Shortening the Sales Cycle

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.

Matt, we're in person. This is a habit of ours to be in person. I like this better, actually. No, I like it as well, yeah. And for once, we're not at a conference. We're at actually a place called Buzz and Bites,

a really cool coffee shop that you found. This place has ambience. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, coffee's good. I haven't had anything to eat here yet, but the decor is kind of funky.

It's kind of out of the way, but still easy to get to. So a big shout out to Buzz and Bites for letting us sit here and record. And today, we're going to be talking about something that every salesperson is in their list of most hopeful things to do, which is shortening the sales cycle.

Oh, yeah. Before we get into that, people, we have not gotten a review. Come on, give us a review. We got one last week. It was really easy to go in the show notes. There's a link no matter what device you're on.

It makes it quick and easy to give us a review. If you love what we're doing, give us a five star. And if you see some room for improvement, go ahead and give us a four star. And if you want me to control the technology, I can do that too. Just let us know.

Yeah. So if you remember the episode that we had sound effects in there, that was Matt. So if you want more of that, let us know. I'll tone it down a little bit, but it was quite fun. It was quite fun.

All right. Shortening the sales cycle. The reason that's so important is in my years of sales experience, the only gas industry probably has the longest sales cycle in any industry I know. And I could spend hours telling you why. But the fact is that every week that you can shorten or even a day that you can shorten

a sales cycle, freeze up your time to go help other people. And so Matt, when I say shorten sales cycle, what's some of the first things that pops in your head? So the first thing that popped into my head is I'm working with like a 120 million dollar company. So kind of a smaller company outside the oil and gas industry and was working with

their CRO. And we had to manually. So I use calendarly or there's calendar apps that you can use. He was still old school and it took four emails or something back and forth to coordinate a time. So painful.

That is just time that you don't need just to get a meeting. Now there's investment, right? I'm like, okay, we're going to get a meeting. So that I guess is good because someone's like putting time into working with you. But that's something I don't mind not having in my kind of process. Like we can really speed up the sales cycle through marketing, which we'll talk about,

but that's the first thing that comes to mind. Mark is utilize technology to help accelerate that loop and getting that appointment set up where it's simple, where it's convenient, where it's low friction is absolutely critical. So using those calendar apps and people talk about this mark like how to give somebody the proper etiquette of giving somebody the calendar. So typically I give somebody my calendar, but I also say if it's easier, please send me yours

and I'll schedule something. So I've been in meetings and debates where people are talking about, well, someone's just wanted me to get on their calendar and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I don't know why that is, but I think that just really saying, hey, whatever's easier, but let's move this thing forward and ask him for theirs, giving them mirrors and then just figuring it out.

A lot of people will do either or. Yeah, what a great place to start because you're right. If you can't have efficient meeting settings, you're not going to short the sales cycle. And calendars came out of nowhere. That's about six years ago and they've really taken over the space. However, people, if you work for a big company and you're an office 365 shop and a Microsoft shop,

you have something that's very similar to what you may not even know you have. It's called bookings. We use it here at OGGN. If you don't see it in your list of apps, it's free. It's built in. You just have to ask your system administrator if you access to it.

And the way I use it is I literally take two days in my calendar and that's the only two days that bookings has access to. Yes, I feel comfortable letting people have access to that because I know they can't schedule any and all times in my calendar. Only those two days. Now, in order for that to work for me, that means all the stuff that Mark wants to schedule

is only scheduled those other three days of the work week. Now, the other thing that used to work really well, especially if you're in a hurry, is you can basically take a screenshot of your calendar and send that to people. The only problem with that is you have personal bits and pieces in there. They may see it. And then finally, if you really want to be a professional sales person and really help

remove the friction from scheduling stuff, hire an intern for $15 an hour. Isn't it worth $30 a week for somebody else to handle all your calendar stuff, right? And when you're dealing with especially executives having to help you both with their calendar and with your calendar, just greases the wheel and makes it easy. That's like a great place to start this because literally, if you can't be efficient and scheduled to the meetings, you're not going to ever shorten a sales cycle.

