How a Global Enterprise Made Its Value Story Land With Energy Buyers
Decision Intelligence for Energy · a global information-management & storage enterprise verticalizing into energy · 2021
/03: The Client
A global information-management enterprise (records, digitization, secure storage, content services) selling into every major industry. Its value narrative was strong, but horizontal: the same story told to healthcare, finance, and energy alike. To grow in oil and gas, that story had to speak energy’s pressures, language, and proof.
/04: The Challenge
A horizontal pitch sounds horizontal to an energy buyer. Generic outcomes and cross-industry examples don’t establish that a vendor understands the operator’s world. The company needed to verticalize (to make one consistent, proven value narrative feel purpose-built for energy) without rebuilding its entire sales engine for every market.
/05: The Solution
ModalPoint built a verticalization system on top of an outcome-based-selling structure:
- A value-narrative adaptation guide: how to tailor the deck per vertical, segment, and region while keeping one consistent spine.
- An energy-specific infographic and solution-brief instructions: swapping generic metrics for domain-true ones (for energy, “core samples stored” replaces a generic records metric).
- “Modernizing Energy” webinar content.
The method:
- Co-discovery. Identify and validate the customer’s external pressures and internal challenges, and uncover their business objectives, before pitching anything.
- Co-creation. Show how you create unique value, which solutions fit, and what you’ve proven for others.
- Verticalize. Keep the structure; change the domain stats, personas, and use cases.
/06: What We Found
- Generic value narratives only land when verticalized with real domain stats and use cases. Energy buyers tune out anything that could have been written for any industry.
- Past-proven value (“what we’ve done for others”) is the credibility hinge. This conclusion repeated across every ModalPoint engagement: case studies carry the sale.
/07: Outcome
The enterprise could now walk into an energy conversation with the same proven structure it used everywhere, but with energy’s pressures, personas, stats, and use cases filled in, so the buyer heard a vendor that understood their world, not a horizontal pitch with the industry name swapped in.
/08: The Pattern: Why This Matters Beyond One Enterprise
Verticalization is not new copy; it’s the same proven value story, re-evidenced for the audience in the room. Keep the structure, change the proof. The vendors that win energy are the ones whose story sounds like it was built for energy, because the proof in it was.