Mastering Sales and Marketing Synergy: From Personal Touch to Digital Strategies with Mark LaCour

Unlock the secrets to mastering sales and marketing synergy in the digital landscape with insights from Mark LaCour. Learn how to blend marketing-qualified leads with sales-qualified leads to boost conversion rates and drive revenue growth. With 27 years in the oil and gas industry, Mark shares examples of how the personal touch in sales can make a significant impact, even in an era of automation.

Explore the benefits of hiring commission-based salespeople and the strategic edge of channel partnerships. Discover why stay-at-home parents could be your next sales superstars and how attractive commissions can fuel business growth. We’ll also cover the rewards and risks of channel partnerships—they can boost cash flow but may pose risks if not managed carefully.

Align your sales and marketing teams to create a powerhouse of brand awareness and client engagement. Learn how transparent pricing strategies build trust and how SEO can redefine your brand identity. Gain insights into account-based selling and marketing, and see how companies like ExxonMobil and Amazon leverage these tools to strengthen their public perception. Join us for innovative strategies to harmonize your sales and marketing efforts and build a resilient business.

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Guest Contact Information: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/oil-and-gas-expert-speaker/
https://oggn.com/ogsm/

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More from EWR and Matt:

Leave a Review if it was content you enjoyed: https://g.page/r/CccGEk37CLosEB0/review

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One-on-One Consulting: https://www.ewrdigital.com/digital-strategy-consulting/private-consulting-session

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: bestseopodcast.com/

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Disclaimer: For Educational and Entertainment purposes Only.

Chapters

• 0:22 Maximizing Sales Integration in Online Business
• 6:25 Effective Sales Strategies and Channel Partnerships
• 13:16 Sales and Marketing Alignment for Success
• 22:42 Digital Marketing for Brand Awareness
• 29:01 Sales and Marketing Alignment Strategies

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:22

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matthew Bertram. I am going to be your host today. I actually have a great person to talk with today here. He's actually my co-host on another podcast. He's also the editor-in-chief of OGGN and the founder of OGGN, which is an oil and gas podcasting network. He has the largest podcast in oil and gas. He has the largest podcasting network in oil and gas and I have the pleasure of sharing a podcast as well as a stage with him, Mr Mark LaCour. Welcome, Mark, how are you doing today?

Speaker 1: 0:58

I'm doing awesome. Thanks for inviting me to the show. This should be fun.

Speaker 2: 1:01

And before I get into it, I typically read a review, and I have actually a review from our other podcast just to give everybody a little bit of teaser. This is from Hammer on June 20th 2024, and Hammer Mark and the team are second to none. Sales and marketing in the industry can be difficult, especially with all the digital noise nowadays, but the team does an excellent job, simplifying everything and providing all the good stuff. None of the extra fluff. Keep up the good work, y'all.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Love it. Thank you, hammer, whoever you are, for the review, we appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 1:33

The one thing about podcasting is please subscribe, because we don't always know who you are. Apple doesn't give us all that data, so if you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe. Please leave us a review. We really appreciate it. It helps support the show. So, mark, our other podcast and I've mentioned it a few times to the listeners is we talk about marketing sales and how they should really be joined at the hip, especially with larger enterprise organizations like In Oil and Gas, and we typically talk about digital marketing on this podcast. But I think that digital marketing, marketing, qualified leads, sales, qualified leads really need to be merged into one, and that is something we have discussed before, and I thought there would be no better way to bring someone that has 30 years of down the payment sales experience in one of the toughest industries to come on and share some of their insights and secrets.

Speaker 1: 2:28

So yeah, and if people you're wondering, I started when I was nine. That's why I have 30 years of experience.

Speaker 2: 2:34

Yeah, 30 years I mean he's, he's been selling uh popsicles and uh, you know, but uh no, no, so, um, mark, sorry. 25 years experience. 20 years experience.

Speaker 1: 2:46

What would you say? Actually, if I really do the math, I think it's 27. So you're closer with 30 than you are 25. But yeah, I've been doing it for a long time.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Yeah, well, I'm super excited to have you here and really dig into the sales side and the integration capacity, and I think a lot of people listening have online businesses. Online businesses, you can automate sales, you can grow your business. But a lot of the companies that listen and a lot of the people that listen that work for or work with these companies have companies that have a sales component, and a lot of times the marketing is being done and then it's getting handed off and then we lose visibility of what happens and we generate a lot of leads and then the sales team decides kind of which leads that they want to go after and to throw out the rest. And so you know what are some of the ways that you see how to maybe better merge the sales experience that people are working with a sales organization as well as marketing.

