How to Accelerate Deal Closure in Oil and Gas

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 today, Matthew, we're gonna do something a little bit different. Before I get to what the subject today shows about, a couple of things I wanna share with our audiences, because you brought this up off the mic

last time we recorded. And I say this a lot, that Matthew and I don't talk before a podcast. Let me explain what that really means. We do talk, we talk all the time. What I really mean is that we don't script out the podcast.

The podcast usually has a subject, and then we both kind of rift on the subject, so we think that's more real and more genuine. Another thing, and actually I didn't have a chance to tell you this before we started recording, Sugar Land, Texas, there's a new restaurant

called True Boy Barbecue. It's run by a guy named Jarris. Jarris led a sales team in the oil and gas industry and decided to pivot. Matthew and I are gonna do a live recording at True Boy Barbecue in Sugar Land.

We don't know when yet, but we'll let you know way ahead of time, so if you can make lunch plans and come out there, there'll be some discounts, we'll have some fun, we'll get to meet y'all in person. But just know that pretty soon,

I'm gonna announce when that date is, and then see if you can put it in your calendar. Okay, oh, one more thing. The Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast is officially sponsored by Motel Point. So if you have AI needs in oil and gas space,

or literally any space, reach out to Matthew. He's a running Motel Point now, they're doing some great things over there. Today's episode is from a listener at Rodein. We'll go ahead and read what they wrote in. Mark and Matt love the podcast,

Long Time Listener, First Time Writing In. I run a large enterprise sales team for a technology company that sells into the upstream operators. Since the very beginning of this year, I've seen an increase in deals being installed in the funnel.

My team is very experienced, and I have the data to support that this year, things are moving much slower than they have in the past. Any help that you can provide would be greatly appreciated. And when are y'all gonna do the book sign?

Let me answer that part first. We're gonna do the book sign at Northwest BMW here in Houston, but it's too damn hot. So we're gonna do it in the fall. So stay tuned for that. We're probably shooting for an October date.

That'll be fun as well. All right, deals get installed. Now it's different when you're working at the enterprise level than say smaller companies, much faster deal flow, much faster time to close. Enterprise deals are complex.

And of all the industry verticals I'm familiar with, all the gas industry is probably the most complex and the slowest of all of them out there. There's reasons for that. But I don't know what you think, but every time somebody has a problem,

like especially if they're a sales leader, I always think we should go back to the fundamentals and go back to the basics. Because usually it's one or two of these basics that have been overlooked. And usually what happens is

when times are great for a sales team, it's okay to skip some of the basics because it's much easier to sell your product or service. And when things are kind of risky, like what's going on right now in 2026 and the Straits of Harmoose and Iran,

crude is at record levels. And yet there's a lot of capital discipline around the operators, especially about spending any extra money. It's a weird year for enterprise sales teams, especially selling the upstream place.

I put together a checklist. There'll be a link in the show notes if you want to download this, but we're just kind of talk through this. And the very first basic, I think a lot of even very experienced sales reps,

sometimes overlook is no economic buyer has been identified. So you're talking to the engineers, the operation managers, the technical, your champion, like we talked about earlier in the last episode. And the problem with that is, do any of them have the budget

or the ability to sign off, to sign a PO? Usually not. And that's the reason that deals feel like they're getting stuck or they're moving really slow because everybody that you're talking to doesn't control the budget.

The budget's controlled by somebody else. So this is very simple and a fix. Map the ARC chart in the first week you're dealing with a new opportunity. Literally ask directly to your champion or to your contact who signs off on the capital spend

at your company for this type of project. Get an introduction to that person before investing any more time into any more sales meetings. And if there's several people that have say so in the budget, map that out and make sure they're included

in the conversations. Okay, so I had a couple of things. And hopefully everybody can hear me. I am out of Houston. It's over a hundred degrees. So I'm in New Mexico for the next couple of weeks.

