AI and Data Governance: The Future of Sales and Marketing

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 Matt, we managed to get two episodes out in a row, like our trend is going in the right direction. And audience, today we thought we'd talk about something that you may or may not have heard of, depending on how much you follow us on social media. But I sold MotelPoint to Matt.

And if you don't know who or what MotelPoint was, MotelPoint was my first company I started about 15, 16 years ago. I started out of frustration. My last corporate employer capped my commission. And people, why would you ever cap a salesperson commission? I don't know, but they did.

And it just pissed me off, Matt. Out of anger, I started my own company and I took the market research I had learned and the salesmanship I learned and bundled it together and started a company that helped other companies sell into the oil and gas industry based upon data,

not based upon relationships, who you played golf with, who you went to the shooting range with, not making introductions to the right VP or getting on the proved vendors list, but by doing solid research and solid data. And back then that was unheard of.

Everything was still kind of based on relationships selling oil and gas. And what we would do with MotelPoint is a company would come to us and say, hey, we want to sell to the oil and gas industry. We want to sell to Chevron or Exxon or Halliburton or whatever.

And we would do a deep dive in their product and we would learn their product as good as they knew it. Then using structured interviews, we'd go out and interview people in the oil and gas industry. And it's really interesting. There's a lot of psychology involved back then

and still to this day. But basically, if you ask the same questions in the same order and those questions are well structured and you ask enough people, you start seeing a trend in that data. And by doing that, we were able to identify who would buy their product in the industry,

literally what companies and what job title, why they would buy it, so what problem did it solve, and how much would they pay for it. And Matt, the thing that was really surprising to me about 75% of the time when we engaged the new client, in my head, I thought I knew where their product fit.

I really did because I've been in this industry for a long time. And about 75% of the time I was wrong, it fit somewhere completely different we didn't even know about. Matter of fact, we had a lot of companies that had sold in oil and gas, but their sales and marketing were kind of struggling.

Think about pushing a boulder up the hill all the time. You can do it, but it's work. And what we figured out is they were selling to the wrong person or wrong group for the wrong reasons. And once we were able to come back with our research and point them in the right direction,

it was the opposite problem. It was chasing boulders downhill. They couldn't keep up with the sales that came in. And it was a very rewarding company because at the end of the day, not only would somebody pay us and pay us a lot,

but they would clap us in the back and shake our hand and look us in the eye and sincerely say, thank you, we could have never done this without you. And I did that for a very long time. And now, and I swore, and I just put a post on LinkedIn today,

I swore I would never sell this company. This was my baby. I started it. I nurtured my names attached to it. It was boutique, but it was very well known in the industry. And then I met you and I decided that it was time to let it go.

Quite frankly, I didn't have time to run both companies and I wasn't doing a good job with motor points. So I just quit doing work there. And you came in, we became friends. We've known each other for a long time. I love your business ethics, your intelligence.

So I sold it to you and you're taking the leads. And I'm so proud that I met you and that you're taking the company. But now you're bringing a modal point up to the modern standards and into the future. Let's talk about what you're doing with modal point. Yeah, I want to back up to and share kind of my half of the story

that like led up to that, right? EWR Digital has been around 25 years. It's a company that I moved up through the ranks and have taken over and you and I came together. So it's a digital marketing agency, a digital strategy agency. We're known for our work in search engine optimization.

Certainly like I've shared before, my mom was one of the first boys in Microsoft. Everything technology, AI has always been like something I just absolutely love and tinker with. But we got introduced because modal point had some clients that you were looking for a referral for someone to execute.

That's right. Delivery work for like, right? So you came to me and you said, hey, I have this big project here, not for us, for a client. Can you do it?

And I was like, why are you giving me this work? Like why are you giving me this deal? Like I didn't understand. And you were like, well, no, we just do the strategy piece of it. We just do the strategy. We need to execute partner.

And that kicked off like our relationship and working together and executing for clients and then doing podcasts together. And like it grew out of that, that we had very complimentary businesses. And the piece that I didn't have was the market research piece, some of the data intelligence piece, like that interview piece.

So it fit together really nicely. Now you were talking about the trends and what you were finding. Well, that in like kind of change management companies and there's like big names out there that do the sort of thing of digital strategy, we started getting into that and we got into that a lot more with AI.