Speaker 1: 3:44

Yeah, so. So actually, let's back up a little bit. So if a lot of the listeners here have an online business, typically that's not a huge organization, it's a handful of people. Many times it's just one person right, and most of the time those online business rely on really high quality marketing to drive leads that converts to sales, that converts to revenue, and sometimes they don't feel like they need the need for a salesperson. So let me just give you a perfect, real world example.

Speaker 1: 4:08

We have a lot of offerings out there. Some of them are very high ticket items, really only targeted for large, you know fortune 1000 companies. However, we have a huge following of small, independent business owners that you know maybe can't afford six or eight or $10,000 a month. So we decided to monetize that smaller group and we did it with a newsletter. And you go okay, mark. So what? Everybody has a newsletter. Well, this newsletter went from zero to 20,000 subscribers in the first 30 days. So that's a wow factor right there, and I can get into later what makes this newsletter different. But I have a salesperson, so we sell basically banner ads in this, in this newsletter. The banner ads, you can go on our website, you can buy them online. You can fill everything out, you don't need to talk to a salesperson, and that's how many online businesses operate. But I'm telling you now, folks, you're missing out.

Speaker 1: 4:53

What my one salesperson does that's dedicated to this newsletter is that she follows up with the people that don't buy and she tells a very compelling story and I would say about 20% of the time they go ahead and convert there while she has them on the phone. So that's 20% more revenue that we would have missed out on if I didn't have that salesperson. But, matt, the bigger thing is is that she stays in touch with them on a regular basis. About every other month, just a quick little ping. How you're doing here.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Something's interesting and, if I'm watching this over about a year's time, she's actually developing sales from old contacts that came in through the website a year ago that normally even though if you had some drip lists or email automation you would have dropped off. So she's not only paying for herself, but she's generating revenue with revenue that we would have missed if we would have concentrated only on the online sales component. And I pay her literally a percentage of the sales. So if she doesn't sell anything, it doesn't cost me anything. So it's kind of a win-win because it's almost lost a way to recover lost revenue that normally, if you're a single person driving sales through your online presence, you would have missed out on.

Speaker 2: 5:57

So you've just probably piqued some people's interest and they're talking about commission based selling, right? So I think a lot of different people have tried different things like this. What are some keys to success? If you're building like an all-commission sales team, because to your point it's a no-brainer If they can sell it, you give them a percentage of it, kind of like affiliate marketing. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that.

Speaker 1: 6:21

Yeah. So some of the things I'm going to tell you is the opposite of what you would think. So, in my experience, what I do not want as my commission-based salesperson is somebody that's desperate for the money, and the reason I say that is that it changes their personality. They will say yes to things they normally wouldn't do. They will commit to things they're not going to be able to fulfill and then, quite frankly, because they're desperate for money, not only are they're looking to make revenue with you or money for you, but they're looking at probably 10 other places, and which everyone gives them the quickest or the most money is where they're going to spend their resources. So you're going to waste your time with those people, and I know it can break your heart, because sometimes these people are your friends and you know they need the money.

Speaker 1: 6:56

My experience I find people that don't need the money, that want a little bit extra, and that tends to be people like stay-at-home moms when their kids get a little bit older, right, and they're not raising a family. If you've raised a family, if you're a man or woman that has stayed at home and raised a family, you understand business better than most people. You understand time constraints. You understand budgets. You understand the reward of working your butt off and accomplishing something like making a sale. You're smart because you had to raise a family. So look for people that don't need the money but want to do something extra. And there's places where you can find these people. This is going to sound really bizarre, but my salesperson actually found at a farmer's market, a local farmer's market. You go, that's retarded. Is it really? Who gets up on Saturday mornings to go shopping for produce that's locally grown, more than anybody else? It tends to be people that number one don't need the money, right. They tend to be okay financially. Number two, they're up on a Saturday morning, which means they have some free time. Number three, they're most probably trying to do something right, which is probably feed their family fresh fruits and vegetables, and for us that's like the ideal person.

Speaker 1: 8:04

As far as the commission, it's going to depend on your margins. Luckily for us, I'm going to be open and transparent with your audience. I give 50% of the gross sales of our banner ads in our newsletter to my commission person as commission for the first month. So we sell two month packages. I think it's $1,100 for two months for a banner ad in our newsletter. Those prices, by the way, are on our website if you want to go back and look at it.

