without there even being aware of it

is they're telling stories. They're telling stories of how they helped past customers with problems. They're telling stories about how they help companies buy certain things. They're telling stories about what their competition has done well or what they haven't done well. They're telling stories about what the market's doing.

It's all around storytelling. And this is a perfect segue to what Matt was just talking about is being able to tell those stories in different ways and different formats on different platforms. Yeah. I mean, taking that storytelling of what the senior salespeople have done is

they've had a story to answer a specific question or overcome a certain objection. Typically when you walk into someone's office, they already know who you're with and they know what you sell if you're a big enough company. If not, like that's when you do the luncheons and you explain it. But telling those stories and if you have good stories that you're using,

go to your marketing department. See if you can amplify those stories. You can put some videography behind those stories to maybe tell those stories on a broader stage because chances are if it's effective one on one, marketing the one to many, it's going to have a broader impact. And again, you're segmenting out who you're going after.

You have to have these marketing channels and these customer journeys and these micro moments where you're touching them with different pieces of content to get them to take that next step in your quote unquote salesfoam, right? And your sales manager should be able to help you guide that and would have those relationships with marketing. So if there's something that works 80% of the time and you kind of have

incorporated that into your pitch, please go to your sales manager, go to your marketer and say, hey, this is something that we might be able to help with on a broader perspective. And if you're a new marketing person, getting access to people at that level, they appreciate it. Okay.

It's helpful to them because they need experience from the field, but also it's going to put a highlight on you at the company where you're going to have more visibility and get more involved in stuff. And it's going to help you your career progression. Yep, 100%. My next beginner tip, do not ignore your competition.

In fact, I used to be famous for going to introduce myself to my competitors all over the world. When I would see them in the same offices that I was visiting, my manager to actually in the beginning had a problem with it because they're worried that I was looking for another job. The truth is I wanted my competitors to know that there was competition

and it was me that does a couple of things. Number one, make sure that your competitors are very price sensitive, which always helps you if you can actually sell something that's not based on price, but your competitors are worried about competitions. They automatically lower the prices and you don't. That gives you higher margin deals.

It's a bit of a mind game. The other thing is you're not perfect. And if your company is telling you that your product or service is perfect, they're wrong. Your competitor probably has one or two things that they do better than you. You need to learn what those are, not only as the way to continue the sale,

but to feedback to your company, especially to product development, so they can actually have real things they can prove upon so you can narrow that gap. And then finally, if you understand your competitors pricing and how they pitch their product to service, it makes it so much easier for you to counter it. Same way, if you understand your competitors that well, you can help

your client or your prospect craft the RFP. So it automatically, if you go that far, it automatically favors you. I've done that several times in my career where my client or my prospect, because of our domain expertise, helped us ask us to help write the RFP. Well, of course I wrote the RFP where we would be the winner in it and we won those deals.

So my next basic tip is never ignore your competitors. So I would add two things to this. Certainly engaging with the competitors, looking at how they're utilizing the information, how they're selling. There's certainly a lot of learning that can be done on their tips. On the marketing side of thing, you can see what ads are running, how long,

what they change to, you can see where they're ranking. There's all kinds of competitive data. And we were even talking in the pre-interview how it got, it can certainly get pretty dirty how people are running ads on people's names and they can be calling them out. And so it's really important to understand who your competitors is.

I would put a little bit of a spin on it to say, if you're in any kind of channel partnerships or you're selling anything where you have a big bag of things that you're selling or you have different partners, looking at how they do their marketing and how they message it. Like, so if they're an expert in a particular area, I was actually on a multi-agency call yesterday and the owners of the company were like, hey,

we have all these different vendors that we're selling as a distributor for. We need to incorporate their marketing, right, in these particular areas because they've already done all the research. They already know it. They already have it honed in. We're kind of paying with a broad brush here.

Let's get really specific. Let's bring them in. Let's partner with them and leverage all their knowledge and data to move the needle forward faster, right? So it's kind of taking a aggregated approach to what's most effective. Yeah, love it.

So my next tip 10 years ago would have been pick up the phone. I've now changed that to reach out. You know, it used to be the phone, Coke on the phone worked. Actually, it worked very well, but that's during the time when there was no internet, there was no email. There was no voicemail.

