Selling From the Stage. How to be Seen as the Thought Leader part one

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back, everybody. The good thing is we don't have video for this podcast, Matt, because it would be kind

of creepy right now. Yeah, well, it's the powers out at my office because of the tsunami or what is it? I'm on soon is what I would call it outside right now. Yeah, we had a horrendous thunderstorm roll through Matt and I, I had some planning to do and the electricity's out, so we're literally sitting here in the dark recording podcast and I'm just hoping nobody on new walks by and sees the dark recording of the podcast.

Anyway, it doesn't matter to our audience, appreciate all of y'all for listening to this. Today we're going to talk about selling from the stage and we're doing this a very specific reason on Tuesday, May 15th here in Houston, if you're around, Matt and I will be presenting this exact topic at the API luncheon. There's a small fee to attend. We'll put a link in the show notes.

You want to come here, Matt and I do this in person, but this is something Matt and I both firmly believe in that is a powerful, powerful tool for marketing sales teams and really for any business in oil and gas that wants to generate more revenue and selling from the stage sounds like you get up on stage and do a dog and pony showing up. That's not what we're talking about at all or is it, Matt? It could be.

If it sells stuff, we would do it. There's two big parts to this. One is using gatherings in a way that's very economical and I'm going to go through that and then there's another part of it where it's really capitalizing on marketing thought leadership to grab the other part of this. I'm just going to jump in the first part, Matt, and then we'll bring you in for the

second part or just chime in like you always do, but selling from the stage is something I've talked about a lot. The goal is to get in front of a bunch of people that can buy your product or service and help them understand how you can help them. Now, traditionally, that's done in a sales meeting. You reach out, you cold call, you know somebody, you know, taking them to lunch or dinner or

making a visit their office and have a sales conversation, discovery type conversation. And that works. It's the bread and butter sales teams. But do you know that you can actually do this exact same thing in front of large groups of people? So instead of a one-on-one conversation.

It's a one-to-many. One-to-ten, 50, 100, 500, 5,000. We typically do this with the large oil and gas conferences, but the conference doesn't matter. The way you need to think about this is where is a gathering of people that will buy from you.

And it's not. So in our case, you know, this is the oil and gas sales and marketing podcast. But let's say you sold some type of technology solution to oil and gas. Well, maybe those oil and gas buyers for your technology solution are at an IT conference, not an oil and gas conference, right? Yeah.

Maybe they're in a sporting arena somewhere, right? It's someplace you always want to think about where's a place that there's a large gathering of your prospective buyers. We're going to use conferences for this one because it's an easy example to understand. So you have the large multinational conferences. We have OTC right around the corner.

We'll be there. We should come check us out. Booth S22 in the main area. Right up. Yeah. Right up front.

We've driven so much attendance for OTC that they took us out of the exhibition hall and put us right up front, which is going to be a blast. And that Wednesday, actually, we're launching, hard launching our Ben show and our connected workers show. Yeah. A bunch of press there.

But anyway, back to the conferences. So let's pick something that you would sell in oil and gas industry. Let's pick generators. I like generators. Yeah. We could use one right now.

Actually, I didn't actually do that on purpose. It was a good time. So let's say you sell generators that's the oil and gas industry. They use them to run compression stations. They use them to generate electricity. They use them to run pumps for fracking.

There's a lot of uses, right? And so where would a group of people that would need their problem of not having a generator gather? We're going to talk specifically OTC. So OTC is the largest offshore trade show in the world. It's usually the first week of May, every year in Houston.

What you may not know is a year before the show, they ask people to submit abstracts, basically submit ideas that you could speak upon. Now, remember, it's done a year before. So for this year. Because they're building a content calendar of what's going to happen next year. So for this year, it's too late for OTC, but this year, you can submit an abstract for

2025. Now, these are all people that work in the upstream side of the house. These are all the major players there. Who would need generators? Now, you may be thinking, oh, it's the guy that's making sure there's electricity on the rig.

You would be right. But that person probably is not at OTC, but let me tell you who really has that problem that you saw is the operations manager. So the guy that's running operations for North America for, say, Shell or BP, if they don't have generator sets in the right place, oil doesn't get produced or it doesn't get moved in a pipeline or it doesn't get refined.

