Virtual Showrooms with guests Ben and Jason from Quake Marketing Group

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. Welcome back, everybody. Matt and I are in person once again because I think Matt, you and I figured out that it

just works better. It does. And we're actually in the ION in Houston. If you haven't checked out the ION, if you're looking for a co-working place, go make sure they're on your list. And Quake Marketing Group was nice enough to invite us in.

Thank you, Ben, and thank you, Jason, for joining us on the show. No problem. Thanks for having us, guys. Yeah, thanks so much. Before we get to the topic today, we got a review mat, finally. I guess after we beg for six months, five-star, needed topics in oil and gas.

Great work bringing the importance of sales and marketing functions to the forefront. Historically, as you know, our industry has lacked synergy between these two groups and pan them in a strict push-pull relationship. But you're highlighting the critical and need to forge these functions together to impact results, keep up the great work, maybe pop out an episode every three days. Yeah, right.

Cheers, guys. And this is from Matt C5454 from the United States. And Ben and Jason, if you don't know, Matt and I both agree that in oil and gas, sales and marketing should be joined at the hip. This is the whole reason we started this podcast. We know it draws better results.

And obviously, our reviewer thinks so too. So thank you. If you'd like to be our, like our reviewer, get a big shout-out on the show. It's very simple. Leave us a review. We made it super easy for you.

Go in the show notes. There's a link, no matter what device you're on, even if you're not an Apple fanboy, you can still leave us a review. We'd appreciate it. And our subject today is virtual showrooms. And like I said, we have guest Ben and Jason from Quake Marketing Group here.

I want to start, Jason, with you from the very beginning. Sure. Why? Why virtual showroom? Like, what is the advantages for clients and prospects in the oil and gas industry of even thinking about a virtual showroom?

It's a great question. I mean, I'll just step back a little bit because we really started this during COVID. So as a lot of things do, right? But you know, a lot of the background for me and my team is trade shows. And you know, we had a few clients that had trade shows that were happening in that mid-kind of 2020 timeframe.

And suddenly that was not an option, right? So the first thing we did is went to our booth suppliers and our exhibit suppliers and said, what do you have virtually that we can support them with? And they came back with, well, we can kind of give you this virtual trade show booth. It's $15,000 for five days. And here's some samples, right?

And it would be essentially like a four-frame web page. Like here's one photo and it's got a built-in PDF and this is another photo and it's got a built-in video. And it's like, well, why would you pay $15,000 for that first of all, but two, why would you actually just limit it to just five days, right? So we took kind of what we had already known from kind of creating virtual elements and

3D models and that type of thing. And we said, let's develop something that, A, the quality is better because again, still images are immersive 3D renderings, not have the same kind of quality as something that's built on a proper platform. So we went through three different vendors and we found kind of a way to kind of take like high-resolution 3D models and products and equipment, put it into a format that could

sit on a web page and then we started pitching it to clients saying, here's kind of an extension of your existing website where your clients can see the stuff and interact with it in a 3D way 24-7. So it doesn't have to be limited to just a show or an event. So one of the data points that I've mentioned on the podcast in the past is 85 to almost even 90% of the customer journey is happening before they even pick up the phone, right?

Before they raise their hand, right? And so where I'm seeing the transformation happen is in websites. So you have to immerse somebody in the experience, provide all that on the website and then it's happening 24-7, right? So you're able to have a trade show to showcase a new technology or an engine or a power generation or anything you have for oil and gas 24-7 like you would have to wait for a trade show.

And so it makes that experience much more interactive. And you see it in Google too with the rich data, rich snippets, that sort of thing. Everybody's trying to be more immersive. Well, before we let Jason continue, and I do want to say this really quick, the whole reason we have this conversation is that one of our mixers here in Houston, I met Ben and he showed me this.

He demoed me this on his laptop in his hand in the middle of us drinking cocktails. It wasn't even a laptop. It was my cell phone. That's right, on your cell phone. So I want the audience to understand this is not something that you need special hardware. You don't need high performance computing.

