Mastering Buyer Champions: The Secret Weapon in Modern Sales

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, I'm not gonna say we're on a roll because I'm a jinxist, but we've been putting out regular episodes. We heard y'all. We got it in our calendars. And our last time we recorded, we touched on something called a buyer champion. And I've had several y'all reach out to us and say,

want us to do a longer episode just on buyer champions. So I just kind of thought we'd start there, Matt, which by the way, a huge congratulations. You're out there killing. I see you all over LinkedIn with a modal point, basically spitting facts and helping people understand

that there's more to it than what they think. And I just love to see you out there being successful with that. And it's just such a warm feeling and knowing that you're carrying the torch. Well, thank you. And I will say we are committed to this.

I am in Riviera Maya right now. So if I sound a little bit different or there's a little lag on this episode, everyone, we apologize, but we are trying to get episodes out. And thank you, Mark. And thank you for all your support.

It's been great. All right, buyer champion. If you don't know what a buyer champion is, I always think of them as somebody that helps you sell to their own company. And they do that quite frankly for selfish reasons.

Either they believe in you or your product or what your company does, and they see the advantages of their company adopting it because it probably helps them with their job. It could also be that they're just enthusiastic about your product or your service,

and they think your company should be exposed to it. And then they usually, like I said, have something personal to gain. Usually the product or service that you sell and your buyer champion, usually that connection is that it helps them with their job

or their department's job or their people's job. Sometimes it's a political thing like, hey, I'm ready to be promoted to that next level, to that SVP level or VP or director level, whatever. And I need a political win inside my company. And by bringing you in from the outside vendor,

you will give me that political win. But usually it's because it helps them with their job or their direct reports job. So that's what a buyer champion is. Just basically in old days, it's called a sales champion. I like the word buyer champion better.

Well, I think also a lot of people that are listening to this show, I know I've dealt with this is, and we've talked about it a little bit in the past, if you have a big logo behind you, okay. No, I never got fired for hiring IBM, Mike.

Or there's that kind of terminology out there. People are scared of making a decision that they don't make a lot because it is going to reflect on them publicly. They want to look good. They want to look good.

They want to make sure that they've done the right thing. Like there's a lot writing on this decision that they're going to invest a lot of money in. It's making them feel good to champion you and also recognize that if you are not with one of those big brands,

that there's a lot more you need to articulate and lay out to make sure that that person can use that ammunition to go to upper management to fight for you and also know that you got there back and you're going to make sure that this is successful and you can help it.

And so it's a lot of clear communication that needs to happen if you're not writing on one of those big brands. And I know a lot of people have gone from those big brands to other places and the doorstuffs don't open the same way.

And I would say in today's world, 2026, even if you work for a big brand such as IBM or pick your big brand of choice, today's buyer habits are different. You know, we've talked about this a bunch on the show. There's no single decision maker anymore.

It's decision making teams that decision making team is diverse, dispersed as well. You may not, in fact, you probably don't know everybody on the decision making team. So the buyer champion really is kind of your secret weapon in today's sales world.

And then Matt brings us up all the time. I don't remember what the number is, but it's something like 70 or 75% of the information gathering that used to be done by salespeople educating their buyers and doing demos is now done by the buyer directly

without even talking to the salesperson. So I think it's even more important to identify and help that champion internally help you sell your processors to their company. We have whole systems around that. Social selling is one of those components,

but there's 30 touch points that need to happen before someone buys. And the thing that salespeople don't like is where's the attribution? I had this discussion yesterday. I was like, we need to set this up.

We need to do this. I thought I laid it out really clearly. And I could tell you it was hesitating. I was like, you can't match attribution very well, can you? And he's like, yeah, he's like, does that really help? And these are fair questions

that we have to go through that process of educating the buyer to let them know that this is where things are going. And where I see it is that machines are starting to make a lot of these decisions and recommendations. And so understanding how to speak to those machines

is quite important. And there's a front end to all this before like you have that kind of pre-sold buyer before a salesperson talks to them or at least softens them up. Yeah, and you're 100% right.

