Strategies for Lead Generation

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! Manage your oil-filled operations from anywhere with rigor, online or offline, whether it's scheduling and dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment rentals

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Hey, Matt. Hey, nice commercial there, Mark. Yeah, well, we got to pay the bills, right? We appreciate your sponsor in this show. Before we get into today's topic, I just want to remind everybody, when you hear this on Tuesday, you have two days left to sign up for our Houston Oil and Gas Industry Mixer.

The last one was sold out. This one should be great as well. It will be a link in the show notes and the little bit of money we charged for you to join us not only provides the drinks and the food and the prizes and the fun and the music, but at the end of the day, the proceeds goes to Redam to help fight human sex trafficking. So besides networking with your peers and maybe meeting some leads, you're also going

to save a little boy, a little girl's life. So if you can join us Thursday, April 27th, we'd love to see you. But if you do join us, come find me. I'll be wandering around trying to make stuff happen. And Matt, you could join us. This one, Matt, or you could make this one, do you know?

Yeah, I'm going to try. Yeah. So if you're there, go find Matt as well. Maybe he'll wear the same Hawaiian shirt he's wearing right now. I wanted to try it out. This is the first run.

There's a theme going on at OGG and several of our people wear Hawaiian shirts and it's definitely on Fridays. Michael Sullivan does that. This is the point of the show where we leave a review, however, nobody's left of a review for us. Yeah.

Come on. Leave us a review. Yeah. Come on, audience. Let us know what you like, what you don't like, what you'd like us to cover. And if you don't feel like writing those three or four sentences, just say great show,

five stars. We'd love to see it. Topic for today, strategies for lead generation and how to nurture those leads in the sales. Now, you know, Matt, anytime you talk lead generation and turn those into sales, every salesperson, all of us in industry's ears perk up because that's something that is something that's constant, that we always need leads.

So I kind of want to hear, Led, you kind of jump into this from a marketing point of view when you think about strategies for lead gen. What do you think of? First thing I think of is emails. I think of emails is really the first thing that I typically think of or LinkedIn messages, right?

Yeah. So I agree with you and a lot of people are very anti-email and the reason they're very anti-email for lead gen is because there's hundreds of thousands of people out there that have no idea how to write a good lead generation email and we all have those in our inbox every day of people have no idea what you do, who you are, trying to sell you something you don't need and that's not what I are talking about.

I actually personally use emails for cold calling every month and I spend a lot of time doing research and making sure that my message is very specific to the person I'm reaching out to and I also use LinkedIn in collaboration with that. So before I email somebody, I reach out, connect with them on LinkedIn and I always try to give them a little bit of something of value and what I'm hoping is when I do send them an email, the bell goes off in their head and go, oh, this is the guy that connected

me to LinkedIn and gave me a free report of what's going to happen with the price of crude in the next six months. So emails can be misused but I really do think it's one of the best ways to generate leads. Well, you know, I'll tell you, I did a cold call, cold calling, like 67 calls a day and a little bit different world than we're living in now but very difficult to get people even to stay on the phone because you're interrupting them in whatever they're doing and they don't

know who you are. I also did door-to-door like phone or like sales when I was in pharma, that was pretty tough too. You'd wait an hour or two hours for two minutes at a time, it wasn't really effective. Now the thing that I think about and I think most people think about the emails or even conferences and falling up from that has changed a little bit but social selling.

And so if we want to talk about that a little bit later but social selling is what I think about now when I think about selling and it's kind of this collaborative effort to build a relationship with somebody online or over long distances where you kind of shrink the size of the world and you build that rapport remotely. Yeah, yeah, it's so true. That's funny you brought up door-to-door.

So when I worked for the phone company 20 years ago, one of the things I used to do, the only reason I can say this now is that company was bought and it's now out of business so I can't get in trouble is I would put my bell south hard hat on, right? The phone guy hard hat and I could walk into any oil gas office I wanted and nobody said a word. Oh, the phone guy's here, right?