Yeah. I mean, that was just something when you asked me what came up to the top of my mind. It's certainly that. And yeah, there's technology where you can say, hey, I'm going to meet on these days. I'm going to do prospecting these days. You can even break like where you're at in the sales cycle for those meetings to schedule

it. So you're in that mindset because at least from my standpoint, from being a sales person, marketing person, you have to switch gears a lot. And so you kind of want to lean into one kind of processor thing. And to be able to organize your time is absolutely critical. And yeah, the friction.

That's what you're trying to remove is the friction to move that deal forward as quickly as you can. And you should be leveraging technology to do that. And yeah, that would be step one. Yeah. I have a couple of things I do over just years of doing this the wrong way.

I actually figured out how to do it the right way and things to help shorten sales cycle. So basically yesterday, Matt, I lost sponsorship for one of our conferences. Oh no. It happens. And then I sold it that day. The deals are already closed.

So yesterday, I went out and prospected and closed the deal. How did I do that? Two easy reasons. Number one, actually really three. The first one has had a very distinct, clear value proposition. Here's what you get by sponsoring a set of conference, very precise with bullet points

with numbers. It's exactly what you get. And the second thing is making sure you talk to the right person. Now, when I said there's three things, those are the two that are most important. The truth is the third is I have my own roll index of contacts and I knew from experience you might be interested in sponsoring that as a conference.

That's the only people I worked out. So you can almost look at that as making sure you're talking to the right person, whether it's by job title and roll or from your experience. But those two things, that clear value proposition and talking to the right person always speeds up a sales cycle. Yeah.

I would say definitely sell stuff before you need it, make the relationships before you need it. I think that when I was on the recruitment side of things, that's also like a good roll of thumb. Build the relationships before you need to whatever. But that's not always practical, especially if you're brought in with a new company or

a new prospect or... Well, that's what everybody's trying to harvest, right? Everybody's trying to harvest your decks. And that's the old kind of mentality of sales. I'm going to bring in a salesperson, they're going to have all these relationships. That really only goes a couple of weeks, right?

And it doesn't go as far as everybody thinks. No. It used to go really far and all the gas. Now it doesn't. It should. It helps.

But it's not as important as it used to be. It's your process, right? Yeah, 100%. I would say really thinking through that next meeting. What is that next meeting? Also, what are we trying to accomplish?

And understanding what those objections are to get to that next space. Like, I always try to ask the question, well, what do you need to move forward? Or what else would you like to get from me? And then when you don't get a response, there's also something called a rebump. Okay. You're going to love this.

You can go check this out, guys. Rebump. Send the same email over and over and over and over again until that person responds. So it'll just kind of bubble up in their emails. And there's certainly ways and kind of how you schedule it and set it. But it's kind of an indirect way of getting to the next step of getting them to answer

your question. I would even say in the emails, like when you're trying to ask questions, what are my pet peeves? And I try to not do this. Send an email with one question for one answer. When you send those emails and you ask like three, four things, they come back with whatever

they key in on and they'll answer one question, max two. And then your other two questions don't get answered. So I like to save those for different email change. Again, we're talking about the flow of information from a, hey, I have this need to, I have this deal. Again, SEO works out.

We'll talk about that in a minute, but I would just tell you, clear communication moves that deal forward and you can leverage technology. I think a lot of things that slow down a cycle is people just get busy in between meetings. So it's scheduling that next meeting, understanding what those objectives are. I'm part of a couple like committees that I love it because they'll give you the time back.

Here's what we need to accomplish. Here's what we need to do. Come in efficient. Move it forward. I feel like my time's not wasted. And if I'm working something through the process, like you understand, when do they need to

make a decision? There's a lot of kind of pre-work, I think is what you're talking about, that you really need to think about before you get into it. But if it's not part of your habit to schedule that next meeting and understand what it is you need to accomplish, you're the one that's lengthening the sales deals, right? Yes.

