The Fundamentals. How to Add New Logo’s and Customers

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 off-field operations from anywhere with rigor, online or offline, whether it's scheduling and dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment, rentals

or inspections and maintenance, you can create, review, approve and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operation management dashboards from your desktop or your phone. No paper, no errors, no headaches. Learn more at rigor.us.

Link will be in the show notes. What's up, Matt? What's going on, Mark? What's going on? I forgot to turn on my do not disturb, which I just did, so we don't have constant dingin' in the background.

Then, you and I both just came back from OTC, and what a great event. Always love it. It's changed over the years, right? It's gotten a little bit smaller, but I still think it's a great way to interact with people and good to see what's going on in the industry and what's new, and I felt like there was a lot of good energy there.

Yeah, and you're using your good microphone. I can hear the difference already. Well, you know, you're a good role model for me, Mark. Yeah. OTC was great. It had about 30,000 people there.

We did our podcast, Pervillion. We literally had four days back-to-back-to-back podcasting, not just OGGN's podcasting host, but other podcast hosts that we invited. We met a lot of people, and we made one hell of an impression on the OTC board, so I'm sure we'll be back again next year. It was just a bunch of fun.

Now, I will say this much, $60 for two hamburgers and three soft drinks, yeah, felt like I was in the airport. Yeah. Well, I don't know if that's them so much. I think it's the location benders, right? But for sure.

Yeah. And let me be fair, they had a bunch of food trucks outside that I could have went outside. Probably I've gotten some less expensive, but I just feel like walking, so that I paid the price. I do like, you know, around four o'clock or whatever, everybody starts rolling out the alcohol and food and apps.

Yeah. Yeah. It was very communal. It was nice. It was super high energy. I have not seen that much energy at OTC since before the pandemic, and it was their record

year. Like I said, they had 30,000 people attend. So it was good stuff. But we're not here to talk about OTC. We actually did record an episode with our sponsor, though, from OTC, so you haven't listened.

Go back and listen to it. It was cool, Matt. We had Michael with Rigger, who's the president, talk about their strategy at conferences, including OTC, and he didn't hide anything. So he laid out how they approach conferences, how they make sure they have a good ROI and what works for them.

So if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen. Yeah. No, I only heard about it from what you told me after I missed it when I got there. Yeah. But today, we're going to talk about something that I hear a lot from a lot of sales managers in oil gas, in that they have good account managers, people that can retain that revenue.

They have people, good salespeople out there that are good at making sure that their existing customers are taken care of. But there seems to be a gap in being able to bring in new logos. So basically think of new sales, and I kind of want to talk through, you know, what does it take if you're asked or you challenge yourself to go after clients that don't know you, that don't know who you are and bring in those new logos?

So that's what I thought we'd talk through that today, Matt. I can tell you that there's certainly a difference between like inbound calls where people know who you are and maybe your logo carries a lot of weight, right? That opens doors for you. And so business development, prospecting, consultative selling is a different skill set, right?

And it requires a different level of strategy and knowledge and experience. And so I'm excited we're digging into this. Yeah. So in my opinion, you can't start going after a new business unless you have a list of the new business you want to go after. And I've always called this my target list.

I have one now, have a list of 10 companies that I would like OGG to do business with. And at the top of that list is what I call a dream client. That's the client that you're almost 100% convinced you'll never do business with, but you would love to do business with. And Apple, if you're listening, you're my dream client. And on my list, number one is Apple, because I would really love to do business with them.

But I spend all my time or most of my time on the other nine companies on that list, which will actually drive revenue. However, I do make sure I spend time on that number one dream client and reach out to them, get to know different people that work for that company in the hopes that somewhere down the road, I'll land that big way. Man, I approach it similar to that.

I kind of use like a bigger, like funnel approach, right? So it's like, what's your top 50 list or top 100, or maybe you take a top 500 list and then you whittle it down to, okay, top 50, top 100. And then out of those, like, what kind of strategic, like, what's the landscape look like? Like, who do you have access to?

