Virtual Assistants, Best Practices for Success

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 all-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,

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reached out to me and said, hey, did you lose your sponsor? And I go, no. They go, we haven't heard their ad. So evidently, my editors have forgotten to drop in the pre-recording, which we did for our editors to make it easier. So if you didn't hear the rigor commercial, they're still our sponsor. We still love them. And I just have to fuss at our editors to make sure they drop it in the beginning of this. Matt, we got another review. Look at this. They're

starting to roll in. Yeah, this is from Keith Haley from United States. Got a five-star. Got to listen if you're in sales. Mark and Matt bring a wealth of knowledge from selling and marketing in this old school industry. Tons of useful information, easy to listen to, a part of my weekly playlist. Great work, guys. Appreciate that, Keith. If you'd like a shout out in the show, just like Keith got one. Leave us a review. If you like what we're doing, give us a five

star. If you don't like what we're doing, let us know what you'd like to change. And Matt, this is something that I think a lot of people have considered and I've actually tried it myself and failed. But today, we're talking about virtual assistants and best practices. I see online all these people that have built enormous businesses and a part of their team is virtual assistants, VA's. And I've always wanted to bring a VA in. I did it

actually back in 2011 or after Housing Crash and it failed. I know it failed because I didn't put the time in to train the virtual assistant. I just expected to hire them and they do the work. And so I've been a little bit gun-shy, but this is like right into your sweet spot, your sphere of expertise. I'm going to let you kind of lead the conversation. If somebody that's in sales or marketing is looking to hire virtual assistants, where

should they start? Well, a little background story that I shared with you previously just to give everybody like a understanding of my experience level in this. I have a number of different, you know, I'm like a general contractor, right? And I do the strategy and I have a solid team in-house. But if we get too much work, I have vendors and contractors and VA's, depending on how you define it, that

can help come fill out work. And I also build teams for people that want to do integrated marketing and run their own team. So I have a huge pool network of people that I work with and I have had VA's for the last seven years. You know, you could call them different things. I actually, my first VA was out of Chile or no, sorry, they're in Chile now. They're still with me actually. But they were in Venezuela and I had to pay them in Bitcoin.

I love it. Like 2014, like US dollars in Bitcoin, because the currency continued to go wild. And there are certainly a lot of different challenges and I've hired VA's from different parts of the world. And there's all pluses and minuses of those different things. So hopefully we can cover some of that. But to, I guess, get into it, you asked, how do you get started with the VA? So do you want to

know where to find them? Do you want to know why you should hire one? Like kind of start with, you know, what's the use case or where the use case would make the most sense. So for me personally, by the way, audience, probably by the end of this episode, I'm going to end up hiring a VA. So this is just academia. This is not me and Matt talking. Whatever he educates us on, I'm going to put to practice and hire a VA. And so for me, Matt, I want somebody to take a lot of

administrative work that I do off my shoulders so I could do more higher level stuff. And that would be things like answering, you know, I get the same 20 emails every day, answer the same 20 emails, maybe do some calendaring, maybe some expense reports, you know, nothing extremely complicated with stuff that's vital, that eats up a lot of my time. So I think a lot of our listeners probably, you know, if you're a salesperson and you could hire a VA that does all your CRM

key punching, how much more sales time would that give you? So let's start with kind of, how do you decide if you need one and go from there? Okay, well, I can just give you examples of where I'm using VA's. And I'll even, I know we were going to probably say this towards the end, but maybe I'll include this in kind of the different tiers, right? So once you define what your needs are, you know, you need to come up with a standard operating procedure specifically

of like what you want them to do. You also need to think about like communication channels. I know since COVID a lot more people are working remote and using CRMs and that's certainly helpful. But like you said a couple of things. You said some administrative tasks, you said sales follow up. Maybe you said some bookkeeping. Think about each one of those things as different skill sets and also different pay rates. Okay. And certainly there could be a VA that is like a Swiss Army knife

that can do everything. But I actually like VA's really, really specific for certain tasks. So to give you an example, I use a overseas person to do my bookkeeping. Okay. And I actually used a third party agency that vetted the person, like found the person, vetted the person, has worked with the person and I can just in time use them just a certain set of hours to help with reconciling our books, right? Because that's all I need. It's bookkeeping. It's really clear. Got

