Sales and Marketing Should be Joined at the Hip

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, it's Mark LaCour. Back with my co-host, Matt.

How are you doing today, Matt? Good. I'm doing well. It's a little nippy out there. Yeah, for the rest of the world, during the winter, you know, 29 degrees doesn't sound that cold, but in Houston, Texas, that is below freezing for us.

We literally and figuratively sew the whole city's button down right now. But before we get into the show, I want to give a big shout-out to Rigger for sponsoring this show. If you want to get rid of paper-field tickets, reduce payment cycle times, plus see all your assets in real-time. Go check them out.

Link will be in the show notes. You'll literally scroll up or left if you're iOS or Android, and you click and go check out Rigger. A big thank you for them for sponsoring this show. So Matt, we have an interesting topic for our first show, but before we get into it, maybe we should tell our audience who we are and why you and I decided that we need

to do an All I Got Sales and Marketing podcast. You want to go first? Sure. Certainly, sales has been part of my background for my entire career, and from door-knocking sales to phone call sales, and that's actually what really led me to marketing. My whole career has been, well, sales and then how to leverage marketing automation

to help drive, well, leads and reach a bigger audience, kind of a one-to-many, and that's why I've gravitated towards digital marketing and podcasting. Now I run a digital marketing agency here in Houston, Texas. And what's the name of your agency? Go ahead and give yourself a plug. EWR Digital.

We started off as E-Web Results. We've been around 23 years. I took over the agency about six years ago and have been growing it ever since. Yeah, and one of the things I learned about Matt is he actually started the sales and then learned marketing, and he is a marketing genius. Some of the stuff that comes out his mouth, I literally takes me 10 seconds to understand

what he's talked about. It's like, wow, that is genius. So we're going to share a lot of Matt's geniuses on these next couple of episodes. And then if you don't know me, I'm Mark LaCour, I'm Editor-in-Chief of All In Gas Global Network. I'm on a couple of shows.

We sort of ruled this space. And for years, Matt, we've had chief revenue officers, chief marketing officers, VPs of sales and marketing reach out to OGGN and go, hey, can y'all start a sales and marketing podcast? And we've been trying to do this since before the pandemic, and it wasn't until you came on board as a CMO at OGGN, when you and I became friends that I realized I had the perfect

co-host. And so we're going to do it. It's our first episode out the gate. And this first topic, I think it's interesting. I think it may even be a little bit controversial at All In Gas, but so what? So the topic is why sales and marketing should work together and not be separate organizations.

Want to throw down first? Sure. Well, certainly when I was in the trenches or on the pavement, I guess, doing sales, I always looked at marketing for support. And certainly, depending on a different organization or what have you, they would provide you materials. But then a lot of times salespeople would make quote unquote homemade sales materials,

right? Because they weren't getting the support they needed for marketing. And there's a lot of like big picture branding that's happening. But I think that there's a disconnect like with sales enablement and marketing to talk together, to be in the same room, to really figure out what things that you can do. I always looked at marketing or digital marketing as like a mech warrior suit or some kind of

armor, right? Like that would make a salesperson 10x better, right? Like if they had, you know, email drips and triggers and there was remarketing happening and all these things were working at concert, you could take one really good salesperson and make them like a super salesperson. And that's certainly something that I've seen and certainly gravitated to.

So I do have a unique perspective on sales and I think that marketing in itself is just sales online, right? So if you know how to sell and you can articulate what message you're trying to communicate, that's where the magic of marketing happens is you can reach so many more people through it. So I think that having a career path where you're in sales first and you move into marketing

is much more helpful because you look at the world a little bit differently than if you were in marketing per se and styled in that your entire career. I love that. Unfortunately, the only gas that's not how it works, it's a totally separate business unit, totally separate organization of sales and marketing. And one of the things I've seen a lot on the marketing side is you've got a lot of bright

people that can do incredible work, but they don't have the information that's in the sales people's heads because the sales people are on the front lines interfacing with the customers. And this is why you see that thing where sales people complain about the quality of leads they get from marketing. It's not that marketing's doing a bad job. It's that sales is not sharing the customer information and if you could put those two

together to your point, it is super powerful. We run that way here at OGGN. Marketing sales is tied at the hip, hence you and I doing this podcast, you know? It's amazing. But one of the things I think is making the discrepancy more is the advent of technology that's come in the last couple of years and unfortunately the oil and gas industry is

behind marketing and sales technology. So I think organizations out there that can see how to merge their marketing and sales organizations will see a tenfold increase, not only in things like sales and revenue, but also in happiness. If you're a sales person and your marketing person is tied to you at the hip and helping you close deals, that's like your battle buddy, right?

