The role of customer relationships in both marketing and sales

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Learn more at rigor.us Folks, links are in the show notes. What's up, Matt? What's going on, Mark? Just busy, busy, busy. And by the time people hear this, we will actually be at OTC. So if you're going to the Offshore Technology Conference, come check us out in our podcast

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Oh, we absolutely. So we want a big shout out to Fifth Ring for sponsoring our podcast pavilion. And Matt, we are making a historic announcement. We're actually doing a press pass on this historic announcement. So it's something that's never been done in the only gas industry before. It's a first for the industry.

It's also a first for OGGN. It's going to be freaking incredible. So it's on Wednesday at 1230 at OTC. So if you're hearing this on Tuesday when it's released, get to OTC the next day. Come to our booth at 1230 and watch history be made. Love it.

Love it, too. This is the place where we talk about our reviews, but of course, nobody's giving us a review. Come on, people. Don't make us a bag. We have a little minute or two to leave us a review, which by the way, people, we have

a little new piece of technology that's in here. So even if you're not in the Apple or Spotify universe, you can still leave us a review. So go to the show notes, click leave us a review and it will automate that for you and make it ridiculously easy. So no excuse for not leaving us a review. And Matt, our topic today is the role of customer relationship management in both marketing

and sales, which is a great topic. Yeah. This is a topic. Yeah. It's your topic. You shouldn't think it's a great topic.

So before we get into the nitty gritty, let's kind of at a high level, let's talk a little bit on the different types of customer relationships, right? So at the very highest and at the very shallowest is the transactional relationship. That's when somebody needs to buy something you have and they just buy it from you and all the time and energy is spent on making that exact transaction. You have no relationship.

They walk away with whatever it is that they need it from you. That is something that is at the lower hierarchy of relationships and you want to move that to more in depth and more valuable relationships. That next step is a functional relationship. Well that transactional relationship is typically like a race to the bottom, right? It's just, hey, it's price, like it's just a transaction.

You're selling a widget. They're selling a widget. Give me the best deal. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

And you want to move away from that. That is transactional. Think about if you're selling paper clips and that which is a commodity, there's still ways to add a lot of value selling something as simple as paper clips. We'll get into that. The next step in their customer relationships is functional relationships.

That's where they know who you are. You know who they are. It's past the transactional stage, but it's not to the point where they see you as an ally. They just see you as a resource. That's not a bad place to be.

To be seen as the supplier of one inch ball valves or of wire line services or of office supplies and they know who you are. So they have awareness. That's a much better relationship than transactional, but still not the epitome of what we're looking for. Well, you're looked at as a resource, right?

Like if they have questions or how to or whatever, they at least like you enough, right, to be able to and know that they can come to you and really sales, right, is professionally helping people buy. And so really meeting that need from a functional standpoint. Yep. Yep.

And you understand how they buy from you. You understand their PO process, all of that. The next step up is an affiliate relationship. And I probably should not have used this word because Matt immediately went to affiliate marketing, which I get, but in my head, this is how I categorize them. But affiliate relationship is past functional.

So it's not the fact that they buy stuff from you. It's not the fact that they know who you are to buy the stuff. They start seeing you as a problem solver, right? As somebody has a resource besides whatever that you're selling. So it's a much closer step to that strategic relationship, which we'll get to next, but affiliate relationship is where they know who you are.

They buy from you. So they have transactions and they see you as also being valuable to whatever they're trying to accomplish. So I talk about in one of my books, essentially, like, you know, you start off down here. So anybody that's listening, it's like your hand is like even, right? And they're starting below even.

And that, you know, in like maybe transactional functional, they're telling you what to do. They're, you know, asking you to do stuff like you're an order taker to a certain degree, right? And then this affiliate relationship is like you're almost partnering, right? Like where, you know, they're looking at you. They're asking you for ideas.