There was no caller ID and the only business communication to was a telephone and people weren't as busy. So when you called them, when you did a literary cold call on the telephone and they answered, if you did it well, they wanted to talk to you. Well, that's not today. Now, when you call someone on the phone that you don't know, you're interfering

with their day, they're probably not going to answer because of caller ID, but you definitely can send cold call emails. We do this all the time. Don't be afraid to actually reach out. Now, there's a couple of things here. Matt, as soon as I finished talking, Matt's going to start talking about

email automation, which fits in here perfectly, right? But what doesn't fit in here is stuff that's non-personalized, that is not talking to that prospect directly. So generic spam emails, no way, but using technology to amplify what you're doing with your reach out is absolutely vital in today's sales world. So, you know, jump back a little bit on my origin story of how I've ended up

in marketing as I came from the sales world. And certainly it used to be a numbers game. And I was cold calling actually in oil and gas, 60 to 80 calls a day. And I had a metric in that area. And certainly there was all kinds of techniques to get people and keep them on the phone, but you're interrupting them in the middle of their day.

So certainly mornings, afternoons, you got people better. Fridays, you got people great. Like the days when not everybody is working is when the bigger areas were even on the weekends. And so it expanded out of that. But now it's really this permission based, right?

Like you need to get their permission to pitch them, right? And you need to get on their calendar. And certainly with all the gating and one gas, it's somewhat difficult, but really it's not with social media. You can reach directly out to and find whoever you want with LinkedIn and some of these other tools.

And if you send a message, there's a good chance if someone's organized, they're going to see your message. They might not be responding because you might not be hitting the nail in the head as far as like what their pain points are, but they are seeing the message and you can reach people and you can tweet people if they're on Twitter. I mean, that's a public forum.

There's more appropriate ways to reach out to people and there's certainly ways to do that. There's actually a whole strategy that we have to support sales teams to warm up leads utilizing social media, which I won't go into right now. But if anybody has some interest, I can talk more about that later. Automation, there's a lot of different ways to look at it.

Automation, there's automation on different tools. There's things that can wish people happy birthdays, right? Like you can automate wishing people happy birthday on like Facebook with different things. You can do things on LinkedIn. You got to always look at their terms of service to make sure you're not

violating it or you're going to get your account shut down. But there's a lot of good CRMs that help you do this. And really we're talking about personalization, okay? And like personalization, automation at scale, because it's like a numbers game. If you're trying to close a deal in whatever sales cycle you're in to get that person to raise your hand and then to give them the same experiences you

would give them if they were your only lead, right? And that's what you're really trying to do with email automation to not, you know, go too deep into the technical, but like retargeting, okay? Example of retargeting means they come to your website and you show them an ad. And what's really cool is you can actually tell a conversation in the ad. You can say, hey, for the first three days, hit them 10 times a day and give them

this message. And then at day seven, I want to switch this message. I want to go like three times a day or one time a day. And then after this, I want to change the message again. And I want to go one time a day. And then after that, like, okay, they're not ready to buy now.

Put them on a nurture drip. Show them an ad every, you know, once a week, once a month, something like that. Probably once a week is probably good to stand for them. That's the new pens and pads. And you can utilize that with messages and then certainly bringing it all the way down to very tactical with the emails and lead scoring and automation.

There's just so much you can do there from a B2B standpoint that if you can leverage the automation, you can leverage the technology. You can become a super salesperson. Yep. We got two more than we got to get out of here. So my next one is do not forget existing customers.

You've worked hard. You have new customers. You've closed a deal. You've made your commission and you move on. Don't do that. Once you establish that relationship with a new customer, nurture it, protect it.

Make sure you reach out on a regular basis, put them reminders in your calendar, use automation. Like Matt said, wishing them happy birthday every year is a great personal touch for existing clients that you don't have to worry about. You can automate by continue to nurture those existing customers. Number one, it's going to drive more business for you.

It's going to give you referrals when you need it. And quite honestly, it's job security. There's no better job security than have existing customers that love you when you're a sales guy because then they want to hire you to come work for them. So my second to last tip is don't forget existing customers. So the two just quick things I would say to that and I'll throw some data

at y'all is from a marketing standpoint and even from a higher level operation standpoint, existing customers. One, the reason they leave, the number one reason people leave is apathy. Right. They feel like a number they're not getting taken care of and like you're focused on maybe the shiny object.

And so they don't feel valued. Right. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is the cost to replacing a new client versus managing an existing one, it's like 25% of the cost to maintain an existing client. Then it is to go acquire a new client and the customer acquisition costs

whether it's your time, marketing, what have you. And so referrals too, right? Like referrals in the business and outside the business. The best source of referrals is your network. Right. You want to continue to strengthen your network.

If they're doing business with you and they're happy and they like you, you want to continue to foster those relationships and positive things will happen. So definitely don't forget your existing customers. Yep. Last one, mind the sales process.

What that means is two things for me. Number one is when I can, I control the sales process. So when I have a new client, a new prospect and they've engaged and they want to move to the next step, I let them know the next step in our sales process is one, two, three. Right.

Then I send a calendar invite. Or in the meeting said, you know, what day do we want to move that next step? 85% of the time your buyer is going to be okay with your sales process. If your sales process makes it easier for them to buy from you. Right. Cause you've done it a million times.