Speaker 1: 8:29

And when she sells that, I give her half of that, which is 600 bucks, right out of our pocket. The reason I do that is I actually make my money the second month. Then it's up to us to show value to the subscriber or the buyer of that newsletter ad on that second month so that they renew on the third and fourth month, which of that newsletter ad on that second month so that they renew on the third and fourth month which my salesperson doesn't get a commission on. So my commission is based on getting money in my salesperson pocket as fast as possible, and that drives the right behavior. But then what happens is, in order for he or she to make more money, they have to go find a new buyer, which then is driving the behavior I want to see. So once again, it's a win-win for everybody.

Speaker 2: 9:08

No, I love that, I love that, and, and so one of the things we were we've talked about in the past is kind of channel partnerships too, right, and so, um, a lot of people have like e-commerce or online businesses or some kind of SAS product that they're trying to get out there or they're trying to uh, productize their service, right. So there's a lot of like service-based businesses that try to productize what they're doing. You know, talk a little bit about maybe channel partnerships on how you could leverage maybe a bigger network to reach more people if you're short on a sales team or your whole team is like e-commerce or online.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Yeah, so having a third-party, reseller or channel partner is one of the best ways to generate cashflow almost immediately. So I'm going to go back to our space. So we have the ear of the global oil and gas audience, but we also have the ear of high net worth individuals. If you think about our audiences, they tend to work in the oil and gas industry, so probably they make pretty good money. All right, so a couple of things right there off the bat. First, on alternate ways to monetize your business Don't just think about the buyers of your product or service. Think about, as a group, what else that audience have in common and how can you offer something to them. Now, when you're bringing a product or service to market, if you can find another company that's also selling in that same space, partner with them is a great way to cash flow. They literally have the clients that you need already. They know who they are, they have a high trust relationship with them and all they are doing is bringing a new offering to those people. Like I said, extremely fast way to generate cashflow. You can scale it up to multiple millions of dollars. You can have multiple channel partners in either different industries, different verticals, different geographic regions. And that sounds wonderful and, if you handle it right, it is.

Speaker 1: 10:50

However, there's another part of this. They own the client relations, not you. So they're the ones that build the trust, they're the ones that have the relationships, they're the ones that have the master service agreements, they're the ones that get the POs, and if they decide they don't want to work you anymore, or if you have a competitor that comes in that's cheaper than you, they're going to drop you and you're left high and dry. Matt, I have seen probably hundreds of businesses in my career that, depending on channel partnership, they end up either almost going out of business or they went out of business because their main channel partner dropped them and they had no other options.

Speaker 1: 11:23

So if you decide to go down the channel partner relationship, a couple of pits of advice. Number one make sure your contract is written where it's also okay for you to have relationships with those same end buyers. Most channel partners put language in their standard contract to keep you from doing that, because they're trying to protect themselves, and you get it. But if you ask them to let you also go after those same people with your direct sales, they'll say yes, they'll change your contract language because they want your business.

Speaker 1: 11:50

The second thing is to make sure that you get some good feedback on the channel partners. Before you sign an agreement, talk to some of their other vendors and see what they have to say about them. For every one good channel partner that's out there that is really going to make you money and protect your brand and work with you as a partner, there's 50 that suck and a lot of them are unethical and you don't want your name attached with that and, once again, you have no control over that. So my advice would be if you want quick cashflow, look for channel partners that are already in your space, but have a backup plan of how you could build those client relationships yourself simultaneously.

Speaker 2: 12:23

Okay, and so I want to go back and just preface we've had this discussion, but I think it's beneficial to have it here Like how does sales typically view marketing and what are some of the preconceived notions? And then maybe, over time, how has your opinion of marketing changed?

Speaker 1: 12:45

So my entire career, sales tends to see marketing as somewhat useful, but not really. And we all know this story. Marketing hands over 20 marketing qualified leads. The salespeople go through the trouble to reach out and to start a conversation with people and come to find out of those 20, 19 of them suck and one was maybe okay. And so if you're a salesperson, you have the same 24 hours a day as every other salesperson, and if what marketing is doing is not helpful to you, you'll quit using it.

Speaker 1: 13:16

Now the other side of the story is the marketing team worked their ass off to develop these leads. They hand these leads off to the sales team and then sales closes none of them, and so that's what starts, the little bit of friction between sales and marketing. And the conversation is always the same. Marketing says we gave you 20 leads, you didn't close any of them. The sales goes they sucked. Well, the problem there, quite frankly, is the salespeople. The salespeople need to learn how to partner with the marketing people, which is the premise of our podcast.