So hopefully the sound so bear with me. Sound good actually. Good. And then also the whole thing with Matthew just, I go by Matt, but certainly Matthew is my full name and I own the domain Matthew Bertram.

And we're doing a lot of like entity management for enterprise companies and cleaning up their data online and kind of managing their brand. And one of the big things is if you've changed the name of your company or your individual and you go by a different name

or if you've gotten married and your last name changes, these are all issues that need to be rectified online. So that's what Mark's talking about when he's talking about Matthew at the beginning. It's me, Matt at modal points. So I just wanted to clarify that.

Back to what you were saying, Mark, I actually feel like one of the things that I've seen is you're not talking to the buyer, but the business case is too vague. You can't clearly articulate, because when I see like a really clear business case

and it's really outlined, those deals happen real fast. Okay. Like when there's a pain point and there's a solution that solved it and someone articulate say those deals close really fast.

So I think that because there's multiple stakeholders because somebody else has a business issue over here and the CFO or the executive board doesn't know exactly what that is. It has to be articulated and explained. And I think deals move slow

because the business case is too vague. I don't know what your thoughts are. This is a perfect example when I want to say, Matthew, I never talk. So that's actually on my list. ROI was never quantified.

All you're doing is pitching the value and that sometimes is a mistake. That's fundamental too. Pitching the features. Like everybody is like features, benefits, but it's like outcome.

What is the in-state? That's what you're trying to sell. And I'm glad you brought the CFO because that's a very important person and that group of finance inside a large enterprise company is somebody you should engage.

Remember, and basically what Matt's talking about is the value is pitched, but the ROI was never quantified. You're a good salesperson, right? You're used to dealing with these large companies and you understand their worries about efficiency or safety or uptime or time on tool

and your software or your solution fixes that and you're talking to the people that have that problem and they're all nodding their heads in agreement. And they're, yeah, and they're getting it. One or two of them, maybe you're your champions. Yeah, we really need this.

However, once again, they can't sign off on budget. You have to bring in the finance people. You have to understand what is the CFO dealing with in 2026 at this company, right? Everybody's blowing and going right now. We've had more wells being drilled.

We have more production going on. The US is capturing market share. Other countries are trying to capture market share because of what's going on with the US and Iran. However, what's going on in the CFO's world? Where's their shareholder value?

What's their stock price right now? What's their cash on hand? You have to be able to have those type of discussions and you have to be able to understand a balance sheet. If you don't and if you can't, if you're not comfortable talking about finances,

get yourself some education. At the enterprise level, being able to engage on the financial side is as important, if not more important, than being able to engage with the people that would actually use your product or service.

So that absolutely is make sure that ROI is quantified with the finance people in the enterprise deal. That is spot on that. The next one, and I see this a lot with software and our person that wrote in didn't say they sold software, but I suspect they might.

And that's basically the pilot. And I call it pilot purgatory. And basically, here's the problem. So your prospect company agrees to do a pilot or a trial or a demo. Everything goes fine and then nothing.

It just sits there. No decision, at the same time, no rejection, no buy, no next step. All in gas companies are notorious for having these open-ended pilots that never convert to a sale.

When you have somebody reach out to you, especially from a large company, Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, Total, and they're inquiring about your product or service as a salesperson, you naturally want to assume that it is a lead.

Remember, all these big companies have lots of people whose job is to do nothing but find out more information. It's not a sales lead. They're not in a buy-in cycle. They're looking for information. And how do you fix that?

You ask them. The basics. For me, it was banned. Budget authority need and time, but you have some formula that you use in your company and with your enterprise sales team

where you quantify if this is an actual genuine sales lead. And a lot of times it's not. Even if it gets to the point where you do a pilot or you do a demo, people on the other side of the table might just be learning.

