Over 19,000 Oil & Gas contacts can be yours. Find out how to get them for free, plus what its like to work offshore, unexpected consequences of industry growth, what Schlumberger does, why your struggling to cold call in oil & gas and finally what’s different about marketing in this industry.
Hey, folks. Let’s learn something new about the oil and gas industry.
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All right. It’s the time of the month where we answer e-mails. Let’s jump right into it.
Number one. Would you be willing to introduce us to your contacts at ExxonMobil? We would gladly pay you for it as we are struggling to get our foot in the door.
I get asked this all the time and quite honestly, the answer is no and you wouldn’t want it to be yes. And the reason I say that is the contacts don’t matter, what matter is do you have the ability to explain to somebody what problem that you can fix and what is the value they will receive. Anybody that you talk to in ExxonMobil that has a problem that you can fix will listen to you.
It’s a myth that the contact list of a salesperson is what makes him successful. In fact, it’s such a big myth, I think we’ll go ahead and do something with this that we’ve never done before. I’m going to go ahead and give away over 19,000 contacts – our contacts that we have in our CRM. I’m going to do it the week after OTC just to prove a point. And the point is that even with a list of contacts, unless you know what you’re doing you’re not going to go anywhere. So stay tuned for future shows and we’ll let you know how you can get your free copy of these over 19,000 contacts. Let’s go to number two.
Number two. What’s it like to work offshore?
It’s actually much better than you would imagine it. The rigs are nice and clean, they have movie theaters, you have gyms, the food is great, the combinations are good. You work long days, it’s typically 12-hour shifts and you usually work two weeks at a time which means you’re going for home for two weeks and that’s the part that most people struggle with. But working at rigs is safe, it can be fun, and the money is fantastic.
Number three. The oil and gas industry is growing like crazy. What some unexpected things you have seen during that growth?
Wow, unexpected things; high school kids right out of school getting offered $80,000 a year to go work in North Dakota. I didn’t see that one coming. The US government losing all its geophysicist and geologist to private oil and gas companies and now the government doesn’t have enough people to help run things like the Bureau of Land Management. I didn’t see that one coming. And the Houston traffic, it is just horrible and I didn’t see that one coming either. Those are three things that are caused by the growth of the oil and gas industry.
Number four. What does Schlumberger do?
Schlumberger is the world’s largest service company. So they provide technical solutions, tools, and manpower to the oil and gas industry predominantly upstream. So companies like BP, ExxonMobil, Anadarko depend on Schlumberger to be able to get oil out of the ground.
Number five. My sales team struggles with cold calling oil and gas companies? Why is your industry so difficult to penetrate?
For a bunch of reasons. One is it’s old fashioned, right? So, there’s all these layers of management that are [tied] in places hard to navigate. Number two, your cold calling is probably not phone-based which believe it or not because the oil and gas industry is old fashioned, the phone actually plays a crucial part in your cold calling.
We have a group within Modal Point called Client Acquisition Services and that’s all they do is they set appointments for other people’s sales team, so we know that it’s different. And the reason you’re struggling with it, it’s not that it’s hard, it’s just different than any other verticals.
Reach out to me directly and if I can help you, I will.
Number six. What’s different about marketing to the oil and gas industry?
All right. So, first thing, let’s clear up what marketing means. People think that marketing and sales are the same thing and have no idea what either one of is. Marketing is basically about generating leads, sales is basically about taking those leads and converting them to cash to sale, right?
So what’s different about marketing to the oil and gas industry is they have all these divisions and subdivisions, each one has their own set of business drivers that are unique to that division, so the service guys what works to market the service guys would not work to market to the midstream guys of the pipeline companies, right? And what would work to market to like say through tubing services inside the service won’t work in like well stimulation services once again which is a sub-segment inside the service.
So the thing about marketing in the oil and gas is there is no one marketing approach, you have to know the segment and the sub-segment that you’re marketing to and that’s why marketing is different in oil and gas.
All right, folks. I hope that helped. We will see you next time.
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