What is producing monster results in 2026

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark Lacour and Matt Bertrand share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back to the Oil and Gas Sales

and Marketing podcast. And thank you, thank you, thank you, audience. It seems like, Matt, we opened a floodgate. We answered one or two listener questions and now they're just piling in, which is great. So if you're listening to this and you have a question

that you'd like Matt and I to try to answer, fire away, go to ogn.com. It's a place to leave comments. You can also hit us up on any of our social reviews. We've got another awesome five-storey review. This is from American Vader.

I listened to this show as I was checking out shows to dive more into oil and gas sales. This was really helpful guiding me as I learned industry and the difference between that oil and gas and other B2B sales. So there you go, audience, two sentences.

That's all we asked. Matt and I asked you to leave us a review. Thank you, American Vader, for leaving us for you from the United States. If you'd like a shout out on the show, just open up Apple Podcast, a couple sentences,

make sure it's a five-star. If it's not a five-star, tell us why. Tell us what you'd like to see us change. And Matt, you know, we've been doing several things. We've answered questions and stuff. And one of the things that I've gotten a lot,

somebody didn't particularly write in a question, but somebody did ask me that. This is, what are you doing this year in 2026 that's working really well that maybe didn't work before, maybe wasn't around? So I thought I'd kind of talk real world.

Some of the stuff we're doing here at OGGN that has knocked it out of the park and produced quite frankly, monster results. That may even be the title of this podcast, Monster Results of 2026. You and I talk a lot about account-based marketing.

One of the things that we've done this year is we've taken it to the deeper level and we actually map that marketing to the buyer committee. And then we give each stakeholder something useful. And if you don't know what I mean, let's say buyer committee, a stakeholder.

Listen to some of our past episodes, we went deep into that. Instead of just running a banner ad or a half a page ad in petroleum journal or whatever, we're literally using account-based marketing to the individuals of the decision-making team.

And that's been killing it this year. I love that, I love that. I mean, one of the things that I would just kind of share that we've been doing for a while, but we haven't really highlighted it a lot, but it's definitely working this year.

As we know, like B2B buyers are increasingly doing research online anonymously. And AI started to really change the game on how you find that. Huge. And we've been focused not on pixels,

but on intent signals. So explain that in case salespeople don't know what that is. Not every clicks an intent. Okay, so here are some weak signals, right? A LinkedIn-like, a blog visit, like analytics on a website, a listen to a podcast, open an email, clicking on the ad.

Okay, what are higher intent signals? They visit your service page. They're maybe filling out a form, a downloadable, watching a webinar. There's also ways to find out committees as well as conference attendees.

Like what are the problems that people are trying to solve? But like competitor comparisons has done really good. And you see that even with AI overviews, where there's comparisons, like case study visits, pricing. Like when people go to the pricing page, we're focused on building strategies

around where they're at in the sales funnel and how strong that intent signal is. There's so much more data available online. And everything is being tracked, even if it's anonymous, you can reach out and target those people

in a compliant way. And it helps with the follow-up. It helps with companies that understand about your brand already before you reach out. Yeah, and a perfect example of that is you're 100% right. So I can see the traffic comes to our website.

But what gets me excited is when some of that traffic actually goes to our podcast advertising page and then intentionally spends time on dedicated podcast advertising, which is what we sell when you want to sponsor a podcast. That tells me somebody's getting deeper

and considering that may not buy from us, but they're considering buying from us. And that's a much stronger intent signal, using your words, than somebody that just come to hit our webpage. I love that.

Another thing that's worked really well for us this year is really rich and real valuable thought leaderships that talks about real facts, figures, and data, especially if it's something that's hard to get publicly. If you're listening to this podcast with Matt and I, we get down to the nitty-gritty.

We talk about tactical stuff. We talk about how to actually do it. That's that rich thought leadership that Matt and I are putting out there. We're not putting out generic stuff. We're putting out stuff that we know is valuable to you,

our listeners, and that positions Matt and I as thought leaders in this space. Now, we're doing that on purpose, but we're also doing it because that's how the show should be running. We're trying to help y'all.