it. Incredible person. KPMG, I think background like fantastic. Now they are on a different time zone. Okay. So working with them, you know, setting times early in the morning, late at night. Sometimes, you know, you might send a video explainer, something like that. And that's where a lot of people get caught up is on the communication. Also, a lot of these VA's can speak perfect English. Some of them are even educated in the United States and went back home. We're

going to say something. Yeah, let's go back up to the different time zones. That's something that's really important for the audience to understand. So my one failed attempt at using a VA, they were actually in the Philippines and there's a difference in time zones and you have to take account for that. And I would think Matt, what most of the VA's that you're probably going to pick up if you're in the US will probably be in a different time zone. Yes and no. I would say VA's for

different skill sets too, right? I think that there's, I would tell you for development programming, Ukraine has been displaced a little bit, but Ukraine programmers, Russian programmers, really, really good, right? IT support, India, okay? IT support, India, customer support, big, big, big in the Philippines. You know, I have actually had the most success with integrating VA's with my team, okay? So I understand the nuances of working with them, but my teams like locally here have

had trouble with that because they want to communicate with them like right then on whatever it is. And so if you go to South America, if you go down, like, and I also have a Canadian that works for me and it's 20% discount and they're actually an account manager for me. They were a podcast listener and there's a client and then he came on full-time with me to, you know, he liked everything we were doing, wanted to learn more, but I get a 20% roughly discount on paying him.

So you can go up, you know, you can go down in South America. There's a lot of people that were educated in Miami or if you're in Mexico, Texas or New Mexico, California, and they've gone back home. And these are really well-educated people. And, you know, I would say the world is also becoming somewhat flat. So the better the person is, the closer you're going to be competitive to what's going on here. You know, that was actually a talk of mine I did for University of

Houston. But so in the Philippines, there's job boards. There's, what is it? Online jobs, pH. You can go post your own jobs. There's micro sites like from Monster Career Builder. You can go find people in specific areas and you would vet them like anyone here and you can hire an administrative person for less. And it's all on you to make sure you ask the right questions and interview them. And certainly you want to make sure that they understand the English because a lot

of times people just want the job and the resumes are not correct and they'll say anything to get the job. And then also what I found that you got to really be careful of is you got to have accountability because some of these people will get multiple jobs and they'll be billing like five people at the same time sort of thing. And then they're not responsive. And let's back up a little bit because that's really important. So we've kind of defined the

needs and we've kind of talked about different VAs for different job duties. But I never even considered that people would rely on their resume, which makes total sense. So how do you manage that risk? How do you make sure the person is who they really are, making sure they're not overworked? Like literally tactically, what does Matt do to make sure he's getting what he's wanting to get from a VA?

Yeah. So a couple of things. And one last thing that I was thinking about is because this is the marketing and sales podcast, from a sales standpoint, we've been building programs for companies on the social selling part, right? The nurture part of setting it up where you're liking their profile, you're maybe making like a small comment. And then as soon as they direct message, you can push it. And there's third party apps that you can plug in to do this. You

want to make sure on the terms and conditions so you don't get your profile banned. A lot of people I think in sales are using all the automation. That's actually against LinkedIn. So really, you know, like make sure you know what you're doing and why you're doing it and what the risks are sort of thing because you don't want to get a profile you built banned. But you can definitely do this as a company. There's a lot of opportunities to build programs to do

social selling and nurturing and follow ups and sending them your notes and everything that stuff in there. So I think that the use case for sales people is massive and it gives you that ability to be that superhuman and automation does that too. It gives you the ability to be that superhuman sales person and give everybody the same experience, right? Okay. So how do you vet people? Funny enough, I was like I said, maybe like the first podcast we did in oil and gas. I

was an executive placement recruiter for seven years and I ended up selling my business in my 20s to an IT company that was moving in and wanted to footprint vetting candidates. There's a lot of different ways to do that. You cannot go off the resumes. They will copy and paste resumes. They will do anything to get the job to get that hourly wage because you know, they're like whatever you think you're going to pay them, it's probably more than what they could make

locally, typically. Now, like I said, the world is becoming flat, but you got to be cognizant of that and how do you vet them? Like, so ODesk, it's called Upwork Now. There's like Fiverr. There's other third-party sites that help manage some of that risk because you get to see job history. You get to see ratings. You get to see what they worked on. You get to see how many hours and then the higher they tear up, the more expensive they get, the better vetted they are. I like to