Speaker 1: 13:43

We literally, matt and I, believe that oil and gas salespeople, marketing people, should be joined at the hip. They should not be separate organizations so they can work together. They should be compensated similarly to drive the right behavior. However, I fast forwarded now and with the advent of digital marketing, the really good digital marketers now are super helpful for sales teams, not just with generating leads, which is what most people think of. I think the bigger help is nurturing those leads further along the process or further down the funnel, so that by the time the salesperson gets involved, the deal is almost done. And if you have a good marketing person, a good marketing team, you love that.

Speaker 1: 14:20

Imagine being a salesperson waking up, open your calendar. You have four meetings and you close all four because the marketing team did all the work upfront, to educate, inform the buyer on what they were getting themselves into. That's actually one of the reasons I mentioned earlier on our website that all of our prices are very transparent. We do that for two reasons. One is we want to be open and transparent. We're like Apple. Our prices are out there and you can either pay it or not. But the really bigger thing, matt, is it pre-qualifies people. That's my marketing team's idea to have our pricing or offering out there, which means that people that can't afford us don't even pick up the phone and then, like I mentioned earlier, those people that can't afford us. We now have a lower, a lower price option to try to capture that revenue as well.

Speaker 2: 14:59

Well, Google likes that too.

Speaker 1: 15:01

Okay, yeah, and Google loves that yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:03

Right. So so a lot of people don't don't want to put their pricing out there, but really Google wants to make sure that you're doing everything you can to help that person make a decision off of that that one page that they're landed on. Let me talk to that real quick.

Speaker 1: 15:17

That is fear. The reason people don't put pricing on their website is their. Their fear is oh, I'm gonna lose some business. That is not true. Think of your own buying habits. When you go to buy something, if it's too expensive, do you not buy it. No, you either put it off, you figure out a way to pay for it, you come up with something. You're interested in that solution, no matter what. And it's the same way with the website I have. I don't know what the real number is.

Speaker 1: 15:43

We have a lot of people that reach out to us once they see our price in our website and they go hey, that's a little pricey, is there something else we can do? And then we engage with sales conversation to see if we have other options that we can help them. And then I'll tell you something else. When you have that price pushback, it's usually not about price, even though they say it is. It's usually about risk. When I have these bigger conversations around podcast sponsorships, which are really big dollars, and it tends to be with very big companies I tend to do it in person if I can, and what I'm doing is I'm reading the room and when I mentioned that it's $6,000 or $10,000 or $50,000,. I watch people's faces and I always notice the person that makes a face, and that's usually the person goes hey, that's a lot of money, and I stopped the conversation right there in the room. I go is it really a lot of money or are you worried that you're not getting a good return on your investment? And if they're honest with themselves in the room, the people they'll say, yeah, it's a risk that we're not, that we don't want to take.

Speaker 1: 16:36

We want to mitigate that risk and so we have ways to mitigate that risk. One is our contracts are written with a 30 day out. So, for any reason or no reason, if you do business with us and you need to get out of the contract, you're whether that's we have another stupid pandemic, or you get mad at me, or you don't have the budget, or you're not getting the return on your investment. You write me an email and 30 days out, you're out of the contract, no questions asked. See what I did there. I just mitigated that pushback on the price because it's really about risk, and that's the same thing with putting your prices online If you have several options and an easy way for people to get in touch with you when they see your prices. If they can't afford it, they're not going to go somewhere else. They're going to reach out to you and see if there's some other way you can work with them. Then it's up to you to figure out how that would work best for both of y'all.

Speaker 2: 17:17

Yeah, and I think lowering your price or not feeling that your price has value, it's just race to the bottom.

Speaker 2: 17:23

You need to figure out a way that you can stack value or position that in a way in the buyer's mind that this is going to help get them from point A to point B. Right, whatever they're trying to do, you're you're trying to solve their problem and your product or solution should be able to do that. And and if the value is there and it does that like it shouldn't be a problem to buy. So I I a hundred percent agree.

Speaker 1: 17:45

Or they could not be a good fit for you, in which case you want to hurry up for both yourself and their self. Get them off of your back right. If they are not a good fit for you, if they can't afford you or you don't actually fix the problem, help them understand that quickly so you're not wasting your time and their valuable time. Having the conversation that is just as valuable as closing the deal.

Speaker 2: 18:07

Yeah, I think that's some of. If marketing is trying to generate leads for sales, they don't really understand maybe the buyer persona well enough or maybe the messaging from what the salespeople are maybe saying in the field or what they're going to catch a certain kind of fish, and if you're catching the wrong kind of fish and these are not good qualified leads, that's where the feedback loops, that's where lead scoring comes in. That's like give that information back and then retweak the content, retweak the advertising, retweak what you're doing to catch the kind of people you want. I have landed a hundred million dollar a year companies through inbound digital marketing.