Okay, so Mark as an entity, Matt as an entity. And when we talk together, we're creating a co-citation. If we reference or cite something that is not public, the AIs build that as a node and link to that. And then they say, who's saying that? What are they saying?

And then they compare it against all the other information. They compare it against all the other authority. And it ranks it essentially online. This thought leadership is constantly with mathematical equations being compared and contrasted versus other stuff.

And then the visibility and distribution is decided based upon all those different factors. Creating a online presence and connecting it with valuable resources, like one of the best ways to do that, people are like, what are you talking about?

A schema, schema markup. Same as associations. If you're listed on multiple websites, also clean data, like data hygiene, names of company changes, you change as positions. Like even Mark, how many downloads?

Half a million downloads a month versus 600,000 downloads a month. If that's on two different sites talking about OGN, do you see how AIs trying to, you gotta build a graph so it understands there's that growth there.

It looks at those things and it's trying to resolve it. It's saying these are different numbers. Why is that, right? Connecting those nodes, connecting those dots and directionally saying this person knows this or this person does this or in this role,

it helps the knowledge graph online understand what's happening. And that's becoming exceedingly important when you're trying to show up in AI results or you're trying to do research and trying to understand how is this data

being presented to me, like why is it giving me this data? I think people are not asking that enough. Yeah, this is another example of how Matt and I did not discuss the subject of this show, but he's a perfect segue. Because the next thing I was gonna say

is visibility inside of voice search and AI search. And I'm gonna put myself on the spot right here because I don't know what's gonna happen when you listen to this, but as of now, if you ask any AI tool out there or if you do a voice search on Google or Apple or Bing

and ask who is the top oil and gas keynote speaker, I will come up. Yes, yes. That's not an accident. If you ask who's the top AI speaker in oil and gas, Matt comes up.

Once again, that is not an accident. We're doing that on purpose. That visibility gives you a lot of credence to your buyers or potential buyers because once again, this goes back to the thought leadership. They see us as a thought leader because we rank there.

And Mark, this is not a short-term play. No. Like starting a podcast, for example, I mean, we're going on three years. It's not a short-term play, but if you know directly where you're going,

it compounds over time. And even right before we got on, you were talking about all kinds of opportunities that are starting to flow to you as your visibility increases and now your name gets thrown in the hat because people are finding you and recognizing you.

And like if you got your name or your company showing up millions of times in the search engines or in the AI over year, over year, over year, or month, over month, over month, that compounds, you become a known entity and you get selected for these things.

I think as a salesperson, the number one thing you want to do is make yourself invaluable to the company that you are an entity in yourself and people buy and want to work with you because of your reputation procedure yourself as a great expert or you're available

that you don't let people get fall in the ditch like you're going to answer the phone. They trust you, right? All of these things, what you're trying to do, and again, I know you don't like this term, but a digital twin,

you need to create a digital twin of yourself online. I know that confuses everybody, but in sales, I think maybe people would at least understand what we're talking about, we're trying to map what's happening in the digital world with what's happening in the real world

and those connections don't always map and so many people just don't build out their online profile and I think it's becoming exceedingly important today. SuperDoug conference and expo, Heart Energy's premier shell event returns September 15th through the 17th in Houston.

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use promo code OGGN to save. So let me tell you salespeople what happens when you position yourself in this space. Number one, nobody beats up over price. Nobody beats up a thought leader over price, right? Number two, people relish you setting meetings with them

because you're seen as a thought leader. Number three, back when I used to run modal point for Met, bought it. When I would go on a customer engagement, basically the initial prospecting call, they would pay my travel half my day rate.

Salespeople usually have to cover your own travel, but because I was seen as a thought leader, they would pay for my travel half my day rate, right? It positions you in a totally different place as a salesperson when you come up as that thought leader when people search for something.

Mark, I mean, that was the biggest shift for me as being viewed as a consultant over a commoditized salesperson and differentiating yourself. Like you're associated with the brand, you're promoting the brand, you have expertise in that,

but they're buying because of you. They're buying because of what you know and how you position it and working with you. And as you elevate yourself to that trusted advisor that a consultant, that becomes critically key. And I would say if anybody's listening

and you've done this and this has happened to you, we would love you to leave a review about that because I know in personal conversations consistently when people make that shift, it's night and day. Yep, so the next thing is, and we did this this year and we're killing it.