And as soon as I got past the front desk, I take the hard hat off and go talk to people. You can't do that nowadays, there's no way you get in trouble, probably go to jail. Well, that's the biggest thing about oil and gas is it's so locked away, right? Like you don't have access. When I was in healthcare sales, you could reach people, you could have access to people, but man, these big buildings, you got to get waved up.

So unless you have a meeting or unless you have a relationship, it really hard to do that outside of conferences, events. Yeah, no, no people do not do that. You're going to end up going to jail if you try to do that or worse. Like do not try to just walk into door. I will tell you this much, Matt.

So OGGN, which is owned by Motel Point, its address is in Sugarland, Texas and the address is actually a PO box at UPS Center. And I don't know how many times in my life I've had some sales person call me saying, I can't find your office. I'm driving in circles. It's like, you idiot, you're trying to just drop in on me.

Let me tell you, it's a UPS PO box. There is no office there. So yeah, people don't do that. It doesn't work. All right. So emails are great.

There's a couple of things. When I think of lead gen that I know that works for us today in 2023, I think we talked about this one of our past episodes, but customer referrals, asking customers for referrals. So for us at OGGN, when we have a happy sponsor, we ask them, do they have any peers that would also like exposure and we get that warm introduction and that's a very high trust way to generate leads.

Yeah. I think I was actually talking with some of my sales guys about that right now is business development. What is the definition of business development? I think making sure that the accounts you have or executing good work is the best calling card and you're always going to want to tap your existing client base for other referrals

of non-competitive like diagonal businesses that might have a need for services like we're offering them. Right? That's the best, easiest one-wing out touch point. Yep. I love it.

So another one that is going to be a little bit different is trading sales leads at a conference and you go, Mark, what the hell does that mean? So in most booths, in most oil and gas conferences, the booth is manned by sales and marketing people. Right? So if I walk up to the Halliburton booth and I meet their sales person and I go, hey,

I know that you're probably trying to get into Exxon or BP or Chevron or Anadarka and Darko's gone now or Oxy or whatever because that's who Halliburton's sales to, right? I will happily make an introduction because I know those people. If you will introduce me to your head of sales in Halliburton, let me tell you sales people are happy to trade leads that way. 100% of the time, they will easily introduce you to their chief revenue officer, which

is our target, or whoever you want if you give them a highly qualified lead and you're basically trading leads at a conference. I do it all the time and people love it and it's mutually beneficial. I actually have several friends that I've made by trading leads at a conference and they end up closing deals and then I'm like their best buddy and they take me out for steak dinner and then they introduce me internally to their company.

And so it's like I said, it's a win-win all the way around. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about just a different form of like equity exchange, right? Like a social equity and you're swapping other things of value. That makes a ton of sense. I thought you were actually going to go like when we've prospect at conferences or something like in the past, hey, is there anybody you know that you think I should meet?

Right? That's where I thought you were going with it. And then I actually like swap leads like let's go a little exchange here and you can easily introduce me to your boss or whoever and then I'll hook you up with so-and-so. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So another one that a lot of people miss is going back and revisiting lost and closed opportunities.

So if you had deals that you lost, you lost a customer, you had RFP, whatever and you lost it, go back and just touch base with them. You'd be surprised how many times that they were not happy with whoever vendor they chose over you and they want to at least have a conversation. Hey, is this going the right way? Are they charging me the right amount for this?

And you'd be surprised how many times that turns into new business and is a new lead. And it's always good to revisit your past customers even if you're not doing business with them now. Well, yeah, that's second opinion. Hey, would you like a second opinion on what's going on is great way in the door. When I think about, you know, revisiting closed or lost opportunities, I'm looking at email

drips, right? Like nurture drips or retargeting, remarketing. Typically only like 3% of people are in the market right then or if you lose that lead, like unless they find a good agency, that's one of the things that I find a good company. There's really a time period where they're still in an audition, even though they won that deal, that it could not work out. And so you could use indirect forms of marketing to stay in front of those potential prospects.

