Referrals. Why, How and When?

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, if you want to manage your oil fill operations from anywhere with rigor online or offline, whether it's scheduling and dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment

rentals or inspections and maintenance, you can create, review, approve and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices the same day and run powerful operation management dashboards on your desktop or phone, no paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us, link is in the show notes. This is the Sales and Marketing podcast.

What's up, Matt? What's going on, Mark? How are you doing? Hello from the Bahamas. Yeah, I'm not doing as well as you are since you're in the Bahamas. So talk a little bit about the Bahamas, the place you're at.

It looks like it'd be a cool place for a sales or marketing team to come do a retreat. Yeah, there's actually a sales and marketing team here from, I think it's FIS. It's called Bahamar. So there's two main areas. I think there's Atlantis who's been around for a long time. And then Bahamar, and I think I'm assuming, based on how it looks, that somebody from

Vegas, like one of the Vegas hotels, built it and it's got casinos and pools and water show and fire and just, it has a whole water park. I mean, restaurants, it's pretty awesome. So good place for business meeting and also good place to bring the family to? Absolutely. Yep.

Maybe this is where we put together our insiders group. Maybe it's the first place we go is there and bring our CMOs and our chief revenue officers to a nice place in the Bahamas to get some peer-to-peer work done. Oh, yeah. There's conference center here. They've got a nice work area, gym.

I would tell you also this flight from United is like kind of a straight shot here. So that's nice too. Yep. And then to the list we put together insiders group. No review. If you want to leave us a review, just go to your website of choice.

And actually in the show notes is a new tool that we've implemented at OGGN where no matter what technology you're on, even Linux, crazy enough, you can actually click on it and it will let you leave a review on any other platform. So even if you're not an Apple user, because the two places leave most reviews are on Apple podcast and Spotify. Even if you're not an Apple user, you can leave a review and it'll end up on Apple's

podcast. So in the show notes, if you want to try to remember, it's love this podcast, Ford slash OGSM and Matt, I've gotten a lot of Snickers at the abbreviation for our show OGSM. I got a lot of sexual connotations around that. We probably eventually should do something fun with that.

Probably so. It's the type of giveaway around S and M. I don't know. Anyway, but our topic is not around OGSM. Our topic today is around referrals because after our last episode where we did a thing on beginners and the basics, I've had a couple of people reach out to me because we mentioned referrals.

They said, can you go deeper in referrals? So I thought today would go as deep in referrals as we possibly can in a half hour. Let's do it. So why referrals? From personal experience, one of the easiest sales you will ever close as a professional salesperson is referral business.

You're basically inside behind the firewall. Somebody gives you a recommendation to one of their peers. That recommendation eliminates all of the fear, uncertainty, the pushback. It's usually an easy deal. And then the best part, Matt, is then people are happy. So the person that made the referral was happy because they helped out a work buddy or a

friend. You're happy as a salesperson because the deal was quick and painless. And then your new client is happy because you helped them solve the problem. And so just the referral itself is a sales tool that I think a lot more people should capitalize on because it really is a win-win all the way around. Yeah, I mean, when you look at it from a marketing standpoint, people, I forget actually the term.

It's like memetics or something like that. I can't remember exactly the term. But people look at referrals in clusters and there's data surrounding. I think it's seven or 12. I think it's actually seven referrals that based on seven referrals, they can aggregate an assumption.

And so that's why you see all these different sites pushing referrals, how you want to kind of pre-frame with those referrals up front and aggregating those reviews and testimonials are so important. But online, that's what everybody's looking for, right, is I searched on Google, I don't have time, I don't have, you tap your personal network first and then you go online second. And so aggregating those referrals in a place where they're easy to be found helps people

make that better decision based on everything you're saying, absolutely. 100%. And then if you even go to the OGGN website and go to our pricing page and yes, we have our pricing very public and transparent on our pricing page, you'll see a video shot of several of our sponsors that are happy and they talk about the business results that they receive by working with us.