One of our sponsors, our sponsor of our supply chain podcast, Verdan, literally is just that it's technology that helps supply chain professionals and professional buyers shorten the amount of time they have to deal with the vendor company.

It does all the research up front. It stack ranks everybody. It starts many RFPs. And once again, it's all technology. That person's not involved. You get vendors that have a similar product

to compete to each other on price. And when it gets it down to one or two that pass all the technology requirements, then it hands it off to real people. So that's what we're competing against as salespeople in 2026.

When you think about empowering your buyer champion, the way I've always thought about and continue to think about today is think of it as many sales training and a little bit of sales coaching. You're basically going to train and coach somebody

in the company you're trying to sell to, how to sell for you when you're not in the room. And when I say sell, I mean, the most honorable part of selling, which is figuring out if you're a good fit and help them solve a problem,

not the worst part of selling, which is trying to make somebody buy something they don't want. All right. So first thing, information to support conversations. You need to provide your buyer champion

the right information to support the internal conversations that they're going to have when you're not in that room. And it has to be done in their language using the way they speak internally and using the culture of their company, not yours. Traditionally, this was always considered

things like sales collateral. But Matt, I think in today's world, everybody is so busy and your buyer's champion is busy as well. Besides doing his day job, he's also championing you inside his own company

that I think just sending a bunch of sales collateral is a complete waste of time because it's more work for your buyer's champion. It's noise. I think it's really asking more of the right questions to understand how to take your information

and package it in a way that is helpful to them. Certainly, depending on the size of your company, there's homegrown material that's frowned upon. But I can tell you pulling out information to just provide the very clear clarity of what is it they really need to know.

And if you know what that is, and you can speak to that thing and string it together in an argument that they can then play the game of telephone and tell whoever they need to tell inside the organizations going to do a lot more help towards what you're trying to achieve if you package the information for them

and understand what that landscape looks like inside the organization. And I think a lot of people, well, right, we talk about salespeople want to do more of the talking and they want to show what they know. I think it's about being really clear and providing less

because you're just wanting that knowledge node to transfer. And the more signal you can create in that transfer, because they only need one piece usually, that's what I found. They always need one little piece and you give them too much and then they have to sit through it and they don't have time to do that is what you're saying.

Yeah, agreed. And then the old days, send in a bunch of emails with multiple attachments or links is how we equipped our buyer champion. They're too busy. That then creates work for the champion

to filter through all that understanding. And you have to remember, your champion maybe has bought this product or service several times, you sold it a thousand times. So you're still the expert in the conversation. The other thing is especially at the enterprise level,

which is mostly what you deal with an oil and gas, that's not a premium buying experience. When you send somebody a bunch of emails and ask them to sit through everything and figure out what's important to them. And then all that information gets scattered.

Once again, you should never use your inbox as a file cabinet, but almost everybody does and so they have to go back and find all emails. I think the thing to do, number one is you ask what sharing service gets to their firewall, right?

So Google Docs and oil and gas usually does not get through anybody's firewall. It's considered a security risk. However, Microsoft's OneDrive and oil and gas usually does. So ask your champion what file sharing attachment they use and then build them their own folder,

give them complete access to it, and then custom craft your messaging in there. We use Claude GPT, not Claude GPT. We use Claude, sorry, chat GPT. Claude AI. We use Claude AI for this.

Now we use the paid version. Basically, we will take our normal sales sheet from one of our podcasts, which explains the audience, the benefits, the size of the audience to reach out stuff. And then we combine that or we ask Claude to combine that

and to go to the company that is trying to bring us into door and understand what's going on in their business. If it's public, there's a lot of information out there. If it's not, you can feed some of the information and then we connect them to our buyer's champion's LinkedIn profile. And Claude can read some of that, not all of it.