And you're right. Usually the decision is not unanimous, right, of who they decide to go with. And so being able to stay on the radar in case something happens or even reengaging old leads and kind of continuing to nurture them, because you just never know when you're going to cross bass again. So I think it's really good to kind of stay out there, digital is the new pens and pads,

of course. Yeah. And to your point, there's a lot of tools in digital marketing makes it so much easier to stay in touch with those people without you physically having to do it one by one. Here's one, Matt, that you may not see coming. So recruiting sales leads on social, and what do I mean by that for me personally as the

energy for All In Gas Global Network is I look who's spending ad money on social, and especially if they're spending ad money to target the oil and gas industry, that tells me two things. Number one, they have budget because I know how much those ads cost. Number two, they're trying to get in front of people that work in the oil and gas industry. Well, for us, that's what we do, right?

So I look at other people's ad spend and who they're targeting, and then I target those companies because I know they have at least two of the three criteria we look for with the new sponsor. And I think it's something that a lot of sales people can easily do. Look at your niche. Look who's spending money to address that problem that your company solves and then reach out

to them because you know they're looking for, they're spending money on social. What you're talking about is you're talking about like analytics, using analytics to sell. You're looking at data points to basically maybe reverse engineer who your target customers might be. And it's funny that you say that, but that is something that we do like measure twice cut once, whatever, like we're looking at data all the time and we're making decisions

based on data. And there's a lot of really cool listening tools out there. And as a CMO and as a digital marketer, I'm always getting hit up with all kinds of digital tools and listening tools to be able to see what's going on with different websites, with spin volumes, with even I can see ads that have been running for a long time, what keywords are going after, what potentially is performing well.

There's a lot of insights that you can get with data and basically trying to figure out what's working for other people and reverse engineering it. And then one up is a lot of what happens in the marketing space. Yeah. I'll tell you one of the funniest instance of that is I actually found a company accidentally, I was Googling ourselves, OGGM, and I found a company I was doing paid ads for our name

that told me a whole volume in what they were trying to accomplish. And I ended up reaching out to them and closing a deal with them to work with us directly because they were targeting us. You may not know that salespeople, but search for your company and see if somebody's doing paid ads against your company. That tells you a whole volume about opportunities that you may have with the lead generation

there. Absolutely. Then get on the speaking circuit. So all the conferences that we go to all around the world in this industry, you set up a booth and quite frankly, I would be impressed if you broke even with your booth, much less actually made a profit.

In the old days, they worked really well. In today's world, it just does not make fiscal sense usually. However, if you submit an abstract to these conferences and typically you have to do it the year before and you talk about something about a problem that you helped solve, the only people that will come listen to you speak or the people have that problem. So now you have a room full of people that have a problem that you solve instead of having

a one-to-one sales conversation, you're having a one-to-500 or a thousand or 2,000 sales conversation. And then when you get it just right, you will walk out of that room and there'll be a line of people waiting to talk to you, handing you their business card that want to talk to you. It's the easy way to walk out with one-to-20-to-50-to-100 leads is literally just get on the speaking

circuit. Yeah, selling from the stage. Right? Yeah, selling from the stage. I can't stress enough how important it is and even if you're building credibility online and there's things that you're doing, you want to do what an authority does.

What does an authority do? They get on podcasts. They write books. They put together white papers and abstracts. They speak. They talk.

They network. They do all the things that you would do to build that know, like and trust, build that authority. And speaking actually through OGGN, I was just at a human performance conference for oil and gas. That means HSE.

I didn't know that. It's like a safety conference. They have their own buzzword in a different space and it was sponsored by Knowledgevine, one of our sponsors. I can tell you a great way to connect with people and it was an easy conversation starter being a speaker at a conference where I didn't know anybody.

Everybody was like, oh, what are you speaking about? What are you talking about? Hey, I'll come see your talk. It really opened up the interactions at the conference. It was cool. And I think speaking, I've done four speaking talks in the last two weeks and usually there's

follow up from that on the prospect side. Right? It's actually not my follow up. It's the prospect following up with me. They wanted to connect. Hey, I like what you said, resonated.