ask questions in the initial screening where if, so I give them something, you want people to have attention to detail, okay? Especially data entry and stuff like that. You need attention to detail. So I'll put something in the job descriptions like respond back, but also put purple giraffe in the subject line, right? And because a lot of these people know English, but they don't know English well enough. And so if you ask them to do a specific task, you can catch that. There's

also tools, which I think some of these platforms are starting to incorporate. You can ask specific questions like, you know, that you want answers to, to know if they know the answer, not based on the resume, if you think they have the answer. And then you can also do video interviews. So if at all possible, I would always ask for a video or audio interview because you can screen out a lot of people based on your first impression in the first 30 seconds and it'll save you so much time,

right? So yeah, those are the few of the things. I mean, I would even say as we move through the conversation, never commit to a big task out of the gate. Definitely do a very small task that you need to check. And I would tell you that you need to check every time I'll give you a story. I had a fantastic person that I had worked with for three something years. Everything was always great. Everything was always perfect. They were part of my CRM. They were like a contractor for my team,

whatever. Well, guess what that person did? They ended up hiring other people to work on that email. And I wasn't checking the work as well as I should have been. And when I started checking the work, I was like, this is not you. Like, this doesn't make sense. Like, these are mistakes. What's going on? And she came out with it and said, I actually ended up hiring five people. And like, you got to understand, like, you're looking at solving a problem for you. But I would also encourage you to

put something in their perspective. And they look at Americans like, Oh, they got a ton of money. It doesn't matter. And I would tell you, Philippines specifically, I had hired probably four or five guys to do some pretty basic stuff. And they stopped being available, right? When I was having them, they took a long time to message me back. I used a tool called Hubstaff that I could monitor when their activity was. And also, there's the ability to take screenshots of what they were doing. And basically, you know,

when I was like, if there's smoke, there's fire. That's what I'll tell you. If there's smoke, there's fire. I would probably cut as soon as you get an inkling. That's something's wrong. I'm a little bit more, I don't know, forgiving or nostalgic. I don't know what the word is, but I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. And so I implemented that software and it was able to catch a lot of stuff. And a lot of people that were in protest about it were the ones that were gone, right? And so adding a little bit of pressure to that. So again,

there's like three tiers, right? So you can hire them on your own and you're at risk. And if you're good hire, great. You can hire it the same way. Again, speaks English. Again, I think South America, North America, great. You know, I think the middle of the road. And if you're talking about hiring somebody, I would think that probably like Upwork would probably be the best. It's very specific to skill sets. And you can, you know, you got to work through the platform too. So there's a little bit of technology that you have to overcome in that. And then the last way is there's a lot of

agencies just in time staffing. I think we even have a host that works with the company that that's all they do. And so, you know, they usually mark it up 100 to 300%. But, you know, if you're paying 10 bucks an hour and they're good, you don't maybe care. 15 bucks an hour, you don't care. There's little levers, right? And it all depends what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it. I would just say don't hire somebody and think they know everything and can do everything. Even if they list it, you really want to evaluate their skill sets. I like to have

specific tasks, define scope, define responsibilities, define check-in, define reporting, define how to do it and have that all prepared before I give it to them. Because I think a lot of the times people fail with VAs is they get busy, right? And they don't provide that full feedback loop even though the VAs they're like, Hey, what do you need? How do I do this? I have a question about this. I got stuck. I don't have access to this. There's two factor authentication. I need to email like to get into this and you just think that they're doing the work and then,

you know, they've sent me three emails and, you know, they couldn't do anything, right? And also some of these people too, depending on what you work out with them, we'll just start doing other work that they think you need. And you got to be careful of that too. And then you get into, well, that's not what I wanted you to do. So, I mean, with anybody that's working remote, I think a lot of these things can apply. There's just different nuances. I mean, when we do SEO, multinational SEO, I end up hiring a country manager, right? Because I don't know the dialects,

like even in the United States, Coke, Pop, Roof, Roof, like different terms in different areas, you want to make sure that they're mirroring that and, you know, based on the level of trust, based on the level of access. But a lot of these platforms are starting to give you different seats, different tiers. They're working to help facilitate a lot of this and working from remote teams. Okay. So, we've talked about defining what you need it. We've talked about determining what you need, whether you need one or many VAs. We talked about finding the talent

and using platforms for that, which by the way, I'm going to take Matt's advice. I'm going to use Upwork and go find a VA for myself. So, now we're in the process of talking about their skills, references. What else do you need to do, Matt? So, let's say you found a VA and passed your muster. They're the person that you believe can help you with whatever job task you need a VA for. Once you hire them, what do you need to do to move forward? And before you even say anything, I do want to talk a little bit about making sure you train them because I think that's why