So I'm glad you brought that. The next thing I was to bring up is that the salesperson, you should control the meeting and the cadence. Right? Not the prospect. So Matt's point.

When you have meeting number one, before you leave, you have everybody in the room agree or disagree that we need to meet again. Okay. Do we want to take this to next level? Yes or no? Yes.

Okay. Everybody, let's counter to this now. You're in the calendar right then. So great way to figure out if they have skin in the game. If they he and ha or they push you off or they ask you to send you literature, the deal's not going to close.

And it's definitely going to close anytime soon. If they're interested, they will set that next meeting. And your goal as a salesperson is to control that cadence all the way to the point where you agree to close the deal or make a go-no-go decision. I want to ask you something about that. And this is certainly something that I've dealt with personally, right?

I have had the biggest thing for me is if I'm going to invest a bunch of time because I have very limited time, if I'm going to invest time to bring on a new client and especially the bigger clients, the deals that take longer to close, I want to know the clients serious. And I can tell you what I've started to do and I want to hear kind of your feedback on this, but people that start kind of dig in or asking me for a lot of information up front basically to do free work for them, like where they're just kind of sucking information

out of you. They're sucking time. They want to keep meeting. They want to keep asking you questions. And it's kind of like, okay, like, do you have enough information to decide to take the next step or not?

How do you deal with the tire kickers that are just kind of utilizing you for free consulting? Yeah. This is my favorite way to deal with that. When you realize that is going on, you stop and very sincerely, and I remember your intent is everything. So you're not saying this as a sales tactic.

You're saying this to try to understand what is going on. You sincerely ask, Matt, Mr. Prospect, if I give you this information, what's going to happen next and then be quiet, wait to have them answer. If they say, well, I got to show it to Jim and Bob or I'm trying to learn more or I'm not quite sure we're doing, they're not interested. If they say my next step is to get it from the decision making team because we need to

make a decision the next month, then you're on the right track and it's worth your time to give them what they need, but always ask them and this is a great way that a lot of prospects politely get rid of a salesperson when they don't want a sales cycle. They'll say, what? Send me more information or they'll do, tell me what the place you're working is and then ask them, stop.

When I give you this information, what's going to happen next? Very easy way. And if their intent, if you realize that their intent is not to buy, you stay in touch with them. It may change somewhere in the future, but it's not a sales cycle that you need to spend your time on.

You kind of park that on the back 40, somebody to stay in touch with. This is where digital market would come in great to feed them whatever information they're looking for without eating up your time. Well, yeah, we can step forward to this at any point in the conversation about how important digital marketing is to kind of position your brand, position your service, prep the client for what to expect because it's somewhere around 85% of the sales cycle is online before

they even pick up the phone. So if you have an inbound lead, they've already done their research or if they've talked to you, they typically go do their research on maybe it's LinkedIn, maybe it's the website and they're trying to find out more information to see if it makes sense to keep going. And that's where content marketing and SEO and just being visible, like online visibility is so, so important.

Why don't you go ahead to the next step, but I have something I'm going to share here in a second. Well, the next thing is, you need to know your own sales process and stick to it no matter what. And you need to articulate that. So for me, selling podcast sponsorships, it's typically starts like this.

If it's a cold call, I usually start that with an email when they reply and they have an interest. I try to set a meeting. In fact, I don't try. I do set a phone call. And in that phone call, a couple of things.

First thing I discuss is price, because if the price is an issue, that's going to slow your deal or it's going to kill your deal. Most salespeople are scared to talk price and you should not be the first things you talk about. Second thing is I lay out our selling process, which is should match their buying process. This is our first in-person meeting.

I'm going to answer all your questions. I'm going to follow up the email to make sure we're on the same page. I didn't miss anything. I'm going to give you the information which for us is typically things like demographics downloads, that sort of stuff. The next call is a decision on whether we want to go ahead and move to closing.

