Revolutionizing Sales Leadership with AI and Data

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, everybody,

to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, and Matt, you and I are on a frickin' roll. This is episode number three in a row, regular releases, like we're real podcasters or something. Man, we're back at it during the summer. Everybody's taking it off and we're speeding it up.

Sweatin' our butts off because it's hot here in Houston right now. Okay, we've talked a whole bunch about how sales and marketing has changed, how the tech stack has changed, how AI has changed it. And Matt, I thought today we would talk about sales leadership and how that's changed over the years.

When I got started in sales a million years ago, my sales manager was basically a whipcracker for an entire team of enterprise salespeople that sold telecom services to large enterprise clients, and I had the Oil and Gas vertical. And then besides being the whipcracker,

he was also the CRM auditor, right? So everything that was in the CRM, what his truth was. And then he actually was really hard on pipeline. As long as your CRM was good, the information you put in there, and your sales pipeline looked heavy,

he would leave you alone. And a lot of sales leaders still do that exact thing. They're still looking at your pipeline, they're looking at your activity, how many calls did you make, how many emails, how many customers you take out for lunch.

And I think that needs to change. In fact, it is changing. When I look at some of the top sales leaders I know today in 2026, they don't do that. What they focus on is behavior. And the metrics are still important, right?

Let's not lie, when you're in a large organization or even a small organization, sales has to report back projected revenue. And the only way to do that is to have data which is in your CRM. And as much as I have my issues with the way a lot of companies use their CRM, I've been a frontline salesperson in the past.

And I know what it's like to have something like judge me whether I'm doing a good job or not based on the information. And we all know this. Back in the day, we would put the least amount of information in our CRM to keep our sales manager off our butt. We didn't put everything in there because it was hard.

It took away from our selling time because you had to keep punch all that. You had to remember, you had to write notes. I used to carry around a notebook with all my notes in it. And now with AI, it's the opposite. You can get all the data you want without creating any extra work.

So now I think sales leaders should focus more on the behaviors of their team and not the data because now the data is actually there. Okay, so I've worked in a number of regulated industries, right? And I would tell you, we had tablets, okay, or a computer that would flip around and then you would use the website

as like where you would click on, where you would show stuff, where you'd highlight stuff, and they would track all that. Okay, and they knew when you were doing that. And then when we were filling out the CRM, because they could get audited, it was like, you had like, I think it was like 30 characters

to put in all the notes for what happened. So I've had like the opposite, and then you had to have your own books of like whatever you're remembering or however you're doing it. And then I worked at like a recruitment. I did recruitment in one gas for a long time.

And we had a call like 60, 70 people a day. They looked at our dwell time of how long these conversations were happening. Now you can take all that data and understand that. And you can really process the sales calls. That's what I love about AI right now from a sales training standpoint. And my guy right now has a feedback loop.

Every call he has based on certain frameworks, it feeds back into him, tells him what he needs to do better. And I can review all the calls. We can get the sentiment. We can get all those data points. And it really is just like following you around

and you're not having to manually put it in because that's what gets lost. Like a lot of salespeople are moving quickly and they don't have time to enter in all those notes. And then they got the next call or this or that. And then I remember it was like you have to put it in every night. Like our database used to upload at midnight every night.

And if you wanted to get credit for those calls that day, you had to get your notes in which was good because you remember it before you go to sleep. And it just became a routine. So yeah. And I love where you work that because that's where I was going next.

When I'm thinking about sales leadership in the modern times, and I'm saying that you need to focus on behavior, not necessarily those key PI metrics, although they're still important. But things like when you're leading a sales team, observing their calls, role playing, coaching, all this stuff to actively develop your reps.

So what I do with my sales team is when we go on a sales call together, I think I may have mentioned this before, is immediate feedback with no emotions. As soon as we get out of earshot of the client or the prospect we're talking to, I mean the moment, we may not even be out of their office. We're out of their office in the elevator because we know it's private.

But I literally ask, what could I have done better? What did you observe? What did you learn? And then I do the same to them. And there's no emotions attached. There's no negative emotions or positive emotions.

