Lessons From The Oil & Gas Services Industry

Background

A drilling equipment provider headquartered in Canada identified a need to develop a formalized sales process to drive sales within their organization.

The sales organization approached sales the old-fashioned way, i.e. take the client to dinner, provide him with hockey tickets and perhaps, close the deal. Salespeople were not held accountable for their sales numbers. There was no system to track account information through the sales process to enable management decisions and hold people accountable.

Primarily due to acquisitions, each division had a different process and structure for managing their sales process, e.g.:

• The Canadian division had a sales team that mirrored the small businesses it acquired;
• In the US division, operations area managers made the sales calls and owned the relationships with the clients;
• The International division had a Vice President of Contracts and Marketing with support staff that aided with the tendering process.

Each of the divisions had contracts with many of the same oil and gas clients. However, there was no consistent approach to these clients. The sales organization did not operate as a global entity.

As a global organization, there was no brand identity. Rigs in the field were not even the same color. The organization prided itself on having an edge on technology. However, there was no data readily available to validate this. They did not know how they compared to the competition in terms of technology.

In terms of Marketing, there was no marketing strategy. There was no formal global marketing position within the corporate structure. Marketing collateral was scarce. While the competition had libraries of videos for their products, this organization had none. There was no budget for such items, despite the superior technology they had.

 

Implemented Solution

A Sales Effectiveness Action Team was created to address the sales effectiveness, marketing and branding challenges within the business.

Kelmic developed a program that teaches the basics to a high-performance sales team.

Part of the engagement’s key accomplishments was establishing alignment of all areas within the organization to support a common goal, which resulted in increased market share from the top 10 operators, worldwide.

Kelmic helped the client construct support mechanisms and helped implement a CRM to reinforce the sales efforts. This included data mining protocols and key indicators to manage the sales funnel.

Driven by a pressing need to rethink their value proposition, sales strategy and brand identity, Kelmic helped the client to engage key stakeholders and to define their brand through a rigorous value proposition discovery better aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives:

• The value proposition included a technology element that identified the company’s positioning versus its peers and determined which elements supported the brand and which did not;
• The brand was designed to be easily recognized by customers and promote engagement.

Marketing collateral that promotes brand identity was budgeted for the following year. Six videos were developed to endorse the organization’s main products and technology.

 

Key Results Achieved

• 20% increase in market share of the “top ten” active operators
• Improved rig utilization to the industry standard
• Implemented salesforce.com, as the CRM to support the sales organization
• Developed key target accounts throughout the world to build new relationships for the future