I spoke for OGGN last Thursday and actually the location owner sent me a message on LinkedIn yesterday and said, I've already implemented some of the things you talked about. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. There's a lot of different vectors, but speaking is getting you out there, putting your name out there, putting you out there as an expert.

And if you're a salesperson, you certainly want to be a marketing consultant or you want to be a sales consultant or you want to be a technical advisor to whatever you're doing. I think why people get frustrated with salespeople is they don't know their product or their craft well enough that they can't be a resource. And so the better you can be a resource and the better expert you can become, people are going to want to interact with you, look at you as somebody that they can lean on.

And a great way to do that and even sharpen that skill is to speak. Yeah, it's so funny. So Matt and I don't rehearse. In fact, we're lucky to have 10 seconds of dialogue before we turn the microphones on, but that's a perfect segue to my next one, which is be seen as the thought leader in your space.

When you're seen as a thought leader, you're not seen as a vendor. Even though you may still be a vendor, your customers depend on you to help them make the right decisions. Now, being seen as a thought leader, there's a lot of marketing behind that. Everything at Matt rattled off earlier, writing the books, getting the speaking circuit. All that stuff is super important.

But also as a thought leader, you have to be really transparent and really unbiased. So if somebody approaches you that wants to buy from you and you can't help them, you have to have the gumption to tell you, no, I can't help you. Sorry. Here's somebody that can help you. And that seems counterproductive.

But the sooner you start trying to sell something to somebody that doesn't fix their problem, you're not going to be seen as a thought leader, you're going to be seen back as a vendor. So when you're seen as that thought leader, leads naturally come in. And then to make it even more interesting from a sales point of view, when you're seen as a thought leader, price is not an object. You're not judged on the price of what you're offering.

You bring so much expertise that prices and even something to be discussed, right? It is what it is. We do it all the time. But positioning yourself as that thought leader, taking the time to be that expert in your space to Matt's point is a great way to generate leads. Yeah.

I think you got to be that resource for people. You got to add value, right? I think the key is like adding value and also even some of the examples you gave earlier with swapping leads, you give the lead first. You share the value first to start that reciprocation process. I cannot help this because you're talking about becoming a thought leader and I'm just

going to provide a shameless plug to the first book that I wrote called a build your brand mania, how to transform yourself into an authoritative brand and attract your ideal customer. And I wrote this book actually kind of making fun of all the young kids on social media that were experts and consultants that didn't really have any authority behind them on what they were doing. And it's like the coach that coaches you to be a life coach that's like getting paid,

but they haven't figured out their life. Like I thought it was really funny and I said, all right, I'm transitioning from a salesperson to a marketing consultant. And I said, I'm going to write a book on that journey and I'm going to kind of tug and cheek, lay out how to do that. And then I'm going to provide some real value along the way and I'm going to build a brand

for myself on how to build brand. And so I've provided all the things that I was doing and then we followed it up with like a group book called rise of the personal brand. I just came out with no I can trust, but it's all about building that authority and attracting the right type of people to you because you're putting out the messaging of what you're looking for and who you can help and adding value in that way.

And when people connect with those things, they become attracted to you. And so you have to be seen. You have to be visible. If people don't know that you exist, like that's the first step. All the copywriters, like if you're thinking about marketing of some sort, direct response, they spend 80% of the time on the headline, getting the visibility before even the message.

So you have to get out there and be seen. And these are a lot of different ways to do that. And then after they know that you exist, then they start digging into your comp. Yeah. And salespeople out there, think about what Matt just said, the fact that he's written several books. If you're a salesperson, you're having a sales meeting, when you go to leave, if you pull

out a signed copy of your book and leave it behind, none of your competitors are doing that. Right. And that positions you as a thought leader. We're going to do an episode on the process of writing a book for your own personal brand somewhere in the future because there's been a lot of interest in that.

But I love that. I love that you've done all that work and it does position you as a thought leader and people see you as something different than a vendor, which is awesome. So here's one to generate leads. Start a fricking podcast. So Matt and I are doing this because we have a passion around this.