There's literally an interchange of information. And it's one of the best ways to develop a rep, your new reps. The other thing is stories. Regardless of how much science and data is in sales, you're still dealing with people. And the way that you convey information that sticks in people's head

is instead of just having the information like an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint that you tell a story, tell a real customer story that has that data in there. And people remember it's how we're wired. So when your new reps, when you're leading a team, when they hear you tell the stories and how you tell them,

they pick it up and they make it their own. And I think that's way more important when leading the sales team now than literally measuring how much time they're on the telephone or how much emails they send or that other stuff. Man, I feel like now, at least depending on who you're hiring, like the younger generation, you can't just tell people to do stuff.

You got to explain to them why it's important and you got to be able to show the win-win of like, if you do it this way, this actually helps you. Because I read a statistic about AI implementation, which I know overlays on top of this, but 26% of at-large corporations are actively trying to tank

the AI implementation because they're worried about their jobs. Okay? Like actively trying to do that because they're scared. I think it's really about educating and understanding what are the bigger goals and why this is helpful to them. And I mean, there's a level of paperwork at every job, I guess,

that you just have to do, but there's a reason for it. And if you show them that reason and you get that buy-in, it's not going to be fighting a pill. Yeah. You brought up something that Paige and I were talking about on All In Gas this week, which is let's not hide from the reality.

Chevron just laid off or just announced it's going to lay off 20% of its workforce globally. And why is it labelling off 20% of its workforce? Is the price of oil is too low? No, it's AI. AI is replacing jobs.

And one of the jobs that it cannot replace, and I don't know if it ever will, is a good sales person or a good marketing, especially if you're a leader. AI may actually replace some frontline marketing sales work. I'm serious. I mean, I've seen it already.

I've seen that light, but not the leadership component. If you're worried about your job, become a good leader in your sales and marketing world. I sat down with like the lead over at Pictal and essentially their mandate, I think it's something like by the end of the year,

they need to be 40% more sufficient or I don't remember the exact number he said. It was a significant number. It was like a third more efficient by the end of the year. And I was like, here's all the tools. Go figure it out.

And he's a leader, right? He's a lead engineer. He's got to figure out how to improve the workflow, how to review stuff. And I think he finds it generally helpful. These are skill sets that you got to look for.

I remember it was like on the resume, experience with the worldwide web. I mean, I look for when I'm hiring people, what are your capabilities in AI? How do you do it? Do you want to be ahead of the curve

or do you want to be behind the curve? And I would tell you, being ahead of the curve, you're kind of starting to get in the middle of the pack right now. These are skill sets that help you become better. I mean, that's the reason I got into podcasting

was the leverage to one to many of reaching people and having a message that is repeatable that can work while I'm asleep because it's about building that report. And this is the next iteration of how to be able to do that and how to leverage these tools to be more helpful.

And you could generally make more money and sell better to do it. And I think that it's hard for a manager to tell like a frontline salesperson how to do something if they don't really understand it. Like that's the worst thing in the world. Mark, if there's someone that's above you

is like telling you something and you know that they don't even know what they're talking about, like the level of respect is not there. So leaders need to like invest in education and understand this and how to use it and then say, here's why you need to use it.

Here's how it's going to help you. Here's how I would use it. Here's how I am using it. And they need a lead from the front. And we will send you a free OGG and hardtop laptop sticker and a temporary tattoo.

Once again, super easy. Just go to youtube.com, search for OGG and 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.

It's funny, you know, Matt and I never discuss ahead of time or rarely discuss ahead of time what we're going to talk about. We literally get all the- We've been discussing every week now. I don't know what you're talking about. Well, no, no.

Let me tell you where I'm going. So this is perfect. So Matt and I didn't talk about this subject at all. And yet you naturally rolled into what I was going to say next, which is training. Sales leaders are good trainers.

And if you want to show a front-line rep how to do something, do it with them. Get in the trenches. Get dirty. Get sweaty. And if you don't know how to do it, don't do it.