Sometimes you have to copy and paste into like a Word doc or a PDF and feed that to Claude. But bottom line is whatever AI tool you use can help you custom craft your existing sales collateral specifically for this person, this project, and this company. And it's amazing at it.

And the more you error correct your AI when it makes mistakes, the better it gets. So now you have a single folder that gets through your product champions, your buyer's champions, a firewall. You have just one or two documents in there.

Usually it's one sales sheet that we've customized, like I just explained. And usually it's a video that's intentionally allowed and made them to share internally. So a minute or less just talking about the benefits of working in this case with us.

So this way you're giving that kind of white glove experience to your buyer champion, not creating more work for them. And then you have all the information that they need to help sell your stuff internally in one place, which makes it ridiculously easy for them. Man, I'll tell you.

You said a lot of things about AI and Claude that I'm not going to go into. I'll just say Fable 5, just turn back on. And it's quite impressive. I know it's long to this morning. I'm scared to say anything.

I've already done quite a few things with it. I think we've got seven days to continue to use it. And I'm sure that they kind of nerfed it from what it was able to do. But there's a lot of great workflows that are happening. But I agree with you.

If you've got to understand what the client's architecture is, their infrastructure is, and what's the best way to do it, I've found so many different calls that I get on. Whether it be Zoom or Microsoft or Google, they all don't talk to each other very well. And you think things get through like sending the,

did they read the file? Did they wish it? That's important. Like I have a proposal out right now. I have a sales guy that I was like, hey, they verbally agreed to it.

Like we sent the contract when we said it's been two days. They haven't even looked at it. Like what is the follow-up algorithm? What is the process? Put it in an email, send it through the email because it's coming from like a different software.

You need to text them and let them know to look for it. Like there's different elevated steps or escalation steps that need to happen. And we've found like with certain clients, and again, it's got to be approved and all that sort of thing. But Slack, we have an external Slack.

We have an internal Slack. If clients are passing stuff back and forth, which that's then tied to OneDrive or Google Drive, whatever, a folder that they can access. And then we have internal access folder and external access folder.

So a lot of this is about the infrastructure and architecture of how you do it. Like even with utilizing the AI, if you hook these things up, copying and pasting stuff, it can be seamless and accessing that. But also you got to know the terms of use.

So again, I go all the way back to like, what is the setup? Because some of these AIs, like say, you're talking about internal engineering documents or something like that. You got to know the terms of use

and know that these things are going to get processed off site. So is it an approved kind of container that you're using? I know a lot of people are using co-work or have gone back and forth or they're not using actually the coding agents. They're just using kind of a voice agent to communicate with.

How you're storing that information architecture about the client that draws that information. There's like, if you're using Google, there's like custom gems. There's custom GPTs if you're on chat. Understanding what your setup is

and what the client setup is and how they talk to each other, incredibly important. And I feel like a lot of people assume, like you said, that these attachments are going to get through. This email's going to get read.

I gave them all the information so they're going to be able to look at and make a decision. And reality is, do they even open the email? Do they skim it? Do they actually read it? Does anybody even watch the video?

Like, so there's software that you can see if like the videos actually get watched. Who watched them, kind of Vimeo. It will kind of tell you where someone might have watched it at. Like you can do a little bit of tracking.

There's a lot of these assumptions that I feel like salespeople make that if you ask the right questions, again, going back to it and slow down and understand you're trying to transfer this piece of information to this person in this way

and making sure that that transfer happens. That's like the, okay, we've accomplished it. Versus I've followed this checklist and I've done it. I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that. 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. We got more stuff to go through, but all that was great. The next step I think in empowering your buying champion is help them map out their internal buying process. For us, and we're unique because we're an only gas niche podcasting company, we've had many buyers champion,

not a single one has ever bought a podcast sponsorship before. Now that's us. If you sell something that's more common, like drill mud or welding rods or something, they've probably bought that before. But for us, remember, your buyer champion likes you

and wants to bring you in. They're not a detractor at all. So they're your friends who treat them like a friend. But treat them like a friend that's never done this before. Basically, we engage with our, we identify and engage with our buyer champion.