And y'all go in together and y'all both drive results, y'all both get awarded for it. The client's happy because the information marketing provided is spot on. I just think that they should be joined together in the oil and gas industry and unfortunately I don't see it anywhere. Well, I can tell you that with a lot of big like integrator type companies that do like digital transformation and stuff like that, they're not talking at all, okay?

And I've actually had a lot of complaints by really top tier sales people that they're getting a lot of information, things are getting pushed out, but they're not given a proven path or a way to incorporate into what they're doing. And then I think that on the marketing side, lead scoring is really important in the CRMs and to tie everything back together to make adjustments because really if your target persona is wrong or you're going after the wrong actions or CTAs, then you're going to get the wrong

result. And so you need to know where to start. And that starts by talking to sales and talking to your customer and being a lot more tied into what's happening here to the ground sort of thing. Yeah. And you just lost all the sales leaders that are listening to this.

Let me back you up a little bit. Talk a little bit about lead scoring first and then let's talk about call to action second, but let's start with lead scoring. What is it? And why is it important? Yeah.

So you mentioned that the leads that were coming in might not be good, right? The leads that marketing is producing sales might not view those leads as good, right? You got to close the loop. So if leads are getting generated, what marketing is typically looking at is how many leads are being produced. People want quality and quantity.

And so they're looking at, okay, we're producing leads, but okay, how many of these are spam? Okay, let's pull those out. How many of these are good quality leads? And you know, I would tell you when I talk to sales people, they're looking for the whale deals, right? They're looking for those monster deals.

And so the smaller deals, they're not putting us higher priority on. And so what you can do is when leads come in, you can rate those leads. You can have some different kind of scoring system, one to 10, one to three, whatever. And you can circle that information where it feeds back into marketing, where they can understand these are good leads, these are not good leads, and they can continue to ask more questions to better zero in on that ideal customer or that target persona with their

marketing. Who are you trying to reach? Who's a good lead? What type of company is a good lead? There's a lot of things that I think are in sales people's heads that marketing just doesn't know and is not provided that information.

Yeah, I can tell you right now from personal experience, when I look at all the big service companies, the Halliburton, Sleberge's, Baker Hughes, Weatherford's, Technique Epiphanesies, blah, blah, blah, their sales teams are not scoring those leads in a way that's effective to marketing. So you just unloaded some genius on the sales organizations out there. So all your sales leaders out there that are bitching about the quality of leads, figure

out how to score those leads so you can give feedback to marketing so marketing can get better at it. The end result is much higher quality leads, easier work for your sales team and a happier company. For sure. So you mentioned CTA.

Let's talk a little bit about that. Call to action. Right. What is the sales journey? I think that maybe you back up a little bit and we talk a little bit about what is the sales journey?

Really what you're trying to do in marketing is you're trying to re-replicate what an ideal customer experience from a suspect to a prospect to a customer looks like. And if you can replicate that in mass scale, that's what you're looking to do from a touchpoint standpoint, from a customer experience standpoint. And it really goes back to what's the customer journey? What's the information you want that person to have when?

And then do you have the right assets or even marketing sales pieces to give that to the person at the right time where they're making that next step? And people don't think about the call to actions online of where you're trying to take them throughout the customer journey on maybe your website, like what's that experience look like? What action are you trying to get them to take?

I can actually tell you, here's an example from big like Microsoft, Google, Apple, their sales support is almost, or I guess not sales support, but customer support is almost non-existent, right? Like by phone, they're trying to drive you to a chat app. They're trying to drive you to an email ticketing system. They don't want to feel just random phone calls coming in.

And so in their CTA or their customer journey, if you have an issue, they want you to submit a ticket. You can't typically get somebody from the big tech companies on the phone because it's not really useful. And I've actually seen a lot of smaller companies since COVID really start to follow this trend is why do we have somebody fielding phone calls at the front?

If most of the phone calls or sales calls are spam, customers know how to get in touch with their account managers. How do we drive that customer experience? For example, if you're running an ad that says, hey, give us a call at this 1-800 number and you don't really want people to call you, that CTA is off with what you're trying to achieve, right?