You can't fool this younger generation. My generation would never have questioned our manager if he knew what the hell he's talking about or not. These newer generations actually will and they'll hold you accountable and they may know it better than you do.

So if you don't understand something, get the training and share that training with your team and get in the trenches with them. Just because you're a leader doesn't mean you can't get in there with them and they'll respect the hell out of you if you do that.

And by the way, Mark and I do do training. So you can reach out to us. Like share this plug. Like we do do training and talk and workshops on this side of the thing. If you're interested, we're available.

Yeah. And it's fun and it's viable to your team. So bring the whole team. Absolutely. That's a great mix. I'm the sales guy.

I should have thought about that first. All right. Back to the training. And you said this, I'm going to say it a different way, but if you have information without any type of reinforcement and repetition and learning,

it's just fricking noise nowadays. There's too much noise for all of us, right? So the training is super important for your reps and then each rep will need different types of training. And here's once again, where a layer of technology can be super useful.

If you have five reps, you may have one that is great at everything they do, right? They're number one revenue generator in a company, but they leave a fricking trails of bodies behind them because nobody likes them. That's something that you need to coach around

if you're a sales or marketing leader. You may have a rep that's really great in getting in the door, but they can't close the damn deal for nothing, right? That's a separate set of training for that rep. You may have a rep that knows everything backwards

and forwards about the customer's business and whatever you're selling, but they can't articulate it, right? They get nervous in front of a crowd. That's another set of training. If you have a sales team identifying,

you can use technology for this, or what their separate gaps are, and then give them very specific training. Either you do it, you learn it, and you coach them, or you bring an outside trainer to help them. But the old days of having this blanket,

one-size-fits-all training that was off-site doesn't work anymore, and it's a waste of your resources and money, and honestly, your reps aren't going to pick up much of anything out of it. Now, with all that said, if you are hiring a brand new rep, some basic sales train

that is kind of one-size-fits-all is helpful. If they've never actually, you know, if they're right out of college or whatever, customize your training to what your people, what your teams need, and you can do it now with technology. We've recorded over 345 sales calls

so far, right now, Mark, and essentially, we find patterns in what's going on, and one of the things that we've just now started doing, so we would record and give coaching, now we're building mock profiles

of the people that, like, AIs acting as the ICP that we're trying to sell to, and we can do mock trainings and see how someone does. So, like, remember everybody's like, ah, mock training, like, I hate doing it, but the thing, if you can do mock training,

you can do real training. Like, if you're really good at sales, you can do mock training because it's easy. If you can't do sales really good, I feel like mock training is helpful, but people don't want to do it.

Well, now, you can have real training, like, simulation training with your target ICPs and it's not your role-playing with your manager, your role-playing with the real customer, and if you're doing phone sales or whatever, like, guess what?

There's a real person that's answering questions, asking questions that are based upon real data, and people are building up these data sets. I'm sure you can rent or buy these models, we haven't gotten into all that, but it's incredible what you can do, and also, like you were talking about,

the resources that you can pull on an individual based on their online presence, and then that helps the conversation along as far as, like, social lubrication goes when you're communicating with them, and I think that a lot of people are still doing sales

the old-school way, or they're starting to leverage some of these things here and there, but it's really about building an operating system that's going to help you grow your business. Dude, this is freaky, because we didn't talk about this. That's literally where I'm going next, right?

The next thing I think has changed as far as sales and marketing leaders is being able to clearly define your ideal customer profile, your ICP like you brought up. It used to be, it was guesses, and it was information from the reps, and depending on the rep and who they were selling to,

it may have skewed one way or another. Now with technology, you can identify the ideal, like, to Matt's point, you could literally figure out what age they are, what part of the world they live in, what is their title, what is their buying criteria, is it a small buying team, is a large buying team, right?

What is their budget? And when you clearly outline the ideal customer profile for your reps, if you're a sales or marketing leader, or for your marketing team, it helps them do their job so much better, because it's real, like Matt said. And the training component even adds another layer to that.

That qualification criteria for your ICP is super important, and now you can do it with technology. So two ways you can do it right now is you can take the, depending on how good the data is in your CRM, you can take the data in your CRM, and you can enrich that data to build this out.