Because AI is eating away at a lot of those change management company businesses. And AI can help do that. And we got really good at AI. There started to be like an infusion or a merger between our two companies.

We formalized partnerships in the past. I think it was at OTC a couple of years ago. We started working together. And so it just kind of made sense. What we're doing with Motelpoint with the data intelligence piece and the go-to-market strategy is being infused and integrated

into what we're doing with EWR. Okay, so it was really like a perfect fit. Now, again, with this data intelligence piece with AI, it adds an additional layer of what you can do with the data to find these trends and to do these things with AI. Well, guess what?

When you start using AI and you start implementing it in a company, there starts to be a ton of issues with governance, with data policy. Like all these things that you didn't think about that maybe you should have thought about when you were doing like process automation.

But some businesses, like I have an example I can share later in the podcast, but there's a lot of tech debt with a lot of companies that they need to go through this digital transformation in these places to add this AI layer. And the first thing that you run against is like,

how are we going to set it up? And what are our data governance? That was something we were dealing with internally. We were dealing with clients. So I went out and got certified. I'm like an AI auditor.

I focused on the EU because we had a lot of multinational companies. And also the EU has the hardest policy to operate in. Just kind of like California, GDPR, data privacy issues. So it's like, if you can do it there, you can do it everywhere. I got certified through a program associated with Oxford

or one of the Oxford professors. I've taken some classes like data governance and AI governance. I even coined a term and we got a trademark called dig, digital information governance. So it's your data internally at the company, but then externally to what happens.

And we got publicly traded companies, oil companies coming to us and saying, we don't like what AI is saying about us. Can you fix that? Other people are saying, hey, if people search AI, because something like 70%

of the search funnel now is like a pre-qualified buyer before someone picks up the phone and calls you. And that heavy lifting is where we've been talking about how marketing and sales fit together. So it's just kind of like, and also by the way, the name modal point, like I want you to tell the story

because I have been in love with the brand for as long as I've known you. And I'm so excited to incorporate it. I just absolutely love it. And I'm doing a lot of stuff with it. And we can get into that more,

but I just wanted to bring everybody up to the background of how this merger happened and why it happened because we were already doing the same kind of work and the experience and the oversight and the advisorship that you brought to my team and how we've been working together

and integrating those teams has just taken it to the next level of what EWR digital can do. So modal point still there, it's just enhanced and EWR still enhanced with modal point. And then there's kind of this new AI layer or cherry on top of things that we're doing that are not an issue today,

but there are potential fines coming. Just like you get an ISO standard, there's going to be AI things that have to happen. If you're in Texas, they've been leading the charge on it. We can go into all the policy issues that are happening. If you're following AI

and we're going to push this podcast out, Mythos or Fable 5, which is Claude, and I know you've talked about how you use Claude a lot, with their most advanced model on Friday at 5pm. I was actually using it when this happened. They shut it down.

And then they took all the employees that were even ad anthropic outside of the USA, national security, no one gets access to it. And we got to figure out what's going on. And I was like in the middle of work and I was like, why is this not working?

Like what is going on? It's funny. So I also was not in the middle of work, but I had the notification that it was available. So I was playing with it. In the middle of playing with it, it got killed.

And to this day, we're recording this on Thursday. What is the day? It's the 7th. 18th. 18th. As Dave, you go into Claude right now,

there's a place that it says it's not up and running. So there's still a check mark there. But when the government shut down, imagine Matt, if somebody's business needed that, be mission critical. And somebody, in this case, our federal government,

but it could be somebody else's federal government, decided to make that decision for you without you knowing what it would do to your business. I do want to tell the story though, because it's so weird. So I started Motley Point a very long time ago.

And if you don't know this audience, Google is actually not originally a search engine word. Google is a mathematical term. It's the largest number that a human can comprehend. It's called a Google. And I said, well, shoot, if it worked for the business of Google,

and they're so successful, I'm going to do the same thing. So I got a list of all the mathematical terms, and I started searching for .com. And you had to do it manually. You had to go do a who us look up. And the first .com that was available was Motley Point.

So I bought it. And Motley Point is actually the fourth dimension number. So we as humans can imagine two dimensions, three dimensions. So two dimensions would be two dots on a piece of paper. Three dimensions would be the dots

that you would map out something like, say, a vector. Statue of vector, right? Fourth dimension is actually there mathematically. We as humans can't comprehend it. So in the strangest sort of way, fast forward all these years, and it's a perfect name for Matt and what he's doing with it,

which is just bizarre, but it's kind of cool too. Hey, it's Mark Lacour, editor-in-chief of Oil and Gas Global Network. We want to give you something free for being a listener to one of our podcasts. It's very simple. Go to YouTube, search for OGGN, and comment on any video.