That's not an accident. That is intentionally on our pricing page because if somebody goes to our pricing page, that means they're thinking about working with us. When they see the head of marketing from Technique FMC and the head of oil and gas sales from IBM talking about how we help them generate business, guess what, Matt, they click on something and they want to talk to us much quicker because to your point, that referral

has now helped them feel like it's a better choice for them to work with us than maybe somebody else. It's pre-framing, right? And I think we'll go into that more for sure. Yeah. So one of the things I want to talk about is referrals should not ever be in a salesman's

world, should not ever be an accident, a referral should not be something that you reach out only when needed. Actually, a process is I call it the referral machine and you have to build a referral machine and when you build that referral machine, the most important part is the original ask. And so the original ask is when you first engage with a new client, a new prospect and you're getting ready to sign the deal and they've asked you for something like a discount

or whatever, you go ahead and agree to give them the 15% off and without putting a period in there, you say, if we do good business with you, I'll give you this discount. Can I use you for referrals? And they will always say yes, right? If you wait till after the deal is closed, a lot of times, especially bigger companies will push that out to legal or HR for their permission and legal and HR will always say

no because it's a risk. But if you ask in the beginning of the deal, they always say yes, especially if you can use it as a negotiation tactic. So you ask that upfront on every single deal that you do and another little thing that you should also ask upfront and this sort of ties into this is, hey, Mr. Custer, if we do a really good job for you, can I shoot a short two minute video of you talking about

the problem we helped you solve, not talking about us, not talking about what we did, but talking about the problem we helped you solve. Once again, they will always say yes in the negotiation phase of the deal versus if you wait till after the deal is closed, they will say no, are they handed off to legal or PR who will also say no because it's a risk. So if you ask for permission to shoot that little short video upfront and then when you

do good work for them, you now have two parts of the referral machine. Number one, you have their agreement that you can personally use them for referrals and we'll get to the tactics about that a little bit later. Number two, you've gotten them to agree to shoot a little short video talking about the problem that you helped them solve. That video is a referral that is now stored for you to help with your marketing efforts.

So if you ask those two things upfront, like I said, in the negotiation phase, every time they will say yes. And if you wait till after the deal is closed, a lot of times they'll say no, but that little short video of them talking about how you helped them solve a problem is worth its weight in gold. Yeah.

So from a marketing standpoint, certainly referrals and online reviews and testimonials are super important. Video referrals are the most powerful where people mention their full name in their company. And then through the video, there's more than just text. You can see their body language. You can see how they express it.

There's so much communication that happens outside of the physical words. And then stepping down from that, like again, the full name and the company is always helpful. Like when you have those referrals where it's like first name dot and then they don't have a business, it's not as powerful. And so really a video takes longer to shoot. We actually have a tool that we use to call pro testimony that we capture the video testimonials

for, but in the process of like building this referral machine, even in the discovery call, what we train our sales team to do is ask them at the beginning, like you said, at the beginning of the call that said, Hey, if you find this call helpful, could you please leave me a referral? And then you asked them at the end of the call, Hey, did you find this helpful? And really you shouldn't be asking for a review if you don't feel like you've added value.

But if you've added value, you can exchange your time for that referral. And usually people are really happy to do that. And you want to build that as part of your process, especially when you're looking at from a marketing standpoint online, depending on your business, if people are using different platforms like let's just say like Google, for example, you want to ask them to leave a review on that platform and you want to build it into your sales culture to be asking

for that if they feel like they've earned it. And then you can ask that same customer for referrals on multiple platforms if it's relevant to your business. And then absolutely asking them for the video referral after you've like delivered valuable services and that way you can build a really strong referral pipeline or referral machine. There's different methodologies of how you do it, but you want to build it into your

workflow. Yeah. So I'm going to come back and tell you in the audience a secret that I did with reviews, but let's get through this part first. All right. So you've asked the prospect, the client upfront before you sign the contract, they'll

be a referral. If you do good work, they've said yes. And hopefully they said yes, that you could shoot a really short video. And I'm telling you a 30 second video shot on your cell phone of them saying how good a job you'd help solve problem is worth anything. You don't need to have a full production process.

It'd be good if you had good lighting, good audio, but just anything that's legit where the client is talking about how you help them is worth its weight and goal. All right. Now, the next thing is, and here's where most salespeople fall short is now once you've delivered the product or service and your client is happy, don't ignore them. Reach out on a regular basis and here's where automation can help so that you're always

top of mind. Because what you don't want to do is not talk to them for two years and then ask them for a referral. It's awkward, like out of middle of nowhere, and I've had people do that to me, whereas if you stay top of mind and reach out to them, it doesn't have to be every week, it could be once a quarter and you don't ever feel guilty about asking them for referrals and

just let them know how things are going. And so that little part can be automated, Matt. What's some of the ways you could automate that touch point so that you stay top of mind? Well, you know, I think that certainly email automation on even text automation is really valuable, building like a nurture drip, right? And you're talking about, if you're talking about like a sales funnel online, the sales