It's easier to run it into a ticketing system or even convert voicemails into emails and then have people follow up with those leads versus fielding them live. That might not be the best example, but I think that's one of the examples that's top of mind for me right now. No, no, no, that's a great example. So I want to loop this back in.

So what Matt is talking about is the fact that as your prospects are working their way through their buy-in process, you want to give them the right information at the right time. Now, Matt, that is not going to be a blanket one paragraph, right? That call to action is going to be different depending on where they are in the buy-in cycle and who that person is, right? So you can't have a single CTA.

That doesn't work. Yeah, it depends. Do you want them to download something to request more information? Do they need to audit? Do they need a quote? Do they actually do need somebody to come out and talk to them?

There's different needs or they're trying to get a question answered. It depends if this is a very hard answer, but essentially you need to understand and build out first that target persona, second that customer journey, and then really understand where your salespeople fit in and where you want marketing to do the heavy lifting along that customer journey and then figure out what assets you need and what actions you want them to take when because some of the data behind podcasting, Mark, that really

brought me into it and I didn't really talk about all the podcasts I've done for the Better Business Bureau and for the marketing industry. We have really a great podcast out there, but really customers need about seven hours from the data that I've seen and actually I've seen it even internally. If people consume seven hours of your content, they're more likely to buy than people that are just requesting a quote, and so really the job I think as marketing moves into premium

content generation through podcasts is how do you create enough content that you can get somebody to consume seven hours to then take some kind of action and maybe I'm taking this not the direction you want this podcast to go. I'm not sure, but I can tell you that data point is really, really important and when you're working with sales and marketing, you're looking at building a relationship with the client either in person or online or a combination of both to try to get to that, I guess, seven

hour mark is what I've seen and then people are typically ready to convert at that point. Yeah, in audience, you will hear Matt and I both go down rabbit holes all the time. So both our personalities because we're passionate about this, I do want to kind of loop this back to the subject of why sales and marketing should work together. You spoke earlier about companies that have numbers for people to call in for help or they have a chat online or web forms or whatever.

Those people in the oil and gas industry tend to be call centers that answer that, right? So the people that are selling drill bits, downhole services, wire line, whatever, they tend to have a call center and that group of people are answering customers questions, but in the oil and gas industry, that group is never reconnected with either sales or marketing, but they're full of useful information. So there's another place where there's a disconnect where you're getting customer information

from your call centers that's not being fed back to sales or marketing so they could change their process. But if we could fix that to your point, now all of a sudden your sales teams are armed with much more accurate calls to actions because they know what's coming in from the field. I agree. Yeah.

All right. The other thing that I want to talk a little bit about is you mentioned technologies, mentioned online presences. Historically in oil and gas, we've had zero online presence. And if we did, it was a website that was basically a static catalog of your business. The world is changing.

People would think I'm crazy, but I'm watching companies like Extreme Engineering, All-Film Marketplace actually go online and sell equipment. So the world in sales and oil and gas is changing. And if you don't change with it, you're going to get left behind. Look at some of the super majors. When you say marketing at Chevron and Exxon, they don't think of digital marketing, which

is you and I are talking about. Marketing in that world means how do you sell your downstream products, your lubes, your fuels, your additives, and all that traditionally has been done on a handshake with people that you knew for years and years. People you played golf with, people you went out on the shooting range, yet this new workforce is coming in.

Number one, doesn't want to go spend an hour playing golf. Number two, is going to make the best buying decision for their company, not make the best buying decision on who they know. So for years in oil and gas, sales was relationship based and that was actually a good thing. If you think about what we do as an industry, we have to have faith in our vendors that if something lets loose at two o'clock in the morning, I know personally that you will

roll a truck and help me go out there and take control of that well or that pipeline or whatever else is going wrong, but the world has changed folks. So from a sales point of view, not only does sales need to be more engaged with marketing to give them the right information so they can do their job well, but the world of sales is changing. When I got started in this industry 25 years ago, Matt, it was not uncommon for me to bring

a fifth of Jack Daniels to a sales meeting to somebody's office out in Houma, Louisiana. You try to do that now, you could get kicked out. And yet we still have to generate revenue for companies. One of the reasons I think sales and marketing should be joined at the hip in oil and gas is the fact that marketing now has so much more power to help generate quality leads for the sales team.

Can we talk a little bit just at a high level about some of the tools that maybe the oil and gas industry isn't aware of that marketing can use to locate the ideal buyer and to help engage that buyer without consuming a whole bunch of the sales person's time up front. There's a lot of technology out there that can help oil and gas companies be much more productive from a sales point of view, but they're not even aware that they're out there. Yeah, you touched on a lot of stuff there.