The third call will be the deal to close the deal or decide not to close the deal. I lay all that out front. So pricing, the cadence of the process, how many calls we're going to have and what the end result is. So now they know. Now as a salesperson, I'm controlling the sales process and to the buyer, they actually

like it. There's not any ambiguity. They know what's happening meeting one, number one, meeting number two, number three, and that's one of the best ways to shorten that sales cycle is to not let them control it because to your point, you're not the only person they're talking to. They have a job.

They have all kinds of other stuff in the way and the more efficient you make them being able to buy from you, the quicker it's going to happen. Kind of going back to that question I asked you, I want to kind of get your response here live. So this is kind of a quasi plug for me to see how the market would respond to it because I certainly do this in a lot of other industries, but what we were kind of talking about to

a certain degree is gating, gating them of like, okay, here's this step and then there's no back step where they continue to ask for more information or they go horizontally into another request. Like that's what I seem to happen is like, I give them that and then they ask for something else over here. Kind of like whack-a-mole of like, I'm giving you all this information, you're pulling information

on me. A lot of what I offer is digital strategy as well as execution. Where's the line between what we're offering and not one of the things that I started to do early on and I have a lot of senior people that said, ah, like people are not going to do well with this, but a lot of the people I talked to are typically decision makers. So to your point, hey, who else needs to make the decision?

Let's bring them in the call to super important to pull that forward. Typically they'll have some kind of line on them budget, right? They have a company credit card, something like that. And there's certainly a limit on that. We have like a $600 consulting session for like hour, hour and a half, two hours, whatever, where we can deep dive into whatever it is they want.

When someone starts to ask me kind of this, that other thing, I say, hey, we've talked a few times. I know you want to get into the specifics about this. This is kind of getting into like what I do strategy consulting. I just want to cover my time. It's great to get a second pen and I can lay stuff out.

But I will also give you your money back. This might not matter for bigger clients, but I'll apply this to our services. But I try to get them to spend money now on a credit card. And it's more about a psychological commitment to say, hey, they're a client and they think of themselves as a client and to invest and engage because here's another data point. People need on average seven hours.

That's why conferences we've talked about are so important to get to know somebody. So if someone's about to spend a lot of money, if you sell it right, because this was like training my sales team, but basically, doesn't it make more sense to spend like $600 to see if like this makes sense versus going to spend $600,000 or $60,000 or whatever it is that you're spending to like get a feel for it? How do you think about that in the oil and gas offering that because it's been interesting

with my sales team training them to do it because certainly if you pitch it, it can land wrong. But also when I've done it in a way, it allows people that are maybe tire kickers or something like that. But also here's the interesting thing. I had a company, 98 locations.

Okay. It was a good size deal wanting all this kind of stuff. I asked him, hey, I just want to cover some of my time. I'm happy to put together this like high well roadmap for you. And he said, no. All right.

So he started digging me for information, asked me for this, let me audit your ad words like all this kind of stuff. Which these are things we typically start to charge for. And I was looking at from a deal size and I said, I'm really on the fence about even moving forward with this. And I was talking to my team about it.

And he had said, no, when I had initially said, hey, are you ready to move forward? And guess what? I don't know how much time I spent on that deal, but it never went anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's real common, especially if you're in the consulting space where you have basically

the knowledge that's in your head is where the value is. It's real easy to let a prospect do scope creep, where you start giving them knowledge you didn't plan to give them, which is valuable. Well, I feel taken advantage of, like I felt in the last like year, there's been at least two people that I feel like I don't know what their intentions were or how I gated them or whatever it was, but it never went anywhere.

But it kept going somewhere until I said, hey, are you ready to like pen to paper? Like let's do this. Yeah. In that space where it provides high value consulting, there's absolutely nothing wrong with you have an hourly rate and letting the customer decide how much money they want to spend.

Right? Yeah. So you just let them know upfront, hey, it's $500 an hour to sit down with me, happy to answer any questions you want. The clock starts now. How many times you think attorneys get told no, that's their business model.

They don't get told no. In fact, they only build by the hour. They build six minute increments, right? Yeah. I have an attorney that I love to death, but I don't even say hello to because I know he's building me in six minutes.