They haven't. They may be buying a mud pump from you, but they haven't sold 10,000 mud pumps like your company has. So your buyer's process that you control allows you to make sure you have complete understand what's going on that situation. Every now and then you're not going to be able to mine the sales process to think

about an RFP or when there's a request for information. And if you can't control the sales process at that point, make sure you set clear expectations. This prevents things from like when prospects go dark. Well, the reason prospects go dark is for a couple of reasons. Number one, they don't want to tell you they decided no.

Number two, they're still considering it and somebody went on vacation or something happened and it's linked out the timeframe. Well, if you're controlling the sales process and part of your process is we have a go-no-go decision every other call, right? For five minutes, you then won't ever have people go dark on you. So just make sure that you mine the sales process.

So there's my basic tips. If you're new to sales and oil and gas, or if you've been doing it for a long time and you've maybe gotten away from the basics. Yeah, Matt, will you throw in? Yeah. Well, I'm glad you ended on that.

Cause I think, you know, really mining the sales process, like the one thing I always knew was all time kills deals, right? Like the speed at moving people through it. And yes, people might make another decision, but a lot of times they're not clear on what the next steps are. And you're professionally, again, helping people buy.

You've got to have that clear next step. And it's also helpful to gate them. Hey, here's the options, right? To move to the next step. And also if you have those tire kickers out there and you gate them to say, here are the ways to move forward, they might not keep pumping you for

information from the marketing side of thing or trying to kind of suck your time. You're saying, Hey, here's how you move forward. Here are the next steps. Here's how we do it. And they can clearly do that. And then if you're not following up with them consistently and showing

those clear steps, you're going to lose the deal. They're going to go somewhere else. They're going to get busy. They're going to focus on something else. And so you have to mine the sales process. Yeah, I love that.

So in oil and gas, there are a lot of groups that have people specifically tasked with finding information. And as a salesperson, when that inbound comes in, you think, Oh, it's a prospect. No, it's a good chance it's not. They're just in the information gathering stage. And the way you figure that out is you literally ask them.

It's like, are you coming in or do you have intention to buy? Or are you just trying to learn more? Because you're just trying to learn more. I have a whole wealth of information I can give you and they will tell you. Now, that doesn't mean they won't become a prospect. But to Matt's point, you're not thinking somebody has a chance to buy

it from you when they're just gathering information because that's their job. You got to ask to where they're at in the sales process, like to your point, because you might need to know, Hey, I need a proposal by this time and we're looking at two other vendors and you've come into that piece. If you don't know where you're where they're at in the sales process, you can lose that deal too.

So they need to understand your process and you need to understand where they're at and where you fit in and how to orient yourself in that way. Or you're not going to close deals. 100%. So this is the point where we do a product review. We have no product to review.

But like I mentioned earlier, if you have something you'd like Matt and I to kick around to use ourselves and give you our opinions on it, let us know. Happy to do it. We're typically looking for gadgety sort of stuff. And Matt has a product review he's going to be doing pretty soon once he travels again. And then on the show notes, either scroll up or left, depending if

you're on Android, iOS, you have all of our social links, Matt and I, both of you connect with us. You heard me say this before. We have an insider's group. It's going to be all the rock stars and all the guys sales and marketing. It's going to be a private community. So stay tuned for that.

And then I think last time I did a LinkedIn fail, Matt. So I think it's time for you to do a LinkedIn tip of the week. LinkedIn tip post consistently. How the algorithm works is if you friend somebody, I think I might have given this tip before you want it for the next two weeks, they're going to constantly see that.

I also think building your personal brand online is really important. So completely filling out your profile. There's other options with live. There's other options with newsletters. But you're building your company, right? As a brand, but you're building yourself as a brand.

And the absolute best way to do that is be active on LinkedIn and be social. Yeah. And people, if you don't have a profile picture, I'm not going to talk to you. At least put a profile picture up there. Okay. So LinkedIn, this is maybe a little bit older data.

Typically people on LinkedIn logged in every 21 days. That's probably shrunk in that time period. But yeah, if you're prospecting and someone doesn't even have a profile picture, they're like not even on the list, right? Cause I'm like, this person's not logging in. They're not active.

If you want to engage with people or be engaged, like you have to post consistently so people can see it and people will start seeing your stuff and recognizing what you have and start engaging with you. And that's how you're going to build community online. And that's the new way to sell today. Like you might not have time to go to that networking meeting.

You might not have time to go there. Certainly you want to show face, but how you're going to stay engaged and connect with people and grow that network and expand those boundaries is online. It's a great, great tool. And that needs to get out of here. So remember folks, make a difference, not a sale.

Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast, a production of the oil and gas global network. Learn more at OGGN.com.