We go through a list of questions. Who are the key decision makers in this buying process? What do each one of them care about? Because each one of us would care about something differently. And I've talked about this before. The finance person may care more about the hard ROI

that they can cost justify. The project manager may care more about getting projects completed on time and on budget, right? So they may be buying the same tool, but they're care about two different things. Who else in the company will be impacted by this decision?

Going back to what I just said, the project tool, maybe it affects HR. Maybe if somebody's buying a project tool, it helps them with retention of schedulers or something. How does the buying team typically make decisions? Do they get together and have consensus?

Do they vote or is it casual? What needs to happen before they sign a deal? Typically, it's legalese. You've got to negotiate a master service agreement. We've gotten away from that in OGN. We have a simple sales sheet.

If you want to understand how I got away from having to get stuff approved by legal ping me separately, I'll explain it to you. What's the typical timeline for the buying decision? We all know this if you sell it on gas. It's a long time to make a buying decision.

How do the different decision makers decide between if there's different proposals? So if you have competition, how do they stack rank you versus your competition? That's a really important thing to ask. And then finally, ask them,

have they ever made this decision before? Or this buying decision before? This is how I know that all of our internal champions and the companies that bought podcast sponsorships have never bought it before because I asked them. In which case, you're now being helpful to them

because you're helping them think through what happens in their own company. They know how their company buys. They've never actually thought through the process. So you're helping them quantify their own internal buying process. And when you ask those questions that just rattled off,

you'll see where the gotchas are. It may be that what they care about is so different that you really need to have different presentations and meetings with a couple of the decision making team because what they care about is so radically different. Or it could be that the typical timeline

for this buying decision is longer than you want it to be. But if they come back and says, three years, I'm not going to wait three years to sell a podcast sponsor. Maybe you will if you're selling something like a tree or a blowout preventer.

Those questions help you qualify and it helps you help your buying champion internally. Basically, you're helping him qualify his own people from sales language to be sales qualified in this buying process. I mean, mapping out all that stuff is absolute gold

because you know what you're up against and where you're going. And if someone will give you that information and you're smart enough to ask the right questions and get that mapped out and listen to what they're saying, life's going to be so much better for you.

I think that a lot of times people try to move too fast with some of this stuff. And to your point, those are the notes you put in the CRM. Like, hey, this person's not ready to buy, but here's all the stuff. So you have that account mapped out

if they're being accurate with what they're sharing with you. And man, you can just move through things so much smoother if you know where you're going. Agreed. All right, so the next step in helping your buyer champion is what used to be called dealing with pushback

or overcoming objections, right? I don't like those words anymore. I don't think it applies as much in 2026. I think of it as roadblocks. It's still the same concept. What will keep this deal from happening?

Now, if what keeps this deal from happening that you're not the best fit, then walk away. You don't want to force somebody to do something they don't want. And you don't want to damage your buyer's champion reputation in the company. I would just be wrong.

I don't care how much commission you're getting. However, a couple of things. I mentioned if you're in a competitive environment, how do they decide between the different vendors? Talk about that. If you're in something that is mission critical

and you're in an RFP, a type of competitive environment, if you position yourself right with the buyer champion, you can help craft that RFP. Now, salespeople, be ethical. Don't specifically craft it so that you win and your competitors lose.

However, it is totally ethical to help craft the RFP so that the right questions are answered and the right data and information comes out, which then should help you win because you should be the better choice. Pricing.

Make sure that you equip your buyer champion with alternative pricing options. So in our case, we don't discount ever our monthly fee to sponsor a podcast, except if you want to sign for a long-term commitment. A typical podcast sponsor at OGG has no commitment.