I pick up the phone to start with problem number one and a lot of consultants and a lot of sales people are worried they're going to lose business. They don't do that. Let me tell you two things. If they're really interested in buying, you're not going to lose business. Number two, if they're not interested in buying, they're eating up all your time that

you could be spending with clients that will buy from you. Absolutely. So don't be self-conscious about that. Have an hourly rate. If you're a consultant or if you're in that knowledge space, let your client know upfront, my hourly rate is X when we meet the clock starts now.

And if they don't want to spend money, take that time, which is super valuable and go find somebody else that wants to spend the money. Yeah. I agree. It's kind of like vetter, right? So inbound, come in, vet them to see if, and then I'll talk to them for a few minutes

or whatever. And it's really a discovery call. It's not a consultation so much. It's a discovery call to see if we're a good fit. And then going back to what we talked about earlier is I have a lot of resources or podcasts or articles or books or whatever, and I say, hey, go check this out, see if it resonates

with you. If it does, here's the link you can schedule a paid consultation. So on our site, you can schedule paid consultations and it allows you to pay before you can even book a time on my calendar. Yep. Love it.

And that's actually a pretty good piece of shorting sales cycles is making sure you're talking to somebody that is wants to buy. You can spend your whole life talking to people that don't want to buy. And then only gas, the other thing to look out for is people that are retired in place. So you have a lot of older people who are getting near the end of their employment, whatever company.

They have a very senior title like SVP or whatever. The truth is they're just parked on the side waiting for the retirement age to hit. They don't have budget. They don't buy anything. Although if you look at their title, you think they would be real careful. Those guys are time wasters.

They will eat up your time, never buy anything from you. The other thing you brought up is making sure you know who the decision making team is. That is absolutely critical and shortening the sales cycle. We talked about this before. If you lose your champion, if something happens and it happens all the time, so I get a new job, they quit, whatever.

If you don't have other contacts in that company, not only you're not going to shorten your sales cycle, this could be 10 times longer or you may lose the deal. Next thing is, we talked about this earlier with the meetings, you really want to plan each conversation with the ultimate goal to get to the go-no-go decision, right? And I think one of the best ways to plan that conversation is with your client. So while you're in the meetings, like I said earlier, lay out how your sales process works

and then ask them if it's okay, 99% of the time they'll say yes. And the few times they say it's not okay is when they want to bring somebody else in as part of the decision making team, which is what you want to have happen anyway. No, I agree with that. And some of the things I'm saying may not apply to everybody listening, so I totally understand that.

One of the things I can tell you with maybe some of these smaller companies, and some of these companies offer different things where this would work, but what you also potentially want to do is position yourself not like other vendors. If you can position yourself as a unique vendor offering unique services outside of what someone can do on the MSA side of things, you can bypass the RFP process. And I have done this with bigger clients of what I'm offering is completely unique to

what everybody else is offering and they can't get a comp and you don't have to bid it out. And you can't see that I'm smiling ear to ear because this happens to Matt all the time. Matt, that is a perfect subject for another episode is how to skip the RFP process or even better how to help write the RFP process. Oh yeah. Let's stick to short and save the cycle.

Okay. So, you know what it is and you kind of touch this a little bit, make it easy for the prospect to buy. Yeah. If you have a master service agreement that you need to get filled out, give that to your clients legal team way ahead of the time that you want to close.

Like as soon as they're serious, ask them, can I get my legalese to you because I know it has to go through your legal team and it's go back to my legal team. We both know it's going to take a month and they'll start that early. Make sure to make it easy for the prospect to buy. Also the same thing on budgets, Matt touched on something, credit cards. I'm not going to mention names of companies, but I have several of the largest all the

gas service companies in the world have sponsored stuff with us and their own internal process of getting PO was so cumbersome to them that they just bought from us on their company credit card. I'm sure that's probably not in line with their company's supply chain rules and regulations, but from my end, how much quicker and easier it is for somebody to slap down a credit card to buy from you.

Make sure you can accept credit cards. Again, that goes back to getting you in the door. Okay. So that gets you in the door. Someone wants to buy from you. There's a low ticket item.