funnel doesn't start when you close the deal, right? Because I think the number one reason that people leave is apathy, like they don't feel like they're being taken care of or they feel like a number. And so there's a lot of things that you want to create those touch points as a salesperson, but also even as a company. There's tools like send out cards or birthday echo that help you stay in touch with them,

sending them gifts on their birthday or for the holidays, but, you know, sending them a weekly, Hey, here's what's in the news, adding them to a nurture drip is one of the first and best ways to kind of stay in touch with them, certainly posting on social media, connecting with them on social media, liking their social media and posting your social media, engaging with them in that way. And it's really about building your network and keeping your network warm because that's

the worst thing, Mark, when someone reaches out to you that hasn't talked to you and they like, try to ask you for something or try to sell you for something and you're like, where have you been? Right. And so, you know, and maybe really where it's coming from is not a bad place and everybody's busy today and everybody keeps getting busier, but that's why personalization and automation

are so, so powerful when you're looking at building that sales. And then I think, you know, social media is a strong number two and there's certainly more ways to do it, but those would be the most tangible that a salesperson could take advantage of quickly. Perfect. So once you figure out how you could stay top of mind so you don't feel awkward asking

a referral, the next thing is to categorize your referrals. Now here at OGGN, we sell basically a couple of things. The biggest one is podcast sponsorships. So what I do is my referrals are categorized into what I call small, medium and large business. Now, because I'm in oil and gas, you know, my small bucket of business or companies that are one billion of revenue and above, my medium buck of business is 20 billion and above and

the large is above that. But whatever your market is, because what happens is not only does a referral super important, but if you can match up this similar business, especially size to the referral for the prospect, it's that much more powerful. So if somebody from Exxon wanted to work with us and I gave them a referral from Chevron, who is a competitor, but it's a similar company, similar size, that would go way further than

some company Exxon never heard of. So in our world, I categorize them in three buckets. Whatever your sales world is, there has to be different buckets that you categorize your referrals in and I actually keep it in an Excel spreadsheet. However you want to keep it works well for you, a lot of the newer CRM tools have places where you could actually tag a field and give a name to that referral.

But this way when you go to give a referral, it's just not a generic referral, which by the way, just a generic referral is better than probably what your competition has. But when you have one that's dialed in, it's super valuable. Yeah, I think another way to look at this too is looking at it from a target persona of like, what are you selling and who are you selling to? And then those referrals.

So what I see in the marketing and like IT departments a lot is depending on the bigger company you go, the more risk adverse they are, right? So they just don't want to hire a company and take a risk and make themselves look bad, right? That's like the number one concern. And so if you have other companies that are like their company or are their competitors,

like you say, it's super helpful. And I think really dialing in just like we do with the podcast to the different target personas or different segments of the business that you're going after to capture referrals in that area. And then even think about your referrals as you start to build like any referral and you build your referral base, then you can start segmenting out those referrals and you can,

we do it with content a lot, you kind of take a content audit of what are the different kind of referrals that you have and then what you need and then you start to shape that. And the more referrals that you have, certainly the more video referrals and, you know, it depends the place in your sales funnel. So you know, you can now embed that video referral in an email link, right? Or even link to a text.

And that's the most powerful, certainly shorter is better. We've seen that. But man, having them on your website, having that trust building, pre framing somebody looking at that, or if there's referral sites out there, like that's the number one thing that I see in oil and gas, people are like changing the way they search and they're using online and some of these big companies are not paying attention to their reviews online

and on third party platforms. And typically somebody that is upset is like, I think, I don't know what the ratio is, but it's significantly more likely that a negative person is going to leave a review. And so if you're not focused on it and you're not focused on building a good review and make sure you're pulling that information of the good experiences that your clients have had, then the conversation online is very, very one sided.

And so I think that that's certainly an area of focus that companies should look at. And really you start with your Google, my business profile is a great place that everyone has that set up, that they should be starting to garner reviews by clients. And you know, that is actually for us, that's one of the KPIs for our salespeople in the activity goals is to generate positive reviews online. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Getting good reviews online in today's world is a must do, it should be part of your sales teams metrics. So but back to the actual referral machine, another thing, so now you have your referrals, you have their permission to use them, you figure out a way to stay in touch with them so you don't feel awkward, you have them categorized. Now here's something a lot of people don't realize, you can actually hunt, hunting from

a sales point of view with referrals. So two or three percent of your referrals are going to be really good referrals. They have a lot of confidence in you, they trust you, they like you, they actually want to help you. That small percentage literally you ask them, hey, if I produce the results that I promise you and if we deliver them on time and on budget and everything is perfect, can I ask

you for an introduction to someone in your network who might need help with the same results. And what that means is you're now letting your client help you find new business inside of their network. Not all of your referrals will do this, only a small percentage of them, but it is amazing. And when you find that right person that's willing to do that in their network, you know,

you think of somebody like an enterprise architect or a project manager or a project accounting or a petroleum engineer, all of their professional networks are people just like them. You literally could turn one sale into a hundred and your prospect is the one doing most of the work for you. And they're happy to do it because they're helping their friends out with the problem that they have.