Send us a screenshot of your comment to marketing at oggn.com, and we will send you a free OGGN hardtop laptop sticker and a temporary tattoo. Once again, super easy. Just go to youtube.com, search for OGGN, comment on any video.

Send us a screenshot of your comment to marketing at oggn.com. We'll put some free swag in your mailbox right away. It's so cool. And also you think about multimodal. There's so many plays into the brand. I absolutely love it.

It is in line with what I do. It describes what we're doing in the digital world, like the digital space. That's how you decide for like search engine optimization or AI, like associations, vectors, basically degradation rates. Like all the math is like all tied up.

And so I absolutely love it. And one of the things that you were bringing up to kind of jump into, again, why the AI is so important is a lot of people are building AI into the workflows. Everything in sales and marketing, people are adding it at some level,

whether it may, if it's from a programmer level, there's like high use uses on down. But if you're using these models, understanding what you're relying upon, that's where on-prem AI starts to come in. And this is like what OT is doing.

It's like, okay, so there's latency rates when you're putting it on physical devices and you need to have them close to it. But man, think about that. You're relying on another company where you put AI in your workflow.

That's mission critical. So a lot of what we've been setting up for clients, they've been like a lot of pilots, is we're setting up AI where their data is secure and it's processed on site. I even am playing around with four different apps right now

that are all AI that are open source models. They've used inference on my phone so I can ask questions. Because remember, anything you put into chat, GBT, they're corporate guidelines, they keep it forever. It's a big surveillance, right? Now, we're using like codecs for some stuff,

but they remember everything. They remember everything. They're gonna be the most powerful company. Data's the new oil like absolutely and all this data is getting flooded through them. But if you're in a regulated industry

or you have IP or you have client information or whatever, you might not want these big companies to have all that data. Building on-prem AI or setting it up where it's on your own server and you're comfortable with like Amazoners

or whatever like they're doing. But separating it out, setting it up and structuring it right is absolutely critical. Now, here's the crazy thing. There are open source models today. Open source, that means you can go set it up yourself

and all you pay for is electricity. You do not have to pay a fee to a company and it's processed on site and you can control it and you can manage the weights. Now, it takes some textual setup, but this is where I think it's going.

I think it's going to fully sovereign systems and I'm seeing that what I saw at OTC with the Ericsson panel was, hey, we're setting up your own Wi-Fi network. You're going to run everything on this Wi-Fi network. I mean, that's what, back to all.

Okay, let's stop. Yeah. Ericsson's going to stop being my sponsor if I let you say Wi-Fi network. It's private 5G, big difference. It is and I'm sorry.

You're not a radio frequency expert. I get it, it's okay. I'm not, but I'm telling you what they're doing is cool and it's where the future is going. And I think that understanding this lingo and the vocabulary and thank you for correcting me,

these are the things you have to learn as the future comes to us. Like whether you want the future to be here now and stick your head in the ground, it's happening today. Yes.

Like you can't, oh, we're going to do it. Like in 18 months, the world's going to look completely different. Going through that transformation now is what's happening and it all starts with like, what is your setup? How are you doing it?

Where are the models in your workflow? Mapping it out the processes and that's a lot of the work that the marketing is kind of branched into. And I'm like, this is not something for a marketing agency to do. This is something for a consulting agency to do.

And a lot of that work that's coming and the branding and the positioning and the digital strategy and all that is living in modal point and the people I'm hiring for modal point, that's their focus.

Does that make sense? Yeah, but Matt, it's way more than that. So if you're working with marketing companies or sales, navelint companies or whatever, they have a vested interest in their business relationship with you.

You need a third party company like modal point. This is what modal point's always been, the third party company that has your interest in mind, not the bottom line in mind first. And that third party allows you to be separate and allows you to give solid strategic actionable advice.

That's not swayed by somebody wanting to increase their billable hours or increase their profit margin, right? And in today's world, Matt, it has changed a whole bunch. So in sales, we know this. It's gotten rid of so much manual administration in sales. I mean, how many calls do you jump on

and there's as many AI note-taker assistants as there are people? But for a salesperson, it is freaking amazing. I love it. It shortens the cycle time. Conversion and deal intelligence.