Don't you think that maybe some of the people that listen to this show reach out to Matt and I and want to work with us further? Do you see how this podcast, while we're trying to educate the public, also allows people to understand what we do? And if they think that we can help them with the problem, they're going to reach out to you.

It's not hard to start a podcast. It doesn't take a thousand dollar microphone. It's something that is relatively inexpensive to do. Go ahead and put it out there. And I'm telling you now, if you do start a podcast, which I really think you should, it should be on what your expertise and passion is around.

And just be okay that your first couple episodes aren't going to be fantastic. Don't worry about your numbers. Don't worry about downloads. Just do it. Do it on a regular basis. And besides leaving the book behind, if you're a salesperson, how cool to be, you'd also

mention, hey, you can listen to my podcast. So I think another lead generation, especially in today's age, is start a podcast with good, useful, valuable content. You can also get on podcasts, right? You don't have to go out. That's a good one too.

You could go get on a podcast, tap another audience. We have a lot of data and case studies around getting on other audiences. They've already built a community. And if your message resonates with them, that's what we're doing right here. Like, hey, like we're showing you that we're experts. We're talking about it.

We're giving examples. We're not just saying that. And if you resonate with some of the stuff that we're saying, you're going to be like, hey, I want to talk to that person a little bit further. The data says you actually need seven hours of connection with somebody. That's why conferences are so great.

You get to spend a lot more time with people, move that conversation forward. This happens in a lot of other human dynamic type situations, seven hours, no like and trust. That's what people do business with. And one of the best ways to do that and generate that massive amount of content that people need to connect with you, especially one to many.

Again, a lot of what I talked about in my journey is why I moved from a salesperson to a marketer was the one to many concept because Mark, you and I can talk. We can syndicate this out. We can promote this. And other people can be sitting in and hearing this conversation and getting potentially that buy-in to say, hey, I have an idea I'd like to talk to you about and it helps them

raise their hands. So being on a podcast, starting a podcast, creating content, which I think that's your next one there. I'll leave that to you, Mark. You should do it. If I get out there, I talked to somebody, I actually talked to two people recently about

this. They just couldn't get themselves out there. I would say start ugly. Just get out there, start doing it and prove upon that. I was talking to Warren about that actually earlier today. He's in town.

He's like, what about this graphic? I said, just go with it. Just get started, get some momentum. It's all about, if you hear the big business or life courses, massive effort or whatever they say, the massive movement and effort and direction to create that momentum, to create that shift is really, really important.

So whatever you decide to do, just do it in a big way. And that's why they say even with podcasts, I think it creates seven of them in a row to get through all those fumbles, to get into it where you're going to be able to continue it and it's going to have length. Yeah. So that's right.

Get out there. Don't let yourself make excuses on why you can't. Put it out there. You go look at modal points, YouTube channel, you go look at the very first YouTube video I did. It's horrible, but it's one of our most traffic videos and I left it up there.

Same way with the podcast. You listen to when I started the podcast, I'm horrible on it. You just got to do it. And there's just do it. Don't make excuses for yourself. That's interesting.

You saw my next one and you think I will talk about content. I'm actually not. So my next one to generate leads is host a live stream. Now listen to me, audience. Host a live stream and get your potential clients on the live stream as a panelist. See what you're doing?

You're getting people that you struggle to get in front of as a salesperson. They will happily jump on a live stream, which is all over social, which promotes their company, promotes their personal brand, have a panel conversation around something that's interested to them. And guess what? You're the guy holding the gate open for these prospects of yours.

You get to meet them in a non-salesy way. You're not cold calling them. You're not giving them the elevator pitch. You're giving them something of value right out of the gate, which is a marketing for them and their company. And they will naturally start conversations with you.

So if you have four or five companies you struggle to get in front of as a salesperson, put a live stream together. And that makes the live stream so valuable versus a webinar is the live stream is broadcast on all social at the same time. However, unlike a webinar, you don't have to give information, email address, it's not gated or anything.

