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Oil & Gas Market Research

Sales and Marketing research specifically for the oil & gas market.

Oil & Gas Market Research — ModalPoint

A note on ModalPoint’s evolution.
This page is part of our oil & gas commercialization library — built on 26 years of advisory work in energy markets. ModalPoint has since expanded into AI decision governance for regulated industries, with a specialized practice for energy operators navigating TRAIGA, the EU AI Act, and NIST AI RMF. If you are evaluating AI governance maturity, start with a 5-day Governance Readiness Assessment. The guide below remains available as a reference.

What Is Sales and Marketing Research for the Oil & Gas Industry?

We get asked this all the time:

“What exactly is sales and marketing research in oil and gas?”

The simplest way to explain it is through a real example.


The Problem: Great Product, No Market Traction

A client came to us from Silicon Valley. They had built a high-quality, intrinsically safe tablet—designed for hazardous environments like oil and gas.

On paper, it made perfect sense.

In reality, they spent heavily trying to break into the market… and failed.

Not because the product was wrong.
Because the market entry strategy was wrong.


Step One: Measure “Buy Now” Demand

The oil and gas industry is not one market. It’s four distinct segments:

  • Upstream (exploration & production)
  • Midstream (transport & storage)
  • Downstream (refining & processing)
  • Oilfield services

Each segment operates under different pressures, capital cycles, and risk tolerance.

So the first thing we do is measure what we call a “Buy Now Rating”—a real-world indicator of which segment is actually willing to adopt something new right now, not in theory.


Where Most People Get It Wrong

Like most companies entering the space, we initially assumed the best fit would be oilfield services—the Halliburtons, Schlumbergers, and Bakers of the world.

They’re technology-forward. They operate in the field. It made logical sense.

It was also completely wrong.

At that point in time, major deepwater projects like BP’s Mad Dog and ExxonMobil’s Hadrian North had been cancelled.

That sent a shockwave through the service sector.

Spending froze. Risk tolerance dropped.
Their Buy Now Rating was the lowest in the entire industry.


The Insight: Follow the Real Demand

Our research revealed something unexpected:

Downstream—refineries—had the highest Buy Now Rating.

Why?

Because they were facing a different kind of pressure: operational uptime.


The Breakthrough: Where the Product Actually Fits

We dug deeper and identified a specific use case:

Refinery turnarounds.

During a turnaround:

  • Entire units shut down
  • Massive contractor teams come in
  • Every hour of delay costs millions

To manage this, operators track percent of work completed across thousands of tasks.

At the time, many were still doing this:

  • On paper
  • Manually entered into spreadsheets
  • Passed through multiple people
  • Sent to schedulers via email

This created delays, errors, and massive inefficiencies.


The Solution: Align Product to Real Value

We repositioned the product:

  • Replace paper tracking with a digital workflow
  • Capture real-time progress data in the field
  • Push updates instantly to schedulers
  • Deploy it on intrinsically safe devices for refinery environments

The value wasn’t “a better tablet.”

The value was:

Reduced downtime. Increased schedule accuracy. Millions saved during turnaround events.


The Result: From No Sales to Supply Constraints

Once we aligned:

  • Target buyer: Refinery turnaround managers
  • Use case: Real-time work tracking during shutdowns
  • Value: Operational uptime and cost savings

Everything changed.

The client went from:

  • Struggling to get meetings

To:

  • Struggling to manufacture fast enough to meet demand

What We Actually Do

This is what sales and marketing research means in oil and gas:

✓ Identify which segment is ready to buy now
✓ Pinpoint who actually has the problem you solve
✓ Define the real economic value of your solution
✓ Translate your offering into their language, their priorities, and their timing


The Bottom Line

Most companies don’t fail because their product is wrong.

They fail because they’re:

  • Targeting the wrong segment
  • Talking to the wrong buyer
  • Solving the wrong problem
  • Or showing up at the wrong time

We fix that.

We connect your product or service to the exact point in the value chain where it creates measurable impact—and where the market is ready to act.

That’s our core business.

Sales and Marketing research to pinpoint specifically where the demand for your product or service is inside the oil & gas industry. We are industry experts and our reputation as an independent, 3rd party “insider” researchers is well known. This allows us to do research and structured interviews with real oil & gas  business leaders to figure out exactly what your best route to market lies. There is no better way to do this than talking to the people who will buy your product or service.

Your product or service solves a problem. Our industry research will identify who has that problem,  what is the value of solving that problem and who receives the most benefit from fixing that problem. We then determine which segment of the market is most likely to buy. This work identifies the target for your sales and marketing efforts with a laser focus, speeding up your revenue generation and keeping you from wasting time and money.

 

Sales and Marketing Research for Oil and Gas

So we get asked often, “What is sales and marketing research for the oil and gas industry?”

The easiest way for me to explain it is to tell you a story of a real client. So, I have a client that makes intrinsically safe tablets located in Silicon Valley. They tried it themselves to sell to oil and gas industry and they spent a lot of money, and they failed. And then they found me.

So, the first thing that we do is we go out and measure some called “buy now” rating. There are four segments of the industry; upstream, midstream, downstream, and service. And those segments you can measure their willingness to look at buying something new.

Now, at this point in history, I just assumed that it would the service side of the house; the Halliburton’s and the Schlumberger’s and the Baker’s that have an interest in this intrinsically safe tablet because of the digitalization in the oilfield. Well, I was completely wrong.

At this point in history which is a couple of years ago, BP had cancelled MadDog and ExxonMobil had cancelled Hadrian North, two deep-water projects. And the service industry was worried, right? It was perception. That they’re worried that these cheap frack wells will kill these ultra-expensive deep-water projects, so they were scared to spend money. So they had the lowest buy now rating which I was completely wrong about that.

We found out that downstream had the highest buy now rating – the refineries. And so, after three months of research we figured out that the fit for our clients’ intrinsically safe tablet was downstream in the refinery during a turnaround where the cost of the company is the downtime of the unit.

And so, they build this huge work breakdown structures and they get a whole bunch of contractors coming in and implement all these work, but they have to track the percent of work complete to keep the schedule accurate. And they were presently doing it on paper which is fraught with errors and it was sent to somebody to keep punching at Excel that would send e-mail to this schedulers to just to schedule and it cost them millions of dollars of downtime.

So we figured out through our market research for oil and gas industry, the fit for our client was during a refinery turnaround, they automated this paper collection of data, the percent of work complete in an app that is automatically pushed to schedulers, but it has to be on an intrinsically safe device because they’re in a refinery. Beautiful, right?

So, my client went from not being able to sell it all to not being able to manufacture the units quick enough because we figured out exactly who his targets are. And his targets were the refinery turnaround managers and the value that he bought was operational uptime.

So that’s what we figure out for you. We will literally figure out who the people that have the problem that you solve and what is the value of you solving that problem. That is our research and that’s our core business.

The Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast

We publish what we learn, every week.

Much of how we read the energy buyer comes from the show Mark LaCour and Matthew Bertramhost on the Oil & Gas Global Network — 99 episodes with the sales leaders, marketers, and operators who actually close deals in energy. It is the working notebook behind the advisory.

  • How energy buyers actually evaluate vendors
  • What earns a meeting with an operator
  • Where marketing loses the technical buyer
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