How to effectively use LinkedIn to prospect for new business with the oil & gas market.
Transcript of Session –
Hey, folks. Let’s learn something new about the oil and gas industry.
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All right. Today’s show, let’s do something a little bit out of the ordinary. Normally, we’d be reviewing the e-mails from January, but one of those e-mails was a great question that we’ve been asked repeatedly, so we thought we’d devote this whole show on how to use LinkedIn effectively to prospect for business in oil and gas. So let’s get started, shall we?
All right. LinkedIn can be an awesome tool of prospect in oil and gas if you do it right. Unfortunately, a lot of you are doing it wrong because you all hit me, you reach out to me, you don’t know who I am, I don’t know who you are and you try to pitch me through LinkedIn if I accept your connection. Stop it. That’s not what a professional salesperson does. Let me show you what we teach our clients and it’s become very effective for us.
So first thing is, your company has some product or solution, right? That you’re offering to sale. Well, that product or solution it fixes a problem and you need to be able to identify what problem does it fix. Then, you need to figure out who deals with that problem and what is their title. Literally, who would you hire to deal with that problem. Then, you need to go on LinkedIn and use that to hump for companies that are hiring for that position and when you do that, you have now identified your target and your target will be those companies that are hiring for that position, their upper management.
So, let us walk you through a real life example. All right. So, let’s say you work for a company that sold a software that helps you figure out earned value on projects. So the problem that you fix is the ability for companies to understand how much of their budget they’ve spent versus how much is their project say if completed, right? That’s earned value. And who has that problem in the company. Well, it’s project managers that are running that project. So we would go to LinkedIn and we go to jobs and type in project manager.
And now, we’re going to look for companies that are looking for project managers. And look, here is one, Oceaneering. So, let’s go to Oceaneering and we actually want to see the people that work at Oceaneering, so now we go to the people. Now, what we want to do, this is everybody that works at Oceaneering that is on LinkedIn, but now we want to target their executives and not – if it’s a big company, not their senior manager it’s not C-level, but right below that which should be like directors and VP.
Well, LinkedIn makes it actually really easy. We just go down to seniority level and we’re going to select director and go back and select VP. Now, every one of this persons that come up will going to have an interest in this company software that figures out earned value, right? And the way you would approach them because you know they’re looking for project managers is you could reach out to say to Ken Stark right here and go, Ken, you know what? I think you’re dealing – you’re struggling with earned value, so I think I can help you. Let’s talk. And he, 70% of the time will just handle it correctly will at least want to hear what you have to say.
So, this is how you use LinkedIn to prospect in oil and gas. Once again, you don’t reach out to the people directly with some standard sales pitch, you actually look for the companies that are hiring for the people that would fix the problem that your product and solution sells and then you reach out to their executive team, right? Because you know they have that problem. This works so well when done correctly and our customers are just amazed at how well they can use LinkedIn.
So, I hope this helps. We will see you next time.
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