How do you reach them? And then if it's social, if it's different ways, like if they're not active, so I build like this roadmap and then until you talk to them, right, you don't shut them down. But I start with like a big list until I get a no, like, I keep them on the list, right? I run people through a funnel, like, I wish I could just like work 10 clients, which that's probably a better strategy, like more targeted effort.

I don't know, I just think I have a little bit wider approach, but having a target list is important because if you don't know where you're going, you're never going to get there, right? Yep. And I'm actually glad you brought that up. So that said, I rattled off, I have 10 clients on there and the number one is my dream client.

I don't think that's a random list. I know who buys from OGG and there's certain criteria. They tend to be large companies, at least $250 million and above. They tend to have either sold to oil and gas before or they have an existing new product or service they want to try to sell to oil and gas. And the ideal ones are the ones that have tried to sell to the oil gas industry and have failed.

So I actually, my list has a criteria has to be to get on that top 10. So you do need, regardless if you want to take Matt's approach and start with a bunch of companies and whittle them down or come up with one of the criteria that your existing buyers use to fit it, you still, I love Matt's approach to start really wide and go in there now, but you're still in there. So on my target list, they're pre-narrowed down because I know which, I know what it

takes to buy from us, but to Matt's point, you're not going to get anywhere if you don't have a list. You got to start somewhere and you got to know who you're going after. So here's the part that we're going to get really deep in. So once I have this target list, I have to come up with a compelling messaging and that messaging and you've heard us talk about this before, but it's super important is not generic.

So for us, our messaging is different. And even if I'm reaching out to the same company, the message is different to their chief revenue officer than it is to their vice president operations. And that message is different. If for some reason I want to reach out to their president or CEO, which we're usually I don't do, that message is also different.

So the message is extremely targeted and it's targeted based upon the problems that I know that company is having. And if you're trying to figure out what problems companies are having, if they're public, go to their webpage, go to their investor relations, find the 10K form. And in that 10K by law, the CEO has to lay out what the risk are to their company. And by understanding what legally their risk they're trying to mitigate and they're worried

about. So right now, if you read a lot of 10Ks in the oil and gas industry, you'll see a lot of companies, especially the service companies in that 10K, the risk they're worried about is inability to hire talent. So you know that that's a problem they have. So I developed that messaging per what's going on in today's date, per what's going

on in that company. And if they're public, I use the 10K to understand what are their executive manager team most worried about and having to report those worries to their shareholders. That gives me a place to start with the messaging. See that's something I have started to do more recently. When I think about, I guess, creating this target list and what goes into it, there's

even more kind of criteria that I look at as far as who I want to develop a relationship with inside that company and what are the vector points to do that. And then the next thing, Mark, I think about is, I was like, all right, I need to develop an email campaign. Maybe I need to get them on the phone. Maybe I need to talk to them.

Like when you start developing email automation, which not to get into the weeds, but you're trying to go, are you dealing with somebody that is like a D personality that like needs the data? Is it a relational person? Is it somebody that needs like to get to the point? I guess that's the more the D type personality, but then there's the analytical person and

then there's like storytelling and stuff like that. And when we build these email automation campaigns, if we don't know who we're targeting, we actually drip a message to like, if you want to get that picture of the ideal customer, like backup for a second, but there's that ideal customer, which we've talked about in previous episodes, you have to have an idea of who that is and certainly different roles and like people in the field versus executive team versus procurement officers or whatever, you want

to figure that out. But also that subset of that is, okay, who is that person or what type of person is that person? And if you don't know that, that messaging, how you communicate that messaging, they're more likely to respond to different things. And so if you know who they are, you can then categorize them in that way.

But if you don't know, we build like email drip campaigns to target people and then we try to mix it up and then we see based on click rates and response rates, what kind of messaging they're responding to, and then we tweak that, right? So there's like B2B sale, like support from a marketing standpoint. That's where my head goes, Mark, when we start talking about it. I love this.

I love this. So sitting on my desktop is a CSV file of every country that oil and gas this week has listeners in. And if you don't know this, shame on you, that means you're not listening to oil and gas this week, but oil and gas this week is the largest oil and gas podcast in the world and it has listeners in every single country.