You don't need a pair of goggles on. This literally can be shown. Anything including Ben's cell phone, which is what he showed me. So this is a game changer. When I saw this, the first thing I said was Ben, you got to talk to oil and gas industry. The second thing I said, we need to get you on this show.

All right. So Jason, come back to you. So this is why you start it because the pandemic makes total sense. But this is totally different than anything I've ever seen. Y'all have this. This is only gaming platform.

So yeah, it's partially built with unity. And then, you know, again, we, there's some customizations that we've made to it to make it kind of fit with how we use it. Does it sit like in an iFrame or on a subdomain? It looks like this might be on a subdomain or how I'm just curious. Yeah.

No, it, so if the model's bigger and we kind of, sometimes we have it as on a separate hosting platform, but it's still connected directly to the website. So it's part of the menu and people can just click on virtual showroom and go right to it. So from the back end, sometimes it has to be moved around differently, but from the user experience.

Is this an iFrame, basically? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the subject for the digital podcast. Sorry. I'm just interested.

No, this is really cool. If you could see what he's showing us, it's pretty amazing. You know, maybe in the show notes, actually we will, the show notes will put some links. You can actually, that's when you really get the power of this is when you actually see it in real time. So folks on the show notes will have links to a couple of the demos for this, but anyway,

so Jason, back to we're going through the pandemic, you're helping your clients and then this evolved. Yeah. Essentially, what we did was we, we created and just back to your original point too, is that this had to be completely easy to use. So if you have to download something, fail.

If you have to get an application, use it, fail, right? If you have to wait three minutes for download, fail, right? So it was really about making it idiot proof so that anybody could do it. We love idiot proof. Right? It works best for everyone.

So yeah. So that's kind of where that came from and then yeah, what we did is as we kind of did a couple of them, we really found the ROI kind of expanded the more that we use, right? So example, you know, when we're looking at right now, you know, the smaller components, but one of the companies we work with is plastics processing equipment. And these are machines that are 10, 12 feet wide and you know, 10 feet high.

If you look at the cost of floor space at any trade show, it's expensive, right? So if you can take, you know, 100 square feet, 200 square feet, 500 square feet, not pay for the floor space, not pay for the logistics, not pay for the dredge paying to have that come in from the shipping dock to your actual booth, I mean, you're saving a pile of money. So now you're taking that investment and saying, okay, well, maybe it's costing me $25, $50,000 to create this virtual environment, but I'm saving $50,000 to $200,000 per show, not just

for all the shows, but per show. And again, it's available 24 seven. So you can again, make it part of your daily marketing strategy, not just, you know, one time thing here and there. So Jason, I have to ask you because we know that a lot of the big only gas conferences listen to this show.

If the only gas conferences heard you said that go gasp, Jason, you're trying to take business away from you. Y'all wouldn't say no if a big trade show came to you and they wanted y'all wanted to whitelist this and resell it to the potential vendors that can't afford the space, but still want to be part of the treasure. You'd happily want them, right?

100%. And the thing that I love talking about the trade show example as a use case, the other thing is you can walk up and literally scan a QR code with your phone and boom, have the piece of machinery right there at your, you know, in front of your phone and interacting with it as well. And then the aspect of being able to use that and have that right there on the trade show

floor is huge. So you're exactly right. If there are some companies who maybe can't ship their stuff in or can't afford to do that, they can utilize this technology right here and right now just with a consumer cell phone. Yeah.

OTC, I'm talking to you specifically. You need to update the way you do business, reach out to the Quake marketing group and add this to your portfolio offer them telling you you'll benefit from this. Ben, I want to come back to you real quick because the thing I found amazing, you and I were literally at a crowded room at our industry mixer. I literally had a drink in my hand.

You were showing me this on your phone and while you were holding your phone, I was able to take my finger, move around with the equipment. I was able to look at the pump in the engine for the pump and I was able to walk over to where the breaker box was. Like if a company came to y'all and wanted to work with you, that level of detail, was that just in the demo that you showed me or is that what y'all do with everybody?

