• September 8, 2013
  • Mark LaCour
  • 0

Learn the top 5 tips when attending oil & gas events. Regardless if your looking to meet new customers, network or even learn about your competition these tips insure your time and money are not wasted.

 

Transcript of Session –

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

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All right. On today’s show we’re going to talk about events. The oil and gas event season globally typically kicks off at the end of the US summer and goes all the way ‘till the beginning of next year’s summer and typically the summers we take off from events.

Events are very important especially if you’re trying to either penetrate the oil and gas industry as a newbie or trying to grow you existing business, but just like anything else you need to have a strategic approach ‘cause you can easily waste time and money attending events and never accomplishing anything. So, we’re going to talk about a few rules of the road to help you actually accomplish things when you attend events.

So, the first one. Have a game plan. I don’t know how many people I know that sign up for event have no idea what they want to accomplish. You need to think about this strategically and let me give you a couple of examples.

So for ModalPoint, our business, we go to events for couple of reasons. Number one is we need to stay on the cutting edge of new technologies and business process in the oil and gas industry, so we target events that showcases new processes or technology. Number two is we go to educate clients. We actually bring clients with us to these events to help showcase things that may help their business. And then, number three is networking. The oil and gas industry is very relationship base and we take a percentage of our time and go up to these events and simply network.

So that’s our game plan. That’s the three reasons we go. You need to figure out for your business what are the reasons that you want to go. It may be to meet new clients or potential clients, it may be to learn what your competitors are doing, but you actually need to come up with plan based on the things you’re trying to accomplish.

Number two. Make it count. Everybody’s busy these days. You could spend your entire life and never go to an oil and gas event and never accomplish anything, you could also spend your entire life going to oil and gas events and never accomplish anything. So make it count. Make sure that you understand what you want to try to accomplish, carve out a time in your day and then be strategic in the events that you go to make sure you can reach your goals.

Number three. Do your homework. Hit the website, look at past events, research the speakers, look at who’s on the expo floor, research the talk tracks, understand the attendance, understand the geographic location, do all of these which goes back into your strategy to help you figure out if this event is something that will help you accomplish one of your goals.

And then, follow the 60-20-20 rule. And I’ll say that again, 60-20-20. 60% of the time that you’re at event, you should be checking off your goals, you should be doing nothing but focus on accomplishing what your goals are. 20% of the time you should spend learning something new, so whether that’s walking the expo floor or sitting in the talk track on risers ‘cause you don’t know anything about risers, that’s well worth your time. And then the last 20%, be opportunistic. So if you run across somebody you haven’t seen in a while, use that time to catch up with them. If you run across a vendor that you didn’t know existed, sit down and learn what they do. But that’s 60-20-20 rule will serve you very well.

And then finally, don’t arrive empty handed. And that sounds like common sense, but I don’t know how many clients that we set up to events and they show with almost nothing. At a minimum you need business cards and I mean a lot, you never have enough business cards on you.

Number two. If you have an elevator pitch, practice it, so if you run across a potential client you’re not fumbling around on it and can rattle it off in unintelligent manner. And then, things like any sales brochures, we actually like – we actually tell our clients to preload a quick presentation on the flash drive and use it as a leave behind. So, whatever you do, don’t arrive there empty handed.

So, follow these few tricks and I promise you your event experience will be well worth it and will positively impact your business.

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