And the only way you can find that out is if you ask them, are you only in a buy-in cycle? One of the things that I've seen and I've dealt with this personally, so I'm talking like myself in the mirror here, but many times if we do a pilot

or a small engagement for somebody, if you don't roll that in to a bigger sale and structure your agreement in that way, they have to remake a decision that they've already made to engage the pilot. So what I've found is if you can structure agreements

where there's not a whole new decision set that has to happen, it's like if you hit these metrics or we hit these KPIs that you define on the beginning, then we move forward. If there's a clear path to rolling into

like a larger agreement or something like that, if you structure at the beginning, you're not having to make the sale twice because that's what I'm seeing is happening is you sell the pilot, but then now you gotta go back and resell it

with all that information. And then there's a big gap there of like what you're trying to do and is this a good sync of time or resources when you got everybody spooled up and like ready to go, because some of it is like the client doesn't understand

what you're providing or what it needs, but you know it's the right solution. If you know that and you've seen that before, try to structure your agreements where you don't get stuck in that pilot and they have to make that new decision,

it just rolls into the next thing because you hit certain metrics. Hey, it's Mark Lacour, Editor-in-Chief of Oil and Gas Global Network. We wanna give you something free for being a listener to one of our podcasts.

It's very simple. Go to YouTube, search for OGGN, then comment on any video, send us a screenshot of your comment to marketingatoggn.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 marketingatoggn.com,

we'll put some free swag in your mailbox right away. Yeah, and then you brought up something good. Remember, as an experienced enterprise salesperson selling to the upstream space, you sold this 100 times, maybe 300 times. Your client may have never bought this one time,

so to Matt's point to you, it's just common sense. You've seen the problem cycles before, you've seen how your solution fixes that, but they don't know this, they haven't sold it 100 times. This might be the first time they bought it. The other thing, and I love how you put that together, Matt,

so here at OGGN, when we do projects for our clients, we never do a demo or a pilot unless it's woven contractually into a bigger deal. There's a cost, even if you're a large company, there's a cost for you doing a pilot, there's even a cost for you doing a demo.

Usually you fly in a couple sales engineers, there's hotel rooms, you always go out for steak dinner, somebody has to actually put the presentation together to fit the customer, and so there's a cost to that, and you should not eat that cost, and it's another way to verify

if they're in a buy and cycle or if they're just looking for information, because if you structure the pilot or the demo in a way that's one of the steps in your buy-in process, remember we talked about this before, that the sales reps should control the buy-in process,

you will quickly find out if they don't have budget or any desire to buy anything, they just want to learn. Now, if you're in that case, this is where marketing comes in very strong, you figure out a way to put them on a drip list, and if you don't know what that is,

go back and listen to an old show or call Matt. Nurture, yeah, a nurture campaign, you can do that with retargeting. I think retargeting is really underutilized, like if someone's been to a certain page or a downloadable, that's a PDF or whatever,

you can put them on a list, you can rate them, and then you can show them ads, either on social media, on the platforms that they're on, you can hit them with emails if they give you an email. There's lots of ways to reach people and stay in front of people

as you build that target persona, but once someone knows your name and knows your brand, it's like a zero to one, and the targeting goes way down. So if you have tight budgets, if you spend more money on that kind of middle of the funnel

or the messy middle to pull people over when they're ready to buy, so you don't lose them. I just know salespeople and myself included, you've built great rapport with people and the timing might be off, and you wanna stay, you wanna keep them warm,

how do you do that programmatically? How do you do that through automation? How do you do that at scale? And tools like AI and Agentec can help with that, but you should really define what that customer experience looks like.

You can set these things up where you can stay visible, and one of the biggest compliments, Mark, that I've ever gotten is on a number of campaigns that we did, they're like, you're everywhere, you're everywhere. Like I can't get away from you, you're everywhere, and that's what you need to be there.

That's why you give the pens and pads to make sure that when they're ready to have the decision, you're at least top of mind and you're in that decision category of the selection, and that's most of what the sale is after they know clearly what it is you're buying,

is making sure that they're comfortable with you, they remember your business, and you're staying in front of them. I don't know. No, no, you're spot on. That's the format I've seen.

