Transition: Dealing with Sales Changes w/guest Michel Prive

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, we're back, everybody, sitting in our...

Oh, yeah. ...new favorite places, actually, to record at. You know, Matt, I actually reached out to the owner, and I'm waiting to hear back. It's like, man, if y'all want some free publicity, we come to record here, you know? Yeah, this is great.

It's right around the corner. It's a good environment. I like it. And now we're stepping it up. We're building, like, a whole studio in the back here. And today we have a guest, which a lot of times we don't have.

We actually have Michelle Privet with us today. Thank you for joining us. That's right. And the coffee here in this place is pretty good as well. You know, I have to say. See you at third party.

Look at that testimony right there. And so we're actually going to talk about something that we haven't talked about before. And it's all around dealing with sales changes. And Michelle, you do a lot of work as either fractional VP of sales or with your consulting work around sales strategy.

And you see these changes and you see how it affects organizations, especially sales organizations. And my guess is it typically hurts sales performance, not helps sales performance. Is that right? Absolutely.

You know, so typically my old curry and when I'm getting in, you know, engaged with with customers is that a change happen or a change needs to happen or a change is about to happen. And this is could be pre acquisition, could be someone leaving, it could be, you know, market collapsing or big customers look, you know, changing.

So it affects people. It affects the business overall and the revenue. Yeah. And so when somebody reaches out to you, good look, we're having an issue. We had some changes going on.

Our team is not performing. We're not generating the revenue that we normally generate. What's the first thing you do when you come in the door? I would be first of all meeting the people, you know, I'm looking at mindsets and I'm lucky to have access to tools to do assessment on the individual basis, on the sales team basis,

on the sales management basis and your whole team. So the end, you know, the first part will be very much the assessment looking at how the customers are handling their own customers. They know their customers. I've seen that over the time is that, you know, organization who have especially says people who have been in their jobs

or, you know, for a long time, they stopped to listen carefully to their clients. And so I would be doing, you know, some very basic one-on-one assessment. I've seen it where I've had a sales team sell to the same three or four clients for a decade and they still don't know the client's business. They basically were order takers.

Never took the time to learn the client's business. And then when something important changed, they didn't know how to deal with it. Yes, you know, about a month ago, I did a workshop at, you know, one division of a million dollar company and I asked each one of the sales people to select the ideal client profile and the buyer persona and to discover that in fact, you know, those guys would decide

to pick up the customers they wanted. How less or not enough they knew about their clients and especially, you know, what makes their clients days difficult. So we had to reassess this part here and, you know, we generated some actions to get that fixed. Yeah, that's super important.

You know, you mentioned client persona. It's one of the things Matt has taught me very much. Even that can change, right? So as you go through time, the person or the organization that buys from you changes and the reason they buy from you changes, and that's something else that you deal with.

Absolutely. What we've seen and, you know, we've met here, you know, talking about marketing, especially during COVID, our profession in sales has changed dramatically. Where before we were able to have face-to-face meetings there and build them the relationship, we were, we stopped being able to do this.

That trigger, in fact, you know, and the same for the buyers. That triggers some behavior change. Oh, yeah. That the buyers now, you know, they have access to tools, plenty of tools to be able to pre-qualify. In fact, what do you want it to sell if you are the right candidates?

So to answer the questions, you know, over the years, the buyers change, their behavior change, the way they communicate change. I've got customers. I saw customers taking orders on WhatsApp here on WhatsApp. That's a new one. Well, you know, $40,000 asset on WhatsApp, you know,

the salesperson never talk to the individuals. Well, that is contractual. Okay. So anything in text or email is contractual. It's just the comfort level of people doing that since COVID. I mean, really, it's even shortened the sales cycles a lot.

Absolutely. Because you can meet with people more frequently remotely than it takes to get a meeting or even like I was getting pulled into like some of these like lunches, right? Like multiple lunches. And I was like, I do not have time for like a two hour lunch.

