Transforming Oil and Gas Sales with ROI

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back to the Sales and Marketing podcast.

Today, we have a guest. We have Stephanie join us. And Matt, you and I have only rescheduled with Stephanie 37,000 times. And we finally got things lined up. And Stephanie, I appreciate the patience while we get this thing done. But man, before we turn the microphone on, you were bringing up some very powerful stuff.

In the world of oil and gas sales, things have changed. I'm going to stop right there and let you finish the conversation because what you were saying was just golden. Well, thank you so much for having me on the show, Mark and Matthew. It's a pleasure. Yeah, what we were talking about previously

is that really oil and gas is going through kind of a crossroads. And companies are now starting to evolve and start to take hold of that digital transformation. So a little slow on the uptake there, but we're getting there. A lot of these solutions, such as the solutions that we sell, they are complex.

It's not just you're selling a widget. There's a lot to it. Really now, the things that used to work before aren't working anymore. We have to really blend a lot of technical expertise, creativity and strategic communication and showcase different ways, whether it's R and Y calculators or whatnot to show and solve the problem that people are struggling with.

It's no longer a features and benefits play. We understand your problem. Here's exactly how we can address that problem and here's how you're going to benefit from it and so that they can see the dollars and cents right away. I love it and you're 100% right.

And by the way, folks, we're recording video. Normally, you're listening to this on whatever podcast player. We are going to put the video once it's edited on YouTube. So check it out. Just go to YouTube. It's OGGN.com.

You'll be able to see this because Stephanie is going to show us some of the tools they're demonstrating. Stephanie, the interesting thing about what you just said is this aligns perfectly with what Matt and I do on the show in that we believe that sales and marketing should be joined at the hip and especially now with the needs to be able to communicate

very technical conversations to buyers. Now you need marketing's help with this, but at the same time, the salesperson, it's no longer who you play golf with or who you take out to dinner anymore, is it? Well, I think relationships still play a valuable role in this whole process,

but you're right. Just hitting golf balls together isn't going to help sell. It may sell a widget back in the day, but like we were talking about, these are very complex sales. They're long sales cycles. There's a lot of touch points.

There's IT, OT, your mechanical engineers, your electrical engineers, and it really is putting a lot of the onus on the marketing department as well in able to create the tools that the sales team needs to tell these stories effectively. It's very difficult, and I know that it took me, if you see some of my kick and scratch and canvas whiteboards

on trying to figure out how to come to the result that I did with this Wellpad ROI calculator, it was a nightmare. I showed it to someone and they're like, my brain can't even understand this, so it does take your right, both sides coming together to really work and understand the problem and be able to tell that story effectively.

One of the things I'm seeing is like finances getting pulled more and more into this decision making where you have different stakeholders involved, and it's starting to a new emergence of like a revenue operation strategy under the maybe CRO, and it's not just selling something, you've got these longer sales cycles, you've got to show like you said the numbers and cents to show that it makes sense. Sales people have to start speaking the language of finance.

That's a great point. Our president and co-founder Misty Jeter, she comes from a chemistry and then later on a financial background, and a lot of times when we're working together on these types of campaigns, we have to address the Misty's in the room because you're right, it is a lot of time someone in the revenue or finance department that is actually making the decision whether to pull the trigger or not,

and you have to justify it to them. You have to justify it to your engineering team, and there's different levels of that. You have to justify it and get buy-in from your operators if it goes down to that level. So you have your operators, you have your champions, you have all the way up to the CFO and everyone in between, so you're having to kind of tailor your message depending on who you're talking to. Target personas, yeah.

The other thing that's interesting about this, Stephanie, in the audience when you check out the video, Stephanie's actually put together an ROI calculator at the wellhead. Stephanie, this means that you as the sales lead had to understand the engineering, the finances, and literally the culture of how people that need this solution buy. This means that the sales people themselves no longer can be just bystanders anymore. You have to be actively involved. You have to understand your customer's business.