Speaker 2: 18:54

It's about the bait that you put out there. It's about what you're pushing out there. Are people attracted to that? Is it going to solve their problem and are you clearly communicating that? I think the salespeople is professionally helping them buy. So there's probably questions for bigger ticket items, how to kind of walk them through the door from a customer support standpoint. But also they're the ones closing the deal and many times they might be the one at bigger organizations managing that relationship or account.

Speaker 1: 19:23

So um yeah, when you get to complex sales and I know I'm gonna get some hate mail on this, but I firmly believe this when you get to complex sales you have to have a salesperson involved. Their role or title doesn't necessarily have to say sales, but you have to have somebody that can help your customers. I'll give you a perfect example no-transcript. And then it goes up to some team and they approve it or don't approve it, and then that following fiscal year, that's the budget that that person has to spend. But you also have something called an operational budget or OpEx budget, and that's the budget that pays to keep things running electricity bills, payroll, health insurance, building, cleaning, all that sort of stuff and that does not have to get approved and you go. Well, so what, mark? Well, if you're selling something that normally would hit their CapEx budget and you have to wait a year to get approved and somebody else has to approve that spend, you could tell your client I can rent it to you and it will hit your OpEx budget and your client will most probably go. I have no idea what you're talking about. So, even though they work for the company, they don't know how to buy inside their own company's rules and regulations. So you go yeah, I will rent this to you instead of sell it to you. By definition, that now hits your operational budget, not your capital expenditure budget, and then you can have it right now.

Speaker 1: 20:44

And then, the way you do that, there's a bunch of companies out there. Just look for invoice factoring companies and they will take your product and your price, they will mark it up so they can make a profit, and then they will turn around and rent that to your buyer. They would be the one that handles all the paperwork, all the contracts. But now you've moved that from the buyer's CapEx budget to their OpEx budget and they most probably didn't know. You can do that.

Speaker 1: 21:06

So by understanding that complexity of the financial world, especially if it's a public company, you're helping the buyer buy, and so you can't do that online, I'm sorry. You need somebody that understands the intricacies, that can read the P&L, that understands the individual companies better than your buyer sometimes, so you can help them buy something they want. So there's a perfect example that you can do a lot without salespeople. Technology can do a lot, especially around the education, attracting attention, brand awareness but when it's complex and you need to understand that stuff right now, the you know the ai can't quite help somebody switch from a capex budget to a opx budget buy all right, fair point, let's.

Speaker 2: 21:45

Let's talk about account-based selling. Why don't you define for the audience how you view account-based selling, because I think, or even account-based marketing? I think those two kind of overlay on each other.

Speaker 1: 21:57

Well, I think they're the same. They're doing two different jobs with the same goal, but it's all about understanding, and so I love account-based selling and account-based marketing. I've always done it, even though it's been called things in the past. So in my world, if I'm talking to somebody that wants to work with us, from somebody like, say, exxonmobil, that corporate culture, their reach, their buying ability, the size of their budgets is different than if I'm talking to an oilfield service company like Halliburton, right? So even though they're both in oil and gas, the messaging is completely different. So I customize not only my messaging but my approach to ExxonMobil, which is different than I do at Halliburton. And then even with inside of ExxonMobil, I customize it even further. So I niche it further down.

Speaker 1: 22:42

If I'm talking to an executive team and I get a perfect example, we're talking about SEO, right here, right? So let's say, I work for a company that help other companies increase their organic search engine rankings and I'm talking to ExxonMobil, which? Number one, congratulations. The odds of you having that conversation are slim. But number two, if you're having that conversation with somebody on the executive team, you're not talking about shareholder value, you're going ExxonMobil. The world thinks you're destroying the planet that you're causing runaway, catastrophic global warming. I can help you rank in areas to showcase that. Not only are you not doing that, but you're actually trying to help with carbon capture, sequestering low carbon fuels, blah, blah, blah. But that whole conversation around your SEO business is now geared toward an executive conversation and you're talking about shareholder value. I had that same conversation with ExxonMobil, with their HR. Now I'm talking to them about how they can hire people, because right now, young people don't want to come work for you. However, if we have the right search engine strategy, I can position you as somebody they want to go work for. So you can see how.

