Story Telling

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. It's Mark and Matt here. We're actually Matt for first time in a while not recording remotely doing it in person. Welcome Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year all our listeners. We're gonna get

into something today that is really important both in sales and marketing. It was Matt's idea. It's a great topic which is basically storytelling. Now from a sales point of view when you brought this topic up I thought about my past sales successes and I think a big part of my past sales successes is I've always been a storyteller. So instead of walking into a prospector to a client's office and talking about features and functions that I would naturally just

tell stories about how I help other clients solve problems that are similar to what this client has and come to find out if you do the research when you tell a story instead of spouting off facts and figures people retain about 80% more of it than the actual facts and figures so without knowing that I was doing something cool from a sales point of view I was. Fast forward now 2024 and with OGGN if you think about what we do all these podcasts Matt we are a bunch

of storytellers. That's exactly what we're doing. I would tell you that arguably I think storytelling is the most important skill set today. I think that all this marketing and everything we're doing is tertiary to what that foundational story is. What are you trying to communicate to go back to just kind of what you said on the sales side. The one thing that I'll add is something that I learned because I'm very very data driven is add one. Only one

statistic into that story because people can remember that statistic like if you just throw a bunch of statistics like it confuses people maybe or people don't remember it but if you tell that story in imagery right because you're trying to paint an image and that's how people that's how the brain processes or something like that more images but if you tell that story of course you know feature benefit whatever but add a statistic to it and you're just general

sales it'll skyrocket it. I mean in a very simple sense right now from a marketing point of view most people are familiar with content marketing so content marketing is not storytelling although storytelling is a part of content marketing right yeah I can lay out this pyramid for you if you if you want me to write okay so and and we can use the example of like podcasting because I think it's I think podcasting is the absolute best rapper that you can

put content creation on today okay there's and there's so many reasons and we can we can go through that but if you think about let's say long form content or like message transmission it could be short whatever you're trying to communicate as the core right you're trying to communicate something trying to commit somebody trying to take somebody from point A to point B whatever it is that starts with that what is it elevator pitch sales pitch and that's

the core piece of information that you're trying to communicate you can do that a lot of ways okay it might be a long complicated cell right and so you need a podcast as a great medium you could be in person to person that's why people do lunches whatever or it could be you know a clip or a short right and a clips like let's say three minutes long and then a short like seven seconds or something like that but it's all part of that same piece of content

so you take that piece of content and you say okay here's the long form piece of content or the video that I want someone to watch or communicate or sales call right like I think a recorded sales call like the pitch podcast or you can basically take a pitch create that pitch and then broadcast that pitch that one to one pitch one to many that's how you supercharge your sales so just in a simplistic format you take that message and then what do you do with that message

you might chop it up you might take different message when I was a pharmaceutical sales rep there was one long story that you'd use the whole sales thing for and then you knew where the doctor was along that line and you would tell that thing to move the doctor forward towards that story or to overcome that objection but you had that like overall piece to it and then now digitally you can reach so many more people and move them forward without you

knowing 85% or something like that E4 85% of people go through the sales funnel online before they pick up the phone raise the hand or interact with the sales person so all digital marketing only let's say content marketing okay you'd have that clip well put that money behind it like so one of the things I think is underutilized and certainly anybody listen this podcast that wants to leverage the OGGN network of 50,000 people on LinkedIn let's create some

content let's run some ads through the OGGN account for your brand as long as it lines up with kind of like the the storytelling the press and like everything that we're trying to do think about that think about how many people you can reach did you know even on social media again I'm gonna go way deep and technical if you just post organically and you don't use those algorithms that are so powerful and you can just spend a couple dollars to get

them on your side but you post organically under 10% of that audience will even see that yep okay so really what you're talking about is there's this whole ecosystem that's being built around that core message of that content and that's where it starts and guess what people don't want to do most create that high quality content right they want to just create a static ad or something like that so and and you got to have a compelling story but this is

the most important piece of the machine like it's the center of it all yeah I agree and it's funny you brought up the pitch podcast so the if you're not familiar audience we have a podcast where we encourage sales people to come on and sell their product or service and it started off as a joke and it's actually become very successful and I've been wondering and doing research on why is it so successful so about 70% of the guests that come on that show that