Everybody. Everybody. What's so great is computers are so overpowered. Your cell phones are so powerful these days that you can pull up different components now and it looks realistic and that's what we kind of hang our hat on is we want to provide a really realistic experience.

We want you to be able to see that and actually double take. Is that the real product itself that I'm interacting with? I think that that's important when you're demoing this. People have to see it to believe it, right? Being able to have a real interactive, realistic platform that you can move around and immerse yourself with is clutch.

Yeah, it really is. Matt, let's split this up a little bit. I want to go a deeper dive down the sales side of this, but I'd also love to hear how you would use this from a marketing point of view. Yeah. You want me to start?

No, I can go. Can we backtrack? Can we talk about how you and I first met? What I said to you is that, hey, I'm looking for Mark LaCour. Yes. And I go, actually, I don't tell you.

I know that. It was a great, totally unplanned impromptu and audience. Think that you can come up to me and my industry mixers and try to sell me stuff. The way Ben did it was very transparent. And I'm joking about him trying to sell me. He was not sales at all.

He just showed me something cool and it wowed me. So I'm always open to be wowed by stuff, but do not try to come up to me and sell me stuff or industry mixers. They do it all the time. From a marketing standpoint, there's so many applications for this. Certainly on the web page, people can find it.

People can interact with it. You know, what we were talking before. I think from an internal training standpoint, there's just so many applications here on educating somebody on different components of whatever widget that you have and really showcasing that, breaking it apart. I think it can be incorporated into training.

What you were saying about the trade shows, the first thing I thought of is like you have your trade show booth and then you virtualize it, right? So you virtualize that booth and then now you have a duplication of that that you can take anywhere with you. And then there's a lot of ways to broadcast that or utilize that to make your conference dollar stretch further, right?

Because you talked about some of the shipping costs and I think what you're trying to do, what marketing is trying to do is just support sales, right? It's trying to be a vehicle to help tell a story, to help someone understand from point A to point B and if you're looking at something and you can take it apart and you can see the inside of it and you can walk around and you can look at it, that level of learning for somebody is so much more than maybe reading text or looking at an image.

I think that said, you know, something around like 80% of knowledge retention when using like an XR environment and training modules. So yeah, you're right on the nose on that. If you can incorporate some sort of immersive learning and interactive training and the retention just goes way beyond what normal e-learning that you might be doing as well. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, and so when Ben showed me this, it took me about 15 minutes later to have it pop in the head. It's like, oh my God, Ben and his company have just killed the demo. So instead of you trying to design salespeople a demo, and I know you're always trying to hurry up and get to the demo, which is a mistake from a sales point of view. That should be the last thing in your sales process, anyway.

Instead of trying to hurry up and get to the demo and hurry up and having a demo deck to show your prospect, this allows the prospect to actually demo it to themselves, right? You just literally give it to them and walk away and let them go through it. Well, Mark, when you talk about a marketing standpoint, you could put a pixel on this. So you could chase them around after the QR code. You could show them ads.

You could see what they're doing on it to set up a drip campaign that would target what you could see based on their actions. So there's a lot of this, and I have some clients in the e-gaming space, okay? And so a lot of what they're looking at is how people play, right? And so you start seeing how people are interacting, what kind of segments they go to, and then you can build customization marketing based upon what they're interested in.

Matt, you just made a whole bunch of sales engineer in the oil and gas industry happy. Now they understand what their prospects are looking at first and what they're looking at last, what they spent the most time on. Marketing engineers, I mean sales engineers, are you listening to me? You're now able to see what your prospects see is important without you having to even talk to them if you do what Matt just said.

Let me jump in here on top of that because I love what you said. And also being able to add, use it as a lead gen tool, being able to have contact forms directly in the virtual environment, in the XR environment, and being able to track that, to see what they were looking at, and then export that to a database that goes into your CRM. Absolutely.