There's AI tools that automatically transcribe, summarize, and analyze sales calls, not the web means, the actual sales calls, and they'll highlight missing opportunities, winning plays. We've all seen it in CRM. It automates all the stuff in CRM,

which is actually ghoul, because hello, fellow salespeople. I know this. I'm bad as it, bad as too. And I run the damn company, OGGN. We put the least amount of information in CRM as possible

because it takes time and we're not selling anything. But with AI, the AI grabs all this other information that's super valuable. When was the last time you called them? How long was the call? What was some of the things discussed?

Are there anything that perked up the ears of the AI that maybe they see a trend? And then you get into autonomous prospecting. I hate that shit. It used to be really bad salespeople. Now it's really bad bots.

However, if you have a trained AI agent, and Claude is a great example, I get Claude to help me write cold call emails. I still write it myself, but Claude is so good at doing the research, not only on the person, but the company.

You heard me say this before. We do cold calling. You reach out. If it's a public company, you read the 10K. You find out what the CEO is worried about legally. Claude can all do that in a second.

You don't even have to go find the investor page. My favorite thing is sales coaching. Salespeople, you need coaching. Myself included, right? You tend to focus on what worked in the past, and that may or may not work in the future.

And in the old days, when I say old days, I mean last year, the old days, you would hire a sales coach, somebody that was experienced, that was that third party that could listen to you on a sales call and can provide feedback.

I do it right now with my sales team and give direct feedback right after a call. There's no emotions attached to it. It's what I heard. It's what my experience says you could have done better or could have improved on.

And then I turn it around, and even if it's a new rep for me, I ask them, what did you hear? What could I improve on? What could I do better? All that stuff's being done by AI right now.

And if you don't have a layer of governance, then y'all are looking for a bunch of pain coming down the road. Imagine just a few years ago if you would have just opened up your CRM to your competitor.

That's a real possibility if you don't have this type of government that MotelPoint's doing right now. There's so much leaking of data. There's so much studies out there on shadow AI. That was one of the things we were doing,

a lot of shadow AI audits, like people triggering cyber security issues where they're getting billed for stuff that people were doing internally, setting up that governance, getting that third-party audit,

knowing what you're doing. Because everything you're telling me is awesome, and I know everybody wants to do it. But it starts with thinking through how to set it up properly. What are your risk vectors?

What are the surfaces that you want to control? All that thinking is good to get a third-party to do it, and that's not something that you want a marketing agency to do it. So it's funny. We also have a hosting company

because hosting is different than marketing and controlling the back-end, and I had to hire some pretty technical people. So we have a hosting company, we have a marketing company, and now we have a third-party auditing company.

What's interesting, and I'm really moving to separate these companies completely, but they build an ecosystem where their focus is this, but they have somebody that knows that's good at it, that they can hand it off to, and implement it.

These companies are starting to build an ecosystem and working together really well, and we have an expanding group of contractors and people we work with. So when someone has an issue, and they're like,

hey, I want to set that up. Like I have set that up, Mark, multiple times for multiple companies, and it constantly improves. It also internal calls, it records internal calls,

and it improves management. Like you have agents that are telling you you can monitor sediment. You can also say, hey, the last four meetings, this person kept saying they were going to do this,

they didn't get it done, this is a policy issue, and also this person might be overloaded, and you might want to look at not giving them anything else. The insights, the trends that it finds,

it's something I saw the prospecting on the sales process of the conversations are happening. There's also devices. Here's two devices, which anybody's watching this,

that I can clip on in Texas. You don't have to, but you should tell people you're recording it. I can put this on. I can listen to our conversation. I can then upload this.

So this was one of the gaps, Mark, because I'm recording all the calls, even like our conversations, podcasts. I like recording stuff. It's a lot of data. There's a lot of stuff I'm doing with that data.