So that spreadsheet has 208 countries on it that we have listeners in with the number of listeners. So when I reach out to the head of sales in oil and gas, which is typically our entry point and I've seen in his or her background that they have an engineering background to your point, I dropped that Excel spreadsheet, that email, because I know they have an engineering background.

I know they want to see the data. And so I dropped that sheet in there. If they don't have an engineering background, I don't drop that sheet and there's a distraction. And to your point, I've AB tested that enough to know that it works 75% of the time, right? You're right. You're trying to understand who you're talking to and LinkedIn is really good at that.

You can see their background, see what their education is. And then lately, because people have allowed their LinkedIn profiles to be more social than just purely business, you can figure out sometimes their personality traits. Are there somebody that loves sporting events? Are there somebody that gardens or, you know, that sort of stuff. Him or her.

Him or her. Yeah. Him or dude. Like I've seen all these interesting pronouns or whatever it is. Yeah. So you have your target list and I think you should have a dream client that target list.

Now you've come up with your messaging and you understand that your messaging is going to be different depending on who you talk to in that organization. Now, here's the part where a lot of people struggle. How do you get in the freaking door? A long time ago, when I worked for the phone company, I literally would put my phone company hard hat on and I would walk into any office I wanted to anywhere in the US and nobody

would stop me because I was the phone guy. And then as soon as I got past the front desk, I take the hard hat off and I'd go talk to people. Nobody do that today. You're going to get in trouble at the very least. It's a different world.

But it used to be that actually going to the office building and chatting to people was a great way to get in the door. It was part of your prospecting. And because of the change in security and some of the craziness in the world, that's not always not recommended. You won't happen.

And if you get caught, like I said, you'll get in trouble. But there's other ways to prospect. So we've talked earlier about cold calling and if you listen to show, you know that I think email is probably one of the best ways to cold call. But there's a whole bunch of other ways that you can prospect. We talked a little bit about OTC.

One of the reasons that we set up a booth there besides to help educate the world about the value of the oil and gas industry to mankind and besides building our community, which was inviting not only our listeners and our podcasters, but other podcasters that some may see as competition, Matt, we were also there to prospect. So people that came by that were curious in what we did, we would quantify them rather quickly.

Are they just curious and they're interested in the podcast, which show that was one conversation? Or because they were at a large offshore trade show in the world, were they looking for other ways to get in front of their clients in which case those people were directed toward me and I would start a preliminary prospecting conversation with them. So we literally were prospecting from the conference that we were also doing live podcasts from.

There's a bunch of different ways you can prospect and Matt, I'm sure you have a whole ton of different ways where you can use digital marketing to start getting into those virtual doors. Yeah. So I got like four quick points that I wrote down. So there's a lot to respond to, but I'll be super brief.

So just to speak to conferences for a minute, something that I don't think's talked about a lot and we've even talked about it on this podcast about like the value of conferences and deals don't always happen there anymore, et cetera, et cetera, right? I believe that, but I also have a different spin on it. So through like what we're doing right now, content marketing or magnetic marketing, we're attraction marketing, whatever you want to call it, we're pushing out content.

If you respond to that content, you see that quality or expertise and you get to know us a little bit more and you might say, Hey, I want to do this with you. There's a couple of people out there that came to up to us at the booth that were listening to our podcast and saying how much they enjoy it, please leave a review by the way. One of the things I think conferences, the value is not talked about a lot is there's data that I've seen really around podcasting and social dynamics that if you want to do

business with somebody, you do business with people you know, like and trust. And there's this magic number and social dynamics and other settings and business settings certainly that you're trying to reach this magic number of seven hours. You need to get to know somebody for seven hours. You need someone to consume. If you want to do it one to many at scale, seven hours of content.