So the way I've always kind of experienced working with companies that are in the oil and gas industry, it's mainly been people trying to get into the majors or to land them as clients, typically people that have a great widget of some sort, whether it's a SaaS product or something that they're selling. When I think about the majors, I actually think more about the lack of like downstream where to be to see customers at the pump sort of thing, like I think that there's a lot

of actually opportunity there. But most of what I've seen in oil and gas is mostly people trying to reach the majors and most people, what they're doing, most companies, what they're doing is they're hiring an experienced sales person to mine their existing relationships, right? And they want them to bring over their book of business with them, right? It was a really a relationship driven thing.

And like you said, there are certainly policies and viewpoints and the world certainly changed and gotten a lot smaller due to technology and online. And so now you got a lot more people competing for those relationships and attention in a lot of different ways. And I think that that's been the rise of technology. And then the problem becomes for salespeople that have a great widget, but maybe not a

huge brand behind them. How do I leverage marketing and branding? Because I've seen this actually, I had lunch, I was taking the lunch by actually somebody that was a mentor to me at one point. And he had moved from a big name brand, you know, when he carried his bag, everybody knew who he was.

He could come in the door and they always delivered great consulting work. So he moved to another company that wasn't as well known. They're offshoreed mostly, but still delivered a great widget with new clients when he would call or when he would knock on the door, he didn't have the same warm welcome mean, right? And so the issue is becoming how do we establish brand exposure and tell that story better for that salesperson and for that client?

And I think that that's where the real merger comes in between sales and marketing. But to get to your point on tools, one of the biggest tools I think that all people in enterprise sales should be probably leveraging to a high degree is LinkedIn sales navigator. And I'm not sure that all the salespeople out there are utilizing that and sales navigator has some really fantastic tools. This is where like a topic of social selling might need to be inserted in the conversation.

This is certainly something that could be a whole podcast. We're going to say it for a future podcast. I just want to kind of talk at a high level, so keep going. Yeah. So certainly I think LinkedIn sales navigator is really quite powerful. I also think that social media in general is quite powerful to connect with people.

I just don't think people are using it in the way that they could be. And I think that there's a little bit of a bifurcation in new salespeople coming on that are leveraging it and more experienced people in the industry that this technology has been on the rise, that they haven't had to utilize it in the past, but it's starting to become more and more a forefront. And I think that even with the rise of technology, you know, you say go take an hour to play golf

like playing golf like a whole day or a half day effort, and then you had something like top golf and just really everybody's time with technology of being interconnected. The work has continued to pile up. The expectations have continued to pile up, but not really the time freedom has quite piled up. And so even people that love to play golf, it's really a choice to have to say, okay,

I'm not going to do all these things and I'm going to actually go play golf and I'm going to spend some dedicated time with this group of individuals. And I certainly think it has its place since COVID, but you talk about technologies. Well Zoom is a great technology that I think everybody's gotten a lot more used to since COVID. Now you're able to meet with people over the phone and it's more accepted than having

to fly, you know, to the other side of the country for a meeting, right? All the time. Certainly webinars have replaced conference booths, right? I don't know. What is your opinion, Mark, of conference booths versus maybe webinars? Yeah, it's changed and it changed quickly with COVID because we had to do it and one

of the things I find hilarious is all of us have learned what good audio and lighting looks like. None of us would have ever learned that if it wasn't for COVID where we had so many back to back online calls. You did touch on two things that I want to mention real quickly. First thing is that in-person relationship.

So what's happened in oil and gas is used to really have decision makers. When I got started 25 years ago, there was a person at Chevron that would buy my stuff and his good graces and I did good work for fair price. He would buy it. Well, Chevron learned that having a decision maker wasn't good for Chevron. So now there's decision making teams so that one person can't influence the buy-ins process

and that decision making team, a lot of it's informal. So even though you may go to a meeting or an online meeting of those five people that are listening to you in that meeting, there's probably another five or 10 that you don't know of. There's no longer a decision maker so you have to sell to the decision making team, not the decision maker and that's where a good marketing partner comes in and helps

you do that. The other thing is that brand awareness, boy, you made me think back. So my first real enterprise sales job was with Bell South, the phone company in the east. The name Bell South carried a lot of weight. I used to be able to put my Bell South hard hat on and walk into any office in Houston

and nobody would question me because they thought it was just the phone guy showing up. And then after that, I went to work for a startup and I got slapped in the face with reality. All these people, all these VPs and directors who would welcome having lunch with me and listen to me when I said Bell South, none of them would take my meeting because they didn't know who my company was. So it was a learning experience.