I would say as good as they do, maybe even better. That's true, and we have a whole team here at Black Pearl. We actually have a marketing agency called Black Pearl Launch, and part of my responsibility and my team is trying to message that down to my staff. So it's funny because if I'm reviewing social content or a blog post or something like that, sometimes I'll read it and I'll be like, yes, but no. To someone who's just reading it off the screen, yeah, that sounds great,

but if you're in the industry, if you know the details, you're going to look at it and go, that's right, but not quite right. They must not really know what they're talking about, and that is a dangerous slope to go down. So we always want to make sure, and I'll pass it by my technical team, like, guys, I think this is okay, but can you take a look from an engineering perspective? So you need their help as well to truly understand and have not only an understanding, but the right vernacular so that you don't look like you're just going to make it.

What I was just going to say is that discovery process is becoming so much more critical on you can't just sell, like you said before, the features and the benefits. You have to truly mark to your point to truly understand that problem and how your solution fits that. And then you're basically professionally helping people by communicate that to each of the different stakeholders or target personas that you're going after. So the salesperson has to, like, really get it. They can't just grow that out there or use that messaging. So you have this

complex sales process that if you get flat footed when someone's asking you a question, you don't really understand the problem and how your problem fits in perfectly. To solve that, you could lose the sale. It takes a level of knowledge that a lot of salespeople need to upgrade their experience or their thinking to be able to start to have some of these conversations where they just have to reach because they haven't been able to do this before. And potentially that's where LLMs can help and help with some of the language and some of the

tuning to help them get a little bit further in their knowledge base. And additional education comes in on a lot of these things to get them the skill set because the skill sets that salespeople have today are not the skill sets that they need to sell in this new environment, I guess, is kind of what we're dancing around. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. We hired someone about a month ago, a new outbound salesperson. And he hasn't yet to make one phone call, one email, because he's still learning. We're still teaching him all the nuances of this one

particular set, which is actually what my ROI calculator was based around, but teaching him all the nuances, how it works, who you talk to, who are the players and stakeholders, how the whole oil and gas industry works, because he's new at this. This isn't just selling solar panels door to door. This is very, very different. Yeah. And Matt, I want to back you up because both you and Stephanie are right. Even the standard discovery call, which was very popular, I did probably hundreds. I'm probably more than that in the late 90s, early 2000s. Even now,

buyers don't have time for you to sit down and for you to pick their brain and understand what's going on. You have to do this research as a salesperson ahead of time. If you're like you, Stephanie, we have multiple customers. When you do that type of research and you start understanding these problems, you start seeing trends across your different customers that they don't see, because they don't sell to their competitors, right? So I think sometimes as a good salesperson, you need to be able to take those trends and go back to your clients and go, look, this is what

I'm seeing in the industry. But to do that, to your point, Matt, the salesperson needs to step up their game. You're no longer just there as an order taker. You're now there to help educate after you've done enough research up front to understand what's going on in your client's world. And I think that's a big differentiator now in 2025 and in the future between very successful salespeople and salespeople that struggle. To come back to it, and then I'll hand you the baton, Stephanie, is analytics and enriched data help you so much today. I mean, I remember

selling before LinkedIn, I remember calling into a directory and had a phone number and dial up and dial back and had to build out that data set. And now you have a lot of that stuff. And to your point, Mark, customers don't have enough time. You have to be able to look at that data, understand what their problem is, and get close enough that you can get their interest. And then once you've discovered, oh, that's a problem. Now you have a set of account based selling, account based marketing, that's targeting on that customer to uncover a little bit more

to get to that next level. And that's this new game of data. And why it's so valuable, why it's the new oil is because you can start to cut this data. And then LLMS, I mean, machine learning has been going on for a while, but you had to clean that data, you had to label that data, like you had all these data marks, and you couldn't do a lot with it for a long time. Now you can take unstructured data and get all kinds of outputs. And now there's all kinds of business intelligence tools that are coming out to help you make that decision to say,

could this offering that I have, could they be a solution for it? And then a lot of that research and a lot of that buying is happening before you even connect with somebody on the research side, on the buying side. And this is just why it's absolutely critical that marketing and sales work together because the data tools that you can get on the digital side, and then the sales side of the relationship and understanding industry have to merge. No, that's true. And also to your point, Matt, sales is on the front lines, right? They're hearing exactly from their

clients and prospects what their problems are, what the problems they're facing. So the solution, for instance, in the example that I have here, they may be wanting to get in front of them about this solution, but they may be hearing on the phone, this happened to me a couple months ago, where I kept hearing over and over again. It was like three times in the same week, someone brought up, I love this, this is great, but can you help me with? And we were like, oh, well, yes, we can. I didn't realize that was an issue, heard it again, heard it again.