So they have the bigger problem, which is uptime. So your generator actually solves the problem of uptime. So quit thinking about the frontline person that actually plugs into the generator. Think about the person that loses budget or loses revenue when they can't keep stuff running because there's no electricity. I mean, any day that rigs down, like off-shores, like a million bucks a day, you know?

I mean, then you've got all the people that you're paying, the day rates, like, you know, you really got to have the right stuff at the right time to keep everything moving. And well, there's a lot of issues with supply chain and people kind of stealing from Peter to pay Paul and they don't have that. And so really not just having the right generators, but also having the right supply chain in the row is an issue as well.

100%. So those people, those operation people will be at OTC. And so what you would do is you would put together an abstract a year before and your abstract could be as simple as simple as guaranteeing uptime. How the right generator supply chain can make sure your operators runs 24-7, right? Now you submit that, the abstract's easy.

It's 300 words, just an idea basically. And if OTC accepts that, then you have to put together an entire presentation, which is a lot more work, slides and all that stuff. But think about what just happened. If you get accepted for free, you're going to be allowed to talk to an audience at the largest offshore trade show in the world about how you can guarantee uptime with the right

generator supply chain. Instant credibility. Right. Instant credibility, instant thought leadership, and the only people that are going to come listen to you are what? The people that have that problem, right?

The guy that's worried about payroll is not going to come listen to you because that's not his job, right? Even if he's a CFO, however, the guy that needs to make sure stuff runs 24-7 will come listen to you and that's the person you want to get in front of. You do your presentation, talk about how you help solve that problem, how you guarantee uptime 24-7.

You do it safely and environmentally responsibly by having the right generator supply chain. You have just had a sales conversation with 5,000 people, 8,000 people, maybe 10,000 people at one time. When you're finished, they will reach out to you. You know what that cost you at? Well, whatever the fee is to submit to be a speaker sometimes, maybe.

It'll cost you zero, right? It'll cost you zero. It'll cost you nothing. Also, I think marketing sneaks into this, marketing so many different places. You got to write the right copy. You got to get the right hook to get people interested in the issue they're dealing with,

what's going on in their head to get them to come even see your event, right? So the title's got to catch them. What you're going to talk about's got to engage them. It's got to tip their interest because they're going to decide between this piece of content and this other piece of content to go listen to, right? So you got to get that audience that you're trying to reach in there.

It's not just they're there and it's shooting pigeons in a barrel kind of thing or frogs in a barrel or whatever. No, and you brought up something really important. The most important thing that I just rattled off, the most important thing that's going to make this work is actually the title, right? The title.

That's what copywriters spend 80% of their time on is just the title. Yeah. And there's a reason for that because you have a couple of seconds to grab somebody's attention. Now, like I said, Matt and I will be presenting this in-person live at the API Houston Luncheon on Tuesday, May 15th, there will be a link in the show notes, but Matt, I just rattled

off at a high level, a place to start, but I know you can go way deeper in this besides conferences. Yeah. Well, you don't have to speak at the big conferences. I mean, I would even tell you there's just as a little teaser, there's ways to show a presence at a conference without even being at the conference, okay?

Because you want to map out the conferences ahead of time, but if you're trying to build thought leadership, you can do it. The oil and gas monthly meetup, right, by OGGN, sometimes we have speakers, right? So that's a great opportunity. But webinars, and I mean, webinars is a great way to pull together all the people you're looking for.

And then the thing to think about where marketing really has a hand in this is all the things that you can do to get people interested and in those seats to then be able to sell one to many. Yeah. So there's a lot of companies, I'm not going to mention names, a lot of old companies in our space that will do webinars for you based upon their existing email database and they

charge a premium, you know, anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000 for that. But Matt, there's a better way to get in front of the right job titles for your webinar that doesn't depend on you having an email list. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, are you talking about you can go after titles on LinkedIn or you can take a target list of your customers, upload it, create a lookalike audience and on all the

different platforms. I mean, the one story that I think we were talking about ahead of time that you may want me to share, I don't know, but really what Trump did in... So just give a teaser. Don't tell the whole Trump story, but tell just part of it. Okay.