pitch their product or service our audience reaches out to them after the podcast airs and wants to learn more so it's it's a lead it starts yeah it's a right and you know what I think it is Matt I think our host Warren in the processes of letting the salesperson pitch their product or service warned weaves into a story I think he makes an emotional connection and I think people when they're listening go yeah I see why we might need that let me reach out and

it's just it's an amazing thing that by Warren guy in that conversation and turning it from a data-centric features and functions what does this product or service do and we even a story around the person the company the salesperson the end results people get attached emotionally and they love it and they reach out and sales naturally follow who would have ever thought that's something that simple could drive results that way well so much is

communicated outside of just like email right or a text message or whatever and I would tell you Warren was previously on our podcast and he really lines out kind of where he wants the conversation to go and and what he wants to do and and if you can make that emotional connection and also think about it if you're a big brand and you're trying to open the door right or you're a sales person I guess and you're trying to open the door and you don't have a big

logo behind you if someone's seen you or connected with you or there's you know people do business with people they know like and trust right and and so they've seen you talk before I don't know how many people call my company and then when I answer the phone sometimes because like there's so many leads that people just pick up the phone and call right and then I can answer that versus someone on the desk or whatever and I've tried all these other models even run into an

answer machine but answering people's live questions and they know who you are and connecting with you takes that relationship and that sales cycle so much further so much faster and and I would just encourage people I think we're we're like I wrote another I wrote a couple books you know a lot about personal brand a couple years ago but you know one was called rise of the personal brand on there was build your brand me these books are as a sales

person to develop yourself into a consultant and I know that that's not the goal of this podcast but that's something that everybody should be thinking about is how do you make yourself invaluable you have to build a brand how do you do that content creation if you're good at telling stories and you're telling it one-to-one every day and you're repeating that same story over and over again figure out that message put that into a video format and

then broadcast that online yeah and you're a hundred percent right there's a big difference in your relationships with your clients it's actually a big difference in your personal income as a salesperson when you move from being a vendor all right to being seen as that thought leader and the way you get there is by sharing the stories with the public and to your point you can take the same stories and using a digital marketing you can amplify that and reach

hundreds thousands tens of thousands millions of people and it's just a beautiful thing let's get audience so I want to make sure we stick to the storytelling theme of this this podcast one of the things I want the whole audience to do is go look up heroes journey or story yeah okay so the psychologists back during the Greek era figured out what up the components of a good story is we're not gonna go to it on the show it's very easy thing for you

to look up however something's really really important with the heroes journey is that story arc itself there there's a process to actually tell a story in a way that's memorable entertaining so like I said just go google that real quick and make sure you understand the basic process of how to tell a journey and once you've done it a couple times you don't need to stick to the process you can you can almost wing it and make it legit to your point earlier Matt if you

think about podcasting in some ways podcasting is education through storytelling absolutely what we're doing right now is telling you a story we're also educating you in a way that hopefully will help you and then you will remember us Matt and I and if we wanted to turn this into a sales cycle if we had say a product to sell actually let's let's do your book so so we will put links in the show notes to Matt's books if you want to learn more about what

Matt has done and get some of his knowledge go ahead and buy his books are a couple bucks right yeah they're nothing I mean we also have video we've done the the voice on audible and all that you can get them on Amazon it's all linked together under my account but yeah we can we can definitely do that I've had book funnels in the past but here's here's what the books really about it's not about selling the book it's it's about explaining to people

just like in podcasting a complicated message in a way that they can they can process it I mean I talk about SEO in the first book about build your brand on how to like leverage social media and SEO in layman's terms right and I was like laying out kind of my journey of what was successful and how it happened and then the second book was how other people had had built their brand and like it continues I one of the things I would tell you though in addition to this and

it's something that I I certainly read about and then I tried to implement it in my book is something called the I think it's part of the hero's journey but it's called like the effigy something basically it's the bridge to understand why people should care and I can break this down really really well finish this and I can I can go into that this is great so the whole point of making with all this is that literally Matt and I not only have are teaching you than ports of