It's like a colleague, right? Almost like at another company. And then you're about to talk about like the trusted advisor status, the strategic relationship where they're viewing you as an expert and they're coming to you for advice and all that sort of thing. Yeah, that's probably a better name.

But my head, I call that final stage strategic relationships. And that's where you're seen not as a vendor, but as a strategic part of your customer's team, where they reach out to you for help, not just around things that you solve with your product of service, but general business help. And eventually I have relationships, Matt, with some extremely senior people in some of the largest companies in the world that I've known for 20 years, they reach out to

me about personal stuff, right? They have such a high trust relationship with me that they reach to me when they're having personal issues with stuff. And so that next level at final episode, I call strategic relationships. That is when you're the trusted advisor. That is when you're brought in to help regardless of price, regardless of competition.

And that I think all, it should be your goal for all salespeople. And I want to stop here, I talked earlier about if you sold something that was a commodity like paperclips that you wanted to have a strategic relationship and people that sell commodities go, how we get beat up on price? That's because you let yourself be beat up on price. You have so much information in your head about your product, even if it's a paperclip

that you could show and be a strategic provider. And then the paperclip example, imagine an office that has to buy, you know, I don't know, 10,000 paperclips a month because they're processing mortgage papers, right? And they have to have the right size paperclips for the right amount of paper. What if you came in and said, look, instead of you ordering these, which means sometimes you had too many and sometimes you run out, which causes problems in your business.

What if I manage your inventory for you to make sure you always have the exact right amount of paperclips the right size, you're not overspending, you're not running out? Who would say no to that? Well, now, even in a commodity place like paperclips, you're now a strategic advisor to the company. You've taken something as a commodity and brought your expertise and elevators to the

point where they start seeing you as a partner. Each paperclip salesperson that uses what I just said owes me 5% of your sales for 2023. So yeah, I have two quick things to add on this. I think really one of the first one is, is like when you're in this strategic relationship or trusted advisor status, you're going to understand their business so well. You're going to understand them individually so well that you're going to be able to anticipate

their needs and you're going to be able to, you could call it upselling or you could understand what their problems are before you have that. When I was staffing in the oil and gas space for a long time, I had great relationships where I knew the people they needed before they needed them, before it even got put through HR, and I already had that person for them. So I could anticipate what their needs were because I was in sync with what their business

was and how it grows. And I think the thing that you said too that I think really, really is important when you go through a RP process or a proposal process or you're in a sales process is if you're selling against competitors, you want to connect the dots for them on if they hire you to do this or buy from you, your product is going to do XYZ and you want to string it together and connect the dots and add that value and say, hey, if you're going to take this for

approval to procurement or up the chain or whatever, if you use my product, we have a case study on how we're going to reduce this versus that. And even if they're selling the same thing, if you can provide actionable data that is tied to your product, you're at an advantage when you're selling and you want to remember you want to connect the dots. And typically what I think people want to do first is they want to hire someone safe,

so they're going to not look bad and their job is not going to be a risk or whatever. So I think that building that trust there first, but then adding that additional strategy, that additional value of how you string it together and that your widget, your paper clip, we have a case study on where we've saved XYZ versus just another paper clip seller. So you want to connect those dots for that person and then you want to also forecast what, like you were saying, what they might need.

There might be even other things that you sell pens and paper in addition to paper clips that as you build that trusted advisor strategic relationship, you can move into some of those areas. Right? Yeah. And you're absolutely right.

I have quite a few customers that are very large technology companies that I, because I have a strategic or high trust relationship with them, I can go in their companies and see problems. They don't even know they have put a solution together and come back with a price and going, here's the problem you have. Here's how much it's costing you.

Here's how much I will charge you to fix it and it's done, right? It's not even a conversation, but you have to get to that strategic relationship level to be able to do that. And that's where you move from a salesperson to a consultant. Yep. All right.

So I want to talk real quick through this. It's common sense, but why do you want to have a good customer relations? The first one is more sales, bottom line, more sales, better customer relationships you have, the more sales you can make. Check the box. Yep.