So anybody and everybody can listen to it when they want. And then it's recorded. So in our case, we use YouTube, but it ends up being recorded on YouTube. And then you can take your prospects marketing people and say, here, you can have access to this content for free, chop it up for your own marketing use. And I'm telling you, it's one of the best ways to generate a lead out there is literally

hosted a live stream and inviting your prospects on it as panelists. I think that it's great. Certainly webinars have a lot of merit. It's basically a speaking talk virtually. So again, that's what experts do. And then the live stream is pushing it out to everybody.

And on those channels, I would just add to everything that you said, I would say, make sure that you do some preparation to promote that on the front end. Make sure that you coordinate that. And the algorithms have changed a little bit because usually if you used to go live on LinkedIn, so many people would tune in or Facebook, you would just have to go live. Some of these tools that you use to go live will let you schedule it, plan it out.

I know setting a van on Facebook and some of these things can really help even sending out an email list or even doing it consistently gets a lot of attendance. There's something to be said for repetition and people can count on it just like monthly mixers or things of that nature. But I would just encourage you to not just do a live screen and not just prep who's going to be on it, but the promotion piece of it too.

Certainly you can record that stream and then you can repurpose it, polish it and syndicate it out. But I like to hit two birds with one stone a lot and I just go live and no editing. Like good luck, no editing, but I think both ways to do it are great. No, that's what is attractive people live stream because it's real. It's not rehearsed.

It's not canned. You see the mistakes and everything else. I will say this much though. If you're going to do a live stream and oil and gas and you're going to invite your prospects on there for lead generation, you need to put a little bit of resources into this. You don't want a live stream from your cell phone.

Get professional gear, professional lighting, professional sound. So everybody looks and sounds well. You don't want to script it, but you do want to have a talk track with your panelists so they're not worried about what's going to come up and they get asked an unexpected question. Matt, actually you were on one that we live streamed from the API with about marketing oil and gas and that went really, really well.

We're still getting kudos and people reaching out because of that. So if you want to see an example of that, I'll put a link in the show notes to the one that Matt was on at the American controlling Institute here in Houston. All right. My last strategy for lead gen and we kind of started with this is cold call, but not with the phone.

To Matt's point, years ago, there was no internet, there was no email. The only business communication tool was a telephone. There was no voicemail. There was no caller ID. People weren't as busy. So when you called them, a lot of times they had an interest in least understanding why

you were calling them. And if you were a good cold caller, you could turn that into a lead. Now even if they have an interest in what you're calling about, you're interrupting them. Because the caller ID, if they don't recognize the number, they're not going to answer. And if they do answer, you've already aggravated them a bit. So throw away the telephone, quit cold calling the telephone.

It doesn't work. All it does is aggravate people. However, cold calling via email or via social, if you do your research up front and make sure it's very targeted and useful, is super valuable. When I get it right, Matt, I get about a 75% conversion rate, which means 7 out of 10 emails I send, somebody replies back and wants to learn more.

Now when I get it wrong, it's like 0%, which means it's something's wrong. And in today's world, if you're cold calling the email, besides doing the research, you need to understand that the title, the subject is the most important thing because everybody is going to read your email on the mobile and you have three seconds to catch their attention. So you want to write something that's not spammy.

I use a lot of quarter stuff, so I'll do something like increase revenue 3Q23. No spam engine world writes 3Q23, but if you're in business, you know that means third quarter. And then right out the gate, I don't say who I am or what I'm trying to accomplish by reaching out to them. I start off with the benefit for them. I know you have this problem, I think I can help you fix it.