Also, on the marketing side of things, you can set up things on your website to capture when they go to certain pages, and you can even find out, depending on, okay, there's privacy issues, I am an associate of privacy professional, like there's different laws in different places.

Be careful of California and the EU is what I'll tell you, and there's a couple other states in Canada, but what I would say is you can actually see who comes to those pages, and you can build a data set with that of, these are the people that are searching for this problem going to this, like people don't understand

how valuable being online is, and how your website can be a tool, and that's really what we've been doing for the last number of years is building out these sites to help salespeople use marketing as a leverage point where it's not just making pretty pictures for your conference and handouts, like there's real data

in technology, that's why it's called MarTech, MarTech technology, that you can do some of these things and build these things out, and so hopefully those are kind of two examples that you can use, and you can even take past customer data, and you can enrich that data to figure out

what these ICPs are, and then you can even aggregate data online from your competitors and pull in publicly used information and build out these ICPs that, and then you can tailor messaging and language and everything to them, and oil and gas, more than anything else, there's so many different ICPs

based on who you're selling to, you gotta make sure your language is speaking to the right person, or the conversations just fall off a cliff. Yeah, and Matt, you're spot on. Another thing besides the website data, and yes, people, if you want to, you can see who comes to your website,

literally who they are, if they're in a database somewhere, what page they went to, what they read, where they hovered, where they clicked through, and that gives you a lot of data, but you know where else you get some really good information? If you don't have a newsletter, that's the number one reason today to have a newsletter, the information,

the data you get from who opened what, what did they read, all that stuff is built into all the newsletter tools that are out there, and it's super valuable, just like Matt said. Okay, another thing I think has changed. Matthew, I'm going by Matthew, doesn't everybody?

I'm going by Matthew, if you search for me online, please search Matthew, we're changing books, as well as podcasts from MatthewBurchup.com. Well, I still can't remember to call it SLB instead of slumberjays, so it could take me a little while to remember to call you, but I will.

I know, I know. All right, next thing I think has changed for sales and marketing leaders in today's world is your process. Everybody tells you, oh, you have to have a standardized sales and marketing process, which is true,

and we've done it for years, but it used to be done on paper and it was static. And maybe, maybe if you had the time, if you're a sales and marketing leader, you would update it once or twice a year, maybe. Now, technology does that for you dynamically

every second if you want it to, and it can look at what's going on in the industry, what is the price of WTI right now, what's natural gas doing right now? Where's the constraint and the pipeline growth? Can you get a turbine anywhere in the world right now? Is that constraint the growth of these data centers?

All that information is out there and there's AI tools that are built exactly for this to help give you a dynamic sales process because sales people, and I'm a recovering sales person myself, sales people, if you don't help them with this, they tend to want to sell how they always have

because it worked in the past. And we all know that what worked in the past, especially the oil and gas, doesn't work in the future. But if you don't give them a sales process that's repeatable, that's dynamic, based upon the data, they're going to fall back to habits.

It's just human nature. And you can do that now with technology for almost nothing. Then as a leader in either sales or marketing, when everybody follows the same process and has the same steps, it's super easy to coach and spot constraints or bottlenecks

or unfortunately, maybe people that aren't a good fit because everybody's following this exact process and you can see where the people that shine are and where the people are struggling are. And once again, this goes back to the training. If they're struggling, you can give them individually coaching

or training for the one piece they're struggling with. And all this is ridiculously easy to do in 2026. Well, Mark, one of the things I want to highlight because I think a lot of people hear a lot of this stuff and they want to use this stuff. But I can tell you, I've seen this in organization

over organization that I've been meeting with is you got one or two champions that know are like power users and know how to use all this stuff. And it's very fragmented or you got different people. It's all about bringing it together in a full system and getting that like system integration

where this skill can transfer to this person. This person can see this like the visibility and that doesn't happen on the fly. Like you got to map it out. You got to understand what your text that is. You got to understand what's going on

and you got to put it together. And that's where I'm seeing the transformation happening and that's where I also seen things fail because people are hobbling together a lot of different tools or things, but it's not depending on the size of your sales team,

the bigger company you are, the harder it is to do it and get everybody on the same page and get everybody on the same tools. So a lot of people, it's funny. They're like, oh, we're like a medium size team

or we're a small team. Like you have an advantage. Like you have an advantage right now to upgrade your operating system before you grow. And if you can get into that AI first mode, you're going to scale so much faster.