But we have like six more of these to get through. The next one, I call it budget cycle blindness. I'll give you a perfect example. One of the big five consulting companies is getting ready to be a new sponsor here at OGGN. Their fiscal year ended in June,

and it starts brand new in July, which means that there was no new spending at the company in May, because they're into the fiscal cycle, which did not line up the calendar year. Imagine my salesperson trying to push for a deal

and not knowing this, and they would have tried to push it in the middle of the summer, which is like, great, you don't have a lot to do, you're a huge company, you have lots of revenue. If she didn't ask, what is your fiscal calendar year,

and learn that, she would have not known this, and that deal would have stalled, and it's something as simple as asking, is your fiscal year lined up with your calendar year? And a lot of companies all ask, it's not. Ask about the capital planning calendar.

Your buyers will know what that is. Don't ask on a fifth or sixth time you talk to them. The very first call, when everybody calls a discovery call, that should be one of your questions. What is your capital planning calendar?

When do we need to get into that planning cycle to be able to buy? For all you know, you can be having a conversation with the client in 2026, but because of that capital budget cycle, they may not be able to buy until 2027.

Now, it doesn't mean you can't sell them, but it changes the deal flow completely, and you would market your CRM that this is a deal to close next year, and that's another reason to deal stalls. You don't understand that budget cycle

with these large enterprise clients. Next one, and this one's really, this in the last eight years, this problem has grown and grown, and grown, and grown, and grown. When I was younger, Matt, selling to this industry,

there really was a decision maker. It really was a person a lot of times, and it really happened that if they liked you, you played golf with them, you took them out to eat, you were more likely to close a deal,

and we've talked about this before, that has totally changed. So now the problem is there's too many stakeholders in the decision-making process, and a lot of them are silent. Remember, just because you don't know who they are,

and they're not in part of the means, doesn't mean they can't veto the deal. So procurement, HSE, IT, IT security, the field operation side, the finance side, all of those people probably have some sway, some decision-making into your deal,

and if you don't know who these people are, all of those silent stakeholders can kill your deal, and if they're not coming to the meetings, they're not seeing the wealth of knowledge that you're presenting on how to solve this problem. Very simple.

How do you fix this? Ask your champion, the person that reached out to you, for a full list of stakeholders, or people that are part of the decision-making team, whether they join the meetings or not. Now, I will tell you this.

If your stakeholder, if your champion is procurement, they're really not your champion. In some cases, some cases they actually will be, right? But more or less, procurements could try to keep you from getting to know who that budget-making team is,

because their job is to get the best deal for the company. They're not worried about the best product. They're not worried about the problem that has improved the lost time incidents the best, or increases time on tool. They're worried about getting the cheapest dollar,

which is counterproductive sometimes, what's good for the company. So ask your champion for a list. If you're dealing with procurement, ask, and they won't give it to you, walk away from the deal.

I've done it a hundred times, let me tell you. 80% of the time, a week later, they'll come back to you and they'll give you that list, because there's a reason they reach out to you. Mark, the one thing I wanted to just add to this is not just knowing who those people are,

but what does that process look like? Okay, cause like trying to build that landscape internally of how is this deal gonna get approved? Like I've asked that question. I was like, just run me through in the past, how it deals kind of come through.

What is the typical process? Who looks at it next? Like how do y'all make that decision? Understanding the landscape internally helps you know what assets you might wanna provide that can get passed around internally.

Who might you need to get a call with? Who might be a blocker? Some people just want the executive summary. They just want the executive summary. They're not gonna get that full depth of knowledge and what it is.

And some people really might be in the buying process at a bigger company, but they might not really care about this thing. They might be involved and there's different motivations. Really understanding what that looks like on how a deal has navigated through to land

I think helps you with figuring out how to deal with these different stakeholders. I understand we've talked about this on previous shows. Ask what their buying process is. If it's a large enterprise oil and gas company, they have a buying process.