There's no term. You can cancel any time the 30-day email. That eliminates a lot of that risk of sponsoring a podcast because usually I've never done it before. However, if they're really concerned, if one of the buyers and there's really concerned about price

and they want to discount, if they will agree to commit to a year, I'll give them a discount. So I've basically given my buyer champion two different pricing options. This helps him or her in those conversations internally.

References are huge. So we have them on video. You can do the same thing. Give your buyer champion real industry references so he can show other people that's evidence of trust and that you can actually do it.

I hate the word ROI. We all know what it means, but I love the idea of highlighting your product's economic benefits. So in our case, it's very easy for us to show that most of our sponsors,

the amount of money they spend with us each month, we generate about five times more revenue for them than they spend with us, some of them more. That's a very good economic benefit, our ROI, if you want to use that word, that we have as a use case

that we equipped our buyer champion with. And then if you have any competitors, we don't. But if we did, we would provide a comparison against our any competitors. Now we'll say this much. On our media page, on OGG, and you go there right now,

we use a third party tool that's not cheap to stack rank our podcast against every other podcast in our industry. So you can go there right now and you can see where OGG and podcasts are. They number one or they number 1,000.

And you can see where our competitors podcasts are. We provide that free because it helps people decide if they want to work with us or not. And then anything around cybersecurity, make sure you share that up front

because your buyer's champion will be asked about that. And in the old days, when I would say cybersecurity, you'd think about networking, switches, routing, computers, all that. Cybersecurity now is affecting things like valves, smart refrigerators.

It's built into everything because so much hardware in our industry is now IP enabled. So it connects to the internet in some fashion or intranet. There's potential roadblocks that you can work with your buyer champion ahead of time.

So they're armed and they're relaxed. You can have a natural conversation like you were there whispering in their ear, but you won't be. Man, you covered a lot of ground right there. I wish I would have had my pen and pad.

I'm out of the country. But what I would say to that is I love that selling the ROI. I think that that's where I've seen everything start to go. It's been that way for a couple of years. I mean, we've moved beyond features and benefits of the product.

But what is the in-state that we're trying to get to? What does this thing solve? And then working backwards from that is critically important. And I think that if that is the goal, if you know the business objective of why they're making the decision,

going all the way back to like, if you are selling a niche product or even if you're not, mapping that all the way back to that RFP process, that's where I was going to actually go next too, is that helps them figure out what are the use cases, what are the features and benefits,

what are the things that they need in a vendor and in whatever it is that they're buying to make sure that their bets are covered. You help them through that whole process. And it's like an accountability partner almost. Like it's like someone that you know what you need to do,

but it forces you to do it, and then you have a sounding board against that and like a whiteboarding session, whatever, to put that together. And once you fully map that out, hopefully you are the right fit for that client.

Or even if you're not, okay, even if you're not, there might be a different product or service that comes out of that, where you would be the right fit for. Does that make sense?

And I've found that so many times that like, when I figure out what the client really needs, and I'm like, okay, I know somebody better for that, but what was uncovered through this process is you actually need this and this too. And the shape of our contract changes to solve that thing.

And then we bring in a partner to help solve that other thing that might be better for them. And I've found that so much. And a lot of times mean with your competition at conferences, at events, I typically go to coffee with them.

I want to understand what it is that they have and how they're positioned in the marketplace. It just helps me be more educated and understand what the other clients are saying, not to outsell them, but to understand where we fit in

and how are we truly solving something in the marketplace to make sure it's a product-market fit. Yeah, I love that you brought that up. A good salesperson knows their competition. A great salesperson knows your competition's business better than they do.

That's one of the differences between good and great in the sales arena. I also like how you team me up without knowing that you do. And we do this all the time. Once again, Matt and I don't prep at all. You said map.