And then you're seeing exactly what that customer looked at, when you sent it to them, what they were looking at, how long they were looking at, and what point they might be ready for the purchase. And then facilitating that through. I mean, I would tell you that a lot of these links, people will share them, right? So you have a share option, so you see where it goes, and being able to map that online

and map the interactions, it just gives you, I mean, data is the power, right? Data is the power when you're selling because you're speaking to what they're interested in, you're not just throwing a bunch of spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks, right? It's very strategic. So much data can be pulled from this. And that's one thing, just back to your original mark, was that this has gone beyond just showcasing

materials. Like you said, there's the educational training part of it. But we've had people now saying, hey, can we use this for product configuration as well? And then we've also had people saying, well, can it link to hardware so that when we do training or demonstrations, maybe we have a small piece of hardware that we can take to a show, but then we use this on a big screen to be the virtual machine that's 50 feet high

or whatever, right? I love it. I love it. You know, it's kind of a gateway to the bigger discussion about XR as a whole and how that's evolving and how that's kind of... Everything's being virtualized.

Everything from money with cryptocurrencies, like what have you, go down the list. This is the direction everything is going. And then we haven't even talked about putting on goggles yet, right? But I'm glad you brought it up. Oh, we did our first Apple Vision Pro yesterday at Apple Store. And how'd that go?

Have you guys done that before? I haven't, no. I'm scared because I'm afraid we'll buy it. Well, yeah. It's incredible. It's immersive.

The video that you can take, product demonstrations are about to explode like in a way that you've never seen before. And then what we do is just a small part of it, that's like an entryway for companies to get more invested into more XR spending. But yeah, the Apple Vision Pro, I think it's the real deal. It's worth the hype, for sure.

Yeah. God, Apple knows you by name already. This year I'm making you better, Ben. One thing that really blew my mind was that, so the new Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max or something can shoot the spatial video. But the headset can also capture 3D photos and 3D video as well.

But they showed some of the samples of that in the headset that we were wearing when doing the demo. And it changes everything. It changes everything because you picture your kid's birthday party, or you picture a visit to the Grand Canyon, or you picture just being in a factory that you work at and you want to be able to capture more of a depth perspective on how the machinery and

all the supporting equipment fits in, right? It just changes everything about how we currently do things. So to even take one more step on this, and this is what I was digging into actually this morning. So it's just kind of funny, it's synchronicity of how things work. But I was looking at generative AI and generative search.

So basically, where this is going and where it will tie to. So this would be in a vacuum, right? So it would be in a vacuum. So once you connect it to the outside world, you're in the virtual reality, and you see something, right? Oh, this engine.

And you do like a little circle on it, and it'll go into detail of the search and everything's going to be interactive at some point, right? And so. The first thing I did when I put on the headset was I was like, all right, I'm going to go look at our virtual showroom. I want to see what it looks like with the Apple Vision Pro.

It was incredible because now instead of pointing and clicking and manipulating and being immersive, I'm using my hands to walk through and to look through the machinery and to kind of explode it and look at some of the graphics. It was just, it's a whole nother level of immersive interactivity that I think was amazing. And I'm glad, you know, the guy was just like, all right, let's take a look at it. He was like, oh, wow, this is actually pretty cool.

The Apple Store employee. So I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, it works that well. Yeah. Let's kind of get away from making this an Apple commercial. Sure.

No, it all sincerity. OGG has had a conversation with working with Apple. So big fans of theirs. I mean, obviously we love that. Just talk to Oculus. They might be more interested.