Now, this doesn't mean that as the rep, you still can't control the buying conversation, but they will have a buying process. And if you ask them, they will give it to you. Well, I think like the buying conversation and the buying process,

people will tell you what their buying process is, but that's not really their buying process. I see, right? The exception is benefiting them or the company 100%. I think I've said this on the air before. We have extremely large Fortune 100 client

that it's so hard for them to get a PO internally. They just pay us on their company credit card. Now, this violates their own internal financial policy, but it's not my company. And so I'm not gonna say no to that, but Matthew's right.

If they want to buy your stuff, they'll figure out a way to do it. And I think you want to ask like, because they're gonna give you if you don't know them, if you're not warmed up to them, they're gonna give you what the standardized process is.

And that standardized process, when I like map it out of like what's happened to close the deal, there's so many different kind of steps and components to be able to do that. And then if you're trying to sell

into a different division of that company or get to know a sister company or whatever, having that contextual understanding of how these things work together, even beyond the official policy, I think it's really, really important.

No, it really is. Okay, the next thing. Now, one of our previous episodes, we talked about how to support your internal champion. You should always try to find or identify internal champion.

A lot of times it's the person that either reached out to you in the beginning or the person that's sitting at the head of the table when you walk into that first meeting, right? However, there are champions that have no budget authority

or no political capital inside the company. They just like you or your product, which is not a bad place to be, but that internal champion without political capital or budget authority has no way to push it through, no way to push it through.

Now, I would rather them have political connections inside the company, political capital, than budget authority. Just because they have budget authority doesn't mean they'll buy from you. But if they have political capital, people respect them and appreciate their work,

they can sway others. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to our previous episode about supporting your internal champion. And I'm gonna reference what we talked about in that show. How do you fix that problem?

Pretty simple. You make sure you arm your champion, even if they don't have budgetary authority or political capital, with the education and the knowledge, and even maybe a one-page or just for them

to help them sell it internally. It's not you selling to them, right? You have to get their input on who's in the decision making team, what is the company really looking for, and then arm them with what they need

to help them sell what you sell to their own team. And that's the best way to fix that champion without political authority or budget authority. Well, Mark, I would tell you too, that a lot of times, some of the people that are your champions

are the person that they've engaged to go do a bunch of the research and find like the top three. And then what happens, this has been my experience, I've gotten pulled into rooms or calls where you have all these different stakeholders on the call

and they all have different levels of knowledge about your product or service. And they start asking a lot of different questions and it becomes unproductive because different people are at different levels of what that is.

So what you were saying about giving the resources and tools to kind of explain it for you and help them look good and sell is a lot of it, right? Like it's not what you're saying, it's what they're saying and they know how to word it in the vocabulary

and the different political issues that are going on to help it get through. But a lot of times different people have different knowledge levels of what you're offering. And if you put them all in a room together, it doesn't always go well

because you're gonna be having multiple tracked conversations. What is your thoughts around how to prevent that or if you get in that situation, how to deal with that if you've been in that situation? So the first thing is you gotta take yourself and your knowledge and your experience out of this.

Remember, you're trying to educate and basically arm your internal champion. He or she is trusted, they work for the company that you're trying to sell to, right? So take all the stuff out because as salespeople you tend to wanna educate,

you tend to over educate. And Matt, you're completely right. I won't tell you a real story, it's hilarious, but it's this exact situation. When we sell a sponsorship, most of our sponsors are looking

for organic brand recognition in All In Gas. Basically, they pay us to be a sponsor or podcast so that we can interview their subject matter experts, their clients, so the All In Gas industry learns about this company and what they do and then the sales naturally follow, right?

