#017: Good Times & Compliance Signs in the Permian Basin & Eagle Ford Shale

The Oil & Gas Digital Marketing Podcast

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Roses are red, violets are blue, and OSHA will fine you a bunch of cash if you don’t have compliance signs.

Thank you very much, Captain Obvious. What else you got?

Operators are killing it in the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin right now.

Strike two. You really like to live up to your name, eh?

What’s with the accent, eh? What are you one of them Canadian Idiots Weird Al sings aboout?

Okay, you got me … I’m just killing time because we don’t have a complete transcript this morning.

But that don’t mean we ain’t got one heckuva show!

Compliance Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

Renee Wesbrooks from Century Graphics & Sign posts up with The Tribe this week. I met Renee at Roseland Publications’ Texas Showdown in Grapevine earlier this year.

She busted out in next level means you tradeshow tactic at one of our client’s booths and we knew we had to get her on the show.

This conversation runs the gambit.

We touch on the booming Midland, Texas market, dig deep into Renee’s six years of experience calling on companies in the Eagle Ford Shale, and pick-up some valuable sales and leadership lessons along the way.

BIG NEWS

Caution: I drop some OUT OF CONTROL BIG NEWS at the beginning of the show!

Hint: We’re feeling right at home, but you’ll have to click the play button to discover the BIG NEWS. (<– That’s called a teaser. The tactic is to give just enough background to create intrigue to produce the desired outcome. BOOM! I just threw that in for free. And i’m not even oiled up, ladies and gentlemen!)

Listen Now

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Sponsor

Ozias Oilfield Solutions, the eEnergyCommerce Pioneers

Dedication

Episode 17 is dedicated to Pittsburgh Dad. His Buckos didn’t even show up down PNC last night!

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I don’t want to be more human, I want to be as absurd as humanly possible. (Click to Tweet)

Notice: You Can’t Fix Stupid (Click to Tweet)

Shout Outs?SOOOOEY!!!!

• Charles is the newest member of The Tribe, and he wanted to learn more about the oil bidness. I got you, my man! –> 7 Free Resources for Newbies in Oil & Gas
• Help Lorenna S. Eunapio da Conceição with her Masters in Business Administration and Marketing thesis!
• Longtime no hear from, Michelle Fourqurean. Michelle’s my girl from montereyshalemagazine.com. Holla!
• Major shout-out and CONGRATS to David Kent and the entire OilPro family on their 1-year Anniversary! Yet another oilfield innovator making the world a better place!

We got Links

• Century Graphic & Sign, Inc.
• What Is A Pattern Interrupt?
• [e-mail]

Good Times & Compliance Signs with Renee Wesbrooks from Century Graphics & Sign

James Hahn II: Joining The Tribe on the podcast today is Renee Wesbrooks. She works in sales at Century Graphics and Signs, which is based in Midland, Texas. She has been working with Century’s clients in the Eagle Ford Shale and Houston area for the past six years. Century specializes in well compliance signs, OSHA safety signs, pipeline markers, lockout tags, hascom labeling, windsocks, and all kinds of other things I don’t know what they are.

I need to spend more time on the lease, where they also make traffic signs. But as we know, what happens on the lease stays on the lease. I met her out at the Roseland Texas Showdown in Grapevine where she was making her rounds with great initiative. I loved this marketing tactic. She came up to one of my client’s booths with an embroidered hat with their logo on it. And I said, “Man, I need to get you on my show.”

So, Renee Wesbrooks welcome to The Oil & Gas Digital Marketing Podcasting. Thanks for joining us today.

Renee Wesbrooks: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

James Hahn II: It’s my pleasure. As I said I was really taken aback when you came up. It might seem like a really simple thing, and I’m probably geeking on about it a lot more than I should because I’m a marketer and I’m just a geek in general.

Tell me about that strategy. How long have you been doing that, and in how does it work for you?

Renee Wesbrooks: Well, whenever we are going to attended a trade show I’ve found if you just walk around and talk to people sometimes you can develop some good relationships, and potential clients will develop from those conversations. It’s always nice to make yourself stand out and be a little bit different. Since our company, in addition to the signs that we do at the shows, we also do embroidery.

I thought I’d look ahead at who’s attending the show, who lives in the area that I call on to see who potential clients might be for me. So I have our embroidery guy out in Midland look on the internet, and he’ll pull the logo down into a sample cap for me for those customers. Then when I go and introduce myself to them as I’m walking around the show I have something to give them that makes them hopefully remember me and that I had come

James Hahn II: It was quite memorable to me because there was there were a few logos that were not easy to duplicate on an embroidered hat, right?

Renee Wesbrooks: Yes, that’s correct. We have great and embroidery head, AJ, outs in Midland who heads up our embroidery department. He’s really good, he digitizes logos for us and can do a good job at pulling something off the Internet and making it look really nice and clean. Then we tried to pick a that we think it’ll really showcase well on.

James Hahn II: I only saw it seemed there was a trucker hat. There’s more than one hat?

Renee Wesbrooks: Oh my goodness, yes. We can do the mesh back caps that are really popular right now because it’s hot. We also do a lot of camo, oilfield camo is really popular right now. We do caps and bags that have that pattern on it. I don’t know how familiar you are with that. They actually have the oil derricks and gears that make up the camo pattern. It’s really unique.

We also do a lot of licensed camo like gang guard and real tree. If there is a Out there that you like I’m sure we can find that the For you there’s a lot of different choices.