storytelling we are showing you how by you listening to what we're doing on this podcast some of you will reach out by Matt's books so we're proving that this concept works in real time on this podcast now the other thing Matt if you think of the most memorable ads in the world they really are storytelling so the one that pops up to me and I'm getting ready to date myself but if you remember right after 9-11 when the Twin Towers fell Budweiser did a commercial

with the Clydesdales where the Clydesdales walked to area in New Jersey looking over the river where the towers were and there was just smoke coming up and the Clydesdales kneeled down mmm Budweiser air that commercial only one time right wow and I still remember why because it told a story right that's a that emotionally pulled me in I do the same thing if you watch I remember the frogs but you know if you think so for me like when I'm watching TV at night if

I see a humane society or SPCA oh my gosh my eyes water up now I don't know if those dogs and cats are actors or not if it's real I think it's real but they tell a story in the story doesn't necessarily have to be 1500 words you what you and I just described the frogs the Budweiser commercial the humane society ads have almost no words in it right but they tell a story and they pull you in and if you have a product or service that you're trying to sell in

the oil and gas industry you can do the same thing so think about something like a downhole tool most people try to sell that on how does it increase production had made my tools cheaper maybe I could deploy it quicker whatever what if you told the story about how the fieldhand the roughneck got to go home to his kids earlier because this downhole tool does his job quicker we would all remember that story oh absolutely I even think origin stories right origin stories of how the

company was formed and the team and the culture help people get behind brands I mean we've seen we've seen that today absolutely one of the things just this is maybe a good point to insert the kind of I think it's called it's called something effigy it's something like that but essentially what it's saying is no one right you've heard the you've heard the phrase no one cares unless like they know who's saying it or something like that right they don't I don't know

exactly how the phrase goes right now but essentially what what you need to do is let people understand your backstory and why it's important to you take them through that journey with you bring them up to the current day and then showcase or share your perspective on something so like when you're when you're selling something if you lay out in terms of like this is what got me to this point so they can go along that journey with you and then say based on this knowledge

of what I learned through these experiences this is now how I feel it they can then get that perspective versus if you're just saying you should think this or you know this is what happens or this you should believe that they need to have that foundational data to make the same decision as you and that I think is really important as an individual of showcasing you sharing this information if it's you or if it's that third-party source that doesn't have

any kind of validation from them understanding maybe the back story between them you see how much more powerful it becomes and and this is a aspect of storytelling that I think is really important yeah and then the other cool thing about the storytelling process which is content markets a piece of content marketing is like everything else in content marketing you can take the same storyline and you can chop it up oh yeah put it on different mediums

to appeal to different audiences so we just hired our TikTok manager and we're in the process of building out a TikTok approach for OGGN I don't expect any sales to come over from anytime soon what I am trying to do is stay in front of our younger audiences which really if you think of the of OGGN that's always been our success we've always stayed our original listeners were were millennials that were just entering the workforce right and they stayed with us

this entire time so now we're taking the same idea which is storytelling we're just putting on a different platform in this case TikTok that the next generation of workers are on why doesn't Chevron and some of these guys give us grants to to to help facilitate that like even like dig world like for if you're like cat like I don't know if they gave those out there I'm Katie or whatever but but dig world like I took my kids there for a birthday party and now they love heavy

equipment you know and and so if we're reaching the younger generation from podcasting which we certainly are like if you look at at the data that's a great way to craft message that's a great way to do hiring okay there there's so many components of this ecosystem and to your point I hadn't really thought through that but we really look at it just from a commercial standpoint helping to sell it but even from like an education standpoint a STEM program to like get

people into this like we could be a great vehicle for that or podcasts in general could be a great vehicle I love when Matt and I do the show because we do zero zero pre-work literally zero we do what you don't know which is what makes this great so part of our new TikTok approach is we're going to offer our services once we have it figured out we have a process to companies like Chevron okay see I didn't know that I didn't know that the other thing you

don't know is our been podcast blue energy nation which is could be hosted by pair of 10th graders yeah target audience is that that same age group the high school group we have now figured out that what we need to do is find subgroups of these teenagers so in our case we're going after debate teams and student governments right and the reason we're doing that as these young adults in high school that are on debate teams and student government if we