The next one is customer loyalty. If they like you, there's less chance of you losing to your competitors, whether your competitors have a cheaper option or not, and I've seen this over and over again, your customers will be loyal to what you do. Then there's a really big one. If you've done really good business and you have that strategic relationship and you

screw up and you own that you screw up, they'll forgive you. You come up front and go, hey, look, I told you we're going to have this by next Wednesday. We're not. It's going to be two weeks out. Totally my fault. They'll go, okay.

Whereas if you had just a transactional or functional relationship, you're probably out the door when you made that mistake. Forgiveness from errors is another one. Then we talked about this almost at every show. Recommendations. Well, just my thought on the forgiveness from errors is looking at it like a social bank

account and you've been putting money in, you've been putting money in, everyone's human. You're going to have to pull money out at some point. If you have enough money in that bank and you've been investing in that relationship, you can pull that money out without going like overdrafting or going negative or something. I think it's a good way to look at it is sales is this ongoing conversation and you want to continuously add value and put money in the bank.

Sometimes salespeople, that means that you have to push back on your own company. If your company is trying to do something that's not right to your customer, don't try to make it work with your customer. Be the advocate for your customer. Push back on your own company. I like that.

Then finally, the reason you want to maintain and grow customer relationships is recommendations. We talk about this in almost every show. If they know you, if they trust you, if they like you, they will recommend more business to you, which makes for easy sales and easy commission checks. Here's where we get to the part of how do you do all of this? How do you make sure you develop high quality customer relations?

One of the first ones I think is finding common ground. That does not mean that you walk into a new client's office and you see a basketball trophy on his shelf and you start talking basketball. That is so cliche. It's more like where are y'all in the business world? What's going on?

I mean, it's 2023 right now in the oil and gas industry. We're out of the pandemic. There's a huge global demand for hydrocarbons, but we can't hire enough people. That's common ground. I could talk to anybody in the oil and gas industry about what I just rattled off and that's something that we share and it's real.

It's not something I make it up because I see a trophy on somebody's shelf in their office. So make sure that you always find common ground with your customers. From a digital standpoint and certainly you can go a lot of different directions and finding a safe area of common ground like that is true. I think you can't discount tried and true like if there's a true connection.

If you see a basketball or you see a basketball trophy, if you don't have anything valuable to say and you can't really connect on that, try to find something else. I'll give you an example of that, what you said working well in a digital format, right? So I just spoke at a conference that was tied through OGGN with Knowledgevine sponsoring it for safety. They don't actually call in power HSE, but they call it just safety or human performance.

And the guy that was running the conference, I saw on LinkedIn that he is a wakeboarder and I actually tore my ACL wakeboarding, I've been wakeboarding my whole life. I did see that and that was an area of commonality and I believe we connected on it and at the conference went to kind of the after party whatever and got to know everybody a little bit better and we were sharing videos. He actually does a wakeboarding, his whole family wakeboards and they actually put together

a Christmas card video, Christmas card wakeboarding, right? And he's very, very passionate about that and that's something that I connected on. But the reality is, if I would have brought that up and I would have just been like, oh, yeah, wakeboarding is cool, right, like or whatever and I didn't have anything of substance of value to say or connect on, I could have gotten really out on a limb in an area that I don't know a lot about, right?

But it was an actual like building common ground that we've shared common experiences is really what we're talking about in the digital world and also in comedy. What is a meme, right? What does a meme stand for? It means memory, right? And that's what comedians connect with people on because someone's been in a similar experience

or seen a different thing from that perspective. And so if you can connect on a memory, there's closeness, there's commonality in that and you can find common ground in a lot of things and more passionate things and more potent things are certainly like lightning rods to connect even stronger with people, right? If you went to the same college, well, why is that a common alley? Well, you can talk about experiences and stories that they can associate themselves with that

they experience while they're too, right? So shared experience always super powerful. All right. So the next how to build this close relationship is just respond promptly regardless of what it is they need or who's asking. And I'm not saying drop everything and respond right now.