Anyway, I want to bring it back here because I don't mind driving sales to Apple later, but I'd like to drive sales and attention to y'all first. So this is a way for you to take very complex items, allow people to visualize it, makes it simple to understand. And if you do this the right way, if you do your research ahead of time, if you're doing this around a problem that your customer or prospect has, it makes them understand how

you can help them much quicker, which increases the sales cycle. But the other thing is it also helps them sell it internally, right? Because you're not tied down to specific hardware or high-performance computing or goggles. You can share it with people inside your sales team, inside your buy-in team with their procurement people, with your frontline manager, whatever, and they can see the same benefits

that we do. So from a sales point of view, I almost see this as an extension of your sales team. If it's done well, then let me ask you this, if a prospect comes to you and wants to work with you, let's say they're a mud-pump company or a drill company or somebody that does stuff for downstream or whatever, can you kind of walk us through the process so new prospects reach out, hey, Ben, I listed a podcast, this is great.

We think you can help us. What would be next steps from your point of view? Sure. So the first thing we have to do is understand the company, what they do, maybe some challenges that they've had on the sales side, if that's something that they're really interested in. But the process is fairly simple.

We take an STP file or CAD file, and then we utilize photographs of the actual machinery itself, and then we're able to place that inside the virtual showroom using the technology that we have. And then that's when the real fun starts, because then at that point, you're actually able to kind of go back to the customer or the client and say, all right, here's what it looks like now.

What do you want it to do? And you can kind of configure it and customize it in a way, you might be saying, okay, we know that we have a customer that's having an issue with this valve, specifically maybe like a repair on this, or we want to showcase a very special part of this machinery. We can go in and then actually customize it to showcase that piece right there. We can...

Well, I want to stop you right there. So you're telling me that if I had a company that sold the same thing, and they had a sales force of, say, 100 sales guys, men and women globally, but each sales person has a client that has a unique problem, you can take the same demo and then tweak it individually for each one of the individual problems of the different companies? Yeah.

Would you say, Jason, that that's... I mean, I don't think you could do a hundred of, but it's understandable. It's pretty easy to kind of modulate and change the showroom up. We had a certain client recently that wanted to have two versions of it for two different companies that they were showcasing for their trade show, and yeah, we'll be able to make changes like that pretty easily.

That's pretty powerful where you'd have it down to unique. This is like the digital twin of the sales and marketing world, right? And so the only gas industry's been looking at digital twins to help with a lost time incidents, health, safety, and environmental metrics, at the same time, reduce costs because you don't want to necessarily have to fly a couple of engineers offshore to go measure how far away that pump is from the valve, whereas you digital twin, you can do it virtually.

This is the next step. It's a digital twin for sales and marketing people. Absolutely. Ease of use for the end user is super important, but actually, at the back end, like what Ben was talking about with development, we also are trying to streamline that as well because we don't want people to say, well, I need to show a room for an event coming up and

we're like, well, we need eight months at notice, right? So the last one we did was a small one, but we did it in like two and a half weeks because they had a tight deadline. That's a crazy turnaround time. That's amazing. So we're continually optimizing the process so that, again, we don't want people to think

that this is a big deal. It's not a big deal. It can be expensive, depending on how elaborate you want it to be, but it doesn't have to be a huge process that takes forever. It takes you more than a couple of weeks to get your show booth lined up and the vendors lined up and your staff and everything.

So you're actually able to turn this around quicker than a live conference. I love that. So if like what I'm thinking in my head is like, how would this be utilized in a webinar situation, right? Like, and maybe not even where everybody puts on goggles and is at home and goes to a virtual conference, but like today, how do you see this being integrated?

If someone wanted to say, hey, this is really helpful, we want to get everybody on a webinar. What would that look like? I'm just curious. Yeah. So it would essentially just be like you, if you did a multi-camera webinar, for example, so you just have a second source. And then if you had a showroom that you want to demonstrate a product or capabilities,

whatever the case may be, again, instead of just going to your factory and having to point to it, you know, just stand close to the microphone and the camera, you know, you could just use the showroom and fly around to whatever perspective you wanted and demonstrate whatever capability we'd built into it. It is impressive. It's impressive with its simplicity.

And then once again, Ben, how quickly I saw the benefit where it literally was seconds. Like, you didn't even have to talk to me. Showing it to me was I was like, this is, this is really impactful. All right. So we get close to winding down the show. A couple of things, Ben, thanks for kind of walking through the process.