So now we came up with something to solve that problem. In this example, it was especially an oil and gas, there's equipment that's been out in the fields for 50 years. And it's just doing its thing over and over, whether it's in a refinery or on a well pad or what have you. Well, back in the day, they may have ordered 10,000 electronics printed circuit boards to update and fix as they didn't work anymore, as they failed in the field. Well, now it's coming up to where, ooh, we only have a few left. We need more. We need more of these boards,

because we still have this old equipment out in the field. Well, some of those parts are obsolete. They can't get it anymore. Three times, like I said, in one week, they needed help getting parts or new boards made for legacy equipment. So now we offer that, it's called replacement technology. Keep your legacy equipment working in good condition, because it's just the PCB, the printed circuit board, that was bad, and they can't get parts anymore. So sales and marketing have to, again, work together to listen and be listening to what are the pain points that are outside of

even what I'm trying to offer. Can we help? How can we help them? All right, this is the type of stuff that only happens on this show. Kinder Morgan, if you're listening, I know you have this problem with a printed circuit board. I know for a fact you do, because I talked to your pipeline integrity, and I know how much money you spent to fly somebody for how to fly first class, because only seat you could get, and you had to rent a private helicopter to get a technician to go change a circuit board out of nowhere. So reach out to Stephanie's company, Kinder Morgan, because I know

you have this exact problem. It's so weird you brought that up. In the audience, we did not rehearse this at all. It's just a coincidence. Isn't that funny? But it's just a perfect example of a pain point that we had no idea that was out there. And by listening and sales and marketing working together, we were able to listen and quickly come up with a solution that now is a product. Love it. All right, Stephanie, you put a lot of work and effort into a couple of things. We're actually recording this video. You want to kind of go through your tool and why it's useful for

salespeople, almost like if a real prospect was involved right here, if we had a real prospect in the studio with us right now. So I'm going to let you kind of go through this and kind of guide the conversation, because I love the fact that you did this. More salespeople need to have this type of knowledge around what the problems that their customers are dealing with. Sure. So one thing, and I'm not trying to sell it, I'm just trying to show an example of something I know is working. This was actually for the SPE, the Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference, is what this

was created for. So we came up with some new remote monitoring devices, wireless in the field, and trying to think, and they're class one div ones, so they are explosion proof and meet all those requirements, et cetera. So I was like, how do we tell everyone what this does and how great it is? I came up with a plan, like I said, my whiteboard is lines and colors, and it's ridiculous, but trying to show how our ecosystem can monitor and meet and give real time reporting in harsh conditions. Well, I have it for upstream, midstream, downstream, and then your environmental.

But for this particular instance, I only focused on upstream. It showed, if you look down here, like here's an entire refinery, you have your midstream, your upstream, your downstream, and your environmental. But I'm going to focus here on just the wellheads, because even though these devices can actually go into an entire system and refinery, I'm just talking about upstream right now. So that's where all of the different colors came from. But it shows these are the sensors that we can monitor on the well pad real time, and we can also control them, whether it's an

automatic control or, hey, if it hits a certain temperature or a certain vibration, turn it off, turn it on, what have you, or it can alert someone and they can hit a button. Okay. So that was the first thing, just figuring out how is it going to work, what sensors is it going to do, how is it going to control the wellheads on site. So then just as a teaser, I had this and it's achieved $730,000 in savings annually per wellhead. I was talking to someone the other day, they have a client that had 183 wells. Well, 730,000 times 183 annually adds up really fast. A lot of money.

It's a lot of money. Real quickly, I was able to show the initial investment was 83,700 for the equipment, 731,000 in savings. So that's a 744% return on investment in 49 days. And that's just for one, for one wellhead. Plus, you have your operational benefits, your safety enhancements, which people get find a lot for safety violations. So if you want to know, well, how did you come up with 731,000? Well, you say 38,000 by not having to have someone drive out there and go look at it. That's a lot of manual labor. Your downtime prevention. What is the number one death in the

oil field? Number one, downtime, down to 100%. Yep. Death is downtime. No downtime. It's so expensive when you have people on site and your productions down. Energy optimization was small, but it's still there. Predictive maintenance, 25,000 a year in savings. And this was the big one, the health and safety violations that you're going to be able to prevent was an estimated 60,000 a year. And these are all backed up by research that I did in my crazy whiteboard. So then we had a QR code on here that said, hey, how many wells do you have? Let's see what it looks like for you.