I failed my first VAs. I didn't spend enough time training. Yeah. So, one is remember their people, okay? Remember their people. And I would say try to make a personal connection with them. I think that that's super critical. That's super critical with any role, any job. I would also say that you need to make sure you set aside time to train them and that you've done that prep work and then you have, I would set like weekly minimum a follow-up, right? With them to see if they need anything, if they missed anything. What a lot of people do is they get going, oh, I got a VA,

check the box, they get run and they think they got it all figured out. They think they gave them everything. And a lot of times we have a lot of stuff in our head that we don't get all that information out and communicate that to anybody and then they don't have a full access or perspective or understanding to do that. I like to do, I say two forms of communication. So, chat, email or task, video, add a video to the task, then have SOP. The more ways you can, depending on their level of understanding of English, the more critical you need to be of

outlining it step by step. But videos really help. A lot of them use translation. Again, it's the better English they speak. And there's different places to look where they go to college. In India, I actually know different colleges where they train them on English and they have different experiences. Like you can get very, very granular on some of that stuff. I don't know if that answered your question, Mark. Sorry. No, no, no, that's, we're going down the right road. So, make sure you train them. I like the idea of shooting video because even if English is not

your primary language, if you see the task on video, you can learn it much easier trying to read it. And then if English is your primary language, having a video just reinforces what the text says. So, before and after two. So, show them here's the inputs, here's the output. That actually works really, really well. Here's what I want you to do. Here's the expectation of that. And there's other marketing things like if you're doing content like mood boards, there's briefs, there's different things you can give, but it's across the board. You need to give whoever's working on it

all the information, but a before and after video, you know, and then description is great. So, yeah. Okay. So, we found the person, we've hired them, we've trained them. Actually, let's back a little bit. Before we hire them, what do you think about a trial period to just make sure they're a good fit for both of you? I think 100%. And I think you need to tell them that it's a trial period. You can even negotiate less for the trial period. I say, hey, like this is like at risk, let's do a trial. If you accomplish this good, give them a little bit of a carrot.

Typically, with a lot of contractors, right, you pay them more for less time. I think when you're utilizing a VA, they want that long-term work and, you know, depending on their experience level, they know you're their resume, right? You're their reference, they're their credibility as you move through it. So, a lot of them will work for less and then you can kind of step them into what you need. References are tough. Okay. References are tough unless you use the agency, like you can see the references online. A couple people have sent me references.

You know, I like video testimonials. I like text testimonials so much better. You know, people have called references on me and, you know, I don't know. It's just like, it's fine. Well, I can tell you this. Who would be dumb enough to turn in a bad reference? So, we get that from the business point of view. People want to talk to our sponsors. Do they think I'm going to connect them with a sponsor that didn't like working with us? No. So, it's almost worthless, I think, in today's world. Yeah. I mean, you want to see a video testimonial and look at their face and see how

they're responding and how enthusiastic they are and they say their full name and they say what they do and, like, it's a legit review. I like all the stars and I like all the reviews and, you know, I think everybody reads the bad reviews and kind of looks at, like, a collection of those reviews. So, I think that, you know, I was talking with a client today is they had one one star review on Google and then they had five star reviews, like 130 of them, but they were from over a year ago, right? And so, it was kind of a mixed bag on, like, hey, you need to work with your team

to continuously getting, you know, those public reviews. And I would expect the same thing because if someone doesn't have a lot of public reviews and doesn't have a brand online, by the way I read a book about that, but I would say, you know, you can't trust it. It's at risk. And I would say the less reviews they have, the less I'm willing to pay them because it's a more risk on my part and it's the shorter contract. But I also call it, I'm glad we talked about this because I almost forgot this analogy. I called it for a long time kissing frogs, okay? I called it a long time for

kissing frogs. So it'd give a lot of people a lot of small tasks, right? And someone would do a bad job and that was just part of it, right? But then you'd find that one really diamond in the rough, awesome, like Prince, Princess, whatever. And then boom, now you have a great person that's affordable and you're stable of people to work with. So, you know, over the last, let's say, five, seven years, I've gone through a lot of people, right? But through that, I've found a lot of really good people and I've really kept that risk short and now we have that process to work

