• December 12, 2013
  • Mark LaCour
  • 0

Part 1 of a 2 part series to prepare you to successfully sell into the oil & gas market in 2014 by creating an executable marketing plan.

 

Transcript of Session –

Hey, folks. Let’s learn something new about the oil and gas industry, shall we?

[Music]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m in a suit, so what? Shut up. I’m at the monthly API meeting in Houston, Texas and ExxonMobil is building in the Petroleum club. And this is a first of a two-part series to help you get prepared for 2014.

From the sales point of view, if you haven’t hit your number yet, give it up, the oil and gas industry is shut down ‘till the second week of January, but you can spend this time to prepare for next year, so let’s go through the first part.

Most important thing is to create an executable marketing plan. I don’t care if you’re a $150 million a year company or a one-man shop. The marketing side of your sales approach is vital and it’s something you can work on this year, so let’s talk about a couple of things. You have a product or a solution that fixes something, right? It fixes a problem. You need to figure out who in the oil and gas industry has that problem. The next thing you need to figure out is who has the value and what is the value of fixing that problem and in oil and gas industry it’s never money.

When you figure out those two things you now know who your targets are for potential clients and what you want to do is figure out what’s the titles of those targets and there maybe two or three because it may be called something different at Schlumberger than at Halliburton, but eventually you’ll have a handful of targets and now you know who to go after. And once you figure out who to go after it also helps you with your events, right? You want to go to the events that those targets also go to. Also, when you’re working on marketing in oil and gas, content is king and long  form content is perfectly acceptable. This is industry based on engineers and they love to read stuff.

Another thing, you should need to work your pipeline. Look at all your prospects that you talk to last year and you need some type of drip list to the ones that had an interest, but did not buy. This way you can stay forefront in their mind when the situation is right, they’ll remember you and they’ll buy from you.

And then, to kind of tie all this together, I got a call from one of the big project management software companies the other day, I can’t tell you who it is. But they’re a very large organization and I was talking to the head of sales and I was asking about how they interface with their marketing and he said the things that’s always a keynote for me that let’s me know I can help. He goes, I’m marketing against these crappy leads and we just don’t know what to do with them.

And so, in that situation, what you need to think about is what I just rattled off. So the marketing department of that software company needs to figure out who would benefit from this project management software, what are the titles and the roles and what is the value. And interestingly enough, if you go back to my previous issue of oil and gas business drivers of 2014, there are two big issues that this software actually would cross the value; one is major products startups and then the second one is operational efficiency. So, this software company actually needs to work on its marketing plan and they’re a huge company, so you know, I see it across the board.

So hopefully this helps. We’re going to do part two and we’re going to actually talk to you about how to build a sales strategy, so stay tuned.

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