Owning the Space with Guests from Fifth Ring

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. Welcome back, everybody. Before we get into the Sales and Marketing podcast, we have a review.

Love this five-stars masterclass in sales and marketing. This podcast is a must-listen. I share it with everyone I know that is working in sales and marketing role in the Oil and Gas industry. The strategies for lead generation, such as cold email and reaching out to customers early in the morning or on a Friday or Sunday afternoons have helped me generate more opportunities

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If you'd like to be about Brendan and get a shout out on the show, leave us a review of what we're doing. We love the five-stars. If you don't love what we're doing, tell us what we need to improve. Matt, we are in-person, which is rare. We are.

We're sitting here in Fithering's corporate offices in the U.S. with Ian and Todd. How are you doing, gentlemen? Really good. Thank you. We don't have time to go in the backstory, but let's just say that this exact podcast and Fithering and Todd and Ian go way back.

It's a fantastic story. I'm the new guy here. Ask him what. Buy me a beer one day and I'll tell you the story. It's a great story. We're sitting here and Todd, you actually came up with some very good subjects in 2024.

We're still in the first quarter that I think a lot of senior marketing people, senior sales people would want to learn a little about. The first thing you came up with, which is going to be this episode, is about owning the space. What does that mean? Yeah, I appreciate that.

Thank you for having us on, Mark and Matt. I appreciate it. I think the things that are keeping people up at night and as they start to think about how they're developing their stories, which audiences they're focused on, which markets they're going into, the goal would be ultimately to own that space. There's a number of competitors that are all creating noise in the space.

Maybe you're creating noise, but it's disconnected. Maybe the story that you're telling is not for the right audience at the right time. There really is a bit of a science to it. The idea is to ensure that your brand can clearly communicate what differ in each of you from your competitor and then doing that by a local market, a regional market globally along those lines.

It's a lot of understanding. There's a lot of time and effort that goes into that. I think that Ian can probably specifically speak to why Fifth Ring has created that. We named it and we tamed it, right? Yes, we named it and tamed it on the space. Ian, would you like to expand on it?

Yeah. Well, firstly, thank you for having us on today. But yeah, on the space, the market and energy in particular is dominated by certain verticals. You can be part of that vertical or you can own a space exclusively in how you operate or how you deliver or it may be product-centric. Knowing what that story is, knowing what that differential is, is really, really important

because it focuses your marketing effort and you talk with a clear, distinct and differentiated voice. So, if we take a very broad parallel, there are cars and we all know there are hundreds of types of cars, but are you a sports car? That's beginning to define the space that you own. Are you a family sports car?

And now you start to think about BMW and the like. Are you an SUV in an off-road? Are you a rugged off-road? Are you a pickup? Tesla. Yeah, but you begin to own a space that you can uniquely address an audience with the

attribute of your product or service. And as Todd says, that'll save you an awful lot of time and an awful lot of money if you can understand what differentiates you in the space. And it takes a little bit of science and a huge amount of creative ingenuity. What are other people offering? What is their message?

What is their positioning? How are you going to differentiate? And then how are you going to take that to market? And potentially, by channel research, dominate that conversation. So I think that that's really important to talk about of like what channel, right? And I think when you figure out what space you want to own and you niche down into that,

you know where you need to be and what you need to do. And then, you know, we know that there's thousands more people getting hit by information all over the place. And so you have to be laser focused in that and to create that kind of omnichannel presence. And through automation and digital marketing and things like that, you can take that message and you can create like a cloud around that person.

And then if you're getting the wrong kind of person, okay, you know that your messaging is off, right? If you're attracting, it's like a mirror. You're getting the wrong kind of person coming to you. You know, you've got to pivot in what you're saying because you're not hitting the point that you want to hit.

