Go-to-market for companies selling into oil and gas.
A better product rarely opens an energy account. Operators buy from people they already trust, through buying committees that seldom click on anything, and most have heard a newcomer's pitch before. We research how those buyers actually decide, then build the market entry, the launch and the sales story around what we find. We have done this work since 2010.
- Houston, TX
- Energy go-to-market since 2010
- 300+ commercialization interviews
The buyer you planned for is often not the one who buys.
Fifteen calls found a buyer nobody had planned for.
A contact-data software company needed to know which oil and gas buyer to sell to first. Fifteen phone surveys across five segments answered it: not an operator, but membership organizations, ready to buy now. The person to call was the Director of Membership, not the titles the company had assumed, and those buyers put the benefit at about $32,500 a year.
The budget followed habit. The buyers did not.
A century-old equipment maker had modernized, but onshore operators in North America still filed it under legacy hardware. Interviews showed those operators learn from colleagues and existing suppliers, use LinkedIn for networking and jobs rather than product discovery, and distrust trade media.
More SEO would have been wasted money.
A benchmarking firm trusted inside the largest E&P companies was launching its first software product. Keyword research found almost no one searching for the category, so the problem was awareness, not search. In that market a few marquee operators on the record moved adoption more than any feature list.
Five questions, answered in order.
Every engagement works through the same five. Skip one and a good product ends up pitched to the wrong committee.
Value-chain fit
Where your product sits in the oil and gas value chain, and which segment feels the problem most. A horizontal story has to be rebuilt with energy proof, not just energy vocabulary.
Value chain and segments→Who has the problem
How operators evaluate and buy, who they listen to, and where they form opinions. Built from interviews with the people on buying committees, not from a template written for another industry.
How oil and gas companies buy→Decision-makers and stakeholders
Who authorizes the purchase, who influences it, and how the committee moves. Account-based software predicts this from engagement data. We build it from interviews, because in energy the people who decide are rarely the people who click.
The buyer types guide→Market-entry strategy
Where a newcomer wins first in a crowded vertical: the submarket, the partner who carries you in, and the stalled internal project that opens the door.
Market entry→A traction plan your team can run
Message House, positioning, seller talking points, and the call on whether your market needs demand created or demand captured. That call decides whether search is even the right lever.
What companies hire us for.
Each one runs on the five questions above. Each links to the work that shows it.
Buyer-behavior research
Interviews, survey work and channel analysis that show where your buyers actually form opinions, and which named decision-makers they listen to.
Market-entry strategy
An edge-computing platform entered a market 76% held by incumbents. Its wedge was operators' stalled internal programs, reached through system integrators rather than a better demo.
Product launch and positioning
A findings study, a Message House, a seller deck annotated slide by slide, and a launch playbook for a first software product.
Verticalization
One proven sales story, rebuilt for energy buyers. For a global information-management company that meant counting core samples stored instead of a generic records metric.
Route-to-market validation
A structured survey across segments and seniority that tells you which buyer is ready now, what they would pay for, and who to call first.
Built by asking energy buyers how they buy.
Mark LaCour founded ModalPoint and ran it from 2013 to 2025 as an energy commercialization advisory. That work left 300+ commercialization interviews on file.
It also left a podcast. Mark and Matthew Bertram co-host the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing podcast on OGGN, more than 100 episodes with the people who sit on energy buying committees. Much of what we know about how operators decide, we heard there first.
Mark now advises ModalPoint on energy relationships and go-to-market reach. Matt leads every engagement.
Part of your go-to-market now happens in an AI answer.
Buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a shortlist before they talk to sales. In Report #2 of our Energy AI Visibility Index, 9 of the 49 companies outside each segment's best known names were never named in 1,584 recorded answers to their own buyers' questions. We publish our own scores in the same Index.
When a go-to-market plan depends on making that shortlist, our visibility and reputation work traces each answer to its sources and fixes them with earned media.
Texas energy companies never named by ChatGPT or Perplexity when their own buyers asked. Measured 25 September 2026.
- Search work for a category nobody searches. If buyers already look for what you sell, search and directories come first. If they do not, the money belongs in peer proof and events. We check which before recommending either.
- A sized market forecast from us. If you need a basin-by-basin demand number, hire an energy research house. We start where that report stops: which buyer, which first account, and what to say to them.
Most of what we know is already public. Hear operators describe how they buy, then bring us the questions that are left.
Bring us the market you are trying to enter.
A 30-minute call about your product, the segment you are aiming at, and what you have tried so far. You leave knowing which of the five questions to answer first.