Speaker 1: 23:40

Even if you had an SEO company, if you're doing account-based selling, not only do you niche it down for the company right, but you niche it even further down to the roles of the people you're talking to. And, matt, that is the right way to sell. If you're a salesperson, doing that keeps you from wasting your customer's time. You don't have the generic 30-second elevator pitch that you pitch out to everybody. You're not sending the same email to a thousand people. It's individual and it works. People, I'm telling you, and it's so much easier. The people appreciate the fact that you've customized everything.

Speaker 1: 24:10

The marketing side for account-based marketing is the same thing, but now you're using the toolbox that the marketers have, not the toolbox the sales have, where you're making it very individual. And yes, I know it's more work and yes, I know that with AI you can craft these beautiful messages with all these emoticons that you can blast out to thousands of people. Stop doing it, unless you're in a commoditized world like paperclips. Stop with that broad-based. It just doesn't work. It worked in the 90s and 2000s. Quite frankly, we did it.

Speaker 2: 24:41

It doesn't work now. Well, I think that there is going to be a resurgence of true creativity and true branding, because everybody's using the same large language models and the messaging and the ads and the offers are all going to sound the same language models and the messaging and the ads and the offers are all going to sound the same. So certainly, if you're at the front of the line, you're going to get the most advantage. But over time everyone's going to kind of catch up and if everybody's working on the same language models, that's a big thing. Why Google did a deal with Reddit? Because we need human input into. We don't want AI talking to AI that's overpopulating the search results. But I think you hit on something big, mark, and I want to open this up a little bit more. You talked about creating shareholder value through content marketing. Okay, and SEO is a huge part of content marketing. But a lot of times people in the marketing space are really hyper-focused on driving sales or driving, you know, top line sales. Basically right, like, get me more leads, get me more sales.

Speaker 2: 25:38

The way to use all the tools I believe of the the digital marketing like tool belt is, is you're solving problems, right. So even internally, you can use social media. You talked about hiring, for example, right. So positioning the brand in a way that's going to attract whatever generation you're targeting, and also how people are searching online one-to-many from a value. That's a communication issue from the executive team of communicating something to a large organization, and through a podcast is a great way to do it.

Speaker 2: 26:18

All of these different tools that are in the digital marketing landscape could be used in different ways. I've brought people on the podcast in the past. I've had conversations about, you know, facebook ads that are in the political season, supporting a certain candidate, or having people think a certain kind of way, or lobbying, getting the public message out there for X, y, z, right. So there's a lot of different ways that, if you look at digital marketing, what is the problem you're trying to solve? And can you do that online? Can you do that through messaging? Can you do that through reach? Can you do that through targeting? Can you do that through your target persona? Yeah, all the answers, I think, are pretty much yes, and so what I really want people to do is think outside of this groove, this wedge, this box that we're in, that all you're doing is driving leads and sales, and we're a big data-driven company and we drive results, and our previous name was E-Web Results and so we did that.

Speaker 1: 27:20

And as we've started to work with larger and larger organizations, the use cases for digital marketing are so much more broad, so I was hoping you could maybe spend a little bit of time hitting on that, yeah, and if you look at what we do, I mean I think we have 20 or 21 different podcasts focused on the energy industry. They're all sponsored by companies, you know, and most of those companies come to us and want to work with us, not to drive leads, matt. It's typically, I guess, at its core, it's brand awareness, organic brand awareness. But I'll give you a good example. Amazon's one of our clients and Amazon has an issue in the oil and gas industry that a lot of people only think of them as the brown box delivery company. They don't know that Amazon has Amazon Web Service, that they're a high-tech company, that they have a lot of cloud offerings for enterprise clients and inside of AWS they have a sub-segment called Amazon Energy Services. It's a group of domain experts that understand the oil and gas and energy industry backwards and forwards. They used to work in it and then they pull along the Amazon technology for the ride. So if you work in my industry and you want help with cloud computing, with a hybrid cloud mix with stuff on your premise big data, analytics, machine learning, ai you may not know that Amazon can offer you that, with experts from the industry itself. So all we do is talk about how Amazon has these domain experts that work inside of AWS and our audiences hear this and they go huh, we didn't know, amazon did that. Bing bing, that's all Amazon wanted. All Amazon wanted is for us to educate our audiences that they have an offer they didn't know. And you know what happens. Sales naturally follow. We actually track that organic brand recognition as a metric as part of our sponsorship with Amazon.