That's what I was going to come up with next. But map in this case is mutual action plan. Create a mutual action plan with your buyer's champion. Really simple stuff. Clear goals. In the salesperson's case,

it may be to bring the deal from discovery to close. But from discovery to close, there are steps. Share those with your buyer champion. Call out specific milestones, like scheduling a field trial before you actually finalize the deal,

or getting contract language approved by legal before you go to the next step. Put those in your shared action plan, your mutual action plan. Then assign responsibility to the entire decision-making team on who does what.

And if you don't know, put, I don't know what part you play in this. So when you do that and they see it, they'll identify because they want to fill in the blank. It's just human nature. This way, you know who you need to talk to

to get stuff, get contract language approved, who you need to talk to to get term approved, who you need to talk to to get the equipment delivered or to get it shipped out. All that stuff, have that in your mutual action plan. And then once you have all that mapped out,

put a timeline to it. And I'm telling you right now, once you build a type line, so okay, it's two weeks between the initial call and in-person meeting with the decision-making team. I'm telling you right now, add another week to that.

Every one of your deadlines in your timeline, add some contingency time because the deals could take much longer than you think. Even if you've done it a hundred times, we all know this. Something can happen so I can go on vacation. We can have a war between the US and Iran.

We can have a pandemic and something's going to throw a wrench into your timeline. Make sure you build enough contingency time in there and stick to the timeline. And if you're buyer, so not your buyer champion, but if you're buyer, the decision-making team

start straying from that timeline, like they don't show up for meetings or they push meetings back or whatever, and it becomes obvious that it's a habit, stop and ask them what's going on. You've all agreed to this upfront.

You have an internal champion, your buyer champion who you map all this stuff out to, you map it to the people and their roles. And if something's new changed, you need to know what is. And usually, your buyer champion will tell you,

hey, one of your biggest competitors plays golf with our CEO. Well, that's a different obstacle for you to have to deal with, different roadblock. Then oh, so-and-so win on vacation, and they're coming back a couple of days later.

Those are two different roadblocks that you have to deal with. But creating that mutual action plan, number one, gives your internal champion literary step-by-step instructions with timelines and everything needs to be done.

But to you as the sales professional, it outlines who does what and why and when so that when your management team goes, what's going on with this deal, you can go, well, we're blah, blah, blah here. And then to Matt's point,

because I know he's going to say this because he's right, all this information should go in your CRM. Because in today's CRM world, there's no reason for you not to put that in there because the AI will do it for you. He just opened up a whole new thing.

I know we're trying to wrap it. I would tell you that you need to create these accountability steps, this map for the client, because many times they're waiting for you to lead them, and they don't really know what they need to do. And they haven't maybe done the cognitive lift

to have to do it. And if you can do it for them, everybody likes to follow directions. If you go through that thinking and that have the agency to help figure it out, you know what needs to happen. They know what needs to happen.

It creates accountability. And I feel like we create accountability and process insider organizations, but we don't create that on that sales bridge until they become a client. And I feel like the faster you can solidify that,

now you're going to know if they're a good client or a bad client. You're going to know also what are the other objectives that are happening. You're going to know when things go off track. I feel like that's something that you don't think about enough

is, oh, this is about to go off track because these are the steps that we needed to have. Yes, I would also say these listening tools, going to kind of what you were talking about. I have a tool that has agents that actually give me feedback. There's different agents at about seven different agents

and they train on different steps on the sales calls of what do we need to do? Or there's an internal one and they're all looking at a different kind of deterministic angle of what they're trying to solve. And it creates a loop or a feedback loop of these things.

And also it documents the next step action plans that go into a dashboard to prove like you create a waterfall workflow. A lot of these things are being done manually right now, but they can be automated and you just have a human in the loop checking that process

to say, hey, yes, put that in there. That's not there. Switch it around, change out the order. And it's so much easier when that's populated for you so you don't have to create it from scratch because it's less cognitive load

because it's already mapped out and you just kind of tweak it, if that makes sense. Some of these tools are so powerful and it helps reduce the friction for salespeople to have to put it all in them and do it all. It captures it.

