Sales and Marketing research to pinpoint specifically where the demand for your product or service is inside the oil & gas industry. We are industry experts and our reputation as an independent, 3rd party “insider” researchers is well known. This allows us to do research and structured interviews with real oil & gas business leaders to figure out exactly what your best route to market lies. There is no better way to do this than talking to the people who will buy your product or service.
Your product or service solves a problem. Our industry research will identify who has that problem, what is the value of solving that problem and who receives the most benefit from fixing that problem. We then determine which segment of the market is most likely to buy. This work identifies the target for your sales and marketing efforts with a laser focus, speeding up your revenue generation and keeping you from wasting time and money.
So we get asked often, “What is sales and marketing research for the oil and gas industry?”
The easiest way for me to explain it is to tell you a story of a real client. So, I have a client that makes intrinsically safe tablets located in Silicon Valley. They tried it themselves to sell to oil and gas industry and they spent a lot of money, and they failed. And then they found me.
So, the first thing that we do is we go out and measure some called “buy now” rating. There are four segments of the industry; upstream, midstream, downstream, and service. And those segments you can measure their willingness to look at buying something new.
Now, at this point in history, I just assumed that it would the service side of the house; the Halliburton’s and the Schlumberger’s and the Baker’s that have an interest in this intrinsically safe tablet because of the digitalization in the oilfield. Well, I was completely wrong.
At this point in history which is a couple of years ago, BP had cancelled MadDog and ExxonMobil had cancelled Hadrian North, two deep-water projects. And the service industry was worried, right? It was perception. That they’re worried that these cheap frack wells will kill these ultra-expensive deep-water projects, so they were scared to spend money. So they had the lowest buy now rating which I was completely wrong about that.
We found out that downstream had the highest buy now rating – the refineries. And so, after three months of research we figured out that the fit for our clients’ intrinsically safe tablet was downstream in the refinery during a turnaround where the cost of the company is the downtime of the unit.
And so, they build this huge work breakdown structures and they get a whole bunch of contractors coming in and implement all these work, but they have to track the percent of work complete to keep the schedule accurate. And they were presently doing it on paper which is fraught with errors and it was sent to somebody to keep punching at Excel that would send e-mail to this schedulers to just to schedule and it cost them millions of dollars of downtime.
So we figured out through our market research for oil and gas industry, the fit for our client was during a refinery turnaround, they automated this paper collection of data, the percent of work complete in an app that is automatically pushed to schedulers, but it has to be on an intrinsically safe device because they’re in a refinery. Beautiful, right?
So, my client went from not being able to sell it all to not being able to manufacture the units quick enough because we figured out exactly who his targets are. And his targets were the refinery turnaround managers and the value that he bought was operational uptime.
So that’s what we figure out for you. We will literally figure out who the people that have the problem that you solve and what is the value of you solving that problem. That is our research and that’s our core business.