Exactly that. But you know, the other thing is, as far as delivering quality work, this allows you to deliver the highest quality work possible. If you're niche down and you own your space, not only do you know who your competitors are and what your differentiator is, you actually know the material, right? So if you came to Matt and I or anybody at OGGN said, hey, we want to talk about legal

podcasting, we would have a clue. You come to us and you say, we want to talk about oil and gas podcasting. We own this space. And all of our hosts are subject matter experts, our sponsors and the ways we make revenue are all in or part of the industry and it allows us to deliver a very high quality results for our clients, which is the same thing we're talking about now because you literally, not

only do you own the space, you know the space, which I think is probably more important than actually owning it because we've all seen companies out there who'd like to act like they know that space. And after looking behind the curtain for 30 seconds, you know, they don't have a clue. I think putting some real world examples to this might even help resonate it. So there may be a company that's well established with some amazing products and, you know, doing

work around the world, which many of our clients do, and that same solution or a variation of that solution that they've been using for downstream for so, so many years and maybe even at one stage in the process, they can then re-engineer it, re-retrofit it, develop a new story and take that to the upstream market, right? And that audience, it's a completely, they're unaware of the company. They're unaware of the solution.

They're unaware of it entirely. And those are not uncommon problems that people come to us with, right? Well, the other thing, you all know this very well, you look at companies that are super successful in the North Sea. And if you don't know this on its fifth ring, you start it off in Aberdeen and you have office here in Houston and Singapore, all oil and gas headquarters of the world.

There are companies that are very well known in North Sea that nobody in the Gulf of Mexico knows who they are, right? So Todd, to your point, it's not even the actual product, it could be the geography that you're in. Indeed it could. Well, assets are like little thiefdoms, right?

Like, I mean, every asset has like how they operate internally, very, very different than other asset groups. And so some of the times, some of those problems don't kind of align and it creates problems, especially when you're talking about like mergers and acquisitions. That's what I've really seen. It's like where you're trying to integrate a new company into kind of an existing culture.

Yeah. I had another one. This was kind of interesting. It met a gentleman about five or six years ago and he developed a piece for a valve and it's a little ball, you know, that's connected to the valve to allow it to open and close. And you know, he says that when I sell those, they're about a buck 50 to oil and gas.

And if I sell that same valve to the medical industry, it's about $60 a piece. And it's the same exact product. Now could you go to them and say, let me share with you everything I've done with all these oil companies and I can do it for you in medical, right? You have to really rethink how you go to market, rethink how you reposition that to justify the additional expense, right?

But Todd, I want to kind of bring you back a little bit. We're focused right now on helping clients in this changing energy landscape. And boy, has it changed in the last couple of years. There's some of our next episodes with Fifth Room where we talk about that change. But if you don't own your space from a client customer point of view, a couple of things. Number one, you're not top of mind, which means there's, the odds are you end up becoming

a commodity, which means you're going to lead by being a low price leader and nobody, including the person that wins the RFP being a low price leader, likes being a low price leader, right? The margins are ultra thin, if you make one mistake, you're upside down in the deal and it allows competitors to come in. But back to your point, if you own the space, you're top of mind, right? You may not be the cheapest, right?

But you're the first person that people think of. And one of the things I think Fifth Ring does really well is you take your clients. Because I see this from the outside and you bring them from being known to be in top of mind, right? From being a vendor to being a thought leader expert. And that's all owned in the space, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, I would say the thing is, is to elevate above your competition and no more vying for specific position, right? We're always kind of jockeying for that position. Where do I stand in this, right? And if they see you as the leader, you're doing different things from a thought leadership

perspective, from positioning your CEOs to, you know, being the go-to for that. So we were having a conversation yesterday with an individual and they had this CEO that was a dynamic, dynamic leader and really just, it was actually in some of the cybersecurity stuff, right? And people are just flocking to him and like a rock star almost, right? When we have those types of clients that have that rock star personality that everyone's

moving towards, that doesn't happen by accident. There was a lot of work that positioned that CEO to be in that place. He must have a great personality, very knowledgeable, all the things, but there's lots of things under the water that are moving pretty quickly to propel him. To amplify what's going on, I would even say like what I've seen more of is you always want to be one of the choices, right?

You're not always going to be the choice, but between these two or these three, you always want to be in that race. And if you're a subject matter expert or you're the thought leader, it's going to be like between, okay, this local person here, this person here, and then who you are. And that's what you always want to be is you want to be in that choice selection to be able to showcase what you're offering.

So Ian Todd, I want to kind of bring you back a little bit, because this is, I want to explain to our audiences what you do. So what we talked about makes total sense, marketing position, owning your market, making sure you're top of mind. But you're the company that does the work, right? Your client's the one that reaps the benefits, but you're the company that does the work.