We've talked for years on the show about reviews from your customers about making sure that that sort of stuff is captured and that you use it in your sales and marketing efforts. However, what we did this year is we look at our customer referrals,

not as something for marketing collateral, it's part of a media channel. So if you go to our YouTube, I think I might have mentioned this before, you'll see me interviewing an executive with ExxonMobil, talking about one of their vendors, Navis.

They signed something like an $8 billion 10-year project for Navis to do real digital twins on all of ExxonMobil's refineries around the world. Treating that customer testimonial as a media channel and putting it out there, which is the usual things. We've created charts,

we've put it on different social platforms, has been huge for us, has driven monster results for us, not only for us, but for our sponsor. Treating that type of customer evidence as a media channel, not a marketing asset, is something we've done differently this year

and we're killing it by doing that. The proof, expertise, authority, trust and experience, experience is something that in the oil and gas space specifically, like Trump's everything else. They wanna see what you've done for other people. I know we've talked about that in the past,

but if you can't provide proof, the AIs won't recommend you. You won't show up differently in the search engines because what are you saying different than anybody else? We just talked about how you're creating kind of independent nodes or citations online

and all your social media gets indexed now. All these partnerships, they used to fight each other. Now they've all kind of done deals together and they all have this data. And there's like hidden intent that people are looking for or the AIs are looking for,

the search engines are looking for. So you gotta have that out there because that is a box that absolutely gets looked at and checked. And it's so much more compelling when you can show, hey, you're in this space, you wanna go to this place. We found someone that was in a similar comp to you

or comparison to you. And we've taken them from here to here and this is what we've done and maybe you get a customer testimony from it. That's compelling. That's gonna move somebody if they have a problem

and you have the solution. And if you can even make personalize it where they're familiar with the brand, they're familiar with the people. Again, you gotta get sign-offs on all that kind of stuff. But that is so powerful.

Huge, huge. Another thing we've done differently this year is we craft executive short narratives about the problem that our buyer, that we will solve for our buyer at OGGN. But we write that short narrative as a business outcome that a CFO would resonate with, right?

So we're very heavy on the financials. It's no longer about the features and the problems we fix in a general way. It's no longer about the technology of having a podcast and downloads and listeners. It's about the business outcome

from a financial point of view and a very short executive narrative. Matt, literally those four or five sentences which AI can help you craft but make damn sure you go back and read it again, read it with your CFO hat on, right?

That has done wonders for our business this year. It gets approval internally much quicker. We're getting higher dollar amounts and we're literally having the executive teams pat us on the back and tell you, thank you. We understand what to expect by working with you 100%

and we have the ability to measure it now. So those executive short narratives written in a way that the executive team understands as far as business outcomes with heavy on the finances has done wonders for us this year. Two things I heard there if I put on the marketing hat

is one, the personalization. Personalization is incredibly important and also speaking to what are those pain points that actually leads into AEO, answer engine optimization is what the buzzword is for that but putting those out there on marketing collateral

on websites, incredibly important. Okay, then what I'm also here from you is the vocabulary of being able to talk to the CFOs and talking the finances because people are looking for how do I solve this problem and what is it gonna cost?

And if you can articulate that in that way and you have that vocabulary, that's where you're gonna get the sign-offs. People are overly critical of deals and numbers today, right? There's a lot of reasons because of that but they're so focused on that

that if you don't have that financial lingo and you're just still and feature benefit and relationship selling, you're not gonna close a deal and this is where I personally, Mark, saw a big difference is I a lot of times thought if you laid everything out for somebody,

they would connect the dots. And I don't know if there's a certain amount of cognitive whatever that you have to use to do that but I've found that if you connect the dots for everybody and you spoon feed it to them, you tend to get the result that you're looking for.

You can't just give them the numbers and hope they crunch it themselves and figure it out. You gotta hold their hand and connect those dots form and explain it to them and put it in an executive summary soundbite so that they can go to the executive team

because not everybody always has that information. And also if you're talking to the executive team, they're thinking about so many different things and they're putting their attention on this one thing for a short amount of time and you gotta transfer that knowledge as quickly as possible

in a language that they understand so the message actually connects because I've seen that kill more deals, Mark, than anything else is they just don't understand exactly how it all maps. And as soon as you map it, that's when the deals close.