And I have example after example after example of me getting the message really right and people replying back within minutes, even on a Sunday. Now once again, when you get it wrong, you get zero. But cold calling I think is super valuable. It's just the tools that you use have changed. Don't use the telephone, do a lot of research, understand the person and the company that

you're reaching out to very target, very short. And remember, the goal of the cold call is not to sell anything. The goal of the cold call is to arouse curiosity so they want to learn more. That's it. So I still think cold call is a greatly generation tool when it's done properly in 2023. I agree with everything that you said and I would add to that that most people do get

those messages. They might not respond, but they get those messages and I can tell you too that if you are kind of spraying and praying and you're not doing your research, you're hurting your company's brand, you're hurting your own brand, personalization is absolutely key. I can tell you when I was even cold calling like over the phone, as well as that shifted to more of this kind of social selling or targeted outreach, I can tell you hitting

people on off times. Most salespeople, right, it's Friday, no one's going to be there, right, or whatever. Or on the weekends or at nights or early in the mornings, the people you're trying to reach usually have a lot of responsibility and are usually put in in big hours and they are slammed during the regular work hour and core block working time. I've found the most effective messages being early in the morning where you get that quick

response, not super late at night, but like after normal hours after people have gone home, maybe like six, six, 30, and then my best day, which is counterintuitive, has always been Fridays. Like everybody else is gone and whoever's in that leadership position, depending on who you're targeting, is grinding still, usually, and they usually have wrapped up what they need to wrap, but then in the week, they're just trying to get a little bit more done

and they're a little bit more open to hearing those messages. So I think timing is really, really critical and that personalization is absolutely key. But man, we are past the days of, I mean, only 3% of people already barred at any given time. That's why people ramp up like the spam messages, but man, my phone, I am so sick of it. It's just almost all spam messages on LinkedIn, on emails, like, yes, if you have a great

message and you show me the value, I want to see it, but if you're interrupting me like during the day and I'm looking at something and an email pops up and whatever, it's just going to get deleted. Again, it's going to be different for everybody. I would just add to everything that you said, if you add timing to that, to try to catch them when they're open to hearing about that message, you know, I look through a lot of

those sometimes on the weekends when I'm free or one evening or something like that. So just know that people are seeing your messages and if you do send something to value, they will get back to you. And so time it right and do the best research you can and try to get to the point quickly to just generate that interest, to then set up that discovery call or that next step, but don't try to hit them with too many words all at one time.

People just, you'll lose them or gloss over it. So yep, to my point, the goal of the cold call is to rouse curiosity, not to educate or sell anything. And Matt, one of my best days to cold call when I'm calling executives and oil and gas is actually Sunday afternoon. To your point, their work has been finished.

And on Sunday afternoons, most executives are planning for their next week. They've done their family time. They've done their relaxation time three or four o'clock Sunday afternoon. They're kind of chilling and they're catching up and planning their next week. And if you reach out the right message, they have time to engage with you. So you're right.

Don't listen to what common knowledge is because it's not usually correct, right? The message is more important than when you send it. All right. So this is the point where we're going to do our product review, except we don't have a product review. However, Matt, you don't know this.

I actually had a company reach out to us that has a marketing automation tool they want us to try out. They're going to give us a free trial. So we're going to do a product review with that. So stay tuned for that. Matt and I's, all of our social channels are in the links in the show notes.

So if you want to connect with us anywhere there, just go to shows and feel free to connect. Here's talking about our insider's group. I promise you it's coming. We're working on it. So just stay tuned for that.

Matt, I can't remember. Last time, did you do a LinkedIn tip or did I do a LinkedIn fail? What time is this? I think you did a fail. I think you did a fail. Okay.

So now it's your turn to do a LinkedIn tip. I'll pull something from the presentations I've been doing because I use LinkedIn like it's AOL instant messenger for everybody that's not at my company. That's how I use LinkedIn. But I would tell you if I haven't used this tip before, but I'll use this data point, 5.2% of all people on LinkedIn are content generators.

That means roughly 95% of all people on LinkedIn consume information. Would you rather be the consumer of information or the producer if you're trying to become that expert and build that authority? So start generating that content any way you know how. I actually have some really good pro tips, but I'll save those for the future. So keep listening as far as the point system associated with LinkedIn to how to get your

stuff viewed more. So you just have to stay tuned for maybe two more episodes and I'll share those next time around. I didn't know those odds either, so that means it's actually really easy to get above the crowd if only 5% of people on LinkedIn are pushing content. So people listen to Matt, go push them content.

All right, 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.