I think again, podcasting is a great way to do that. But conferences are also a fantastic way because you can consolidate a lot of time of getting to know somebody. If you hang out with the group of people you don't normally hang out with over that time period or you go out to events afterwards or you spend time with that people, it accelerates your know, like and trust or your reach of this seven hour magic number to work with

people. So if you're doing business development or even coworkers in other departments, there's a really big value especially now with COVID and people working remote to being in the same room with somebody and especially people at other companies or customers or stuff like that. So I wanted to really highlight that and then quickly, social selling, we'll talk about

that later and then really all the things Mark that you're talking about doing that you know work 75% of the time, like you said, actually when I was a headhunter, when I was an oil and gas corporate recruiter or whatever, I would figure those things out. I'd figure out the things when I cold called people, what I said, what worked like it kind of got down to like an algorithm. And then you can now through digital marketing, why I gravitated to that is you can take those

things and you can use automation from a B2B selling standpoint, amplify that and make a good salesperson great, you can make a great salesperson like superhuman and you can do these things at scale. And if you know, like you're telling me things that can be quote unquote, programmed, right? And scaled up and automated and and you can have superhuman feats of reaching people following up with people through this automation and email stuff.

So I want to put that out there for everybody. And I did have one last quick story. And I think we may have shared this before I can't remember, but it's certainly something I couldn't do today. But I remember when I was prospecting oil and gas accounts and it's very hard to get in the door unless you know somebody.

So how do you prospect the count? So again, gravitates to more social selling, which we can talk about later. But what I actually did is accounts that I was a little bit in the door with where I knew some people or even accounts that were just close to my geographic location. When I was younger, so I kind of use this mentor mentee kind of sell. So for all you new salespeople out there, it's a really good motif to like put yourself

in of, Hey, educate me. I want to learn and get really good expertise wise, especially if you're male competing against female, like you got to leverage what you have an expertise. I think is that, and I was leveraging like a mentee relationship. I actually went to parking lots funny enough. This happened by happenstance of like leaving a couple of accounts.

There was always a group of people that were sitting around in the smoking section and they were smoking and I didn't smoke, but I would go over there. I was young or whatever. And there was a lot of secretaries that would like smoke and I would just befriend them or people. I did that a few times and then it like actually became like a strategy.

I developed a lot of great relationships and got in the door, kind of like in the back door really, right through that. But I mean, now you got security and I wouldn't recommend any of that, but it's just funny how the world has changed. But I certainly have different stories like that mark that I remember and again, everything's more gravitated to online, which there's a lot of opportunities to, but it is a different

world, right? I do want to go back to some of the stuff you mentioned. So the after-hour parties and happy hour events at conferences are super valuable for prospecting because you have something in common, right? You're at the same conference, which then tells you sort of what the makeup of that room is going to be.

So if you're at a conference, there's actually a conference coming up on valves, Matt, here in Houston. So if you go to the after-hour parties for the valve conference, you know that most people in that room have some interest in valves, right? So where people screw up is they try to sell in those happy hour social events. That is the absolutely wrong thing to do.

What you do is you want to just make introductions, exchange business cards, use the LinkedIn app. If you ever figure out how to scan the Q-code in the LinkedIn app, it's super valuable trade contact information. And then follow up later, the same way with a lot of the industry organizations, join them, become active in them, do not try to sell to anybody, but just get to know the

people there. Getting those relationships built is the fundamental of good prospecting is having those established relationships. What you don't want to do is go from not knowing somebody to meeting somebody and trying to sell them. This happens to me on LinkedIn every day, where somebody will send me a connection request

and I look at it. If it has anything to do with personal finance, anything to do with franchises, I don't accept it. If it looks legit, I accept it. And if it's a really bad salesperson, which is about 30% of the hour, immediately when I hit accept, here come the inbound sales messages, right?

That's the wrong way to do it. You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. I did you a favor by allowing you to connect. Get to know me first before you try to sell me anything. So those in-person happy hours, after-hour events, you know, industry, things like that

are super valuable. Same way with the industry organizations, because you get to meet the people and form that relationship is like the fundamental step of good prospect. So Mark, I'm going to throw something, a new concept maybe out there that a lot of people haven't heard. Maybe it's a little controversial.

I want to actually see what you have to say about this. So the way that if you want to frame it up, okay, so you have people's public life, right? And certainly online, you know, everything's trying to get digitized and the algorithms and Google and all the social platforms are trying to connect what's going on in the real world. But here's the thing.