We built this. So let's say you have 10 well pads. Well, your investment's going to be 163,000. Your annual savings breakdown, and this is exactly how much you're saving. So you're going to save 7.3 million a year. Your annual cost on going are 37,000. So that's a 3600% ROI. You're making your payback in 10 days. Over five years, you saved $36 million. That's on 10 wells. I absolutely love this. What about 85? Well, there you go. Because I'm finding, at least in here at Black Pearl, if you can start with, hey, I know you have a problem. How many wells do you have 10?

Right. How would you like to save $7.3 million annually with a small investment up front? This talks dollars and cents. It breaks down exactly how they are going to see that benefit. What the investments, there's no secret here. There's no underlying hidden cost secrets. It is saying, I'm going to save you $730,000 per well head. What's stopping you? The numbers don't lie. And whether you're a CRO or all the way down, an operator is going to appreciate not having to drive out to 10.2 to go check a well head. Think about Landman, episode two. What happened when

they went to go on that well head? There was a leak and four people died. Three people died. That could have been prevented with this technology. What I love about what you're doing is, and Matt and I talk with us all the time, is you have to have different conversations with different people in the same organization about the solution. And your ROI calculator touches all that. It shows you how to have the separate conversation with the head of safety, HSE. It shows you how to have the financial conversation with the comptroller, the CFO. It shows you how to have a productivity

time on tool and uptime conversation with the guy that's running operations. And it's all fact-based numbers. This is what a good salesperson should do. By the way, people, if you show up to sell to me, this is the type of research I expect you to do on OGGN, is understanding the problems that we deal with. Stephanie, this is fantastic. Let me kind of back you way up though. When you first came to Black Pearl and you saw this need for this type of salesmanship, is this something that was an easy switch for you to do? Because you've been in our industry a little while. You've

been selling for a long time. I've been in marketing and sales for over 30 years. I was the president of a large global marketing agency, and Black Pearl was actually my client for a one-off campaign. My experience and background was B2B technology clients, but I was always so fascinated by what they did. And I lived in Dallas, and they're in the Woodlands in Houston area. I would drive down. Normally, I didn't get involved in client projects, but I was just always so fascinated by the technology and the innovation. I would drive down here with my team. I wanted to be on every phone

call because it was just incredible. So when their campaign was over, it had been a few months, I was just like, can I come work for you? And they were like, yes, come on. So I won't have to say it's been like drinking from the fire hydrant. I did not have a lot of engineering expertise or background. I did not have anything in oil and gas. So it's been a big learning curve for me, but obviously, there are tools out there. The LLMs, Matt Tier Point are very helpful, but this is what is expected and needed in order for sales to be successful today. And what you don't know is that Matt and I

preach this all the time. Bring your marketing people to sales meetings. And we didn't talk about with you beforehand. You're a perfect example of the value of having marketing have those front line conversations with your sales teams. Not later. I love it. I know I'll cut you off, Matt. I'll shut up. No, Stephanie, what I was going to say is I really love what you did because I've always heard from salespeople reducing downtime. Like if you can reduce downtime on wells, would be onshore, offshore, and you have X number of wells, you can get to this number to say,

like, we can save you X amount. What you did is you kind of took that concept of where the opportunity is, and then you laid it all out, and you added different components to it, and you rolled them all up into where you have a number that's going to get somebody's attention based upon the number of wells that they have. It calculates the formula based on all these different areas. And what all those different areas do help you speak to the different people that you're selling to, based on what they care about. And then you have this overall number, which grabs that attention.

And I love how you laid it out. I thought this was like a textbook example of how you should be selling today. So I just absolutely love it. Yeah, and I'll give you props to this is absolutely how you should be selling today. And you laid it out so simply, the audience pay attention to this. I don't know if Stephanie's for hire to help you with your strategic sales planning. Absolutely are. Actually, that's Black Pearl Launches Force. So if anyone needs help or needs their own ROI calculator or research, we can absolutely help with that. I love it. I love it.