So in my world, Matt, you know, I get 200 emails a day, probably 50 texts, I try to respond within 24 hours. And if I'm busy and it's a complex answer, I will respond twice or respond once I will let them know that I got their message and I'll get back to them later. But this is just makes people feel like they're important. Nobody ever likes to be ghosted.

And in the sales world, you know, we get ghosted all the time and you know how that feels as a salesperson. So don't do that to your clients and that will help you develop the strong custom relationships. Like that's a form of rejection, right? Or people could view it as a form of rejection. The biggest thing that I had to train people on, and I think it seems to be pretty common

when I was training a sales team and we ran a phone bank and certainly I've done outside sales as well, is if you don't know the answer, you should respond like you said, hey, got your message, I will get back to you X, Y, Z, win, right? And then do what you say you're going to do, but respond to them so they know they got the message and they know that the ball is in your court. Because if they send the message, like things get lost in cyberspace, people's email address

has changed, stuff does happen. They just want to know, you got it, it's you're in your court now and then they're going to give you a reasonable business length, whatever time to respond. I think 24 hours is good. I think in consulting, I've seen, you know, four hours. I try to actually, I don't have my email open all day.

I actually check it in the morning and I check it in the evening. I wish I had time to check it during lunch, but like people get busy and, you know, if you just get back to them, kind of, hey, I got your message, I'll get back to you or a response in that 24 hour period, I think you're good. But yeah, people think it's like, they didn't get your message or you're not important to them and you definitely don't want to make people feel like that.

The number one reason that people leave based on the data is apathy. They believe that you view them as a number versus like a relationship, a human, right? Yep, yep, that rolls right into this. My next one, which is just show that you're reliable. So being reliable is keeping your promises and everybody understands that stuff happens. So for some reason, if something changed and you can't keep to your commitment, as soon

as you find out, let them know. And showing that you're reliable is just one of those other personal things to help build customer relationships. And everybody out there that's listening, that works in the Apple universe, you may not know this, you can drag an email out of mail and drop it into a calendar, it makes a calendar invite, which makes it ridiculously easy to remember to follow up.

It literally takes a second to do that. So showing that you're reliable is another way to build a strong customer. And what I would say, Mark, from a marketing standpoint is you should be leaning on your marketing team. A lot of commonly asked questions, a lot of like how tos, informational videos. And what I mean is job is to try to make your job easier and to take maybe even complex

answers or conversations and boil them down into maybe a one pager or a video or some kind of resource that you can be reliable, right? Like you get back to them in time, you let them know the things they need to know. But also they're looking for you to help answer their question and you can lean on marketing to help expedite getting them an answer or getting back to them. And being connected into marketing, they maybe have access to other resources that you might

not have. So I would just say, if you're a salesperson, you should have a marketing contact that you can lean on because you might not even know how they can support you and help you. And then automation technology, like you kind of touched on that, Mark, there's all kinds of things to be able to personalize it and to help you do things that you do consistently or a lot or commonly asked questions in a way like canned emails, right, are a great

ability to be able to respond quickly and reliably. Yeah. And another thing, make sure that if you get asked the same 10, 12 questions over and over again, you bring your marketing team in because they literally could build you some resource and content that your clients themselves could access that content at their leisure to answer their questions, which once again, you're not doing anything but showing

that you're reliable. All right. Here's another good one. Always add value. Try to add value in every conversation that you have with your clients, right? It doesn't have to be anything big.

It could be something as simple as, Hey, did you notice that the price of WTI is flat this week? It could be something as complex as, Hey, I know you're headed toward the end of the year and with your budgetary cycle planning, can I help you with your budget planning? Right? Always adding value is important.

And if you think about this podcast that you're listening to, it's what Matt and I are trying to do. We're trying to add value to sales and marketing people's lives in oil and gas. And the reason we're doing that is because some of our listeners will end up being customers of ours. And so we're adding value with the podcast.