And also it protects you. Like you make a promise or a commitment. So from a compliance standpoint, it's really important to have a call, HR. It's important to like, oh, you're on a call. What was said?

How is it said? There's so many ways on why I think it's important to have a listening agent monitor it if you can get it through legal. And but you can plug it into all kinds of things. It's just amazing what technology can do today.

It really is. It's getting almost unbelievable. Have you got an Amazon drone delivery yet? No. I have. I've written in a Wemo though or a Wemo

or whatever they're called. I literally spoiled. I live next to an Amazon Fillments facility and we're part of the test case for their drones. I order stuff ending less than five pounds. I get it within an hour.

I have so many drone deliveries by Amazon. My dog who used to bark at the drones ignores them. He's used to it now. And it's like, you talk about technology out of the future. I mean, it's amazing. Even though it happens to be day to day,

I still can't believe it. All right, we need to wrap this thing up. So last thing to arm your buyer champion. Surprisingly enough, salespeople, your buyer champions can have meetings without you. I hate to tell you that.

They're going to have internal meetings. They probably have more internal meetings than they have with you. So you need to arm them and help them prep for internal meetings, a couple of things. And this is where you need to lean heavily

on your marketing peers. If you can equip your buyer champion with some very short customer testimonial videos, not 10 minute videos, a minute or less of one of your buyers saying, this helped us solve this problem X

and we would do it again with your company. Stuff that could be shot on your cell phone. That is an amazing way to arm and help your internal champion for internal meetings. Work with your marketing team and custom craft a sheet showing what your product or solution

and how it exactly matches to the buyer's pain points and the opportunity that they're trying to solve by working with you. Then share real world implementation examples. So whatever you're selling, somebody had to use it, get your existing clients that like you

to give you real life implementation. Because selling a product and implementing is two different things. In those internal meetings, a lot of us can be built around how do we implement this? Make it easier.

Give them your implementation recommendation, people's email address, job title, company and phone number. Reach out to those people and say, hey, my new prospect may be calling you to talk about how the implementation with.

That's super important. Then get ready for any type of scenario. And I was joking earlier, but not really. What happens when you have another pandemic? Have you role played that with your buyer champion? What happens if somebody gets poached by another company

and they lose one of their key decision makers? What happens if all of a sudden they don't have budget for it? If you listen to me for a long time, you know my answer to that one's really simple. Rent it to them and have it hit their OPEX budget,

not their CAPEX budget. Most people don't know they can do that. It's one of those things that a great salesperson has in their back pocket. So having those different role playing scenarios and having them mapped out to give your buyer champion

in those internal meetings, answers to questions that may come up. Then we talked about earlier, a solid financial turnaround or an ROI, if you want to call that, give that to your buyer champion. Then finally, get with your marketing team,

use AI, build the damn slide deck for your buyer champion for them that they could use for internal meetings. Number one, they will love you. Number two, if they correct anything, that's telling you that you didn't communicate

something well with somebody that wants to buy your stuff, which means you really need to focus on that with the other people that haven't made up their mind yet. So there you go. There's the steps for helping your buyer champion be armed to help you sell your product or service to the company.

And if you do this well, you make a friend. I have several of buyer champions that are great friends of mine, personal and business friends, and they've changed companies. And guess what happens, Matt, when they change companies? They bring you with them?

They bring me in. And you want to know how quick that sales cycle is? It is ridiculously quick, because they've been through this before and they know that you are looking out for there in their best interest.

So now you're not a vendor anymore. You're an asset to their team, and that's a great place to be. I mean, building that bridge, I think that that's really what I hear that you've talked about a lot is building that bridge,

constructing that scaffolding for that client relationship. Quicker, you can build that bridge. The quicker the relationship and everything flows across it. I mean, building the slide deck, now with AI, there's a bunch of tools that you can do, but it forces you to make sure you understand

what their needs are and what they're saying, and then it forces them to correct it. So it gets the communication channel perfect before that happens. So even having that deck, like, is this right? Then you get those objections sooner to know that. And I think even pulling, again, bridge,

the implementation team, that's what smart buyers ask now. Okay, this is the sales, you did the dog and pony show. Who's going to be working on my account? How are we going to get it implemented? What does that look like? What does the first three months look like?