I got, I got other stuff that's going on, you know? And, and so it's just changed how people buy, how people do research and then, and the decision-making process. And I just think that Mark, why we started this podcast, that intersection of that information. I mean, this data point, which I've said multiple times,

which we were talking about is 80, 85% of the people are like doing their own research and kind of looking to buy before they raise their hand and start talking to a sales order. And so the lead nurturing process can, can be developed and really help the salespeople as kind of like air cover or auxiliary support as you're doing that account based selling or you're developing new prospects

and, and it opens up your tools like for tools to assess new clients as well as for clients to access vendors. And you can use all these tools to help make better educated decisions. It is amazing how much COVID changed all that. And even though I like to consider myself a very aware person, even though I'm not always aware, recently had somebody do just a

plain old fashioned phone call with me, no screen, no video. And it's like, I forgot what that was like. I sort of like that, you know? And, but that's for, for COVID. That's all we did was conference calls, right? There was no video conferencing.

It was there, but we didn't use it like we used it today. So I will tell you, I know that this is a LinkedIn failure tip, but I'll talk, we can talk about it next one. I use the QR code, okay, the QR code in LinkedIn to connect with people nine times out of 10 versus business cards today. Yeah, I started doing that too.

Now LinkedIn moved that damn QR code about six months ago. No. No, well, it used to be in the top. Well, they're now, they might have moved it. They moved stuff all the time. Yeah.

But it's a great way instead of a business card. You're absolutely right. Well, if you just go into network, if you just go into network, say, I'll do it right here. And there's this blue button. Once you go to your network, you click on that and then it has the QR

code there and then you can also scan to the camera. And I mean, I've, I've done this so many times, like when I'm not caring business cards, I run into somebody, hey, let's connect. And then you use LinkedIn as like a AOL as the messenger for everybody listening where you can communicate with people. And then I mean, after you're talking to them, if that's the

medium you're talking on and you're comfortable with, yeah, I take orders on that sort of thing, right? Or I send links or here's a bi-link or whatever. Yeah. Well, until LinkedIn sponsors this show, although LinkedIn, if you're listening, we would actually, you would make a great

sponsor for this show as much as we all use it. So another thing Michelle, that happens a lot is you will see businesses change, especially in oil and gas. So right now today is 2024. A natural gas is at historically low price. A lot of the natural gas producers like EQT are actually shutting

in wells because they're not making any money. So if you're a salesperson that sells things like a gas compression engines, access to pipeline gas dryers, you're dying right now, you're suffering. However, crude's up. And so the people that sell, you know, well parts and pieces,

mud pumps and all that stuff are doing really good. So, you know, if a business changes because of market conditions, that's another reason that they may need to bring somebody like you in to help them figure out how do you deal with these new market conditions? Absolutely.

And especially when you're, when your business is fluctuating, we know that, you know, this is cyclical, except if there's a revolution, let's say that. But so this is when you have downtime, you need to change in fact, your focus and your activities in sales. So, you know, your customers are not buying, but this is maybe

at the right moment to do all the things. So you have to look at, you know, potentially where should be using not so much about your product, but your capabilities. You have to reposition eventually your business into, yeah, into services instead of selling or both. Or it could be just doing housekeeping.

What I'm saying housekeeping is that what we've seen organizations who are locked into one position and very much the victim of the market conditions, they need to have to adapt themselves because otherwise they're going to be there into the next cycle again. And so housekeeping is would be about reestablishing or writing

processes, allowing the company to be to be more agile to changes and be able after that also to expand in other places in the world diversify in other markets. But to be able to do this, you have to have the right mindset right from the beginning. And I met several customers who just throw their arms in the

ears that well, you know, it's the market is going down. So we're going to be scrolling down and let's hope that the other, you know, it's not going to be too long to last. So what I'm bringing in is that this is not fatality. We can make it different. They are different outcome.

I got that, you know, my original background is very much from the aerospace. I grew up in aerospace and that was at the time when aerospace was very cyclical. I don't know if you remember, you had the good years. You had the terrible years all the time.