Well, you know... I don't think that Facebook actually thought Trump was going to win, but they said, hey, we're going to spend $100 million, okay, on Facebook. And then Facebook's like, we'll give you a whole team, okay? And they actually had a strategy where they sold something to people, okay? The people, they took what the people bought and then they said, give me other people that

look like this person and it just crushed it. Okay. I mean, that's the tip of it to maybe tease you a little bit, but I mean, political campaigns from Obama are now one on social media. Yeah. It's just coming to hear Matt tell the Trump stories worth coming to the luncheon right

there because it is an amazing story on how do you do marketing right without spending a lot of money? I want to back you up a little bit. So we talked about webinars, we talked about job titles and you talked about look-alike lists. If people don't understand what a look-alike list, I'm going to explain it and you tell

me if I get it right or not. So basically if you're a company and you have a list of people that buy from you, you could segment that list into the people that buy the most from you or the people you like doing business with the best, you can take that list, upload it into a tool and it will go out and find other people that are similar, very similar to that. So now you're putting your webinar into equal or similar people than what you selected out

of your own customers. So you literally could fill a webinar with people that have the problem that you solve and that, you know, will spend the most money with you. Well, yeah. I mean, this is actually where AI from a marketing standpoint really come and leverage. These social media platforms have so much information on people, on their behaviors,

on their buying habits, on everything they're doing. And so if you can say, hey, I have this customer, show me people like this customer, you give it a little bit of money and a little bit of time. You can typically grow that audience size to two thirds more than what you have of potential clients that look just like the people that bought it from you. And then you can give it even additional markers to get even more specific.

But this is the like, I don't even run ads anymore where you don't have some of this kind of targeting. You don't just do top of the funnel to just spend advertising dollars everywhere. You want targeted advertising. So when you're talking even about account based marketing, these are the kind of things that you have to be doing and you can get laser focused.

Like I've said in other podcasts, 85% of the customer journey now is happening before they even talk to a salesperson. So you need that marketing person to be connected in your sales strategy to provide that air cover for you, to soften whatever up before you get in there and to position the product service, whatever you're offering in the right light, just like when you're walking on stage, if you're already talking on stage, you already have that authority, you can do

that with marketing. Even before you're doing your own event, you can position yourself as the expert to walk into it to then everything you say, hold more weight 100% and you're not treated as a vendor. So for the salespeople out there, you're not beaten up over price. So my company modal point, I was seen as a thought leader in that space. So when a company would engage with me and they want me to come out and have what you

and I would call a discovery call, they paid me, they paid half my day rate and my travel. Most salespeople eat that cost to have a sales meeting. I on the other hand was having customers pay me to go sell to them. And the only reason I could do that is because I was seen as the thought leader in that space and you can do the exact same thing. It's not hard.

But knowledge and value. If you know your product and you know the issue and you're creating value for people more than anybody else, salespeople, like taking an order or you're trying to get someone to do something. You need to professionally help people buy and you need to be the expert, the consultant to know everything there is to know.

And once you start to cross that threshold of being that, you know, equal kind of business partner to then that, that thought leader or expert where they just take your advice, it changes the game on how you say 100% Matt to this day, I have extremely senior people and some of the largest companies in the world call me when they get stuck with a business decision. You know, when they're having to lay off people and they have to lay off good people,

they call me. It's like, this is a struggle for me, Mark. I don't know how to do this. I can lay people off. They aren't doing their job. But now I have two people that are great at what they do and I got to lay one of them

off. And those relationships are invaluable, but they only come from being seen as a thought leader. And like I said, you know, Matt, your position as a thought leader in this space, the oil and gas space, you're one of the few marketing people, especially a few marketing people that's been recognized by Inc as the top CMOs that also have the oil and gas experience.

And that's what we're going to be doing both at the API luncheon is we're going to be showing this stuff off. We're also going to start offering this as a class somewhere in the future so we can help other companies learn how to do all this. I do want to roll you back though to the webinar because webinars are still real popular here. So I just want to make sure people understand what Matt is talking about is instead of you

hiring a company that has an existing database and you don't know how old those contacts are, you can do the same webinar showing off the problems that your product or service solves to an audience of new people that are your exact match to your existing buyers. Right. That's a game changer. And once again, does it cost you a whole bunch of money?

Well, you know, you can even recycle past leads, right? It doesn't even have to be customers. You can have people that reached out to you. It's anybody that's given their information to you in some way, whether it be a conference, business card, anything like that. So really this is where well CRMs become really valuable.