However, one of the smaller benefits of working with OGGM is that if there's certain companies or people, your sales team wants to get in front of and they can't, we can invite them on the right show as a guest and the salesperson gets a warm and person introduction,

that's non-sales, right? It's a very minor benefit. We have a client that that's all they were worried about. They didn't care about the brand awareness. And if I would have let my salesperson run with that, she would have continued to push

all the other benefits of working with OGGM. Once our internal champion said no, they wanna use the podcast to get in front of the right people, the right prospects, instead of having a cold call them, then we armed our internal champion

with documentation and education on just that, even though to us, it's minor. And that was us listening to the internal champion about what's going on politically in his company and the reason they wanted to work with OGGM. So remember, it's not about you,

it's not about you educating the company further. It's about what does internal champion need to help you close this deal? I like that. Okay, this one happens all the time. And I have to admit, I was guilty of this for decades.

Treating a procurement and legal as an afterthought. Trust me, people, at the enterprise level, at the level we're selling at, as soon as you come in the door of that company, the first thing you do is you get your MSA, your SOWs, all your legal language in front of legal.

How many of us have gotten the phone call, the email saying yes, we're gonna buy your product or service, yes, we're gonna cut you a PO, we just have to have it go through legal. And three months later, you're still waiting to come out of legal, right?

We've all had it happen. And I'm telling you, the way to get around this is get your contracts, your legal stuff, in front of the legal team of your buyer immediately before you even start talking pricing to shorten that cycle and to keep that deal

from being delayed. The other thing is if you have legal resources, if your company's big enough to have your own attorneys to help negotiate contracts, find out who's being assigned because your buyer will assign a legal person

or an attorney to your actual deal and get them talking to your lawyer, your legal person upfront. Once again, before you even get into pricing, get it done, that's one of the quickest ways to make sure that it doesn't stall the deal.

Same way with procurement. Precurements can have some type of process, speaking of buying process, ask them what it is, they'll tell you, they have a job to do too, right? And probably the second worst place to have your deal hung up is in procurement.

Just don't treat them as an afterthought. Take care of that part of the, it's kind of hard and it's not fun work, but take care of that. What does it eat the elephant one bite at a time? Eat that legal and procurement elephant upfront. Well, I would tell you,

depending on which legal person you're working with or what their kind of directive is, there's certain things that they'll tell you that they're looking for, or there's certain language. Like I just did a big publicly traded company and we were going through the legal process

and the red lines that we were getting back, I was just like, they're saying the same thing. Like they just wanted to have their language. Like they weren't changing structurally like the agreement at all, but they wanted it to be their agreement versus our agreement.

So they just like rewrote everything. So I think that what you're talking about of that buying process on the micro level, having that question with that individual and don't look at it like just legal as this big black hole. Like it's an individual, it's a person,

they have goals that they're trying to achieve. If you understand what those things are, there might be something that's holding up the deal that you can go back to your executive team or your legal team that you might be able to waive or you might be able to change.

And that's the one thing that's holding it up that might not be that important to you, right? And it's just getting caught up there. So I think having those questions and having open dialogue is certainly helpful. And if you're coming in as the salesperson,

you're just like, hey, I'm just trying to be an advocate here, help facilitate the process. Is there anything that they'll tell you that they might not tell another lawyer or they might say, I wanna talk to the lawyer and then the lawyers talk.

Like you don't know what's gonna happen because every individual in each procurement and legal process is a different person and they're gonna handle it differently. And they're on a different comfort level of what they're willing to tell you,

what they're willing to do, as well as what their goals are and what they're trying to achieve in that role. Yeah, and I'll tell you something else. I hate fricking Aruba. However, that's the buy-in process of one of our sponsors.

So getting onboarded in Aruba took forever. It's not intuitive. How to get my financial people connected, their financial people, it delayed the deal for almost two months. Just getting onboarded in their tool to pay us.

It was so aggravated, it's almost not worth the money. The other thing is things like liability insurance, umbrella policies. It may be something as simple like, so here at OGG and we carry a $5 million umbrella policy. That usually protects us for everybody.