And the company I was working for, in fact, in on the sales side, we were doing, we were so much working with our customers developing the new generation of products, the new technology we were, in fact, working the most at that time. So to be clear that even if we didn't have any orders on the engineering side on the customers partnership for the new

technology to brings, we were spending quite a lot of time and we were, in fact, you know, harvesting our efforts a little bit later. Well, you know, aerospace is a long cycle sales. So we know that, but we were always coming up or coming back from the crisis much stronger than when we came into the

crisis. There's always something to be done in sales 100% or that no matter what, you know, the cycles you are in. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you right now, all your sales leaders in oil and gas that when your numbers aren't right, you

blame it on the market, stop it. There's always opportunity. In fact, I would venture to say that during a down cycle, there's more opportunity than when there's an upcycle. So there's an upcycle. Everybody's busy and they're not taking the time to look at new

products or services. They just need to get stuff done in a down cycle, oil and gas. People will stop and listen because they're not generating revenue. Well, that's where you do the house cleaning. And I like that analogy of house cleaning and that's where

you reposition and that's where you strengthen. And if you can do good in the down cycle, you know, the weaker players are going to fall off. You can grow pretty substantially on the upswing. And so, I mean, I'm looking at the car industry, some stuff we do afford.

Like they sold through the down cycle and came out so much stronger than the other car companies. Okay. That was the answer to the problem is let's market and sell and build the brand and position ourselves well so that when there's another car buying cycle, we're the market leader.

You know, what you don't know because you and I never talk, even though you're a chief marketing officer is I came back this morning from a car dealership. We just closed the deal. We have a new podcast. The car dealership is sponsoring.

So to your point, you would not think a car dealership would be a customer of OGGNs. However, I looked outside the box and said, what a car dealerships look for, especially luxury cars. They look for high net worth individuals. What's one of the characteristics of our audience is that since

they work in high working on gas, they're high net worth individuals. Yeah. I mean, just by making a mental shift to your point, I opened up a new market. If this things works, we now have a different line of potential

customers for OGGN outside of the companies that work in the oil and gas space. Blue ocean. Absolutely. And you know, and that's that's one of the things that you know, about the change is the mindset of being open and be able

to recognize listening very carefully to whoever you are contacting and be open, being creative as well, innovative and be able to carry after that these words to someone. Yeah, the market research like that. I think the market research because things we were talking about how things shift over time.

Like you've got to really know who your customer is, make sure it's the right kind of customer because a lot of times sales people think someone's their customer, but for whatever reason may it be the margin, whether it be like the, you know, the bulk of the business, like how maybe their sales basket is set. This is who their most important client is, but they don't

understand maybe the bigger goals and everything has to be aligned properly. And I would even say I've seen incentives mark being out of whack cause salespeople to do things that are not in line with the business that have to be repositions or I mean, that's what's dictating how driving activity for salespeople and

if that's not aligned with what you're trying to do, people are going to like work loopholes if they're good and work the system and it's going to take your business in directions you might not want to go. I was that guy in my past career, my company set up certain goals for salespeople and what did I do?

I maximized my personal income. It wasn't the best for the company, but they set up the wrong incentives which drove the wrong behavior and we were talking about this earlier salespeople will always gain the system. Engineers, project managers, accountants never think about salespeople always gain the system.

So you're a hundred percent right and that's actually I'm guessing one of the things that you help is helping set incentives to make sure you drive the right behavior. Exactly. And I've been a business owner myself. So I've been managing.

I'm an engineer by my training. If I came in, you have a personality. How are you an engineer by? Well, you know, I love engineer. You know, I'm an engineer and I became a salesperson than a sales leader there, but I approached the sales very similar

way that as an engineer, you know, I like the creativity. I like, you know, what is happening there. But to come back to your point, yes, we do incentive plans. We help the business owners to create incentive plans that are in fact, mattering for the for the business, the business owners and snuts.

The incentive plans needs not to be on the quarter. It needs to be on the years. It has to be attached directly to the business strategy, then the sales strategy, then the immediate needs for the quarters. So you need components of all of this into it so that if the sales guy is doing good with their customers, the business

will do good as well. We are no one is losing. And obviously those compensation plans needs to be reviewable on a quarterly basis because market condition change. And you want in your team as well, you know, component of a teamwork and team efforts combined together.

But it's a long answer to your question. It's a great answer. And you made me think of something you talked about earlier about actually doing assessments. And if people aren't familiar with that, which you should be if you're in sales or marketing, basically you're measuring

people's experience and maybe their personality traits and you're doing that because you want to compare that to other bits of data. So when you come in, you do an assessment of sales thing. What I'm guessing is by doing that assessment, you can individualize the help.