If you've put in that data in there, you can segment that out. You can lead score and you can figure it out. And a lot of times, depending on what you're selling, there might be a different target persona. So there might be different messaging. There might be a different customer journey, but you want to map all this stuff out ahead

of time. And then when you get those people on that call and you solve that problem, you're going to be taken orders faster or you're going to be able to put out bids faster than than anybody else because here's what I remember when you're a salesperson. You're trying to have that perfect call that you have and answer those objections. I don't know how many times a day, how many times a week, how many times a month.

If you could take all those people and all that time and all those meetings and put that into a webinar and then get those people lined up that want to move forward through your process, how much can you restructure your time in your day to effectively deliver? And there's two things I want to make sure we cover about this. Number one, that webinar value doesn't go away when the webinar is over with, right? You can use it for your marketing efforts and it's ideal because it's real customers,

real buyers, real problems with real solutions. The other thing I want to go back to the persona is that Matt, you can actually help companies help their marketing team craft those personas to target executives in the industry so that you're solving executive problems by selling them your product or service, not selling to the frontline people, right? So go back to my generator example I used in the beginning of this conversation.

You wouldn't think an executive would care about a generator. However, let me tell you what executives of public companies like Exxon and Shell care for. They care about shareholder value and guess what happens if Exxon can't run an operation because they lose electricity, their shareholder value goes down. So by providing a supply chain of gen sets to an executive at Exxon Mobile and explain

it to them how you can make sure that their projects are completed on time and on budget because they have constant electricity and their project is not going to slip, you actually can increase shareholder value. And I'm telling you right now, our audience, every executive in this industry for a public company, when you say you can increase shareholder value, they're going to listen to you. So getting that in to help build those executive personas is to help you craft your sales

message to a totally different audience that honestly doesn't care about price. Well, you got to connect the dots for people, right? You got to be able to explain that in a message, but to your point, okay, when you're talking to the executives, if you don't connect the value of like the uptime that you were talking about before, it's dead in the water. Like no one's going to connect the dots for you.

You have to do it. That's one of the things that I've absolutely learned. But to your point, when you do a webinar, when you record the content and the repurposing of the content, what I have seen across all major platforms, and this is all industries, oil and gas, everything else, I'm telling you right now, you got to be offering value. You can't just run static ads.

So you got to take a little short clips, make, make shorts or clips, you know, two, three minute long clips that are happening in that podcast where you're offering a nugget of value and then you can put some money behind that and then get that in front of the right people. That becomes even more kind of teaser lead flow to get more people into the rest of the webinar for people to see it.

So everything kind of builds upon itself. It's like a stacked system that continues to bring more and more people into the ecosystem. Yeah. And everything Matt just rattled off is goldmine of information. We've talked about, especially things like executive personas, how many marketing people target executives?

I'm telling you right now, very few and very few understand their problems and yet you bring Matt and I in and we know what these conversations like because we have them daily with executives. And by the way, Matt, I just realized I looked at the calendar, I gave everybody the wrong date. It's actually May 14th.

So it's Tuesday, May 14th here in Houston at the API lunch, I'll put a link in the show notes for that. The next thing, Matt, I kind of want you to talk through is looking at this from a bigger picture point of view. So if you're a marketing group inside of an oil and gas company or inside a company that's trying to sell the oil and gas, this selling from the stage is something that is so powerful

because you're positioning yourself to your point as a thought leader, not a vendor. Right. So you can talk a little bit more about the differences when you're put in that place versus just being seen as a vendor. So one of the books that I wrote a couple of years ago was talking about being a trusted advisor and reaching that kind of expert level status.

And so typically, if you're just a vendor, people are talking down to you, right? And then when you're a business partner, they're kind of at your level, they're asking for your opinion, but they don't have to take your ideas. It's kind of like a brainstorming session. And this is what I think and you kind of decide when you become the thought leader, it's like your word is gold, okay?