And some of our sponsors require more than that. So it's just a rider. But if you don't know that, it's gonna delay the deal. So make sure not only do you get legal taken care of immediately, but also make sure you understand procurement.

Because when you deal with enterprise companies, this is part of the buy-in process and you have to be onboarded as a vendor. I'll give you another quick example. This was interesting. This was something I learned.

So I'm sharing something I recently learned. We had a client that's been a client for a lot of years and they always pay by check. And I hate clients that pay by check. Like I'm big forward of crypto, right guys? Like it's all coming.

But I think that payments, I hate companies that cut checks and send checks. And there's a lot of stuff that's happening in the mail that you can't even trust and all that. But here was the crazy thing. So this was a six-figure check.

They normally cut us a check. I'm actually in New Mexico. And we had to go pick up that check. And I was like, Bart, we can't pick up a check. Like I'm not gonna go pick up a check. And essentially, we're set up on bill.com

and they were set up on bill.com. And they're like, oh, we'll just transfer your money right there at like same day. Something that was like this long process that we've done for a couple of years, it was an immediate transfer.

It was so understanding how they pay and what their infrastructure is can be really helpful. And I know that that might not be relevant to everyone, but that was certainly relevant to me. And sometimes you have to wait on my long-term payment terms. And if you can have an instant transfer,

that saves and cuts down on some of that time. Yeah, for sure. All right, so my final reason that enterprise level and only gas that deals get stalled is there's no compelling reason for your customer to act now. It's that simple.

We've all done this. We jumped through all the hoops. We've done all the demos. We figured out who the decision-making team is. We got everybody in agreement. We went through legal.

We got onboarded as a vendor during the procurement process. And still the deal doesn't close. Why? Because your customer is probably fighting a thousand fires. And maybe your priority is 999, right?

What you wanna do is be priority in the top 10, maybe not number one in the top 10. Now this one's delicate here. If you're very low priority and they're dealing with other stuff, there's only a couple of things

that you can try to do to speed it up. But what you don't wanna do is be gimmicky or salesy. You don't let the used car salesman that tells you the deal's happening today and you have to buy today. But if you don't, you won't get the price.

And we all know he's wrong. That whatever price he tells you can only get today, you know you can come back a week later and get the same price. Don't be that guy or that girl that does that. However, there is nothing wrong in taking your deal

and putting a time constraint around it. Now, listen to me, people. Most people immediately jump to pricing. This price is only good for 30 days, 60 days. And that should be part of your standard language when you do a proposal.

However, that may not be what your client is cares about the most. Let's say in this case, they sell them to upstream operations. They sell technology. They probably do something that increases production.

I don't know what, I don't know what this company is. But what if you told them that instead of the pricing deadline that you only be able to have your implementation engineers available for the next three months for them? That's a different lever to pull, right? So now you're telling them that you can buy

whenever you want since this deal is stalled. However, if you want us to actually implement it, you have 90 days. Sometimes that is a better lever to pull than to say pricing's only good for 30, 60 or 90 days. And be real careful.

Once again, be genuine, be real, be transparent. And if they call your bluff, it shouldn't be a bluff. This should be a real thing that you're offering them. And if they don't close the deal in that timeframe, then they close it, they wanna close it a week later, don't jump through hoops to get your implementation team

to do it because they missed that window. You gotta be real here. So that's one of the few things I know how to speed things up. But if you're in that place where there's no compelling reason to act by your client,

that's a really hard one to get around. And that should have been something you figured out in the beginning of the deal in the discovery cycle. Was there a time element around them solving this problem of buying your service? Okay, two things.