So in the world we live in today, right? And in this online connected social media driven world, that is actually how you start the reciprocation process is you start by adding value. Like when you meet somebody, Hey, how can I help you understanding what's going on with them? And then adding value and starting that positive cycle to build that reciprocation.

It is absolutely how business is done today and it's certainly done online. That's what the definition of content marketing is or attraction marketing. And the reality is, you know, this may be getting in the weeds a little bit, but there's done for you and done with you type services, right? And a lot of oil and gas is done for you type services or done with you consulting type services, not like do it yourself.

But you want to show that you're an expert and you want to explain that you're an expert. And so providing resources of things that you've done before case studies or testimonials or things of that nature, showing that you're that expert and that you or your company have added that value before and then teaching them something starts that positive cycle up, right of reciprocation, 100%. The next thing, listen and don't sell.

Now if you're a sales person listening to the show, you're mature enough in your sales process to know that, that you can't make people buy stuff they don't want. And if you try all it does is aggravate them and lowers your chance of ever closing a deal. But when you're talking to your clients and you're looking at building customer relationships, listen, just listen. The sales conversations will happen when it's time, but don't make your conversations with

your existing clients about sales. Just understand what's going on in their days and see if you can help. Yeah. And I would just say with new sales people, like even just sales people, like you like to talk, right? We like to talk.

You got to remember that it's an ongoing conversation. Don't word vomit right out of the gate. You have this desire to sell, this desire to talk. Know that you can cover a lot of that, but you really need to get to know them. They need to know you care before they, and they know why you're there, right? They know your company.

They know your role. Like if you're interacting with them, you want to really treat the beginning of those relationships in a discovery process, especially like I was training my team on the phone is like, Hey, when someone sets an appointment with us, like literally 80% of the time you should be listening. You should have these questions.

You should uncover it. And then here's the great thing, right? With email, with video chat, if you understand what their needs are, you can go back and craft whatever you need to craft to then send it in an email and hit the nail on the head to cover those thought buttons and move that process forward. You don't have to do it all in the call.

And the more things that I realize when salespeople are talking, only a certain amount of it's retained, right? So if you're a word vomni, they're going to pick up one or two things. It's really better to listen a lot, keep it short, connect with them, and they're going to remember how they feel versus what you said. They're going to remember the feeling they took away versus all the things that you've

covered. And there's only going to be a few things that kind of highlighted high or low for them. And so, you know, focus on that connection and understand their need and try to solve that problem. And again, building on the adding value, right? So yep.

Then check in with your clients, even if you've hit your quota, even if you exceeded your quota, take the people that buy from you and reach out to them once in a while just to see how they're doing. And this is where marketing can come in and do all this stuff for you. But it's super important. Just check in with your clients.

Yeah, there's surveys, there's polls, you know, certainly checking in with people just, hey, are we on the same page? You're understanding how things going. You can automate that. Really yeah. There's from a marketing standpoint, you can leverage that.

And also like having these touch points that are outside just selling every time you're talking to the customer, it gets you outside that transactional or that functional relationship. That's how you're going to move up that chain. You know, you just, you sometimes they just need a year to listen to, they're having a bad day. Like you can offer so much more and people are not like two-dimension, one of the things

that I actually used to do. Now we have LinkedIn and all these other things. But when I was a young salesperson, I had my company business card. And then I had a business card that actually had a link to like a personal blog or a link to my Facebook. And I tried to humanize myself as much as I could, right?

And to kind of connect with them, that blurs some of these other points that we're talking about, but you've got to listen and you've got to connect. You just need to see what's going on. A lot of times you're like sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, like, hey, are you catching me? Are you explaining something in a sales presentation? Check in with them.

Stop to see if you're over people's head. Look at their reactions. Don't be so focused on you, right? I think it's more even what this is saying. If you're doing a sales presentation and you look up and everybody's on their phone, you've lost them.