Yeah, I think that that's so important. Like that's what one of the things we tell our account managers, right? Like if you can't ask for a review and if you can't ask for a referral, then what are we doing wrong because we're not delivering the value we need to be delivering because you should be able to ask for that. You should only ask for it if you know that you've earned it.

So then what are you doing with that account, right? And then really when you're looking at generating new business, that's the absolute best place to start is really, I don't know, mine is the right word, but you want to reach out to your personal network or your business network, actually your business network first and your business network, if you're an account manager or salesperson consists of clients that you've closed or clients that you're managing.

And so that's the absolute best place to start because those warm introductions are going to help. I think at least for me, it goes back to delivering the client kind of service that you feel comfortable and your team feels comfortable of asking for it because you have to solve that first, but asking for it becomes easy. And there's typically, you know, people have two to three people that they could almost

instantly refer you to. If you ask for it, I think the data is typically like 40% of the time. If you ask, people will leave your referral or like a review or they'll actually take action and connect you with somebody. So one is you got to ask, two is you got to like be, you got to deserve it and you got to have earned it.

And then really the sales process becomes quite easy because it's a warm introduction and you just run with it, right? No, it's perfect. And I'm glad you brought the ask up. So that's the next thing I want to talk about is how you ask this. I know I'm a bit old fashioned.

My preference when I ask for referral is to do it in person. If I can, and if I can't do it in person to do it on the telephone, I literally will try to schedule a 10 minute call just to ask for referral with the people that are in my referral machine. I'm sure you can do it via email. It's just fine.

I like to do it in person. Now, as a salesperson, one of the things that your customer will be thinking about when you ask for referral is, Hey, is Mark going to be like this pushy salesperson when I introduce him to my friend and kind of make me look bad? So you need to own that emotion up front. And while you're asking for referral, remind your customer that not only will you not be

a pushy salesperson, right? Let them know that you're not going to helm the person. You're going to talk to them one time. And if they don't don't have an interest, you can leave them alone and let them know that if we end up doing business together with the referral, you will keep your client updated on how things are going.

If you do that, it eliminates any fear of them being worried about you being a pushy salesperson and damaging a relationship that they've taken years to build. So when you make that ask, don't ignore that elephant in the room. Go ahead and own that and be upfront and let them know you're not going to be a pushy salesperson and you're not going to bug people to death. Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, based on generationally, maybe I would ask for a referral a bit differently. Like I've certainly asked for referrals and reviews through text message significantly higher than in person. But I think that I have the relationship with those people that I'm communicating with them enough, right? Like it's not like a random text message out of the blue or something like that.

But man, I agree with what you're saying is that's probably the number one reason why people don't do it is they don't know maybe how they're going to respond. Now, if they know who you are and they know how you operate, it's always good to even say it. Hey, you know, like sales and my definition of sales is like professionally helping people buy, right?

And it's helping them get something they actually need. And when you're asking for that referral, don't ask for like this general referral, right? Like ask for your exact ideal customer of the person that you're absolutely going to help the most so that they in their head can target in when they see that they know exactly who to refer you to, of who you're looking for.

These general kind of referrals don't do as well and people don't have you in their mind position in the way that maybe you would want to be positioned because I've found the more I tell people exactly who I want to help, how I want to help them, what I want to do for them, when they find that person, they just know that that's what I'm looking for and they want to help me and they just send me that referral. Like I think proactively get it when you're not even thinking that you're going to write

because they see that much value in sending their professional friends your way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just really, really believe that you want to ask for business that you know that you want, that you're going to do a great job for and then it's not a favor, right? Like I actually tell them like certainly like people, if I'm not super close with them and

they're giving me a referral, usually I'm telling them, I'm going to make you look good, right? I'm going to deliver for them like what I've been able to do for you, right? And they typically want to help people. It gives them credit to a certain degree. I find that people like maybe early on in my career, I didn't know how to handle it,