educate them about the realities of energy these are the ones that eventually will be future leaders of business in our government so we're intentionally trying to influence the next generation of vote voters with energy literacy but we're targeting a very specific niche inside of these high schoolers so it lays over exactly what you just rattled off and once again you didn't know any of that tell just told you which is it just it just makes sense right like

things that make sense like line up and that that's the funny thing right like if you talk about sales in general like enterprise sales now there's certain methodologies out there and we can go down rabbit holes but generally there's a certain expectation of like what the sales process should look like and if you have people that have been trained in corporate sales versus someone that hasn't like there's kind of like this is acceptable standards in that right and

the reason that is is because it kind of works right and everybody kind of came to the same conclusion to a certain degree but if you haven't been exposed to it you don't see those trends and what have you I mean I've been in podcasting for eight years so when you say these things it's just like boom boom boom that falls in place that makes sense that aligns correctly to what what the goal should be right and I would leave the audience with something

very tactical something they can use so we've discussed in ports of storytelling we've talked about how we use it ourselves let's talk literally from beginning to end Matt if you're a marketing person in an oil and gas company say an oil field service company whatever and you want to really maximize storytelling to drive leads and sales for your company where would you start and where would you end like let's tell the whole story from beginning and you

have four minutes all right well I mean I would first reach out to you at OGGN and me at EWR well because what you need is you need a good strategy truth and I think that a lot of people like just get going or they don't get going because they don't have a strategy and they don't understand that endpoint is and if you don't know where you're trying to go and you don't know how you're trying to get there but you're just kind of experimental marketing stuff it

doesn't always pan out well right and and that's when social media marketing and like vanity metrics and all that sort of thing and it's like oh it doesn't drive real sales I can tell you people that build their businesses only on social media okay and I can tell you sales people in all different industries that leverage social media organically that more than anybody else so I think that you got to look at it one is what are the channels that we're gonna use

okay also what is the message you're trying to communicate who are you trying to target so when you build those target personas and you understand what that customer journey is and I can tell you if you don't know what the customer journey is and you're trying to figure it out ads are a great way to go because you get a lot of data and you can pivot you know you buy that big billboard you buy that print magazine man hope that message you works because

you're you're getting your marketing that that that's where the transitions happening that I'm seeing is so many companies these bigger kind of companies that are not trying to do digital now but didn't really do digital they were doing print TV everything's come way down digital's gone way up and and it's so much more complex there's so much more data I think a lot of people in the digital marketing space are undervalued honestly for for what they can deliver I

agree on a large level I'm only competing against big brands we pump our but okay here's the layout okay what's the message what are the channels like tiktok like what's that messaging that you're putting on tiktok who you're trying to reach and there's actually really big data sets on tiktok of people like I mean everybody just has no attention span right or whatever and so okay is is that trying to lead them into a sales form video is that trying to set

up a call is it trying to get them to download something is it trying to get them to watch a longer video like you need the layout what you're trying to do okay like I and I'm telling you that is like the most critical thing because you've got to know where you're going all right so you so you figured out what you're going you figured out kind of the content you want to create you figure out how how you want to distribute it okay so it's like all right well I'm

gonna build this content and we're gonna we're gonna throw it on our website all right well how are you gonna get demand generation two people to view that right okay well we're gonna put it in a newsletter okay well does a newsletter reach new clients if that's what your goal is or is it to manage so I do I do a podcast actually every month for existing clients to let them know what the trends are that's different than prospects right you're in it you

know I mean like so so it's a different target persona it's a different customer journey it's a different goal all together so what I need you to do for me really quickly and sorry we're way over four minutes is tell me what you're trying to achieve to build this strategy because all of these things are just tools in the toolkit yeah so you're a hundred percent right which by the way don't reach out to me reach out to Matt for the strategy so number one you do

need a straight out to mark and that strategy needs to be just a few bullet points literally what do you want to accomplish and what resources you have to get there so I'm going to use the idea that we're trying to attract new customers okay okay so our strategy is we want to attract new customers our resources are we have $10,000 budget I have buy-in from the executive team and have a couple of people in the company that are pretty good on camera right