I wouldn't put it off until like, oh, I'm bigger to do it. It's easier to do it with less people. So I just want to throw that out there. No, no, you're 100% right. You're much more nimble. And even big companies,

I'm seeing this in both sales and marketing organizations and some very big, I mean, Fortune 100 companies where they've learned that they need to act like they're a smaller company. So instead of having these enormous sales and marketing organizations,

they break them down so they're more nimble. They're smaller, things get done quicker and the company benefits from it. And honestly, it's less stress on your sales and marketing team because they get stuff done. They get those easy, quick wins,

which everybody loves those things. And that's going to lead me to my next thing. One thing I'm seeing Matt in the last couple of years and people that sell into the oil and gas industry is declining confidence in either your ability to sell or market

or what the external forces are doing to your sales and marketing game. A couple of episodes ago, we talked about overcoming buyer hesitation, right? And enterprise sales. And that's one of those things that has changed.

There's much more hesitation, buyer hesitation because now they have data to slow down and make smart decisions for the company when they're buying something as opposed to Joe plays golf with his vendor, so he's go buy his stuff, right?

That rep, if you're listening to this in the last couple of years, if you're in sales and marketing and you don't have that confidence that you used to have, you're not alone.

The market is changing. A couple of things. If you're in that space, talk to your manager and your manager should be a good coach. If you work for a big company,

they may even have some coaches available to you. That confidence, you need to rebuild it and understand that even though things have slowed down, that you don't close as many deals as you used to or it takes longer to close the deals

and that you have to provide much more information and that competition has gotten worse, you're still the most valuable person in the company because if you're a salesperson, you're the only person bringing in revenue. Everybody else is a cost

and if you're a marketing person, you help that salesperson bring in the revenue. So you're a tag team. That confidence is something I've seen a lot in large and medium-sized organizations and sales leaders have to not only understand it

but have to say that it's not a personal problem. It's what's changing in our world right now and you have to just deal with it. Yeah, I just got back from a conference and everybody's talking about how the buyer has changed, how the buyer buys has changed,

who the buyers are, right? We've talked about that a lot, who's buying has changed, how they buy has changed and what are their concerns and what I can tell you is

the traditional view of marketing is like, okay, there's the big top-of-the-funnel like brand positioning and there's not the tactical, strategical marketing and then like account-based marketing is kind of what it's all fallen into

but man, I can tell you we're doing a lot of engagements that are very tactical that a lot of the work is pre-done before you get in front of a salesperson. A lot of people are going through their own buying process opting and opting out

and they're using data that they get online about your company, about you, about past employees, about past customers that might not be accurate, okay? And it's getting adjusted into these AIs and AI decision-making

is leading people. I mean, I can even tell you in the consumer market, oh my gosh, if it tells you to buy this toothpaste over that, you're going to buy it. Like, people are listening to the AIs.

That is really where we're focused is people are like, what cars to buy? I mean, people are putting in so much data and AI. You got to make sure your data and that's why I came up with digital information covers. How do you manage the data internally and externally

and how does it present to other people? And that's what we're getting a lot of calls for right now. Like, this is saying stuff that's not true or is not right or it's not accurate or is not the whole picture. We have some reputation management deals right now

for some investment kind of oil deals and there's just like, you got to understand that so much is happening and there's so many touch points. There's like 30 different touch points before someone gets to a salesperson.