Like you said, people throwing business cards at you, like, you know, you go to a work event and people are handing out business cards. They don't even know who you are. And then they hit all the business cards and leave and they're like, oh, I did my job. Like those business cards typically go right in the trash, right? So when you're interacting with anybody, whether it's hiring, whether it's sales, whatever,

there's kind of some psychology here. You're interacting with everybody on their public life, right? Even if you go to this conference, everybody's going to put their best foot forward, you're interacting with people on their public life. So what I think you're really trying to do at these conferences when you're getting to know people and really this is the crux, I think, of like business development is you're

trying to get across the line of the public life to people's private life, where people, like you have a new level of intimacy with that person that you actually know things about them that they wouldn't be able to find out online, like where you make this connection, right? There's even actually this deeper concept of like someone's secret life. And if you get access inside someone's secret life, like they're going to tell you everything

you want to know in their private life, but really a lot of people that you meet, you're just dealing with acquaintances that there's pleasantries, you know, the basics to develop business again, going back to know, like and trust, you want to try to break through that. I think that that's really the goal is to actually connect with people on a personal level. Have you ever had those conversations where you have like interest and then all of a sudden

the conversation goes completely in this personal direction, where you feel a stronger connection with somebody than you did before you knew that, like that is actually what the goal is I think is to break through the public life, connect with people in the personal life. Now they're just not just another what everybody knows, you know something about them, there's another circle of trust or intensity at that person.

And then of course, like, there's those people that like really know who you are, know you are that are quote unquote, you could put it in the concept of like a secret life. But do you see how there's different levels of getting to know somebody? And when you're at that conference, I feel like the goal is to cross that threshold and doing that in person and doing that over time where you're interacting with them a lot over a short amount of time.

There's a lot of value in that that again, I don't think talked about enough yet. I agree with you being able to be human and transparent and authentic, your authentic self. People know that. And when you make that connection at that authentic self level, that's a different level of trust. Right.

The last thing before we get off prospecting is content. You can create valuable content to prospect. I do it all the time. My original company modal points, you go back and look at the blog and look at all those video shorts where I'm talking about how to sell to Exxon and what happens when you lose the deal and all that stuff.

I created valuable content that my buyers or potential buyers, my prospects found super valuable. And guess what? Not only they consume my content after a period of time, if they had a need for what I did, what modal point did, which is help companies sell to all of us, they would reach out. So you can use content creation to prospect and the great thing about it is with not a

whole bunch of work and without hardly any money, but by putting good, high quality educational content out there, talking about the problems that you solve, that content is prospecting for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I've had clients reach out to me, I've had prospects reach out to me that became clients on a piece of content I did 10 years ago. So content creation itself can be used for prospecting.

This is straight up the power of the internet, right? We talked about target personas a little bit in past episodes and briefly touched on it earlier. Now we're talking about the customer journey, right? And you're talking about at each mini decision point, right? Through that buying process, where are they at in the funnel?

Are they unfamiliar with their company and they're trying to get like a framework in that? Are they trying to decide between that? Are they in the purchasing decision? You need to have assets in all those areas or sales pieces or sales aides or whatever you want to call it.

And this is where marketing comes in, right? Like it helps tell the story concisely and you can either create that yourself, homemade content, you can generate on multiple platforms. There's video, audio, right, podcasts, there's print, there's images. The brain can process images like way, way faster. So when you're telling a story, you're showing a graphic or infographic, really, really powerful.

Well, if you know these good stories or you know these good decision points or how-tos or commonly asked questions, getting your marketing team involved or tapping the marketing team as they might have resources in this area, I mean, that's literally what their job is to support the sales, the B2B sales. So get connected with them, get a partner to help support that and again, build that customer journey and figure out, do you have assets all along it, right?

And really, I think that graphic design and branding, marketing, like is so underutilized by salespeople, in my opinion, that requires so much experience and skill. Like if you're to compete on complex concepts or getting third-party reviews to say things that you couldn't say yourself, like you need to map this out of where the conversation typically goes the most and you need to have resources and tools in your tool belt to help you move the conversation forward or to get past that objection.