Yeah, let's talk about this for a minute because you touched on a couple of things that we've talked about before in other episodes but it's really important that we talk about it here. So first thing, a good salesperson and also a good marketing person tends to be an educator.

Now they have different ways of educating, different tool sets, right? They tend to be an educator. Also, both sales and marketing people have sold or marketed your product or solution hundreds if not thousands of times. To Matt's point, and I agree with you Matt,

I've seen it myself a bunch, the prospect can't connect the dots like you can whether you're in sales or marketing because you know your product, it's built into the back of your head and actually your personality,

your wire to be an educator. So you lay it out in a logical way that makes sense to you but you've done it a thousand times. They've only bought this once, maybe never, right? You have to go into connected dots. And you're right, everybody's super busy right now.

If you're talking to somebody about the financial part of the benefits of working with you, leave the rest of the stuff out. The CFO doesn't care about this other stuff. He or she has too many other things to do. Vice versa, if you're talking to the chief marketing officer

about this, make sure you concentrate on the marketing benefits of working with you, not the finances. Now the finances, we'll have to talk to them about but make sure you personalize that because you're 100% right.

Because good sales and marketing people are naturally an educator because they've done this a bunch of times, they expect the prospect to naturally build the connected dots and they can't most of the time. And I would say if you're a new salesperson listening

to this, we've all talked about the word vomit. You just wanna share all this stuff. Here's the framework that I want you to think about. Signal, what is the signal? What are you trying to communicate? What is the through line?

What is the quickest point to what you're trying to get to? And what's relevant? And anything else that's not in that through line is noise. Get rid of it and your sales won't improve. 100% agree. And Matt, this is a funny time for me to ask you this

but dammit, it's our show, we do whatever the hell we want. Do you shoot? Do I shoot? Yeah, like several times we've had conversations and you made a point to say this is like a shotgun instead of a rifle or rifle instead of a shotgun.

I'm just curious if you shoot. Oh, physically, I was like podcast shoot. I do both. Yeah, so this analogy will resonate with everybody that should hopefully. In-person events run with precision, like a rifle, right?

Not a shotgun approach. So this year we've been favoring executive dinners, field workshops with a very small but slick group of people that have a common interest, a common problem. And that's doing way more for us than booth scans or generic lunch and learns.

We try to get everybody in that room or a webinar, very small precision run in-person events. When I say small, four, five people, but guess what? Of those four or five people that we do a field visit with, a field workshop with, sometimes all five of them sign up because we have the exact right people in the room.

They're with their peers so they all have something in common even though they may work for different companies. And nobody wants to go and be sold to at a lunch and learn and then walk away with somebody who tries to follow it with you every 15 minutes for the next three days. Nobody wants that.

However, if you have an educational event where you bring somebody out in the field, so in our case, we bring people, usually technology companies that don't know the oil and gas industry, we'll bring them out and show them a rig.

We'll show them a pipeline. We'll show them a network operations center, right? We'll bring them in a refinery. And when you do that sort of stuff, that precision in-person event has been killing it for us this year.

Once again, it's another way we've knocked out the park in 2026. I love that, Mark. I actually thought you were gonna go a different direction with that. I thought you were heading some outdoor stuff.

That's coming. I just wanted to use the rifle reference there. I used a lot of, I don't know. I feel like common knowledge is really important. And I think even military analogy sometimes, especially in the oil field,

because a lot of people have military backgrounds tends to resonate really well. Yeah. Speaking of that, go listen to Warrior Shaman. He's a Marine. He obviously has combat experience

after listening to his stuff. And he has a lot of radio experience, heavy metal sort of EDM, a blend around real military stuff. It's good stuff. He's just got a free shout out on the show.

