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.