That's one of the touch points and one of the levers. It's not the salesperson's going to do the whole thing. They need help. They need support and it's everything about your company and your brand and there's ways to get that LLM visibility

and to do it. And again, that's just a lot of what I'm doing right now and I feel like salespeople feel like sometimes there's one hand tied behind their back. That's where the marketing comes in to help you and maybe it needs to be called something a little bit differently

because everybody has it pigeonholed into one thing in their head. Yeah. And my last thing I want to talk about and you mentioned this very early on in this conversation, which by the way, people, if any of this stuff sounds like something you're interested in,

just reach out to Matt. He's not going to try to sell you something. He's going to try to help you. I'll point you in the right direction. Yeah, he'll point you in the right direction. Yeah, you can trust him.

I trust him. I sold him my damn company. I trust him that much, right? Another thing that sales and marketing leaders deal with now that you still have to deal with is skill and will.

Will and skill. It used to be that everybody needed a paycheck. So you hired front level marketing person, the manager of managers and marketing, the sales manager, whatever, that's under you.

And if you compensated them well and if it wasn't held to work at your company, they would stick around. So you didn't have to worry about the differences in people that can't, that want to improve,

or the people that don't want to improve, or the people that want to make it something that sells, but they don't have the skills, or the people that just don't care, just don't want to be there anymore. And the problem is,

it's really easy to find a bunch of jobs right now. If you sell an oil and gas right now, especially if you're a hunter, you can't find hunters right now. Hunters now are commanded to pay $200,000 to your base,

another $250,000, $300,000 at risk. And if you're listening to me and you're a good hunter and that number sounds big, you haven't been job shopping recently, right? The big tech companies have snatched up all the hunters

because they see the potential in selling into the oil and gas industry as these data center boom is taken off and they need to power these data centers. Chevron just signed a huge deal of Microsoft to power the data centers for the next 20 years.

And a bunch of tech companies are selling into that and they need true hunters of oil and gas experience. So a couple of things here, if you're in this space, if you're a marketing sales leader, if it's a competency issue,

which basically means they have the will to do something, but they don't have the skill, pair them up with somebody that has that skill that's natural. One of the most common things I see is pair up a sales person with a sales engineer.

If that sales person or that marketing person doesn't understand the technology or can't have an in-depth conversation about what you're selling, pair them up with a sales engineer. Sales engineer, it lives, ease,

and breathes that stuff, right? But you also run across people in marketing sales both that don't want to do it. They don't want to change. And this whole episode is about things that are changing.

And if you don't want to change, in my experience, honestly, it's probably best for both y'all to part ways. However your company does that, whether you have a performance improvement plan, if you have a heart-to-heart talk with somebody,

if they don't want to change, you can't force them. And unlike the old days where that person would be a B player and kind of keep the ball mulling while the A player's brought in the B kills,

you can't have the B players anymore. Technology has level set all of that. Everybody should be an A player. So if they don't have the will, if they don't want to change, in my experience, at some point,

you better off part ways. The quicker you do it, the better it is for both sides. However, remember, if they have the will, they don't have the skill, use technology to get them that skill.

In today's world, there's no excuse for not being able to do skill transfer for somebody that wants to learn something. Oh, I mean, you're pretty sure to acquire. I think that the days of picking up the phone, like, that's what I have to tell people a lot.

The personal connection since COVID, it's accelerated a lot of online stuff, but it's also accelerated a lot of like, I'm just going to send an email or I'm just going to send a text like, you got to get in front of people.

You got to talk to people. Even the younger generation, like there's the social capability that you got to meet people. It makes a difference today to get in front of somebody.

And if you can leverage that technology, you can become that hunter and it's all A players. Okay, it's all A players. The money is rolling up to the top. It's like a K-shaped economy. Become one of those people,

invest in it, learn it. You can do it. If you're an old dog, you can learn new tricks, right? Like I'm telling you, you have to reinvent yourself.

The companies, that's the thing that really hit me hard. My generation was told, hey, you go work for this company. They're going to take care of you. They're going to give you a pension.

