Basics 6 of 7 · Oil and gas industry basics
Who actually buys
The engineer who loves your product cannot sign for it, and the person who can has never heard of you.
The words
- Economic buyer
- The person whose budget pays and who can sign the PO. Usually not the person you are talking to.
- Champion
- Your contact inside the buyer who wants the deal to happen. Valuable, and almost never able to approve it alone.
- Decision-making team
- The formal or informal group that actually decides. The show's position is that a single decision maker no longer exists in this industry.
- HSE
- Health, safety and environment. A function with a veto on anything that goes on site, and a seat at the table whether or not it comes to meetings.
- The field
- The crews who will use what you sell. They do not sign, and they decide whether it worked.
The most common reason a deal here feels stuck is simple, and the show names it first in its list of why deals stall: nobody with budget authority has been identified. The engineers, the operations managers and your champion all want to talk. Then the question that matters:
“do any of them have the budget or the ability to sign off, to sign a PO? Usually not.”
Source: How to Accelerate Deal Closure in Oil and Gas, episode 98 of the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast.
The fix the show gives is mechanical. In the first week of a new opportunity, map the org chart. Ask your contact directly who signs off on capital spend for this kind of project. Then ask for the full list of people who are part of the decision whether or not they come to meetings, because the ones who do not come are the ones who kill deals quietly.
Those people have different jobs, and the show describes how misaligned they are on purpose. Procurement is there to save money and not get blamed. Engineering wants a technical problem solved. Safety wants nobody hurt. The field wants it to work on a Tuesday night. One message cannot land with all four, which is why the first week goes to finding out who they are.
The committee around one purchase order
Any of them can kill the deal without coming to a meeting
- Economic buyerhas the budget, signs the POepisode 98
- The engineertakes nine out of 10 decisions on engineered equipmentepisode 22
- Procurementthere to save money and find a vendor that will not make them look badepisode 78
- Your championwants it, and usually cannot sign off on budgetepisode 98
- Financehas to be brought in, because the champions cannot signepisode 98
- HSE, IT, IT security and the fieldeach has some sway, whether or not they come to meetingsepisode 98
The workshop day maps this on one of your live deals →
More from the show
The list of who else is in the room, from the same episode:
“So procurement, HSE, IT, IT security, the field operation side, the finance side, all of those people probably have some sway”
Source: How to Accelerate Deal Closure in Oil and Gas, episode 98 of the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast.
And the clearest statement of why they want different things:
“procurement is there to save money and find a reliable vendor that's not going to make them look bad, but the engineering side of things, they were looking for somebody that is helping them solve a technical challenge”
Source: Selling into Oil Patch: The RevOps Playbook, episode 78 of the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast.
On engineered equipment the weight sits with the engineer, because procurement cannot write the specification or judge the proposal; that goes to the end user's engineers or to the EPC. The show puts a number on it.
“So now you have the engineer who's probably taking nine out of 10 decisions.”
Source: How to Sell Engineered Products, episode 22 of the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast.
This was not always so. The show describes a time when one person at even the largest operator could sign a PO, and says the companies dismantled that deliberately to end relationship selling.
“So now there's decision making teams, either formal, where you know who they are, or most probably informal, where you don't know who they are.”
Source: Building a Sales Team from Scratch (hint, start with marketing), episode 67 of the Oil & Gas Sales & Marketing Podcast.
Before the next call
Who signs off on capital spend for this kind of project, and have you met them?