It's pretty cool. We can go into that later, but these kind of devices, I think you're going to see these more and more. I can listen to this, I can upload it,

and it fills in the gap. So now I know what's going on with the client, and if you want to build that kind of quality assurance later, that supervisory layer, it helps improve it,

and really, if your culture is set right, people want it. People want to do better, get better at their job, or remind you to do things,

not miss stuff, deliver better quality work faster. Like, there's all these values in that, but when you say, hey, I want to do that, I know I can do that,

the first thing people say is like, how do I do that? Like, where do I start? Motal point is the starting point to figure out what your issues are, what your governance is,

what the IT issues you're going to deal with are, the size of your company, who you want to have it. Think through that. Do the workshop. Figure that stuff out,

and then I have people that are either, they're part of my network, or they're part of companies that I'm managing to execute that work,

and we've executed that work in regulated industries. Hopefully people are understanding how this works and where modal point fits in, because it's really going to be the start

of a lot of the conversations when you start talking about AI is governance, and your technical setup, and what are those blockers. Like procurement,

procurement of these devices, and like who has access to what when you bring somebody new on. Like all these things got to be thought about before you implement it.

Yeah, and I want to go back and touch on a couple of things Matt said earlier. So the first thing, this video probably won't go out, but we do need to start airing video.

Now that our YouTube channel's grown so much, which by the way, audience, if you want a free OGN hard hat, or a laptop sticker,

and a temporary tattoo, be a member of the tribe, really simple, go to YouTube, search for OGN, comment on any video,

take a screenshot, send it to marketing.oggn.com, that's marketing.oggn.com, and we'll send you a free laptop, a hard hat sticker, you'll help us grow our channel.

A couple of things that Matt brought up. So the first thing is, when he was talking about the device, since you can't see it, it's a small wearable device

that doesn't look like much of anything, but it's recording all the audio conversations Matt's having, and once again,

Matt's using that to learn and to train AI models, and AI can understand that now. Second thing, I talked about selling modal point to you,

I'm still involved. The thing is, I'm just not running the company, it's not money anymore. So I'm a tool, basically Matt's toolbox,

when he needs me, he will bring me in to the project, to the conversation. So I'm still part of modal point, I just don't have to worry about

paying the bills, or supervising anybody, which is actually kind of good. And then the other thing is, Matt mentioned your reputation, reputation management,

and if you're an oil and gas company, oil and gas service company, big tech company, let me tell you what's happened. We've all seen the fake AI nudes, right?

You can take somebody that's never posted a nude picture in public, and use an AI, this happened a lot to movie stars, and it happened to influencers,

they're using AI to fake nude pictures. Well, that seems kind of titillating, kind of wrong, right? But did you ever think somebody could do the same thing to your company?

I don't mean nudes. People could create horrible disaster stories with pictures and video that your company never did, and ruin your reputation online.

And unless you've thought ahead of this, do you know how hard it is to turn that around? It used to be we worried as an industry about bad public perception,

and it was people talking about things they didn't understand or they didn't know, or they just didn't like us and they exaggerated or just lied.

Now, people can produce what looks like evidence against your company. Can you imagine the crazy environmental wackos what they could do with AI

if they wanted to take down Chevron or Halliburton Exxon? And you got to think about that ahead of time. Then the other thing that's going on

that just is driving me crazy, but at some point we're going to come out of this tunnel is the massive amount of AI-generated crappy content that's out there.

It's really hard to get your real, genuine, educational content out there because everything that you spend the time to produce, AI can produce 10,000 more

pieces of content than they all suck, and we know that. But it's flooding the market. You got to be willing and understand

how you deal with that. And then the other thing is social listening. Once again, you used a couple of tools years ago to monitor social channels

and it would look to see if your name was mentioned with an ad or a hashtag. Now, man, trying to get ahead of that is almost impossible.

And once again, from a reputation management point of view, not only better you have a policy in place, you better have a plan in place

because it is coming. If it hasn't hit you yet, it will hit you at some point. And then think about your competitors. What if you have a competitor that's unscrupulous

and they hire somebody to do some of this stuff to elevate their brand and elevate their sales and industry? I mean, folks, this isn't something

you should take lightly. But the bottom line is because of the way things are moving, especially in marketing and sales, I've put marketing first. Marketing is no longer

gut instinct. Marketing is a data driven science. I've seen Matt do it a million times and he's taught us how to do it. If you're not leveraging AI and marketing,

you're already behind. And it's the same thing in sales. And we've talked about a little bit on the show, but there's so much to get ahead of. And the truth is,

instead of you trying to learn it yourself, hire an expert. It's shorter, quicker, faster. And once again, you have that third party, which will tell you the truth,

even if it's a hard conversation, even if there's something that you need to change. Maybe one of your executives is doing things they shouldn't do. Somebody needs to let you know about that.