the next thing I think you should do is literally write out the story now I don't mean spend hours and hours and coming up with 10,000 words you literally could open up your iPhone turn on voice recorder and start telling the story right get that that audio file which is very easy thing if you do you can do it while you're commuting have it transcribed then clean it up well I think there's even more planning that has to happen like are you going after the

executive team are you going after people in the field or going after procurement a persona you know exactly you're going after and then and you got to understand like what is the the biggest problem maybe on a account-based selling model that you're trying to get over the hurdle on where that's where I think that's a good point Matt so one of the things for our Ben podcast is I have a board of advisors it's made up of everything from eighth graders to juniors

in high school and they're helping us make every single decision that's something I skipped on this so when you come up your strategy before you figure out what you're gonna implement try to get feedback from your buyers right try to make sure that your story aligns with something that resonates up to your point are you talking about the problem that they have and is it a problem they want to solve well well also like what is this piece of content gonna do okay is this piece of content

trying to get like get people excited and raise their hand and say hey I'm super interested is it to help your sales team overcome an objection because I a lot of times viewed digital marketing as like hey maybe I have that order taker on the phone and I'm trying to drive in bounds and and then I have like product high services that people can buy or whatever and you're kind of helping guide by them or like okay is that what it is or is it hey I don't believe in SEO right like I need

digital marketing like I don't believe in SEO well can that salesperson on the phone overcome that objection better than from the marketing department from the company that statement that that's that resource that they can share right so if you're creating that piece of content is like okay well we create this piece of content we're trying to get a bunch of these people over the hump so we're gonna put this content in emails we're gonna take that list we're gonna upload it to Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever where it hash builds out like that

list and people that look like them and so these people that are potentially dealing with this issue that are in market we're gonna try to move them for like there's so many different ways that you can use it and if in $10,000 doesn't go very far anymore I had a campaign really quick that the type of client I wouldn't even go into what type of client is is a medical spa whatever but I helped them launch in Houston okay and I ran this campaign and it was like 30 cents it was brand new it crushed it that campaign COVID killed that thing you know another company

came to me later on it's been I don't know five years something like that you know I picked up that campaign I made some modifications to it I tweaked it I you know whatever same campaign or similar campaign three dollars a click yeah so the economics of the 30 cent click versus the three dollar click very different so we had to build a new strategy right like it didn't work anymore so there's just all these kind of considerations and if you don't know exactly what you're trying to do and you don't have measurable points of what your KPIs are what

you're trying to do you're going to spend that money and you're going to and you're going to think it's like the rest of marketing like hey we just put a billboard up and like no one's called right especially if you're in corporate marketing you have to justify your spin and so we're talking about is besides driving results is your ability to justify that spin and in my head I really do think that once you come up with your your strategy and once you've gotten feedback from your buyers to make sure that your messaging is on point and start about a

real problem and once you have that target persona identified I really think you ought to write out the story it doesn't have to publish it but it's a starting point and from that story that's written out then you can think about video then you can think about podcasts you can think about using that story snippets of it on social media you can actually use the blog post but always think you should write out the story first and like I said earlier you don't have to sit from a keyboard you literally can dictate it dictate it to an audio file but at that point that's when you get to use

the different channels please remember folks use the channels that your buyers that we're talking about are on and use channels that your company and you understand yeah like don't go into a new territory so easy to waste money the other thing though is these stories with some some modifications can also help you with your search engine rankings oh my gosh so SEO is just a mirror like if you put out good content it's going to show you how you rank in the top 100 yeah like I mean and how good your content is and then you make modifications and you see it's literally like looking in a mirror

like if you're unhappy with your search is ranking like that's what's happening yeah so audience if you search right now for oil and gas podcast advertising organically you can see ogg and come up I think number three on that first page and we're and we're not paying for it it's not sponsored that's because we told a story about using podcasting for marketing and oil and gas and we wrote that story in a way that google could understand google sees it as valuable and so when people search for podcast use and podcasting for marketing oil and gas they can see us first so if we want to play

like who has the biggest fish kind of thing like you could also search for a b2b marketing agency houston I think we come up with number one organically if you search oil and gas marketing agency so I didn't know when I really got into this like oil and gas marketing was like a whole thing but I got a lot of these people calling me now and and we've worked with some of them built some websites and stuff like that but but oil and gas marketing agency or oil and gas marketing services like we're we're up there right and that creates that feedback loop of the wind in the sales