Let's go ahead and give a plug to Black Pearl. What does Black Pearl do, Stephanie? Black Pearl is actually we have seven companies started out as an engineering group and have grown from there. We have Black Pearl Engineering, which is like we call them the Navy Seals Engineer. So it's a couple of guys, people come to us and say, if only I had something that did XYZ, it doesn't exist. Can you make it? And they'll go and do a little digging and go, yes, we can or no, we can't. The three years I've been here, I've never seen them decline. And we've been able to do and produce

everything that's been asked so far. I think still on David, our other co-founders wish list is building the Iron Man suit. So that one they're still working on. But once they give the thumbs up, it goes over to Black Pearl Technology. And that's where we bring all of our mechanical, electrical, software, firmware engineers, the project managers, things of that nature, and actually go through designing, bench topping, prototyping, and low volume production. Then we get into high volume manufacturing. That's Black Pearl Innovation. We also have Black Pearl Security,

which does encryption over the air encryption updates, real time dashboards, etc. And then we have Black Pearl Launch, which is our marketing agency. And then we have some of our SMT for printing PCBs. We do that as well, up in Canada. Good stuff. And if people wanted to learn more about Black Pearl Technology, where should they go? BlackPearlTechnology.com. Yeah. And the links in the show notes, people will also put a link to Stephanie's LinkedIn profile if you want to reach out to her directly. Unfortunately, I could go on for another two hours with you, but we're

getting close to winding the show down. A little announcement, audience, we know that we have not been putting out episodes on a regular basis. I hear, I get the emails, apologies. Most of that is my fault. One of the things that we're doing this little change this show is I'm sort of stepping away a little bit. Let Matt run with it. He is going to be able to crank out more episodes on a regular basis without me being in his way. I'll still come back and do some guest appearances, but Matt's now is going to just take off and run with this. So y'all give him a big round of applause

to support him. He'll be fantastic in this. And then Matt, you and I are still hitting the conferences, the trade shows, all that sort of stuff, which by the way, we pulled off something. I challenged my web team to do this and they did it. If you go to OGGN.com, if you go to the events page, we now have an active live calendar in real time that should show every oil and gas trade show and conference and event in the world with a link to it. So now you can go to one place and find it. It was a personal challenge. I didn't think they'd be able to pull it off and they did.

So good stuff there. Newsletters, they're sold out. So you're not going to hear me try to sell you anything on the show. So if you're interested in one of the newsletters, you have to reach back out to us in 2026. Stephanie will put you on the spot here. I forgot to mention to you at the end of the show, we always ask our guests for a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. So something that you see on LinkedIn that people shouldn't do or something that you've seen on LinkedIn that you thought that was pretty cool. Maybe people should do. Do you have a LinkedIn fail or tip of

the week? One thing that I noticed, especially in the direct messages, I get an oil and gas at least, I know a LinkedIn is a gold mine. If you know how to use it right. What I see because I get in my direct messages is just a bunch of cold email type verbiage, which is an automatic X block. I don't want it. The way that reach out, you link with someone that you're wanting to get in with. You're like, Hey, thanks so much for linking in. I appreciate it. And then maybe a couple days later, how are things at ABC company? Things good for you. I know prices with oil

going up and down. How are you guys doing? Start a conversation just as if you would walking up to someone at a trade show. You wouldn't give them the cold email speech at a face to face. Don't do that on LinkedIn. You're going to get so much more traction. David, one of our co founders actually just this morning, he loves LinkedIn and he reached out to someone, a CEO of an energy company and was like, Hey, just started chatting back and forth very casually. And it was like, I'd love to talk to you maybe about some of our products that we

have. Lo and behold, God is email. We have an appointment on Tuesday. Literally, it took like 30 minutes. You don't have to capitalize everything. You don't have to sound like super uptight, I guess is the word. Just be a person, be yourself. And that's going to get a lot more traction than blasting these cold email direct messages out. I just think that's terrible. You're singing our song 100% and you're 100% right. All right, guys, we've got to get out of here, check out Black Pearl, links in the show notes, reach out to Stephanie if she can help you

with anything. Remember, make a difference and not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGM, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. And don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.