So I'm going to get off my high horse on that. No, I love what you said. I wanted to add to that. OK, so regs are coming. Regulations are coming. There's policy already in place.

Reporting starts in September. Like AI and hiring or discrimination, like it could be up to $200,000. Incident? $200,000 in incident, $20,000 a day in fines.

Like this stuff is coming at the end of the year. They pushed it back a little bit. Reporting starts in September. So this is something to be aware of if you're using AI

and you have shadow AI. We are putting ourselves out there and trying to provide that education now. But in 60 days, you're going to start hearing a lot of governance conversations.

It was crazy to me that Microsoft's governments kit with co-work or co-pilot just came out like a month ago or a month and a half ago.

That blows my mind. Reputation management, okay? AI slop is a real thing. That was actually like the word of the year last year for one of the dictionaries.

Pretty funny. Social listening is really where what you were doing before. If you break it down, okay, I started sales. I wanted to get more leverage.

I want to reach one to many. Podcasting was that answer, right? Digital marketing was that answer. Podcasting was that answer. One to many, you're reaching a lot of people

through ads, through content that is out there that people find all the time, through podcasts. Podcasting, guys, creating video content,

audio content is the one thing that AI can't do. It's creating data sets that are unique to you. And if you want to control and you want to show up,

which I can go into Reputation Management here, in a minute, I know Mark, you have something to say. I'll save that

to talk about Reputation Management again before the end of this podcast. But you add that layer of social listening and you add that layer of data sets,

these AI's, and the search engines love unique data. They've already indexed everything online. If you're saying something that AI said, it's just running to the mean of whatever anybody else has said.

It's nothing new. It's not even going to show up because it's not valuable. So creating these unique data sets about your company and telling the story about your company,

one of the absolute best ways which I can't get around it. Podcasting is it? I have a book, again, y'all are not watching. It's called No Like Trust.

It's How to Start a Podcast. We've done presentations. We've done workshops like How to Start a Podcast, but OGGN, the authority that you already get from OGGN

and coming on an OGGN podcast and creating that content as well as being part of the community, it's 10X. It's 100X better than anything else you could do on your own.

I know you probably have something to say to that, Mark. And I do want to talk a little bit about GEO, AEO, what kind of what that is and where Reputation Management is going

and maybe a case study or two of things that we've done for oil companies and services. All I'm going to say is I have a little tease and I agree with you. Right now, AI cannot reproduce a good podcast

and also on the other end of stuff showing up when you search for things, don't think that Google's not fighting this battle too. Google's AI is figuring out what is AI and what's real content. However,

OGGN is working on something top secret that involves podcasting, so you just got to stay tuned and we'll update you when it happens. There was a big update, a May update that finished in June,

that Google was going aggressively after AI slop going after this content. And the only way to fight that is to eat expertise, authority, trust,

experience, like kind of verifying who said it, like putting your name on it, like authorship, like who said this and it needs to be unique.

And if you want to tell that story of what's happening of your company, if you're not saying anything, somebody else is saying it for you. I had a call literally yesterday

and I need to get a proposal on Friday, someone attacking their company, a disgruntled employee, there's paperwork out there, there's stuff on government documents, like how do we deal with this?

We've been around for 75 years, like we're a good company and I'm like, there's no footprint online, you don't say anything, you don't post on social,

your website is not at the level it needs to be, your investor relation category, like we don't know what you're doing, you're leaving all these things to be decided by other people and you're not in that conversation.

We need to get you in that conversation. There is some reputation management. You need to create that digital twin, if you will, of what you're doing in real life online so people know it

and we need to map it. And a lot of this is data hygiene. Data hygiene, kind of, I want to start a non-profit. If anybody wants to get involved,

man, I want to start a non-profit about data hygiene because I feel like it's the biggest issue that companies and people are not taught about their social presence and their company presence online,

you change the name of your company, you move locations, there's all these data points out there that AI doesn't know or search engines don't know, they don't trust it.

Yeah, and I need to throw something here real quick. Sales people, sales leaders have to listen to this. Everything Matt just talked about will cost you sales. You will lose sales.