Speaker 1: 29:01

We ask a one question survey. The host on the podcast reads it saying hey, if you want a free hard hat or a laptop sticker, go click on this link. It's a one question survey. It takes 12 seconds and that's the key. It really is one question. It really is 12 seconds and the question is simple Did you know that Amazon had Amazon energy services as part of AWS? Before you listen to this podcast, yes or no? People click yes or no and the predominant number of people that listen say no. We bring it back to Amazon marketing and guess what, when they go, try to justify their budget spend, they now have real data that we are moving the needle, that more people know about them, which is what they want it to do, and so it's just a wonderful relationship, to your point where what we're really doing is using the digital marketing toolbox to do something other than drive leads, but it's just as valuable, if not more valuable, to our client.

Speaker 2: 29:51

Yeah, I mean brand awareness, brand positioning. Especially if you have a big brand, people might view it a certain way, and so there's a lot of discussions right now of retooling the brand or brand refresh or brand positioning, or how people are affected in the market.

Speaker 2: 30:09

I was at a talk the other night where they were talking about how HubSpot has an issue of how people view them and they're starting to do a lot more enterprise stuff. So it's like, okay, how do we reposition ourselves online? Or maybe do we start like a DBA or another brand to go after that? And I think that there's different approaches, but many times there's a lot of organizations out there in the marketplace that actually are operating under different names and you don't know it. I'll give you an example, mark. So we're starting to get into some apparel clients and stuff like that. And so did you know honest question did you know that every brand that's in the Sunglass Hut in the mall is owned by the same company?

Speaker 1: 30:54

I had no idea.

Speaker 2: 30:55

They buy the companies and it's all part of one conglomerate, but those are each individual brands but they sell as different companies. But but you're really just buying from Sunglass Hut, which actually is part of a bigger eye care company that owns 50% of the entire air car market and and as you know, let me tell you this.

Speaker 1: 31:17

That tells me two things right away. Number one they're they're trying to own their space. So if they have competitors that own a piece of the market, the right business choice for them is to go pick them up. That way they buy the market, so they have to build it. We do the same thing. We have acquired podcasts because we wanted their market. But the other thing is imagine how much leverage they have with their vendors. With all of these different sunglass manufacturers under one roof, they have to buy the raw supplies right the plastic and the metal and the lenses and by lumping them together they get better leverage of vendors, better pricing, which then gives them a huge competitive advantage. I love the idea.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Well, I mean, that's really the idea of Silicon Valley is find a space, like we talked about Amazon, like let's go after rare books that like people are going to order like once or twice a year or something like that, and let's own that space. And then let's build another space and own that space. Own that space and then ultimately, now they own the whole world, right, or they're a huge market player. And that is the kind of modus operandi of most companies in the tech world is find the space, dominate the space, build a monopoly, essentially, but don't get in trouble with the government for it and then go do it again, right, and and I think that that's what we've seen over and over again and so all these things are, are part of, like, um, an ecosystem of, of selling and marketing, right, um, what are some other things that, uh, we've talked about, maybe in the past that we could pull through to this podcast about how sales and marketing really work well together?

Speaker 1: 32:47

Oh, that's a good start. So you know a lot of your listeners, I think, are smaller and they maybe have a smaller team. If you do, that makes it much easier to do what I'm about to say. Have your marketing people simply hang out with your sales team. I'm not going to say force them, but get as close as you can to forcing them as you can.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Marketing people tend to be more introverted than salespeople. It's the nature of what makes you good at what you do and they tend to be a little fearful about going to client meetings. Tell them this could be okay. Have your salesperson introduce them as the marketing peer and they're not really participating, they're just learning. That alleviates any fear from the marketing person to have to say something because they're worried they may say the wrong thing. Have them hang out with your salespeople. Have them sit in on calls. Have them go to client meetings. Have them go to industry events review package or your performance review or whatever.

Speaker 1: 33:41

It is that the way your company structured to rate the salespeople. Part of it is going to be the amount of time you spend with marketing. So also make sure that your salespeople have an hour a month carved out in their calendar to go on the marketing side of the house, take them out to lunch, hear what's going on in their world. If you can get those two people, not the groups you can get those two people together and start working together. The magic happens. Then the group comes together because you have the people together. Then and this is where I'm going to get some hate mail, but I firmly believe it, I've seen it work Figure out a way to change the compensation a little bit so that your marketing people get rewarded when your sales team kills the big deals.

Speaker 1: 34:17

The marketing team contributed that and I know you're paying them a salary and they may even have a bonus based on some metrics, but it's not tied to the sales success. Tying your marketing people's compensation to sales success is going to ruffle some feathers, I'm telling you now, but it drives the right behavior and what you want to do is start out with it being very small, so when the salespeople miss it, the marketing person isn't starving to death. But at some point I would like to see it substantial. I'd like to see it be 15, 10, 15, maybe even 20% of the marketing people's take-home pay and once again, give it enough time with the people working together. It drives the exact behavior that you want, which is to generate more happy, high-paying customers.