I mean, just stop. Just stop and go. It looks like I lost you. Everybody's on their phone. Yeah. All right.

And then finally, when you look at building good customer relationships, think long-term. You may lose the sale. You may not get the margin that you want, but you maintain the relationship and over a long period of time, that will come back and help you form some of the most deep and rewarding customer relationships that you've ever formed. Some of my best customer relationships right now are with companies that told me no in the

very beginning. And I stayed in touch, I showed value, I showed that I was reliable, I listened, I didn't try to sell to them, and now they're big spenders with us and they trust me, right? So think long-term when you're thinking about customer relations management. You know, the people that say no, that kind of reminds me of like the tough teachers, right?

Are always the ones that you had to try. They raise the bar. You know, not everybody's ready to buy, that 3% of people are ready to buy. The data says salespeople just fall up on average like three times, and it's like seven to 12 times to close the deal. You want to be exceptional.

You want to go above and beyond. You can use automation. You can use sales tools to do that. I would say also the thinking long-term, especially with COVID, like some of the downturn, companies can go through stuff. You never know where that person's going to end up, right?

And you want to keep that relationship open. And also, if you can add that value and go above and beyond and think long-term, you can forge some really, really powerful relationships by doing that. And you, again, want to think about this in an ongoing conversation, a multifaceted multi-vector interaction, because things can change in an instant, and people could be in different roles, and people can be promoted, and it's just crazy where life takes you.

And really developing good relationships is, I think, the key to sales and being proficient in whatever it is that you're offering and to add value and be viewed as an expert. And there's a lot of ways to do that. I think that will lead into talking about how to write a book at one point and these other things. You're trying to move towards that trusted advisor status, and that is every time you

interact with somebody, you're building that trust. And that's one thing we haven't talked about, is doing one thing can jeopardize it all. And so you're constantly building, and you're building your name, and your reputation, and your reliability, and your thoughtfulness, and your expertise. It's this ongoing process of building your personal brand, and you've got to think about long-term for your business, and you've got to own up to your mistakes, and you've got

to be able to connect with people, have that dialogue, know they can trust you. It's kind of all-encompassing of how you should be yourself, how you should be like the long-term. I think that is important. Yep. And so we just went through the reasons and the hows and the whys of customer relationship management, both from a sales and marketing point of view.

It's time for our product review. We don't have a review today, although Tiago reached out to me, and we're going to review his product pod squeeze on the next show. So stay tuned for that. And then if you go to the show notes, they'll all of Matt and our social links there. You can connect with us on whatever your social channel choice is.

Our insider group's coming. We're still working on it. It's going to be awesome. I promise you. All right. It's time for our LinkedIn failure tip of the week.

Last time you had a tip, this time I have a fail. Matt. I had somebody that called, called me on LinkedIn, sent me a message, right, an in-mail, actually, not even a connection that caught my attention, that looked valuable, that was very transparent, that caused me to click on the link because I wanted to learn more. And when I clicked on the link, I hit a 404 page.

Wow. This salesperson did everything right, except they didn't double check their link, right? So they had my attention, which is hard to get. I wanted to learn more, so my curiosity was aroused and it brought me to nothing. So if you're doing work on social, double check your links. It takes a second, but look at what the salesperson lost.

He may have closed a deal with me if he just would have taken a second to check his link. And of course, he didn't do it on purpose, it was an accident. And because the message was so valuable, I reached out to him and said, look, you sent me to a link that's bad, but still I would like to learn more. And he was super thankful because of course, he had sent the same thing to 10 other people. But just take a second to check that link, it can make all the difference in the world

between starting a relationship and closing a deal and striking out. Man, marketing, automation, it's technology. You've got to double check what you're doing, especially if you're going to do something at scale. You've got to make sure that your first impressions are the right impression because who knows how many times you've done that, right?

So that's great that his message was so powerful that you actually reached out. A lot of people that were lukewarm would just move on, right? And opportunity lost. All right, we've got to get out of here. So 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.