but I've found the more people I connect with other great people, it's a positive. Like I think people that don't want to share their network or they have access to somebody, if it's going to help both parties involved and you make the connection, it's going to give you credit and you're going to get value for that and you want to make those connections. You want to introduce people to that and you know, understanding who you're asking for the referral for and how they view their network and understanding that you're going to help

them tends to I think open them up. So I think it's just delivering that quality product and that's your calling card more than anything else is what you want to lean into. All right. So I told you I'd get back to online reviews. So when Yelp first came out and Yelp's business strategy basically is to own reviews of your

business and then charge you if you want to suppress some of the bad reviews with good reviews. When I first figured out what they were doing, Matt, it pissed me off like really you can leverage me as my own business. So everybody that's listening, go to modalpointreviews.com. You want to guess who owns modalpointreviews.com?

I own modalpointreviews.com. Right. I beat Yelp at their own game. Yelts are gangsters, Mark. Yelts are gangsters. All the reviews you see on modalpoint.com reviews and modalpoint.com are real reviews

from real clients. However, I outrank. If you search for modalpointreviews, modalpointreviews.com comes up first and you see the reviews I want you to see. So I beat Yelp at their own game. They are not very happy with me.

They quit talking to me once they figured out what I did. But I'm not going to let another company leverage my own online reviews for their own monetary. I beat them to it. So if you have a domain name for your company, you might want to buy the domain name of your company reviews so that you can own that space and not let Yelp try to leverage you. You know, there's other ways to like certainly like review sites have its place in the world

and it's become big business. I see review sites popping up all the time. Also having a section on your page and organizing your site architecture where here are reviews, your case studies, your like, you know, resources, referrals, white papers, all that sort of thing. Like even having a section where people can send you referrals works really, really well. If they want to send you a referral, they know how to be able to do that when you improve

your sitemap. But yeah, let's say that let's say that till we get to our website strategy. That's going to be a totally different episode. Right now I want to get to the product reviews because we finally reviewed or you finally reviewed our one adapter. That's the name of the company and their product is One World 65.

And basically it's an adapter that works in all the different countries in the world, but it's very high power, very low physical size so you can leave your laptop brick at home and charge all your devices including your laptop. And so Matt, you actually got to use it today in the Bahamas, didn't you? Yeah. It's really nice.

You know, you can charge your phone, you can charge like an Apple computer. It becomes the brick of all bricks, right? Like the... I love it. The brick of all bricks. So we want to get a big shout out.

Well, the One World 65 gets thumbs up from me and Mack and all the guys sales and marketing. Thank you One Adapter for sending us the product. If you have a product you want us to review, send it to us. Remember, gadgety stuff, nothing huge like air compressors, right? Also in the show notes besides the One World adapter, we just talked about is all of Matt and I's social links if you want to connect us on all different social platforms.

I talked earlier about the Insiders group. That's coming. We may end up doing it at the Bahamas, which would be cool. Now we'll get ready to close out the show and it's my turn to do a link that fail or tip of the week. So Matt, do you get hit up on by salespeople on LinkedIn that literally have no idea who

you are or what you do? All the time. Yeah. I figure out a way to monetize them. So now when I get hit up by these salespeople, I'm going to read this. This is my reply to them.

Thank you for your outreach. I am not interested, but may I offer you some unsolicited advice? If you want to drive more sales by using LinkedIn, especially from the oil and gas industry, there is a podcast made just for you and it will greatly increase your success. It is called Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing and can be found here. So now when these salespeople hit me up Matt, searching for oil in LinkedIn and they try

to sell me something, I redirect them to this podcast right now. So if you're listening to this because of what I sent you on LinkedIn, realize what I just did, I moved you away from trying to sell me something that I don't need from the point that you have no idea what I'm doing to now that you're listening to us. So now you're supporting the show. So there's always a way, if you think through stuff to make things to use to your advantage

and actually in this case, I'm helping educate the people so that the next time they can do an outreach to LinkedIn, maybe they'll do a better job of it and they'll actually pick up a client. And I would also just add on to everything we're talking about, getting LinkedIn reviews personally of who you are and how you do business is really quite powerful because I would tell you that most people when they're in the market for the business, they're going to be doing

online research. And one of the places that I've seen people typically go is they go to the LinkedIn profile and they check it out. And so making sure it's up to date, making sure you have a picture, making sure you have some reviews, making sure you're posting actively on it is really quite powerful. Great way to close this out.

All right. Remember, 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.