Learn why many of your inbound leads may be worthless, largest mistakes sales reps make in oil & gas, the unfairness of our oil leasing system and a surprise visit of NCC 1701.
Transcript of Session –
Hey, folks. Let’s learn some more about the oil and gas industry.
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Okay. This is our monthly show where we answer e-mails. So these are the April e-mails.
First one. We’ve seen an increase in new inbound leads and the number of our initial meetings are up, but we’re not closing anymore business. Help.
Okay. There can be a lot of reasons for this, but one thing about the oil and gas industry is a little bit different is they actually have teams of people that do nothing but gather information. So these inbound leads could most probably not even be from buyers or decision makers, it could be from these people that are directed to gather information. And what you need to figure out is if the companies already identified that they have a problem and they’re looking for the solution or, are they looking to see if it’s worth fixing the problem. And those are two different things.
Basically, one group of people that are gathering information know they’re going to buy something and they need to gather this information and bring it to their management – the actual buyers. The other group are just doing the cost benefit analysis. You need to handle those two groups totally different. I hope that helps.
Number two. What mistakes do you see most sales reps make when selling to the oil and gas industry?
Number one is failing to understand the customer’s business. It’s so diverse and there are so many different things that’s going on that each segment of industry has different business drivers and you need to understand that all the way to the decision maker level. Second biggest mistake I see sales reps make is talking instead of listening. And then finally, and I see this just way too much is a rush and hurry up get a proposal out to a client before they’ve got agreement that the client is actually going to purchase something. So, knock those three mistakes, take them off of your list and you’ll do probably a hundred percent better.
My marketing team and I are curious on how much you can bench for us.
Really folks, I almost get this once a week. I am not answering this on the show.
Does the US only allow US companies to bid on oil leases like the Gulf of Mexico?
Actually, no. So the way we do it is we let anybody come in and it goes to the highest bidder. We’ll take a Norwegian company, Statoil and a Brazilian company, Petrobras and just in the Gulf of Mexico between the two of them, they have over 340 leases about $40 billion worth of oil and gas assets. We do it differently here. The rest of the world makes the US and European oil and gas industries partner with the nationalized oil company which is owned by the government. They don’t allow free market to just take place. So, our oil and gas companies are basically handicapped, but we don’t do that to other oil and gas companies.
Number five. Would an oil refinery will stand an attack by a photon torpedo?
Really folks, that’s sci-fi. It’s not reality. There’s no such thing as USS Enterprise and there’s no photon torpedoes. This is a really silly question.
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