They're going to do all this kind of stuff. And all that's gone by the website. It's like, if we got to make a change, you're gone. And then employee, and I was a head hunter,

same way, like people are moving all the time to move up the ladder. I think it's really about providing value and understanding what is the issue and what is the need. And if you can synthesize that information,

you can help do that. And when you work at a top level, a top tier company, there's not a lot of people that need a lot of direction. The better talent you can hire,

again, the money is just rolling up and rolling to the people that are doing it. So if you're hiring these people or managing these people and you're having management issues, like honestly, if you find somebody

and you pay them the right amount, like you probably won't have that issue. That's true. It's so true. And you want to be in that role. And if you're looking for those type of people,

they're out there. Like they're out there. I mean, oil is about to, oh, I think it's going to just boom. I know everybody thinks that everything's straight and I'm not a macroeconomic person,

but I'm going to tell you, I'm starting to see the right on the wall with some of these things. And technology and oil are hand in hand and people are skipping the middle market. These tech companies are just securing the oil

like we should have run directly. Okay. Like same thing with these chips and mining and silver and all that. Like they're going just straight to the source. Like I'm going to just cut out all the minimum,

give me the best price and I'll guarantee you this amount of whatever. Like that's a different world than we live in. So a lot of people are being cut out of jobs and I would just say, make sure whatever it is you're doing has value

and it adds value to what somebody's doing and you will not be replaced. Your salary will be accelerated. You will be more desirable. I don't know. That's the final thing I would leave people with.

That's a good place to leave it. Speaking of stuff that we don't want to leave, remember, sign up for our two newsletters so that Matt and I can collect the data on you. Matthew and I, all our social links are in the show notes as well.

And then it's time for a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week and this time I don't have one. Actually, maybe I do. Do you have one? I have a couple of things that I'm doing with LinkedIn. If you have one, go for it.

So this has happened this morning. Follow me on LinkedIn. And if you're not following me on LinkedIn, why not? Follow me. He posts a lot. I need to keep up with Mark, honestly.

So I had a conversation with somebody that disagrees with my view on catastrophes. My viewpoint is, and I keep a running list. I literally can show you every time somebody makes a global catastrophe,

especially if it has something to do with man's intervention, like man causing increase in CO2, which is causing the earth to warm up. I write it down. I have a list of several hundred global catastrophe predictions going all the way back to the 1800s up until last year.

I update this list there a couple of times a year. So I'm having this discussion with this guy on LinkedIn who disagrees with me, which is fine. I do that on purpose because I'd like to hear different viewpoints. And he quotes something from Google. So he sends me the link.

So let me tell you, when you get to the point where you disagree with somebody and instead of you being able to articulate and explain why you disagree, and you have to send them a link of something that you Googled, what you're doing number one is telling me,

I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know what this person does. So you read it and show that. Let me show you that you're wrong. But number two, do you know that you're training Google to feed you that type of information?

Google has switched. The way it searches now is 100% AI. When we've been talking about AI a lot, Google has got rid of, completely got rid of all its old algorithms and search, and it's customizing everything.

If you believe that Martians are controlling the United States and you search for that enough and you read something, Google will understand that now almost instantly, and that's all it's going to serve you. Be careful of people on LinkedIn. You can make yourself look stupid because of the biases that are built into the AI

of Google trying to give you what Google thinks you need. Do your research, folks. Well, there's perpetual memory of certain of the things that you ask, and then there's like degradation rates based on algorithms. It's more recent, so it might be more relevant. Like there's ways that they're trying to serve it

where it's more helpful to you. And once you start understanding this technology, you know how to use it better. But I remember somebody was like, oh, this AI is falling in love with the Golden Gate Bridge. And it was like, well, if you, in that prompt session,

searched for the Golden Gate Bridge like 50 times, like a course that thinks that that's what you're interested in, and so it wants to help you with that thing. So you need to probably set up a new session or you need to delineate what you want to know about it. So here's the best thing that I could share, Mart.

Everything is about clear, concise communication. Like the better clarity that you can provide and articulate what you want, the better answers you're going to get with humans, with AIs, with anything. Sales is like, how good do you communicate a message

and understand what other people are communicating to get to like a situation where it's a win-win? Like improving the clarity of your communication, I think is like the number one thing that you can do across the board with technology and everything else. Alright, we'll end it there folks.

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