People will not find you when they have a problem you can help them with. When he says data hygiene, don't just think of making sure that all the code is right behind the website. No, this is literally directly tied

to people and companies being able to find you and buy from you. This is not something that's an IT problem. This is a business problem. So really quickly, the sales funnel

and how people buy has completely changed. Agreed. Okay. It has completely changed. Driving people to like,

well, man, I don't even want to open this gate because it's going to really go into kind of the different routes that people hire, but it's not 11 touch points anymore.

It's more like 20. And people are just like getting a pre-qualified buyer, getting a buyer that's already ready to buy before they talk to you

is the job of marketing, is the account based selling. It's doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It's doing a lot of the air cover and you have boots on the ground, that kind of military analogy.

It is critically important. It's not brand assets for a conference. Like that's not what true performance marketing is anymore. We specialize in getting your brand known.

If you're not a well-known brand, you're going up against big brands. Man, that's where we can help you compete. You got to build this infrastructure. You got to leverage it. You got to use AI.

These are the things that we're doing and reputation management can kind of wrap all that together, but it's really, really important. And we've been talking about a lot of different things,

but I wanted people, if you're still listening, go to matthewbertrum.com. Go to matthewbertrum.com. I just used AI to rebuild my website. It's not fully done,

but I want you to go look at it. It's my AI speaking talk site. Okay. And some of these concepts, if you want to go into more depth, like I do workshops,

we do podcasts. Like I get involved in a lot of different levels. I'm doing two workshops. I did one workshop this week and I did one kind of consulting call.

I do these things all the time, but the sales process has changed and so many businesses are like, Hey, we've relied on channel partnerships. People know who we are. This, that, the other thing.

And how people are buying shifted. We've been talking about that forever. And you need to update and upgrade this stuff, but there's a cultural shift mark internally at these companies that needs to change.

So sometimes before you implement a policy, you got to kind of warm people up to that idea. So doing a workshop or doing a class or doing a talk about this kind of stuff gets people thinking the right way because you know,

if you think in AI, they're kind of like glasses that you can wear on how these companies work. And if you don't know that lingo and that vocabulary, it's hard to have two people talk

if you don't know AI or what you're trying to do and getting everybody on the same page. Reputation management, I think, and where your brand's out there and your footprint and what's going on,

that's going to help you sell. That's going to write. Nothing happens till something gets sold. It's going to be the driver of new dollars, of new growth, where you can invest in these other layers

and understanding this stuff. But if you're still operating on an old kind of legacy system, and a lot of people are, I think 71% of people are still doing manual data entry

and they're not using APIs and they're not pulling data in, we can set all that stuff up. You should be doing that and it's going to save you in terms of hours of team members.

Like that's how we calculate it now, Mark, is how many hours is, if we build this automated process or this agentic process, going to save your team and work that it can do

to get more leverage. It's not about replacement. It's about getting leverage and giving your team hours back because a lot of times, people don't follow the process

or the checklist or whatever because they're overloaded, potentially, at some of these mid-sized companies or it's not well-defined or that process is just not built,

but there's easy things that can be done and you need an evaluation of a third party to come in and look at that and go, are we using this properly? Because guess what?

18 months from now, 36 months from now, more and more people will be using AI and those people every month, every week. And I feel this, man,

it's moving so fast, you're going to get left behind and they're going to be so far ahead of you and they're going to be thinking and process improvement that you're going to start getting going

and they're going to be so far ahead of you, it's going to be very hard to catch up. So the business that are investing in this now are the ones that are going to win in the next 18 months. And listeners,

you need that independent third party and I'm telling you from experience, it's a modal point. So reach out, modal point team will take good care of you. We need to shut this thing down.

I do have a LinkedIn fail or tip and it involves, of all things, crazy enough, AI. If you're using LinkedIn

and you click that let AI rewrite button, it's horrible right now. And I think part of the reason it's horrible right now and nothing, no shade on Microsoft is Microsoft owns AI and quite frankly,

co-pilots behind all the other AI that's out there. So people don't click rewrite with AI on your LinkedIn post. It ruins your post. Be authentic.

It's okay if you misspell a word. It's okay if you don't get the grammar perfect. It's you. It's your real voice. That comes across way better than letting LinkedIn AI rewrite it.

Nothing gets you LinkedIn. I'm sure at some point you'll get better at that. All right. It's time to get out of here, Matt. This was great. Let's see if we can actually stay on track

and put another episode out next week. So remember folks, make a sale. Oops. Gotta edit that out. Make a difference, not a sale.

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