You can back into a MSA from that. Well, there's other things you can do better than that. So boys, I'm going to have some people get some account pay to get me for this. So if you have a big ticket item, typically people's company credit cards usually capped out about five grand per purchase is kind of a rule of thumb for a single purchase. Let's say you have a 20 grand item.

Well that five grand won't work. Not yet. We'll agree with them that you could do four monthly. That's five grand each. And now you've made a 20 grand purchase on their credit card that normally they couldn't make and both of you are happy.

Okay. I don't know how much time we have, but Creative ABM, which we can talk about in a later podcast, but I would tell you that, and this is something that I know that you do, okay? Reading the 10K report, knowing that someone has a need and there's maybe like a timeframe that they need it in, that's the number one way I think to expedize to close the deal is you've got to find people in that 3% window that are absolutely ready to buy.

Also to piggyback on that, when someone's in that buying process, you want to run that process as forward as fast and as far as you can because when they switch gears to go do something else, they're not a prospect anymore until they're back in that cycle. Where I've found the most success is, and we've done past podcasts about data analysis and market research and all that sort of thing, but if you know that they have a need and what you're offering is that need, and here's what I've seen, there's many, many companies

out there that are offering the exact same thing, but when you're going through the sales process, the storytelling and you connecting the dots on how it solves that problem. So if you have two people that are offering the exact same thing, storytelling, which I love, you can give them how this solves their problem because they're trying to hit something or trying to do something or the data in a way that if the competitor doesn't do the same thing in their proposal and their pitch, you get the deal even though you're

selling widgets, like you're selling the same widget as them. It's really about the story. It's about the emotional buy and then with the digital marketing, if you know that or you find that out and you have a creative account based selling process in place, you just turn the nozzle up on that where you're just hitting them all over the place where you stay top of mind because many, many times when someone's ready to buy as long as that

deal cycle is, when they pick it back up going into the prospect mode, you're not top of mind. The person that called them or the whatever happened, depending on how closely tight you're moving this deal forward, someone just sneaks in there and takes the deal. I've seen that a lot. Yeah.

And this is a good tie into what I was in all this with was be persistent. Now salespeople listen to me. There's a difference between aggravate the bejeebies out of somebody and being persistent. I am never persistent up until it comes to closing the deal. In fact, when I have a client go dark on me, I reach out one more time after go dark and then I drop it because I can't make them answer me and quite honestly, it's not worth my time

to worry about that. They went on dark me for a reason. They don't want to tell me what is. I got other people I can talk to. However, when the deals at the point where you're waiting for the PO to be issued, right? You wait for the check for the wait for the contract to be signed.

Be persistent and be persistent on whatever avenues are at your disposal. I knew this one lately actually has been text text people and saying, Hey, look, very gentle ping on this, or we would get contract signed this Wednesday. Like you said, I skipped the email, skipped the phone call. People tend to answer texts quicker that way. Now, if I need to convey information, like let's say there was a red line to the contract.

I'm not doing that. The text of city emails. Well, you could send the text and say, Hey, take a look at the email because it's really about flow of information. Yep. Yep.

So that's the one time to be persistent, not be aggravated is right with the deals about the clothes. And then when you shorten the sale cycle and you close this deal, stop for a second and thank your client. Oh, thank you for helping me shorten the sale cycle. Thank you for helping me get this deal in the door.

I would even say this absolutely at the tail end of it, but also anywhere in the sales process. Many times just like you said, Hey, send me more information. They're just trying to kind of kick the ball. And if they're busy, clarifying with them, Hey, when is a better time to talk to you about this?

Because when people say call me next month, let's do it next week. Because you haven't set an exact date. All they're doing is kicking the ball. Okay. The more you get them to think about it and what that looks like and visualize, okay, we're going to do this and we're going to do this, going to do this.

If they can see them doing a deal with you and closing it and what that process looks like when they start to visualize it, it goes into thought first, it goes into word second, it goes into action third. You can literally like, I mean, it's silly, but almost visualize these deals or get the clients on the same plan as you. Because many, many times I hear people go, Hey, let's figure something out next month.