with them. And what, you know, like I said at the beginning, this is what I've done a lot is, you know, there's teams that want to build like an internal team, but they're not ready yet and you're spending a lot of money on one person. A lot of people want to buy like an integrated team already, right? Like they want to buy a skill set of people, but they don't want us to manage them as the general manager, project manager, whatever you want to call it, or strategists, maybe they want to manage their own people and then, you know, use it an advisory kind of,

hey, I want to get your opinion on this. So, based on my recruiting background, based on my marketing background, I've been building a lot of teams for people and then kind of handing it over and trying to corporate train them on being able to utilize that. And I'm seeing a lot more of that as everybody's trying to cut costs, you know, is like you can find the equivalent like let's say on the very admin level, right? I would range a right out of school admin person, I don't know, 35, 40K if they're administrative, not one gas, one gas, like, you know, it's crazy

versus the rest of the market. But if you compare that, you can get a five-year experience person for a fraction of what that is or you could get five people or more. I don't know, I think you have run the numbers for that person, you know what I mean? And so, man, it's starting to become a different world. You know, I think everybody has to compete effectively on what they deliver and everybody needs to lean into the skill sets they bring. I still believe that US client-facing, US-based people is better. I also believe customer service. I actually believe

like the Philippines, they're going to compete with AI. I think AI is going to get really, really good on customer service. And, you know, a lot of people want to talk to a real person. I remember when I talked to a real person and they really helped me and they can answer the question, like that makes a huge difference. So, you got to evaluate all these different kind of levers and decide, you know, what's right for you and your company or you as an individual. All right. So, we talked about defining the needs, we talked about using platforms,

we talked about making sure that you conduct proper interviews and tests, we talked about training, trial period, you touched a little bit on payment. Let's kind of go back up a little bit because I'm getting ready to hire VA based upon this conversation. So, let's talk about range. So, if you wanted an entry-level admin person, what do you feel is about the right amount that you would pay? And then let's say you wanted a .NET developer that's really good, which would be on the high end about how much would that be and how much would you pay? Just so people that listen,

you know, feel for the range. You know, what I first say is ladders.com does a really good job. And there's other sites that do a really good job of giving you pay ranges based on country, okay? And also region of country. I would take that into consideration based on who you're trying to pay, you know, and make sure it's competitive, but also like not astronomical, you know what I mean? I would say if you're looking, like, I mean, again, like what are the things, Mark, that give me the exact person you want to hire from, like,

do you want them to speak perfect English? Do you want them to work on your time zone? Because some people in Indian Philippines will work at night. Some of these younger people will work at night. They're super hungry. Yeah. So, let's say I hire somebody that I want to be able to read and write perfect English, not necessarily speak it. And originally, I'm going to hire them just to answer the same 20 or 30 emails I get every day, which is, you know, an hour or two a week logging in. And I don't care what time zone they work. I would say, you know, again,

different levels of English have actually different kind of pay ranges, you know, four to six bucks. That's what I paid. Like, depending on, like, if I was to find somebody to do that, depending on areas of the country, like I can tell you, like, Chili's going through kind of a hyperinflation. So, it's changing the rates, you know, but I think you could find really, really good person. Like, four bucks is good. I mean, three bucks is kind of like trial. Some people will do it. They're kind of getting into the business of doing VAs that they did

usually like customer service, like in a big call center and now they're doing it on their own. You know, they'll lie to you too on how much they're getting paid and everything. But I would just say, you know, start somebody between four and six bucks, maybe four and I wouldn't pay more than seven bucks. I think you can find really, really good person. So, let's say my next level up is I'm a sales person and I want to hire somebody that speaks, reads and writes excellent English that works on my timeline scale. And I want them to do all the key punch in my CRM and all my email

outbound follow-ups. So, it's not coming from automations, it's coming from a real person. How much should I pay for something like that? Depends on their level of experience, right? Depends on their level of experience and also how good your SOPs are to be able to do that. Just gut instinct, I would pay like that seven range as the bottom range to 11, 12 bucks. You know, if you want to be richer, then be richer. But I think 10 to 12 bucks would be, you could get somebody with three, five years experience that knows how to do it. Now, again,