So I'm guessing that one salesperson may not want to talk about price. One salesperson may not be good at closing. One salesperson may not be good at generating leads. And if you measure that and recognize that, then you can individually target that salesperson that needs to understand

how to close a deal and just train them on that. Am I close? Yes, you are close. Or if, you know, one of the first things that I do as well is to validate the coach ability of the individuals. Oh, that's a good one.

Because, you know, this is part of the assessment is the ability to listen towards us. And, you know, if you see people that are closing, they are not good at being coached and that even for salespeople, they generally have difficulty to hide that. You know, it's easier because it could be just moving people

from one job or one sets of tasks that they are doing in the sales process into another set of tasks where they won't have to talk about the pricing. It will be repeated orders. It will be customers very much care customers management more on the ability to expand the customers to, you know, sell

more less transactional, more strategic. So once again, you know, the assessment is covering this. And obviously what you want in your sales team, you want a little bit of everything to be able to to function the best way. But what the assessment is about as well is that to identify

if you have a sales team with a lot of people who are not good at talking about price while training is very important of your scene. But after that, you know, for the next recruitment to balance the team, you invite using the assessment to create your job descriptions for the next one to come in.

And I know you say, you know, in because customers are changing, that was the beginning of the discussions here. You know, the communication methods, the people we are talking to, you have to adapt. You have to be sure that your team stay very much in line into this.

So you might have some changes and the new changes of the replacement will be more in line in fight with what you want to do next today and tomorrow more than what you did in the past. I love that. So now you can hire for fit. Right?

Yes. It's sort of like if you had a football team and you need a new quarterback, the rest of the team is solid. You can hire just the quarterback. Exactly. Well, you got to say, I think setting that baseline is super

important to know what you're working with and and also the capabilities of every salesperson are different, right? And you can, when I, I was on a pharma team, okay, I know we're talking about oil and gas, but they had different people with different skill sets at different ages that would connect with different people as well.

And we were all selling the kind of the same bag because everybody had like a different vector or approach or angle. But I think that like understanding like, I don't know, I use the analogy of like a video game, like you're on a race car and you're going around the track or you're going through that cycle and like, what do you need to upgrade?

Like, what do you need to improve? And then you've talked about this a lot, Marcus, getting that customer feedback. So really understanding the customer feedback and getting that third-party data to even bring in somebody that can look at that to give you perspective of what you're seeing every day.

Like people can see things super clearly and then building that all-star team. I really like that. I like that idea. And I also like the idea of moving people around. It's not a good fit.

How many, how many of us have seen where the top performance sales guy in the team or girl gets promoted to sales leader and fails miserably, right? Because what made them a great sales contributor up front is a different set of skill sets and experience that takes to lead a sales team.

Biggest mistake ever made in my career was taking that jump, moving from a frontline sales person to salesman. I was horrible at it and I didn't make enough money, right? Because everybody else had to beat their number. So I went back to be in a frontline sales person. Oh, well, I guess I think does a pretty good job of this.

Like with you, you talk about like technical managers and like manager managers, like they separate that out understanding that delineation between, you know, you're like a technical advisor, but maybe you don't want to be a manager manager, right? And do the managerial things.

And I think the same thing can be done in sales and understanding what is the sequence of events when we talk about that customer journey that that person needs to hear and who needs to be brought into the conversation and who's going to connect with the right person. So when you have this team, you're basically like a symphony

orchestrating what what's happening and how people are interacting. And I can tell you like, certainly, I think belief is like some people don't have an issue with price because they don't believe in the cost of whatever they're selling. And there needs to be education behind that because this

transfer of enthusiasm is absolutely critical. The one thing I wanted to ask you about was like, how do you deal with pre-Madonna's? Okay. And if everybody understands like, so the sales all stars that just don't take the direction that maybe are not the

team players, but they're so critical to your business. That's some of the bigger issue. I think when you have a sales team, if you if you have some of these legacy people in there that are so good, like, what do you do with them? Well, you know, that's excellent.

We all met pre-Madonna's. We might have been pre-Madonna's. You know, I was kind of a one too. And and and I was lucky every time to in my career to have mentors who are who manage my this spot there. So obviously you need a mentor.