We don't have to use a real client story unless you want to, and we don't have to use a real client name. But can you kind of talk through how a prospect would come to y'all that needs to own their space and what y'all would do literally, you know, high level, step one, step two, step three. How would you help them own their space?

I'm not sure clients come to us looking to own the space. I think clients come to us looking for revenue generation and in conversation, we look at the competitor set, we'll look how they play, we'll look how they show up, we'll look what they say, we deep analysis with the client experts as to feature and benefit, the features of the products, the asset features the product, we'll look at the rational benefits, we'll look at the emotional benefits, accrued, we're dealing with that particular company because

often the essence of creativity and the essence of differential comes from the emotional benefit. And we're all smiling at this. We all believe that B2B clients are entirely rational, but they are human as well and they will make an emotional connection with a particular vendor or a particular company or a particular product. It's there.

And from that culmination of understanding of features, benefits, rational benefits, emotional benefits, competitor messaging and the like, there will be a story that emerges that is absolutely distinct to that company. And I'm a passionate follower of the history of advertising and some of us will have watched Mad Men beginning to end and if you haven't, I commend it to you. I have a signed poster of all the players.

I'll show it to you. Oh my God. It's okay. Oh my God. Oh my God. We've only just met and I think I love you.

And if you think about some of their stuff in those early days when Hertz and Avis went head to head and their locations were pretty much similar, the range of cars were pretty much similar and what did they go to market with? We try harder. An emotional benefit. Right.

I should attest that if something went wrong, they would try harder to fix it or try harder to make your rental experience better. And that slogan, that positioning exists to this day 70 years on. And I love the fact that we can talk with engineers about science and attribute and benefit and all the rest of it, but often the story lies in the emotional benefit. The characteristic, the service, the culture that drives the vision of the business.

So there's a lot of hard work, desk work to look at and analyze the marketplace. And sometimes the solution lies in the attribute of the product, but many, many times it lies in the emotional connection you can make with the audience. So with your accent, I almost thought you said hard work and I was about to be like, absolutely, right? Well, you're telling me I have an accent, I'll add to his thought.

So I've been in the business, Ian's been in the business well over 30 years. We both started the newspaper business, right? And now, yeah, turn the lights off on the way out. So now, you think about all the technology we have at our fingertips. We have so many tools that we can use to help think this through and get the story out. But you know what remains is artful storytelling.

Love it. And that's really where I think the core of it is for fifth ring is the artful storytelling. And when it's right, it's right. Like you know it's right, right? And we certainly know when it's wrong, right, Ian? Yeah.

Yeah, one of our recent past episodes was on the exact thing, storytelling. Because you think about it, even our sales leaders are listening to this show. When you look at your best reps that are out there closing deals and making sure you make your number. Yes, they're doing features of functionality and price, but watch what they do. They're telling masterful stories and those stories from a sales point of view are usually

how you help previous clients, right? And people are wired to listen and retain a story versus numbers on the Excel spreadsheet. So I think the art of storytelling is something that both on sales and marketing is super important. Actually, we should have prepped Ian and Todd with this. Our concept on this show is that sales and marketing in no organization should be separate.

They should be joined at the hip because in modern, in 2024, the sales people need the help and the amplification the marketing people provide, but the marketing team needs the knowledge and customer facing experience that the sales team has. And when you join those two teams together and compensate them in a way where they both benefit, it's magic. You will double your revenue without doubling your headcount, right?

And those old companies, and you know who I'm talking about, it's not all field service companies who still think that separation marketing sales is smart. It's not anymore. Right? That's what we're talking about. We're talking to some of the biggest experts in the world around this, and we're literally

talking about how to tell stories to drive revenue and position you as that thought leader in that space. It's simple to say, and the concept is simple, it's the actual implementation that can get complex if you're not careful. I'd like to underscore what you've said. I read an article maybe a couple of weeks ago, and we are all mature enough.

I almost said old enough, but mature enough, and I make an exception here with Matt. There were people who had black books who would drive around Houston or Aberdeen or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Saudi or whatever and knock on doors with some doughnuts and all the rest of it, and they would do the courtesy call and look to pick up an order. Technology changed that, COVID changed that, and the article I read maybe only a couple of weeks ago talks about the informed buyer.