So both sides, you wanna also ask, are they talking to other people and where they're at in the buying process? I think that's one of the first things you should always ask. I think that that goes without saying. On what you were just saying specifically though,

in the manufacturing space, typically prices, depending on what it is, go up every year at a certain time. They go up every year. Not everybody that's buying always knows that. But what I have seen, like I've seen it like clockwork,

everybody waits till the last minute. They know that there is a real constraint here. The price is gonna go up by 5% or 7% or whatever. And they're notified on that. And then at the last minute, because everybody's priorities change based on deadlines,

it bubbles up to the top. And then everybody's like, I wanna buy it at the same time. That is also something serious to deal with as well. And there's ways to give kind of incentives or to let people know ahead of time.

So you're managing it more effectively. Audience, I put a checklist together of everything we discussed. There'll be a link in the show notes to click it. That should be something that you should keep in a notebook on your phone somewhere,

or if you're old school, print it out and keep it in your binder or whatever. And it just goes through. It's a mental checklist to help make sure these deals don't get stalled. Our two newsletters are out there.

Once again, they've sold out for all of this year, but they're still very useful. Our Vince newsletter and then our weekly update. All of Matt and I's social links are in the show notes as well. This is a time to do our LinkedIn fail or tip of the week.

And Matt, I don't have one this time, do you? Well, one of the things that I'm starting to do a lot more of is there are terms of use guidelines around what you can do with LinkedIn, but they're starting to add different apps and tools that you can use.

And there's a lot of workflows that you can build if you're posting because only a very small fraction of people are posting where you can create a content calendar and then manually post it or then there's even tools that like help you do that. But LinkedIn's starting to open up their terms of use

and allowing like approved tools to be able to do different things. So that would be something I would look at because that's another way to stay top of mind with people is to become a thought leader and post content. Matt, if I'm not wrong, LinkedIn used to frown upon that.

In fact, I know several companies that took the time to write code and built tools to automate stuff on LinkedIn and when LinkedIn found it out, they killed the API that they built and they killed the connection. So now LinkedIn looks like it's actually encouraging that,

which I think is awesome. Yeah, so I just think things are changing, stuff's shifting. One of the things that I was trying to do with LinkedIn recently, and this could be a tip as well, I was having trouble, you used to be able to download all your connections,

all your contact information, everything like that. I tried to do that recently and I might've been doing it wrong, they moved stuff, I don't know, but it didn't give me their email address anymore, it took that away. And I always thought that was weird that they gave you that,

but I wasn't complaining about it, but we were setting some stuff up and that was kind of something new. So leave us a comment if I misspoke, correct me, but LinkedIn has become like a center of gravity with marketing to business.

And I don't know how many businesses I've still seen that their business profile is not really filled out totally, the individuals on the executive team are not sold out and we were doing this reputation management for a new client actually in the oil and gas space, there was a past employee that started posting

a bunch of negative stuff and there wasn't anything online to combat it and then there wasn't anything even online to really know that this was a great company that's been around 75 years or whatever and then the individual had some great stuff about him PR-wise,

but it wasn't linked to the company and it wasn't even on his like LinkedIn profile. So there's a lot of kind of this entity work that we're doing in addition to implementation that I think starting to be really, really valuable and like fill out your LinkedIn profile.

I know that that's like the most basic tip, but people still a lot of people in oil and gas are not doing it because maybe they don't wanna get contacted or you're like, oh, that person was just looking for a job. I think LinkedIn's changed quite a bit

and you wanna put your information out there and the algorithm looks at actually what's in your job title, your description, your headline and that impacts the visibility that your posts get if you're posting on topic. So there's your tip.

There's a technical tip. Good stuff. And if you all need to get in deeper and that go to modalpoint.com, reach out to Matthew and his team and they'll be happy to help you.

One more thing, if you like the fact that we answered a listener's question or it hopefully helped them solve a problem they were having with their sales team, you can reach out to us on any social media platform out there.

You can actually go to OGN website, there's a place you can fill out a form and leave it and we're happy to read your question on your ear and see if we can help you with it. All right, Matt, it's time to get out of here. Remember, make a difference and not a sale.

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This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.