And in the part of the pre-Madonna's when I'm coming in as an organization or in new job, they very much come to you first. Yep. So obviously you have to welcome them first for who they are.

And one of the things that that would be acts as them is to contributes to to help me in my role of educating others to become how good, you know, as good as they are. And we talked about an incentive plan. There you go. And because an incentive plan for pre-Madonna's you should

have also to help them or to because they are competitive to have a function or to have a component of their incentive plans to help all this to share what they do well with the houses and I combine in them into this mentorship that you try to implement into the team. And so most of the time, you know, we are in cells or cells

of marketing egos are big in cells. And if you don't have a system with egos, that means that you have a potential issue here. You have employees. You don't want them. You want competitors.

So the the whole idea is very much to harness this this ego this this competitiveness for the good of of the team. I'm not saying to get the money from the individuals in the in the pocket of the team is to get some of the time of the big competitors to be shared to help the team to go up. I love that and I was one of those pre-Madonna's and now

that you said all this, I just realized that one of my sales managers pulled that exact thing on me. Now I thought before we had this conversation, I thought that he really needed the help. Now I think he was just dealing with one of his top performers. That's what I got.

That's exactly the same thing. He asked me to help bring some of the other sales, the junior sales people up to my level. They come shadow me and then I would explain to them why I did certain things and why I didn't and a part of my compensation was based on that.

Oh my God. I just realized I got managed and your ego was satisfied and I loved it. I loved it. Exactly. Well, I would tell you, I think what I've seen happen is ask

them to do the coaching, but don't tie it to any kind of incentive and then it and it looks as like more work, right? Like do I want to take on more work? So I think it's aligning that ascent of with what the goals of the company are because, you know, you're maybe you're speaking to someone's ego or whatever and you got the mentorship

component, which people can step into that role. But I think you have to have that aligned with the incentive plan to encourage them to do it where it doesn't feel like here's an extra chip on your shoulder that you have to carry. And that's the reason why it's important to do for those pre-medunals.

You know, if you have the liberty to do it is to have their incentive plans on that part together with them. I like that. Because together with them. So that means to be a trade on or it could be that they get a piece of what the other guys are doing for them.

So it overrides or something like that. Exactly. So and so that means that there's nothing forced upon and if you are smart, you make sure this is their ideas. You know, but they see you from a distance if they are stupid. So, you know, you know, I like to put things on the table and

let them know what I'm doing. So I have a question and this is gonna come out from right field, but Matt and I firmly believe that an oil and gas that sales and marketing teams should be joined at the hip should be a team as in one, even though they do different duties and we even think they should be their compensation

should be connected as in the marketing team compensation should somehow be tied into sales performance. What do you think about that idea? Absolutely. You know, it's to me, I see, you know, I looked at it as a customer's journey.

Yeah. So the customer's journey start very much from the from what marketing is is expressing to loyalty and it goes from, you know, the lead generation, the qualification, then after that closing the orders, understanding why we lose the business. Then after that, you know, the repeat orders to the loyalty

to the can count management and and then after that, the transformation of its own brand or services, you know, according to what the customers are asking you to do. So obviously everybody's is very much connected into this because it doesn't start with marketing and stop where marketing and sales starts.

It's an overlap and the best way to do it is that is very much to look at these aspects, not from the departments, but from the customer's perspective. Love it. The customers, you know, the journey of the customers so that if you look at what Amazon is doing, you know, we have

very high regard. We are used to consumers of Amazon. They're very much doing this. And so they make it so easy for the customers to buy from them and repeat them. So the question I have to piggyback on the question of customer

journey is I would like to hear from you. If someone brought you on to help them and they had a struggling sales organization, okay, like what are some of the big kind of red flags to say, oh my gosh, I have an issue. I need outside help, right? But then what what does that customer journey look like when

they bring you on? Like we talked about like looking at the sales team setting the baseline incentives, like could you just paint the picture kind of all the way through so someone knows like start to finish what that might look like. Well, yeah, that's a complex.

Well, it could vary, but like let's say like most of the time it will follow this general path. Part of my own assessment of the customers here is that I'm looking at attrition. Attrition, okay. Attrition rate is very important.