Speaker 2: 34:58

You know, I think that having some kind of bonus associated with sales that close and really pull in the marketing and the sales team closer together is the right direction. And I've seen with a lot of e-commerce companies, the whole team all the way up to the executive suite, because I think it comes from a culture standpoint. Everything's driven on, like you know, leads and what's going on online, and sales and marketing are literally the same function. I think with the advent of the CROs, the chief revenue officers has started to merge those, so you don't have an executive team, a marketing person, a salesperson at odds with each other, but you have somebody that they report to and that person reports to the executive team. So I think that's been a a really good evolution in in, in in the, the kind of sales and marketing relationship I wanted to add.

Speaker 2: 35:59

Before we get out of here cause we're sitting to get to time to wrap up, a question that could be like on our podcast, we ask if there's a LinkedIn failure tip of the week. So certainly, if LinkedIn and I know you're on there a lot is your secret sauce, please share that. But I would like to know, from a digital marketing standpoint, what is a secret that you would like to share, as it relates to digital marketing.

Speaker 1: 36:27

This can be unexpected. I hope it involves college interns. So if you're in the organic search engine world, you understand how important is your domain. You also understand that you most probably cannot get your company's name and what they do with a com, because those have been gone for a long time and so it's like man, how do I get the domain name with at least my company's name in it? Preferably a com, but I've had to a net or org, but probably com, because they're all gone and there's a bunch of brokers sitting on there. When you search for that name of your company, most probably instead of somebody using it, it's parked somewhere and they want to sell it. So here's what I did. I actually did this for OGGNcom. We could not get it. They wanted $29,000 for the domain name. I didn't want to pay that much money for it, so I bought Oil Gas Global Network. Can you imagine how big your business card has to be if you have that long URL on it? Plus, google didn't rank it as well as I would have had OGGN, which is the name of our company.

Speaker 1: 37:25

So I hired a college intern from my local university who was a business major, who had no connection with me on social and that's really important and we'll get back to why that's really important. And basically I pointed him at this domain and the company was held it that wanted $29,000. And I said I don't want to pay more than $15,000 for this, but for every $2,000 you get below $15,000, I'll give you an extra bonus. So I structured his compensation in a way that the cheaper he got the domain for me, the more money I paid him. And then I did the math in such a way that I wasn't upside down in the deal, right. And don't you know, he got that domain name for me for $4,000 and I was willing to pay 15. They wanted 29.

Speaker 1: 38:05

We didn't lie, so we weren't unethical. But the reason that it worked is they had been sitting in this domain name for a long time. If you went back in history and looked, they were smart enough to buy every three, four, five letter wordcom they could imagine right. And so they were sitting there for a long time. And if I would have reached out to them and they saw the name of my company was OGGNcom, from a negotiation point of view they probably wouldn't negotiate it for a month and maybe I could have got it for 15,000, but probably not when they saw a college kid and they assumed he was starting some business in his dorm room. Now, once again, we didn't lie. They made the assumption not us and they saw that they didn't know he was connected with me. He had all the leverage, so he got my top levelcom domain name for pennies.

Speaker 1: 38:47

So there's a tip that you probably never heard before If you do it, make sure you do it ethically. You don't want anybody that sells a domain name to come back and think you swindled them. They may have fooled themselves, which is their fault, not yours. But there's a tip that has served us very well for almost all of our podcasts and, like I said, we have over 20 of them. We own the com and I use that technique all the time.

Speaker 2: 39:08

That's great. Thank you so much for sharing, Mark. So what's the best way for people to find you and to find out more about what you do?

Speaker 1: 39:16

Yeah, easiest way is hit me up on LinkedIn. Like Matt said, I'm very active. It's a Mark LaCour the podcast guy, the all gas podcast guy I'm on. I'm on Twitter a lot as well. Not so much on the other social channels, although we do have a presence. And if you want to check out the podcast arena and actually look at our pricing and look how we structure our pricing, which is going to be useful to you whether you're in my space or not, just go to OGGNcom. I got that domain cheap because of how I used it in a dirt.

Speaker 2: 39:48

Awesome, Mark. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'll put the link to OGGN as well as our podcast, if people want to go check that out to hear more of us banter back and forth about sales and marketing. Until the next time. Bye-bye for now.