James Hahn II: How long have you been employing this particular marketing tactic? You’ve been developing that region for six years now. When did you first do this sort of memorable exposition? “Let me make something for them before I go and talk to them” thing?

Renee Wesbrooks: I guess I’ve probably been doing that for about three years now. In fact, one of my top customers right now is one that I couldn’t get in with when I went and made cold calls on his office. I go and I knew his name, but I was in Houston Texas calling a large corporate office and I was getting lost in the shuffle. So when I was at a trade show and I went and asked for him at the booth, he was there.

I got to have a face-to-face conversation with him, and I was able to get him to give Century a shot. We’ve done a whole lot of work for them ever since then. And since then, it’s given me the motivation to keep looking for customers like that. I can think off the top my head, I’ve probably gotten 5 or 6 clients like that.

James Hahn II: I love that because it speaks to a sales tactic I learned in my time at Drillinginfo, at least I learned the name of it. I think i’ve been doing it for much longer. But, it’s what we call a pattern interrupt.

When you come up to an expo booth and you’re talking to the decision-maker, their eyes naturally glaze over, like, “Oh, here’s another dude to pitch me”. That was my experience at my first NAPE because I was just learning. It was a whole different experience going back and having a conversation starter, which was my podcast. Instead of going up to them and talking to them about my services. And it goes against my whole philosophy to go up to someone and think that I can move the needle in 32 seconds.

So, talking to them about the podcast or producing content opens a that conversation. But also, it’s that pattern interrupt where you’re not really expecting it. Some people know that my business card is a stainless steel beer bottle opener, and it it doesn’t way of a small amount. It’s quite heavy, actually. And when I go up to a tradeshow booth with one of my cards, even if even if the person is far away from the booth, I will still move them over back towards that stand-up desk so I can slap that thing down and get the (THUD). And now they’re listening.

That’s what I what I what I really take away from this this lesson is not only about how to be memorable, but also how to how to interrupt that pattern they’re going into just saying, “Okay, here’s another salesperson” and being able to push through that and start a conversation. Because until you start a conversation, you’re never going to sell anything. Am I right?

Renee Wesbrooks: You’re absolutely right. That’s the whole key. When you’re at a tradeshow trying to engage many people who are attending that show in conversation you can talk about what you do. We do so many different things if you just walked by our booth and looked you might think, “I don’t need to stop at their booth.” But if we can get you to stop and talk to us, then we are more effective and we get more return from the tradeshow that we exhibit at.

Another thing that we do is that we have a some very fun deca that have funny sayings on them. One of them says, “Notice: You Can’t Fix Stupid”. We hand those out at the tradeshow. If you are standing at the edge of your booth and somebody’s walking by and you hand them that, it’s a good icebreaker. The stop and talk to you when normally they may have just walked right past you. But if we can get them to stop and look at the sticker, talk about signs, let them know that we do that. Then we can also engage them in talk about other items. Other things that we do, like embroidery, and screen printing, and promotional items that we do.

Is kind of sets us apart at a show. We also play music in her booth, so we make our booth fun. We try to make the whole experience something that people will remember. And when we do our follow-up email after a tradeshow, we always start out with that, “Notice: You Can’t Fix Stupid” tagline in our emails because that’s what people remember about us.

James Hahn II: Is that actually the subject you put in, or where’s that messaging at?

Renee Wesbrooks: I put it in the subject of the emails that I send out. it’s really funny, I always get replies to emails after a show. They were respondents say, “Yeah, I did remember your booth” or “that was hilarious” or “yeah I remember can you send me more information?” So, it’s affective.

James Hahn II: Absolutely. It reminds me of one of my little tweetables or ISMS that I live by these days. Because I always have to tell my clients to be more human. It’s hard for us oilfield folks. In person, we can totally let the hair down even if were bald, and totally let loose. But the whole business posturing thing is a little bit … Sometimes we take ourselves it much too seriously. At one point I said “I don’t want to be more human, I want to be as absurd as humanly possible.” Because that’s memorable, and that’s what I hear you saying with that subject. I’m going to have to do something like that myself.

Renee Wesbrooks: Well, it sure makes them read your email.

James Hahn II: That’s a great point. Also, I was thinking about that point about music. I always have my backpack with me. I upgraded at at at Winter NAPE in February 2014, for people that are listening to this decade from now.

I had my my iPhone in my change pocket in my jeans. Which was a strategic move as well. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt at Winter NAPE where it’s just 25,000 middle-age men in suits. Middle aged white men in suits, I should say. So, I had my iPhone in there and I play Willy and Waylon and all kinds of stuff like that. Johnny Cash and all the good stuff. People look at me and say, “Is that … Do I hear Willy Nelson?” And I reply, “Yeah man, right here!” Then they’re like, “Oh man, you’re partying!” And next thing you know you’re having a conversation. So, I love that.

I also wanted to move over because you were telling me before about the fact that you’re not just a warehouse. You build the things in-house. Tell me a little bit about your manufacturing process and what goes into that because that’s really fascinating.

Renee Wesbrooks: Our home office is based out of Midland. That’s where we make all of our signs. We engrave our well signs out there. We screen print our signs, and we weld the frames. We also prints all over details and banners and lockout tags. We also imprint our wind socks that we sow. Everything we do is done out in Midland, which really makes our price is competitive because you are buying directly from the people who are making the product.

(Complete compliance signs transcript coming ASAP … The BIG NEWS got in the way!)

The post #017: Good Times & Compliance Signs in the Permian Basin & Eagle Ford Shale appeared first on Tribe Rocket Inc..