Have to reach out to him telling that. All right, the in-person events that are precision. All right, here's a new one for us this year and we're killing with this too. Using partners of your clients to help build the ecosystem

and further whatever you're doing. I was aware of this, but we never used it till this year. Our clients, a lot of them tend to be large companies. And because of that, a lot of them also are technology companies. Because of that, the technology providers

are whining and dying in them. So all the cloud providers. So Amazon, Microsoft, Google, whining, dying, some of our big tech companies. You can imagine if your IBM or Ericsson or whatever that those companies are whining and dying in you.

What you may not know is they have co-marketing dollars available. Amazon wants Ericsson to sell more stuff because the more stuff Ericsson sells, the more Ericsson spends with Amazon. And because of that, Amazon has dollars set aside

to help Ericsson market Ericsson stuff, not Amazon stuff, right? So this year, we've been getting our sponsors to do more and bigger dollar stuff with us. But instead of them paying for it, we have them tap into their own partner ecosystem

and get co-marketing dollars. And Matt, we're freaking killing it doing that. And everybody wins. Our sponsor gets more stuff without spending another penny. We get relationships outside of our sponsor. So it's a multiplication effect.

And then our sponsors, partners get exposure on the network without actually doing anything other than contributing the co-marketing dollars, which we're able to contribute to anyway. Co-op dollars are phenomenal. And how many companies don't use them

or use them at the last minute to buy a bunch of gear or something for a booth, they get wasted. And that's a great question to ask. And this kind of coattails on what you're saying. I've found, Mark, and we've definitely done a lot of this,

is your network is your network, net worth, is that what is that? Network is your network, right? Is your network, yeah. And for whatever reason, certain people, it's not all, it might not be talking to you,

is they don't wanna share that network, okay? They feel like I have this connection and I don't wanna share it because I don't wanna use that social equity and that person has limited time and what have you. I've found the more I connect people in my network

and just not trying to get anything out of it. But if this person and that person can actually genuinely meet and make that connection, it benefits everybody and I look at if it's a genuine helpful connection, like if it's thoughtful, it's not noise,

they appreciate it, both parties appreciate it. It actually builds social equity, it doesn't use social equity. Dude, you're spot on. We have a new podcast coming on. I don't wanna mention the name yet,

but the company that's sponsored is not spending a dollar to sponsor. They got their partners to put up all the money. We get a new client. The sponsor is gonna be happy from the results we draw with the new podcast

and their partners are paying for it and their partners are happy to do it because the more successful this company is, the more they buy from their partners. It's just a win-win all the way around and we never did it before this year.

All right, I do wanna close this thing out because we didn't close on time on the stuff that here at OGN we have stopped doing. It's wasted time and money. Spray and pray outbound, right? All it does is train buyers to ignore you.

There's so much noise out there that if you just randomly put crap out there, not only are you wasting resources, you're making it harder for your sales and marketing team. Marketing qualified lead worship. We talked about in the last show,

we had our show before last, somebody wrote in saying that their CFO wouldn't accept that as a metric. Marketing qualified lead is not the same as buying a tent according to what just what Matt talked about a little bit earlier.

Generic claims about using AI. Every vendor in the world is over hyping AI. Stop it, all of y'all. Now the funny thing is audience, you don't know this, but there's a pretty big chance that Matt and I may be hyping some AI soon,

but when we do, it's real. It's legit. And that's what I've seen, Mark, and it becomes like a barometer of, because I'm doing AI stuff all day, every day. And when you talk to people that are legitimately doing AI,

like you connect, like you're speaking a different language and the lunch we had is pretty fun. Yeah, the next thing we quit doing at OGN is what I call content factories. At some point when HubSpot first came out, if you didn't know what their strategy was,

they literally produced content around anything to do with marketing and they produced so much of it that when you searched for anything, HubSpot came up. That was great. Now with AI, it's just noise again.

So quit just putting out random generic content for content's sake. Okay, I'll be quick, but it is very important to know that if you're trying to create something and then go after the same like target buyer

and intent and message, and you got 85% of the same content and you're publishing stuff online, it dilutes your signal, okay? Because you need to chionicalize that this is the source.

So it's much better to update your pillar content or what you're focused on to say this is our authority, this is what we say and spend time enhancing and improving that versus spreading it out because again, I'm not gonna go too deep, but if you're talking about a website,

there's a math problem essentially of how many different domains you have, where they rank, okay? And what their intent and the keywords they focus on are. You're gonna start to cannibalize what you're doing if you have three different things going after one thing.