And typically the marketing department and ad copy and messaging, all these things we've talked about, if you have more than just yourself, you have a lot more potency and you have a lot more expertise and experience to rely upon to help you make that sale. And if you have access to those resources at your company, like please utilize them. That's what I encourage you to do, like tap marketing, because that's what they're there to do.

Yeah, and audience, this is why you should listen to what Matt just said, because what we haven't mentioned is Matt was just recognized as one of the top 10 most influential CMOs to follow in 2023 by Inc. Magazine. You heard me right. Matt is one of the 10 most influential CMOs to follow in 2023 by Inc. Magazine. So he's given you very expensive consulting for free on this show.

So we appreciate that Matt. So think about bringing in new logos, we've talked about your target list, we talked about your messaging, we talked about prospecting, basically getting in. Now the next stage is what has always been called a discovery call, even though it may not be a call, it may be a meeting, or it may be an email conversation, whatever. The discovery call is the most critical stage.

As a salesperson trying to bring in new business, this is where you're going to lose it. You'll get to this point, and if you don't have everything dialed in, this is the point you can lose this new prospect. A couple of pointers from me doing this for a very long time. 1. Be extremely comfortable and confident talking about money up front.

Do not hide the cost, do not he and haw about it. Both you and the prospect at this point need to know if it makes economic sense to continue the conversation. You're not going to scare people away. I see too many salespeople that are worried that they're going to scale people away if they talk about the dollars.

And quite frankly, if you're going to scare them away, they're going to be scared whether you talk about the dollar in the beginning of the conversation or the end, it doesn't matter. So that's super, super important. Then I see this with a lot of software people, please software peeps, quit doing this. Do not try to rush to a demo.

A demo is where the most risk is in this entire process of bringing in a new client. If you do not get the demo perfectly right the first time, you're going to lose this. By rushing to get the demo, I'm telling you up front, you're going to miss stuff. And please, if you have your demo deck, do not put a slide in the beginning of that deck with your current existing logos, people you're doing business with, I don't care. I might care later if I decide to do business with you.

Just get to the point, get to the problem that you're helping me solve and how you help me solve it. I don't care who you sold to before, I don't care how old your company is, I don't care where you're headquartered, get to the problem up front. So be able to talk money up front as quickly as possible. The financial acronym you have around being able to talk finances is huge.

I think we talked before in the show about if somebody doesn't have capital budget to buy whatever you're selling, you can move it to the operational budget or OPEX. Being able to understand how that works and help your customer move that to a different budget is huge. Then while you're in this discovery call, you need to make sure that you control as much of the sales process as possible.

Now I don't mean be overbearing. What I mean is, you come to the discovery call, you understand they're giving up their valuable time to teach you what they're struggling with. You need to learn, take really good notes and then set the next meeting. Before you leave, make everybody open up their calendars and set the next follow-up meeting. That could be a 5-minute go-no-go decision.

But make sure you get it in their people's calendars. Make sure you control as much of that discovery call as possible. If you're in a situation where there's a decision-making team and procurements involved, I promise you that if there's five people in that room that are supposed to be the decision-making team, there's another five people that are part of that decision-making team that are not in that room.

Be upfront and ask procurement who else is on the decision-making team. If they push back on you and they say, we don't want you to know, say, look, I cannot deliver a good solution unless I know everybody's concerned, all I'm trying to do is make you look good. Any time you tell procurement that you're trying to make them look good, they'll want to help you.

The other thing is, when you have your team that you're bringing in, if you bring into this discovery call or for this discovery meeting, make sure your team is smaller than your prospects team. You don't want to show up IBM with 10 people in suits and red ties if there's only two people on the prospects line. That's just basic psychology.

You're going to end up coming across as being intimidating. If you have somebody on your team that doesn't know how to be quiet, don't invite them. The worst thing you can do is just come and throw up with words. You need to listen. This is all about learning. This discovery call is super important that you learn as much as you can.