Not necessarily procurement, but the informed buyer who has a challenge, a challenge of production or flow or whatever it might be, will do as we all do on relatively high value expenses, whether it be vacations or cars or homes, they start their journey online. It's self-directed research. The research now shows that 60% to 70% of buyer preference is ingrained before they engage with the company themselves by email or by phone.

I've even seen data that suggests higher than that because of the journey. I have too, and I'm aggregating it so as not to shock the audience, but that's the kind of number that you're dealing with, that people are looking at you, people with intent to purchase without you knowing about it necessarily. When they come on to you, the salesman's job these days, and I'm not minimizing the job of sales, every one of us in one way or another works in sales.

I'm not minimizing the role of sales, but you do their fight in an uphill battle because the buyer preference is against you, or you're going in at a competitive advantage because the buyer preference is with you. That does not in any way dilute or minimize the skill of the salesperson to negotiate and land a deal, and ideally land a deal on their terms as opposed to the procurement terms.

That unity, that coalition, that working in harmony between marketing sales, the people that get it right, accelerate the sales curve. The people that get it wrong and they're handing over leads and opportunities that are ill-measured or ill-scored or ill-conceived are getting it fundamentally long, and it's costing them a lot of money to do it. Let me just...

I think you're teasing what's a future episode, which is about account-based marketing and the intelligence that goes around that from salespeople to say, not only do I want to know who my perfect world client is, but I want to know what scotch they drink. I want to know what sports they like. I want to know more about them to deepen that relationship and done well. We can use some of these great tools that are our fingertips, and marketing can support

sales for those, as well as sales can inform marketing as we're focusing on them. I wrote a book like five years ago called Build Your Brand Mania, and really, I was a salesperson. All my career, if you look, like 15 years, sales, like hardcore sales, I'm talking cold call sales, I'm talking door-knocking sales, I'm talking real sales, not taking orders, a consultative selling.

What I saw with digital marketing and the direction, certainly I was in the pre-I can't spam that, and facts blasting and stuff like that, but what I saw with marketing is if you have that effective story that Mark was talking about with sales and you bring it in to a one-to-many kind of situation where you can amplify that, market that, reach people with that. It's so powerful because I think as a salesperson, at least I remember, I was kind of knocking

my head on the wall going, I'm saying the same thing to the same candidate over and over and over again. I said, how do I do this in mass? That's what's led me seven-plus years ago to podcasting because it's a broadcast format, and then it's engagement, it creates like a different platform, and what people want to do is they want to do business with people they know, like, and trust, and they want

to build that brand, and you want to create that, and so that is the power of marketing, and there's salespeople, and we've talked to a number of salespeople that don't believe in the value of marketing. They still don't believe in the value of marketing. I think they haven't learned how to utilize those tools potentially, but that's what part of digital transformation is.

When you go after the marketing piece of it, digital is transforming every piece of the business, and it transforms the way you sell, and once you understand the power of branding and PR and digital marketing and SEO, you never go back. You never go back. Maybe that discord starts early on that one or other set of sales and marketing, and let's agree that they should be bonded together almost like S and M, and I may have misspoken there,

and you may want to cut it out. No, that's with an inside joke to the podcast. And way to get better, Ian, because in OGGN, all our podcasts have a four-letter designation. This podcast is OGSM, and audience, I'll let you laugh privately to yourself, and OGSM is the name of our podcast. But we would never work a proposition for a client.

I take great store from listening to the salespeople who sit in front of customers who have that dialogue. They understand the questions that they ask. If I understand the dilemmas they face, the creative team at our shop will produce a far better result because we are focused on their dilemma. We are looking at solution selling as opposed to product selling, that you've got a problem

that we can uniquely fix, or we believe we can uniquely fix. And I think too many marketing teams go off, and we're in a room that we can write on every wall and on any surface here. They go off into that kind of folk, that kind of brainstorming thing. The marketing team would come up with the materials. The sales team has to drive that.

They know it works in the field, right? The sales team see it at the 11th hour and go, where the hell did you get that from? But I would never approach a proposition or a creative brief without getting that. Some of what that frequency looks like, what kind of questions did they ask? Why do you think they ask that? That's the stuff.

That's where the juice is. That's where the goal is for creating compelling, creative, and creating compelling messaging that drives this concept of owning the space. 100% in fact, Matt and I are big believers that if you're in sales, you go grab one of your marketing peers once a month and bring them with them on sales calls so they can hear it, right?