I love that you make sure that you understand the customer's problem first before you even think about trying to sell them something. And then, you know, Jake, being able to turn us, I mean, sorry, Jason, being able to turn us around that quickly, that is amazing. Do you have a bunch of app dev people locked in the closet somewhere? Just joking.

They're not locked up. They're not locked up. So we're at the point of starting to line this thing down. If Jason and Ben, if people wanted to get in touch with your company, where should they go? I would say go to our LinkedIn page, quick marketing group. Yep.

We'll put a link in the show notes to make sure it's very easy. And then Jason and Ben, if people want it to reach out to y'all personally, where's the best place to go? I would say LinkedIn as well. You directs. Yeah.

Message messages on LinkedIn. Yeah. We'll put links in the show note for that as well. Remember, we have two new newsletters out there. If you're speaking of events, which is what we talked about here, we have an oil gas events newsletter that started because I could not find one place with all the

conferences and trade shows and I'll make my interns do it every month. And we're happy to share it with you for free. You can sign up for it and links in the show notes, especially if you're in sales and marketing, you're curious about what all gas events are going on. It's a great resource. And then we have our Sunday update, which is continuously changing.

We have the recipes for the oil fill that are over a hundred years old, which people love. We help people find jobs. You have behind the scenes, look at ODG and our newest thing is we help home. I find forever homes for animals. We accidentally did it the first time and we had 50 freaking thousand people reach out, go, oh, so now we're doing it a lot.

So once again, that Sunday update, the links in the show notes, it's also free. Um, that's actually a weekly newsletter. And then all of Matt and I social channels are also the links in the show notes. Our insiders group, the website is coming along fine. I'm ready. You're ready.

You just got to prove it. Yeah. So that's going to be our, our mastermind group for all the gas sales and marketing professionals. That is going to be a ton of fun. LinkedIn failure tip of the week.

We always ask our guests to, uh, to have one. So do you have a LinkedIn failure tip of the week? One thing I'm still fascinated with is that every now and then somebody will post something that's more like a dating profile or something super personal. And while it's, you know, not obviously doesn't fit the audience. I've, what I find fascinating about it, how quickly people like pile on them.

Like that doesn't belong here. And, you know, they get really kind of almost personally offended by the fact that don't post a picture of your kid's birthday or, you know, present yourself like you're dating. I don't, I just find it interesting, I find it interesting too. Cause over, I've started using LinkedIn almost at the very beginning.

In fact, I'm still grandfathered in. I have the premium edition and I think I pay like $12 a year. I don't know what it is now, but it's much higher than that. But the same, same thing, Jason, is that I see people condemn others. And from my point of view, I'm seeing the different social platforms, always jockey back and forth.

Sometimes people do more personal stuff here. I'm starting to see way more business stuff being done on TikTok than I've seen in the last couple of years, right? So I'm like, yeah, yeah. Well, that's another story. Yeah.

Right after a higher TikTok manager, then I remember decides he won't abandon it, but no, I agree with you. I don't think you should condemn people. Now I will say this much. I get approached by a lot of very young oriental women with no followers on LinkedIn quite often and I'm pretty sure they're not legit, right?

So if you want those people, don't do that because it's obvious that you're not legit, but I don't have a problem. People putting personal stuff on LinkedIn at all. And if it bothers you, just don't read it. Don't tell me that already. Send them the money.

We need to have this conversation off the microphone because it gets funnier and funnier. All right. Thank you guys for joining us. This is very insightful. Hey, audience, literally, even if you don't think you have an interest in what they're doing, reach out to them because what they're doing is so powerful.

And I know they mentioned that it's not cheap. It actually is for what you get. I think it's very inexpensive. And it's, it's like I said, it will drive results and it's the future. I mean, Apple, you owe us something if people buy more of your, uh, your glasses because of this.

Ready to get out of here, Matt? Yeah, let's do it. 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.