And so it's really about strengthening the signal, consolidating that, chionicalizing it to really be clear on your messaging and spray and pay does not work, it just dilutes your signal. So come to it.

And the last thing we quit doing here at OGN is the relationship single thread selling to your one friendly customer, right? Oh man. We've learned, and don't get me wrong, you want to develop friendships with your customers

if you can, you want relationships with them. This is being human, this is not due to sales and marketing. However, having just one person that you're talking to in a company is a recipe for failure. And we've talked about a bunch. So here at OGN, the moment we come in door

to a new prospect, we go wide. It's just part of our sales process and we're open and honest about it. So that's the stuff we quit doing. It's also all the stuff that worked for us for this year. Hopefully that was useful to you.

Matt and I have some big stuff coming up with this show. We just can't talk about it yet. Motelpoint, hey, check out Motelpoint. We've been revamping the site. There's a lot of things that we're doing on go-to-market strategies,

utilizing AI in your business. There's a lot of test cases that are coming out. Reporting for misuse of AI is coming up and there's fines associated with that. We're just trying to get everybody ready. So go check out Motelpoint, also EWR digital

if you're looking for sales and marketing. Go check them out. People, seriously, go check them out. All of Matt and I's social links are in the show notes. If you wanna send us a question that's easier for you, then links to two newsletters are in.

Matt, I had somebody ask us or ask me if we would have an interest in starting all you got sales and marketing newsletter. So maybe you and I should talk about that offline. It's more work, but like we talked about a while ago, a good newsletter is still very relevant in the B2B world

if it provides value. So maybe. I think some dedicated training sessions. I know that we were talking about a mastermind a couple of years ago, but even like some short trainings that we've done,

like you talked about have been really successful. Maybe there's a sequence or a module that we could do for people around different area and then we could build a playlist around it. It could be a live van or. Yeah, if you want Matt and I to come help your sales

and our marketing team reach out, there's a bunch of different things we offer. We do a lot of workshops. These are like real rubber hit the road workshops. It's not academia. One of my favorite things I do

I'm putting myself on the spot again too is when I teach a cold calling workshop in today's world, whoever hires us to do that, I will try to cold call their CEO live in front of the class like when the class starts and with the hope that by the end of the class,

he's actually answered my email. Doesn't always happen, but when it does happen, it's pretty cool. So I do want to say this. There's been a number of people that I don't exactly know how they've got my contact

information, but I'm getting reached out to a lot of different ways. A number of people have texted me. Super appreciate it. Love it. I love when people send me stuff.

I got a lot of like we talk, the theme is focus on the signal. Maybe it shed the noise, but I got a lot of people reaching out to me and it gets orphaned like in a text message thread or it gets stuck in my LinkedIn or something like that.

I would love Mark for us to add a form that people can fill out and then that sequence until like an email thread so I can communicate with people and stay in touch with people. Cause I just got a lot of different people

and I super appreciate everybody reaching out, but I'm just trying to manage it all. I do have like a personal assistant and a project manager that also helped keep me on track from getting distracted. And if you send something in a text and it's after hours,

like I sometimes rethink about it, but it could take me a while to get back to you. So just thank you, but that's just something I wanted to put out there. Yeah. Let's count that as our LinkedIn tipper fail the week

cause it's actually a good point. I get a lot of people reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. That is not my primary communication channel of choice. For me, it's email only because I can do stuff with email. I can file it away. I could turn it to calendar invite.

I can add it to my to-do list. That's a little bit harder to do with LinkedIn messages, Facebook message or even text. Facebook messages are like, I only check though. Someone asked me to speak on a panel and I was like, is it over?

This was like 15 days ago. I have messenger cut off the alert. So if you try to hit me up on Facebook, it's only when I randomly check it, which is maybe once a month. Once again, it's too much noise.

I guess that's gonna be our LinkedIn tip of the week is don't depend on LinkedIn. Find out the preferred communication channel of whoever you're reaching out to and use that channel. All right, Matt, let's get out here. Remember, make a difference, not a sale.

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