Even if that person's manager has an issue with it, go talk to them. I'm going to make this marketing person 10 times more efficient by just them coming and hanging out with me for an hour in a customer call. Almost nobody does that and it's so valuable to the marketing team. They want to help and they have resources and experience that sales people don't have, but they can apply it unless they know what's actually really going on.

Absolutely right. Often it's not when we're looking at positioning for the client, we will insist in talking to active clients to see if what their message resonates. We'll talk to lapsed clients because there must have been a reason that they've broken off and we'll talk to their potential clients. Most people will say this, well, how are you going to get that done?

In our experience, when you open a dialogue, much like the forum of these podcasts, people don't stop talking. They will give you all the information that you ever want or need, but getting that almost 360 of perception because we all know, even in this B2B world, it's supposed to be about facts and figures and rational benefits, perception is stronger than fact. Yes.

I love lapsed clients too. We've talked before about doing loss reviews and how valuable that is. We probably need to do a whole episode of the technical parts of doing loss reviews. Well, bringing back old clients is a great way and if you understand why they left, you need to do those exit interviews. That's extremely valuable because what is it, churn and just apathy, right?

That's one of the number one reasons people leave. They don't feel like I'm a value to you or I'm a number or something like that. People are afraid to ask for feedback and feedback is a gift. If you have an opportunity to understand why and if you're not selected, there was a reason. You walk away and say, well, I was on my best day, but they'll probably tell you if you dig deep enough.

Well, so here's something funny because I've done a lot of work on this with my market research company. The interesting thing is if you're a salesperson and you lose a sale and you're a good salesperson, the prospect of the client without meaning to won't tell you 100% of the truth because if you're a good salesperson, they like you and they don't want to hurt your feeling. What you do is you hire an independent party.

We always hire college interns and the first thing out of their mouth is I am not associated with modal point. I am hired to do just this research. I have five questions and I'd like you just to answer them truthfully. It will help us help you in the future and you'll get to Ian's point. You can't get him to shut up.

You ask five questions in an hour long conversation and every bit of that data is super valuable and almost nobody does loss reviews. That's a great pro tip. This is the point because we're talking about making sure we don't have to vie for your position with your competition. Stuff like a loss review is one of those expert techniques that will make sure that you don't

have to vie with your competition because most likely your competition is not doing loss reviews and guys, unfortunately we're at the time limit. We need to write down this episode. We have more coming. Speaking of more coming, sign up for our two newsletters. Our oil and gas Sunday update is killing it.

My marketing team, even though I thought it was a stupid idea, proved me wrong. They went from zero to $40,000 subscribers in 12 weeks with that newsletter. So go check it out. Same way with the oil and gas events newsletter, both those for free, links in the show notes, Matt and I social links are also in the show notes. We have our insiders group we're working on.

Actually, if you heard our review, we have at least one person that left us a review that's ready to join our insiders groups. We have one buyer already. This is the point where we do the LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Todd, do you have a LinkedIn fail or tip for our audience? Well, first of all, I'll share a slight story.

So I've been in LinkedIn since 2017. I'm sorry, 2007, not 17, 2007. Big difference. And yes, and I'm at the max, which is 30,000 connections. And I think the big benefit that it's had for me is people meet me and know me already. They'll come up to me at the airport.

They'll come up to me at an event and they already feel like they know me. And for my days, I've worked in radio at some time. For my days, I feel like LinkedIn is always on. You got 24 hours, always on, and you're building that perception in the market of who you are and what you're about. So it's your storytelling time to tell your brand story, right?

Love it. And ask people, what is it that I can do to build my brand story and think it through and plot it to be on that always on LinkedIn radio station? Love it, love it, love it. All right, Ian, if people wanted to learn more about fifth ring, where should they go? Easiest place to go is to www.fifthring.com, and you'll find out about our operations here

in the US and in Asia and in Europe. Or you could go old school and go onto the web and find a telephone number. Can you imagine that? No, no, no. Don't let your telephone number or email address. And you could call somebody up.

Can you imagine? Stop it, stop it. But what we will do is put both of y'all's LinkedIn profile links in the show notes and people want to reach out to you individually. Audience, you want to reach out to fifth ring, the link will also be in the show notes. You ready to get out here?

How's that? Remember, folks, make a difference and 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.