How is that going to happen? They want to see that map out and visualize it. And if they can see it and map it out, many times they'll sell themselves. The clearer you can explain that, and they know who that person is and that person's real,

and they're thinking on this, the more they think on it, the more it's going to happen. So you just build that bridge and things transverse across it. And the more you transact across that bridge, the more familiar you're becoming with that person, of that's a route that we can take in the future,

that there's less cognitive lift to say, this person can help us with this thing. So if they crystallize in, this person helps me with this thing and they do this thing well, next time they have that issue at the next company they're at, or someone asks them, who do you recommend?

Boom, you get that recommendation, and who does not love a referral recommendation? Those deals close so fast too, right? So that's what you're doing is you're building that connection in, I don't know. I would say I built it in cyberspace,

but that's not what we're talking about here. You're really building it with your buyer champion. Yeah. And you're making them look like a rock store, and in return for making them look like a rock store internally, you get to close a deal with less effort and probably a higher margin.

So it's just a win-win for everybody all the way around. I love buyer champions, and in today's world, you need to identify them and figure out how to help them. And like I said, how do you arm your buyer's champion to help you sell to their company?

Two newsletters and links in the show notes, they're sold out for the rest of the year, so you can't sponsor them, which is a nice place to be for us, but sign up, they're very useful. We have all the guests events,

newsletters, we list all the trade shows, conferences all around the world in our industry, and then we have our weekly update. That one's kind of funky, but fun to sign up for that one as well. Matthew and I, social links are in the show notes as well,

so you want to follow us anywhere there. You can do that very easy. I do have something. We are going to be doing a book signing soon, and I just been working on building out energygrowthplaybook.com. I would encourage you to go check it out there.

We have 92 episodes. We've been on the air since 2023. You can see all the episodes, the interviews, constantly adding stuff to it. But if you want to go check that out, please do let us know your feedback in the comments.

Hey, audience, you're listening to this audio only, but Matt and I record this and we record video as well. Matt, maybe we take some of the video recordings that we're not horrible looking in and post them on your website as well. That's some different content that's not out there.

We need to get some of this distributed. I did set up a channel, Energy Growth Playbook on YouTube, so we're going to be starting to put the visual on that so people can check that out. But this all ties back. The podcast ties to the book, ties to the website,

so check it out. There's a lot more coming there, but we really appreciate all your support. Both Mark and I do speaking talks on a number of different topics. If you want to get us involved in your program,

please reach out to us. Yeah, happy to share the details. All right, it's time for LinkedIn Failor Tip of the Week and I don't have one, do you? Yeah, I do have one actually. Again, I'm nerd.

Okay, I am a nerd. I like to look at algorithms and how these things work. And there's really something very, very important about your profile and about your tagline and about your name. And Mark, you called me Matthew.

Okay, if you go to MatthewBertram.com, Keonicalize, that is the domain for who I am. And there's a knowledge graph. And they look at who you say you are and what you do. And guess what? When you post on LinkedIn, right,

people are trying to post on LinkedIn trying to get things to go viral. Like I just had one go like 63,000 views on something. Oh, it was pretty good. Yeah, no cost. That's associated with that.

That is because there's alignment in the topics you're posting about with your current title and what your kind of subject line is underneath your name. Interesting. Makes sense. I mean, this is math, right?

This is algorithms, like how do engineers think? So if you're posting about the topic that is semantically associated with your title that is semantically associated with the tagline under your name, it will get a boost. There you go.

Audience, you just got $10,000 worth of free consulting from Matthew. If you want more, reach out to him directly. He knows his stuff. He really does. All right, let's get out of here.

Remember, make a difference and not a sale.