they're all going to say they know how to do it. So, you got to kind of sift through that. But I think you can get great people. I have great people in that range. So, see salespeople, if you want to spend more time selling and less time doing admin work, it doesn't cost you that much. And at around 12 bucks an hour for say six hours a week, all you'd have to do is close one extra sale a month and you've more than covered that cost and you've made your job easier. So, one of the things I would even tell you

that I've seen salespeople do, depending on how much of the book of business they're managing. And again, oil and gas is different, right? But a lot of people on gas are selling widgets, like high volume widgets, or they get referrals. I've started to help people build questionnaires and like canned emails for when you get like a new client to come in to kind of run them through a different process versus nurture versus outreach or outbound. There's again, different buckets. Even these US-based call center services, you can pay per minute and no conversation on like a

quick district recovery call, asking a few questions or even customer service at night. These services, a lot of doctors use these kinds of services. I mean, 20 bucks a month, like total to deal with a bunch of calls. Like even, I get so many spam phone calls, I'm actually thinking about doing that now, which I haven't done that in a while, but run it to a call center service to pay per minute to just put it all and send it to me an email, you know what I mean? But because, you know, to follow Google policies, you got to

be available to answer the phone, even though they never answer and you can never get them. It's just kind of do as they say, not as they do. But, you know, there's a lot of ways when you have these different skill sets to build workflows, right? To have people do different things and then, you know, really give them a very narrow scope. But man, you can, like utilizing a call center or intake for new calls or even, you know, sometimes people want to answer the phone for the referrals or, you know, existing clients. Like there's so many different ways to layer it

based on your business. You just need to map it out, right? I think that that's the biggest part of it. Yeah. Well, this has been great. We're actually way past time. So hopefully audiences helps you not only figure out if you want to hire a virtual assistant, but the steps you go through to be successful at it. Product review, we actually have a portable Apple Watch charger that Gaga King sent us. And unfortunately, Matt doesn't have an Apple Watch. So I am going to review this next week and Paige Wilson is going to step in and do a guest review. She's going to

review it as well. Yeah. So we'll see what's going on with that. By the way, if you're listening and you have a product you'd like Matt and I to review, something gadgety, something travel, something tech, send us two of them, then we're happy to review it. Just know that we're going to tell the truth. If it's great, we're going to say it's great. If it sucks, we're going to say it sucks. In the show notes is all of Matt and I's social links. If you want to connect us on social anywhere there, my Insiders group, we're still working on it. This is time for our LinkedIn

failure tip of the week. And you and I did not talk about anything. LinkedIn failure tip. I do have something that's noteworthy though, in that I opened up a post just recently and when I went to type, I got a prompt from LinkedIn saying, Hey, tell me what you want to talk about and my AI will help you write your post, which means LinkedIn is jumping the AI bandwagon and Matt, it impressed the hell out of me. So I was just messing with it. I just was trying to confuse it on purpose. And so I started talking about hydrocarbon oils, which is, you know, oil and gas. And I try to

mix it up with essential oils, which is not oil and gas, which are organic oils people use for health and wellness type of stuff. And Matt, it knew the difference and it wrote me an incredible post on how hydrocarbon oils are keeping the world running. And yet essential oils is old, ancient technologies that's being rediscovered that people that want to leave a more happy and centered life. Like how cool is it that the AI was able to kick that out? And this is just the beginning of that. Well, so these large language models and why they're throwing them out there

for free is every response you're doing, you're helping train it and getting it smarter and smarter. And I'm telling you that every aspect of every business is going to be transformed by this. You can see charts on different industries that are affected more. Even call recordings, they can summarize the notes, right? And like, I was typing an email in Google and someone responded back to me. And the first part of the email, they answered the question, it disappeared. And I was like, whoa, like, whoa, it read my email, it understood. And it said, that is not

relevant anymore to this thing. And it just deleted, which, you know, plus minus that could be good or bad. I was like, where did the paragraph of my email go? It just disappeared. So I mean, this is going to be transformative in every industry. And I'm super excited about it. And I would encourage everybody to try to learn as much as they can about it. And don't just use the buzz word, it's real. It's a real thing. I suspect Mac and I will be doing episodes somewhere in the future about large language models and AI and sales and marketing, because it's a huge role there.

All right, let's get out of here. So remember, folks, make a difference and not a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast, a production of the oil and gas global network. Learn more at oggn.com.