And then finally, once you've learned as much as you can, once you've secured next steps, once you've had the conversation about finance upfront, ask them if there's anything else that you need to know about how they buy. What they'll do is do two things. First thing, it will give you a timeframe. So a very common thing that I'll hear is, yeah, we're trying to make a decision in

the next three months. Well, in oil and gas, making a decision in a quarter is really fast, which is telling you there's a high need for what they're doing. They may not have time to go to RFP, which means that if your solution is dialed in and your demo was spot on based on everything you learned, you might just walk away with the business with no competition.

If they tell you they're just looking for information or they're looking to make a buying decision in the next 12 months, then you have to worry about things like RFPs. If you get into the process at RFP because you are the expert, volunteer to help them write the RFP. Now, I'm not going to tell you to do anything that's not ethical, but if they ask you to help write the RFP and you know that your solution better than anybody else's, make

sure you highlight that in the RFP and the questions so that maybe the RFP is written in such a way that you seem to be the best winner for whatever they're looking for. Once again, don't lie, I'm not telling you to do anything unethical, but try to volunteer to help write that RFP since you are the subject matter experts. So I'm going to stop there, Max. I ran off a whole bunch of stuff.

You want to comment on any of that? Yeah. Yeah. This is why I love this podcast because, Mark, you bring a ton of expertise to the sales process in oil and gas. I have some opportunities to emphasize a few areas and maybe fill in some gaps, but everybody

listening is just getting like fire, right? They're getting just really great knowledge. And so, you know, if you're listening to this podcast and you think it's valuable, please share it with other people because we're basically doing a sales training course, right? This is really, really good knowledge that was acquired through a lot of trial and area and experience.

We're sharing a lot of it. So I'm really excited to be part of this and just tap on some of this great experience that you bring to the table, Mark. So a couple of things, right? I love that you need to lock in the next step, right? You have to lock in that next step to make sure that you have a follow-up meeting.

A lot of times in this discovery call or free consultation, you talk about word vomit, you come in and you're trying to sell your thing, right? And you said this in there, like, remember, like when you're interviewing for a sales role or something like that, people talk about selling the pen, right? It's not about selling the pen, everybody. It's about listening to figure out what the person wants to buy.

And that discovery call and that free consultation, whatever you want to call it, you should be doing like 80% listening and you need to walk away from that meeting with the understanding of what is the problem and what are they trying to do? What's the problem that they're trying to solve? Because guess what? If you have that when you leave the call, you can do everything else in email.

I mean, if you got that dialed in right, you can keep pushing on that button. But if you don't get that right, a lot of times too, when you're sending that follow-up email, if you didn't do the discovery right and it's not sitting right with the customer, they're not taking that next step really quickly. And that's why it's really, really important that if you're going to send anything later, you got to lock in that next meeting to make sure, hey, what I sent you is that on is like,

you need a temperature check with them to figure that out to really uncover their problem. Now the pricing thing, I agree with you, certainly one is if they're not a prospect, you want them to deselect out. I would add, actually, I love the concept of anchoring, right? So basically throw out the big price at the beginning and give them a ton of sticker shock, right?

And then whatever their needs are and you're walking it back and you're customizing that solution to them, that price potentially comes down quite a bit of like the full bells and whistles of they need everything. And then that price doesn't look as bad to them because you've anchored this really, really high price. There's things that you're doing throughout the sales call, but I think people get this

desire to jump to that demo, like you said, to spray and pray, to just try to get that out there. Like you're not there to sell. You're there to see if they're the right fit for your services and really get zeroed in on what their problem is. And if you can solve their problem, you will win, okay?

If you answer that correctly, and then the last thing I'll just say on the RFP, I've written some blogs about this, really, here's the deal. If you're the one helping craft the RFP, you're probably going to get the sale. If you're the one that says they already have RFP written and they're asking you to submit, they're just getting like a ring in the hat, right? They just need another set of ring in the hat.

You're not the front runner. It's kind of like even on the hiring side, when the job is posted, it's probably already filled. You want to be on the inside loop of that. And I talk to people that are bidding after RFP, after RFP, after RFP, unless it's the government, like government contracts, which there's still some of this going on there,

but you got to understand people do business with people. And how did they get to the point to craft that RSP? You got to understand where they're at in that process. When I ask questions like, hey, when are you making a decision? Are you talking to anybody else? Where are you at in that selection process?