And Matt, I could keep going on and on. Unfortunately, we're out of time when we need to start winding down this show. But I want to pull it back real quick. Last couple of thoughts from you about why sales and marketing should work together in oil and gas. Well, I think one is helping better shape to the right people what the message or the

brand is, right? Because you don't need to mass market to the entire world to become what the majors are and what you know the majors to be if you're a smaller company. You can leverage digital channels to be omnipresent to the right people, right? That's one of the really cool technologies. Even email automation, which we didn't touch on.

I don't know if it falls in marketing, sales in different organizations, it could be differently. But that's something where there's usually an email specialist or there's a drip campaign that you can be as a salesperson creating more touch points by leveraging marketing support, right? And you can focus that energy and those ads to the right people. But that takes close coordination between marketing and sales.

And so from a sales standpoint, I don't know the exact data, but it's something like a typical sale happens on like seven plus touch points and most salespeople stop under three, like reaching out to a prospect. And maybe it's because they've given up or maybe it's because they have too much on their plate or they're trying to reach too many people. But that's where the marketing automation comes in is to help provide that gap and bridge

that relationship and extend and warm that relationship in a way that the salespeople can reach more people and create a experience in which they know will convert sales. And that, I think, is the biggest power of marketing automation and digital marketing to support salespeople is you can figure out what that perfect customer journey is, what that ideal experience is, and then things that you wish you could do. You can leverage that marketing automation to do it.

There's even tools out there like send out cards and birthday code that helps create those touch points of things that you know you've wanted to do, but you might not be able to do it. And if you have marketing support to help you with some of those things, it just helps make you a better salesperson. And so Matt and I don't script this show out. He could not have given me a better segue to close out the show.

So salespeople, what Matt is talking about is 100% right. His data is legit. It takes anywhere from seven to nine touch points to engage with a client in today's sales world. And most salespeople start at three. However, if you partner with your marketing people, there's a process called email automation where they can send custom emails that looks

like they're from you that are helpful. So it's not spam. It's useful. And so the marketing can help you automate four or five of those touch points. So you get to closing a deal quicker. What a great rate in this episode.

So I've got to do some housekeeping stuff. So Matt and I have an insider's group in the works. It'll probably be the second quarter of 2023 when it comes out. Think of it as a mastermind. It's going to be hand selected senior people from both sales and marketing oil and gas. We'll get together in person a couple of times a year, Chatham House rules,

and we're going to share best practices, bring in experts. It's going to be a lot of fun. So just stay tuned for that. And then if you want to connect with either Matt or I on social, all our social links will be in the show notes. And then we're actually launching an all in gas SNM newsletter.

And I know everybody just chuckled themselves when I said SNM newsletter. Well, this is the sales and marketing podcast. We're not quite sure how much SNM material will be in that newsletter, but there'll actually be some really cool sales and marketing stuff. So just keep a lookout for that. And then we close the show out with the LinkedIn fail or tip of the week.

And we're going to alternate back and forth. My LinkedIn fail is this one right here from Leanna Roberts. She's a chief information officer. She reached out to me on LinkedIn. I read your profile and it made me curious and I thought we could talk. Now, number one, Leanna, I don't believe is a real person.

I believe she's a bot. Number two, if you're writing these bot scripts, at least make it sound legit. No person would call you on LinkedIn. No real person would sit. I read your profile and it made me curious and I thought we could talk. So for the people out there writing these bot scripts,

spend a little time, make it more conversational. And maybe you'll have a little better conversions on that. Any comment on that, Matt? LinkedIn's pretty noisy right now. Certainly, I think they could do more to clean that up. But what I can tell you is regardless of the message you send,

if people respond or not, people get on LinkedIn about every 21 days. At least that was the old data that I used to look at when I was actively on LinkedIn a lot. But people look at your messages and they certainly make judgments about you, but they do see them. And make sure that you're quick and you're getting to the point

and you're trying to engage them. And so if you look at their profile and find something interesting you could connect with, maybe you went to school together, you had a shared experience of some sort that you can highlight that you are a real person, people are a lot more likely to respond to you. Yeah, agreed.

All right, 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.