If they are in a business or B2B business where what they sell should be a repeat business and they are very high attrition rate. It means they are not doing there's something they don't do right. So after that, the attrition would be is the customers cyclical. So that mean it could be assigned to they buy too much stock or you know, that could be, you know, related to other aspects there.

But attrition rate is very much a big there. And most of the time when I do my assessment, customers don't know. Sometimes, you know, they see that they start the year by they want to grow, they say they have $10 million business. They want to be 11, but they just realized that in fact, they don't need to grow by a million dollars.

They need to grow by two and a half million dollars. So one part of the business strategy would be, and this is the business strategy, not the sales retention is the customer retention. What are we doing to make sure that we don't have to to swim with ski shoes against the current?

Right. I like that. It's so that means that, you know, so on the sales side, it means that the customer loyalty has to be taken care of. And then after that, you know, what more can we sell to existing clients? We know this is the shortest.

Increase the basket size. Absolutely. And then after that, you know, where can we be bringing people in? Yeah. So this is, and this is very common. Big business, small business.

It's very common. I hope I answered those questions. That was great. I do want to go back and revisit the prima donna thing just real quick. Did somebody just hand deliver you lunch while we were recording a podcast? No.

I guess they did. So I think that definitely falls in the prima donna category. At least today. Just give you a little bit of hard Greek hard time that and we're getting close. We need to be winding things down.

This has been a fantastic conversation. If people wanted to learn more about you and your business, where should they go? They should go to LinkedIn. Yeah. And we'll have a link in the show notes for LinkedIn profile.

So make sure you go check everything out. Matt and I's social media accounts are all in the show notes as well. We're hard and heavy on our insiders group. I sign up for our two newsletters, both the Sunday update and the actual all in guest events newsletter, especially if you're in sales and marketing a super valuable stuff.

Now it's time for our LinkedIn failure tip of the week. We always hand it over to our guests. Do you have one? Well, you know, yes, I would say that I tried to do, you know, a failure. That was my own failure, not dealing as a professional. I tried to have one of the podcast on a very specific, uh,

Educative topic and, you know, few minutes before the topic, you know, I found out that it was the link was not working. So I felt very much so it was, uh, it was, and I had a lot of people coming in. So I still didn't recover from that because I'm not done that. So, you know, that that's a failure.

What I'm using and a tip for everyone is very much I try to be educative into my posting for LinkedIn. It would be on, on tips for sales. It would be some reminders of some sort. Or if I see something that for sales, you know, I'm not posting socially on LinkedIn, but it would be on, on the good practices and,

and all that I see from you, Mark or Matt about reminding people or extrapolate it to, you know, that we should be doing this or doing that. I don't like to be told what to do, but it's just a reminder. It is sometimes nice to be reminded of the basics, right? The fundamentals, the fundamentals never go out of style.

And now, and one of the things we all do, myself included is sometimes I forget, right? To go back to the basics. So the one I mess up on all the time is when I have a new client and I preach this, but I don't always do it. We have a new client.

The first thing you need to do is go deep and wide just in case something happens to that contact. They get fired. They quit. They go somewhere else. And, you know, in the last couple of years, I've quit doing that.

And that's come back and bit me in the butt several times. So yeah, going back to basics is always a great tip. Well, I think, I think the content marketing component of it is staying top of mind. I think everybody logs into LinkedIn while the data was a couple of years ago, every 21 days.

I think maybe that has increased, but content marketing on, on LinkedIn is, is fantastic to build yourself as an authority, as an expert to stay top of mind and to put good information out there and, and, and be an option. And I think I've curated my feed where, you know, I get stuff that I want to see right over time and you've liked stuff and it's nice to get that and especially to have those best practices.

I tell you what, though, Matt, it makes LinkedIn so much more useful if you take the time to curate your feed. So then you're only getting stuff that you want to see. If you're getting stuff you don't want to see, it's your fault. If you're looking at stuff, spending too much time on stuff, looking at stuff, sharing stuff, anything like that, it shows in what it's recommended to you.

So it's a really good mirror to see how you're being profiled by the algorithm. I think on that note, we'll get out of here. This has been awesome. Thanks for joining us. We'll have to get you back on. Thank you very much for having me.

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.