And they take your advice, they listen to it. And they execute on it. And one of the things I've seen more than anything else is if people aren't viewing information in that way, right? So if you get the same information from this person that's a trusted advisor and then you get the same information and you don't know how to value it, they're going to take it

for granted and they're not going to execute on it. And so there's a lot that has to do with building the thought leadership to share that message. Maybe it's a similar message than what your competitors are sharing, but how you're positioning your brand and you as an individual, your personal brand to communicate that, okay? Makes all the difference. It's not necessarily what you say, it is what you say, but it's who you say it, how you

say it. Like there's all these other factors on how you got a position that to do that. And that just doesn't happen overnight. There's a strategic way to build content and a calendar to execute on that. Yeah, and I actually saw it happen to you personally. So Matt and I did an event a while back with a bunch of other marking people in the oil

and gas space and Matt engaged with one of the head marking people and she engaged with Matt originally and then never really followed up. And I think the reason they're ever winning where it's because you gave it away for free and she didn't see the value. And I'm watching this on the outside going, what is Matt has given you is $50,000 for free consulting and yet because you just rattled it off the top of your head and there wasn't

a dollar to set to it, she didn't see the value. Now from the outside, I realized that she walked away from a bunch of free consulting that would have changed the trajectory of their marketing department. So you're right about that. Well, I want to help people, right? Like I want to help people, but it's also how you package it, right?

It really is. And what's interesting is people think that the amount of work you put in should equate to the value, but that's not true at all. No, it's not. And if you wrap that packaging right and it delivers a message and it solves their problem, you need to go back to the uptime issue, right?

This is going to save you millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars because we're going to shave this off of that. That's what's going to move the executives 100% and I don't want to go too deep in this because we're going to teach this later, but that messaging, even though you're talking about the exact same product in this case, a generator, that messaging to the executives is totally different than the messaging that we need to the project manager that would

be to the supply chain to finance, right? And so understand how to craft those messaging using the oil and gas lingo and the understanding of how this industry works is vital. There is no other. I look, I have wasted, I don't even tell you how much money in my career growing two companies. I've wasted a lot of money outside marketing agencies.

If they don't understand the oil and gas industry, they're worthless. Not that they don't do good work, but because they don't understand the nuances in the tolerance for risk in this industry, they can't move the needle. Yet, if you work with people that know the industry, it's totally, totally different. Well, I think a lot of these big agencies have this kind of waterfall mentality where they tell one person it passes it down, it passes it down.

There's no real kind of, you know, execution or somebody that's kind of on your side to deliver. You really need to have the strategy piece and someone driving that as like a kind of a general contractor to drive that messaging and to keep all these vendors in line, you know, and this is the perfect point. We got to wind this thing down.

If you want to hear more of this in detail, come join us May 14th, Tuesday, May 14th in Houston, it will not be live streamed, although we are going to record it as a podcast and put it out as a podcast. So come join us if you can in person. I'll put the link in the show notes for you to sign up. If you can't, you can wait for that podcast episode to go out, but this has been great.

Remember, you need to sign up for our two newsletters, both the Sunday update, the Olingas events newsletter, all of that nice links for our social channels are also in the show notes. Our insider group, the website stood up and it looks amazing. It's not ready for the public yet, but we're making progress. So stay tuned for that.

Matt, we have to have a LinkedIn failure tip of the week and you and I didn't even discuss anything. Do you have anything off the top of your head? Well, I would tell you something that is pretty interesting is there's a feature called radar on LinkedIn that you can actually see who's around you. So if you're at it, I don't even know that was there.

Yeah. So there's actually a feature. It's just like when you, you can airdrop stuff to people that are in your general location, there's a way in LinkedIn to basically see who is around you. So when you're at a conference, you can see who's around you. Or if you go into a room, you can see who you want to see.

Of course the speaker, right? We talked about that in the podcast, you want to go talk to the speaker, but if there's other people in the room and their phones connected and they're on LinkedIn, you can go connect with them and then you can just go in there on their network and you can connect on LinkedIn. I know we may be shared that before, but man, I've done that probably five times

in the last week because I don't have business cards really not carrying them around and so, and I'm showing people how to do that quickly. And then we connect on LinkedIn and you chat them and it's just like AOL and some messenger or, you know, whatever Slack, whatever you use inside your company. But with people outside your company, it's a great way to, to build report, build a network, quickly connect with business contacts.

Yeah, I need to reach out to LinkedIn and be paying us for that. I didn't even know that was a feature. That's an amazing tip, Matt, which by the way, you don't know this because we don't have a time to chat, but our, our little coffee paste that we typically record at that usually has electricity on like here. Sorry.

No, no, no, it's making a joke. We got the generator. Uh, we actually got a generator here, but, but we are in the, anyway, a little coffee paste wants to work with us. So we're going to give them a little, little love on this show. So stay tuned for that.

Anyway, it's time to get out of here. So 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.