Let's figure something out next week. Hey, yeah, let's do that later. When is later? Yeah. Give me specifics. Right.

That's a great way to end this episode. We're at the end of it. Sign up for our two newsletters. Actually, we added something new to our Sundays update. If you're looking for a job, if you're looking for a new role, reach out to us. We list one person a week.

So instead of listing jobs, we're listing people that are looking for jobs. Let me know if you're looking, happy to put you in there for free for a Sunday update. All of Matt and I's social channels are in the show notes. So insider's groups coming along. We actually had somebody else ask about it actually yesterday. Well, I would also say if you go to ewrdigital.com, you can schedule a free consultation.

We have great expert digital markers that you can talk to. If you want to get on my calendar, if you like the value you're getting, you want to talk to me about your specific issue, under learn more on our website, ewrdigital. There's a one-on-one consulting session. You can book it. You can pay for it with credit card.

You can pick a time and we can get rolling. And you will spend no better dollar in your entire professional career than grabbing some of Matt's time and helping him get him to help you in your company with your marketing. All right. LinkedIn failure tip of the week. We didn't even discuss.

I actually have a tip that start off as a failure. Let's hear it. All right. I'm going to give you a little bit of an example of this to you that obviously has the automated LinkedIn sequence set up. It's so obvious, but it's actually very well written and it's funny and he pokes fun at

himself and I've ignored him. He is actually a video producing company and he's trying to sell me his video services and I just ignored him, but I have been reading the sequence. Every Wednesday, he sends me another email or another message on LinkedIn and his last one, which is usually what you call the breakup secrets where you go, hey, it sounds like you don't want to talk to me, but you know, I'm already here and everything.

He goes, well, Mark, you passed the test. He goes, very few people make it to the end of this and have it call me back. I go, somebody that's making fun of himself that I'm going to reach out to, so I reach out to and I told him, so look, I have my own house, videography team. This is probably the best email sequence I have ever experienced and he replied back to me.

He goes, good. He goes, if you need something, I'm going to reach out to you once a quarter, just stay in touch. And I think that was the perfect way to use automation on email on LinkedIn. Okay. This is a pro tip for anybody still listening.

Okay. Anything you can think of, Mark, you can do. Okay. We built this sequence and this was a couple of years back is with automation where I did some follow-ups and then I said, well, let me introduce you to my branding guy. Let me introduce you to my paid media guy.

Let me introduce you to that. And you can set it up where the emails come from that other person's email. And then you're like, hey, hello, blah, blah, blah, and you have a picture and you tell the story. This was like, we had to team about 15 at the time and we've grown since then, but essentially every single person on a team got to introduce themselves in the emails.

And it's like, I'm going to have someone so introduce you. So they get all these. Okay. We're going on a tangent where we're supposed to close out the show, but you made me think of something. What's happened to me the last probably six or eight months is I get this email sequence

where somebody pitches something to me and then within 15 minutes, I get an email from their manager. Yeah. Have you gotten those too? Well, I've set some of these up for clients. And when I first saw them, they actually got me.

I didn't realize it was an email sequence, right? But then I started getting the same thing over and over again for the people out there that are doing that email sequence to make it more real. Don't send me the email from the manager within a few seconds. Yeah. Obviously it's automated.

You can time it though. It's easy. You can set it for an hour. You can set it for the next day. But typically same day. Again, yeah, we're going on way big tangents, but if you have multiple emails that fill

up the inbox back to back to back to back, what it does is it kind of stacks when someone's skimming their emails, they're going to see what you're saying. And so that's why people actually do it because it takes up more real estate and their inbox. And so they'll actually see your message because if people don't see your message and that's why the tags are so important when you're talking about copywriting, if they don't see your message, they're definitely going to not take the next step, right?

All right, folks. See another reason to go to Max website and book some time to have this genius stuff like that. Let's get out of here. Remember, 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.