Certainly like if we were in like, okay, let me just use the past experience of recruiting space for gas, well, are you talking to other candidates? Okay, candidates, are you talking to other companies? You need to understand where you're at in that process to then evaluate what that next step is and where that urgency is on moving to that because so many people lose the deal, not because they have the right product or service or even the right relationship.

They have everything there. Somebody else is just further along in the conversation. And if they can get there and solve that problem before you, you lose. So you've got to really understand what you're competing with and try to be first and have the right solution and develop the right, like all those things happen, boom, you close the deal.

Right? Yeah. And I want to go back to the RFP because this is really important. I see this a lot in oil and gas. That is right in that procurement will have a number. So we need five, we need 10, we need 12 responses to this RFP.

So most probably the users or the end buyers, not procurement, already probably have their vendor of choice picked out in their head, vendor number one, vendor number two. If you somebody asked you to respond to an RFP and they won't let you meet the decision making team, don't respond to it. I'm telling you now, you're not going to win it, you're wasting your resources. All you are is a number, your cannon fodder, right?

If they won't let you meet the decision making team, decline. And if they push back on you, be very open and go, I think that the only reason you're asking me to respond to this RFP is because you need another submittal and I don't have unlimited resources. You can pay me to submit because it costs me time and money. And at that point, supply chain or procurement will leave you alone the moment you ask them

to pay for an RFP, they usually leave you alone, which is in another sign that you work cannon fodder. So this has been a great, great conversation about bringing in new logos. The one thing I want to close the conversation is we gave you a bunch of really good information that's not academia. It's based on real-world results of working in the oil and gas industry.

Between Matt and I, we probably have 40 years of experience of selling this industry. The very last thing I want to leave you with is you got to do the fricking work. We gave you information, we told you how to do it, we gave you tactical, we gave you strategy. Get out there and do it. Most salespeople that have a hard time bringing new logos, the fundamental mistake I make is they find excuses not to get out there and do what Matt and I just told you you need to

do. So get out there, get the work done. You will bring those new logos in. Yeah, I would just say the fortunes and the follow-up, right? The data says most salespeople stop at three follow-ups and then the data also says most deals are closed between seven and 12 follow-ups.

So there's a discrepancy there. Keep following up until you know it's a no and that door is closed. Professionally follow-up, automation helps, knowing who you're going after, why you're going after, that they're the right deal to make sure you're spending your time right. But man, I just had some people on my sales team close a deal because they were like a hound dog.

They knew that person had a problem. They knew they didn't solve the problem and they knew that we were the answer and they followed up and boom, closed the deal. So the fortunes and the follow-up. Keep on it. Don't just do three follow-ups.

If you need more touch points, leverage marketing automation. Yep. We'll just might drop it right there. This is place where we do the product reviews. Matt, we have a company that reached out that wants you and I to review their remote controls for presentations.

Cool. Which I thought would be pretty cool. So as soon as they arrive, I'll get it to you. We'll play with them a little bit and we'll give a review on that. If you want any of Matt and I's social links, they're all in the show notes. They're inside a group.

We're still working on that. That is going to be like the cream de la cream sales chief marketing officer, chief revenue officers in oil and gas, get together in person, almost like a mastermind. So stay tuned for that. And Matt, we didn't rehearse this. It's time for LinkedIn failure tip of the week.

The last show I did, I actually gave a fail. Do you have a tip? Man, I had a tip at OTC and I was like, man, this is going to be a great tip and I don't have something right now. But I can say that I did do a presentation on how the LinkedIn algorithm works. And I think that people, we might want to reserve this for some of the training, but

I would just tell you, the social selling component is becoming more and more important every day and putting out quality content. But I think it's 5.3% of all people on LinkedIn are actually content creators. So that means 95% of people are content consumers. So I would just say, be a content creator. There's still a lot of opportunity out there.

LinkedIn wants to create community and they have active groups. They have active feeds like create content, become that authority in your space and it will set you apart from the 95% of other people that are just consuming content. Great tip. All right. 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.