I'm not saying it closes the deal by any stretch of the imagination but it puts me on someone's radar and it starts that process and it builds that credibility of how did you get there because you produce the best possible content out of everyone for this keyword in this kind of geographic area in the top 100 I mean so powerful yeah and all this is from storytelling something that simple right so it's time for us to wind this darn thing down I will say this much if you're going to be in houston the first week of february matt and I will be at nate that's north american

prospect expo like we are every year we have a podcast pavilion set up if you're there as an exhibitor come find us and maybe if you're good we'll let you come on the podcast as a guest and if you're interested in crypto and crypto mining and anything related to that come talk to us as well yeah that's another thing people I'm inviting other oil and gas energy renewable mineral rights podcasters to come use our booth for free they don't have to haul their equipment they can come use all we have all the video all the other equipment set up we'll get you press passes for free

so if your podcast or touches any of that including cryptocurrency mining reach out to me I'll get you free press and bitcoin for you bitcoiners but there's bitcoin crypto like they're separate I get it yeah and we will have you come join us you come record from the conference free have a good time meet a whole bunch of your peers closing this thing out you know matt and I's all our social links are in the the show notes if you want to connect with us there same way with our two newsletters matt this is crazy so we just went through a cold snap here in

Houston which was yes bad for us but the rest of country would laugh because it really wasn't that cold um and so things are starting to come back up and I looked this morning before I came here to record our Sunday update newsletter in the last 28 days has picked up 17 000 subscribers fantastic I mean digital is so powerful and the like I remember and a lot of people listen to this podcast remember before there was email yeah okay before there was social media before there was online and everybody was just like you get an email and you like look at it for like 20 minutes like

you're like oh my gosh I used to get three emails a month three emails a month is it safe is it safe like the world has changed so much and it's speeding up and if you're behind this digital transformation like you need to say 2024 is the time to take action and if you don't you get left mind but anyway links to our two newsletters in there the Sunday update which is growing like crazy we just added a new section it's not a help one it's section it's the opposite it's people that we know that we trust that we vet they're looking for their next role right and we call it looking

for a job that doesn't suck so that's in the newsletter there's recipes from the oil field all kinds of cool stuff same thing with our sales I mean I'm sorry our events newsletter if you want to know all the oil gas conference trade shows expos that newsletter is free it's all the links and also in the show notes my insiders group we finally we're starting to work on the website if I understand it correctly well you know the I have it almost ready to go it was funny because you know really we opened up the website the oil gas marketing podcast.com like we were trying to

figure out what is the name why like where is it going to be before we started building and it was right in front of us as we switched everything over which it's still kind of redirects and we'll have a redirect link if you if you go to that to find us on OGGN.com but um that's where we're going to build it everybody so coming soon very soon all right uh linkedin's failure tip of the week we have not discussed anything do you have one man I have let me do one then real quick because the Sunday updates I looked at this morning I did not realize because my marketing team put

together the newsletter and linkedin the Sunday update which by the way you can either sign up in a linkedin or sign up via email either way I didn't realize how easy it was to make a linkedin newsletter oh my gosh it is so it's ridiculously easy when you launch the newsletter every single person in your network will be notified of it so you have instant audience growth so I think my linkedin tip is do a newsletter it's easy it's free it's very powerful and it's extremely powerful and I had no idea all this time nothing against my marketing people they're fantastic all this time

I picture my marketing people slaving away for like a month getting this thing done now I realized it took them 15 minutes to get it done that's how the podcast or that's how the newsletter was launched no no I mean linkedin live used to be the thing and then and with all these social media tools whatever they're trying to push they're going to put extra wind behind and I would tell you that this newsletter if you have a big network is the most powerful thing I've ever seen 100% go so go make the newsletter all right Matt it's time for us to get out here uh folks 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