Oilfield Sales Tactics: No Pain, No Sale – No Pain, No Leads

The Oil & Gas Digital Marketing Podcast

Reading Time: 5 minutes

No pain, no gain! Am I headed back to health coaching, or are am I gonna learn you some oilfield sales tactics?

When prospects reach out, they don’t tell you the whole story. Let’s look at the oilfield sales tactics you need to uncover their real problems, convert more leads, and close more sales.

Oilfield Sales Tactics Transcription

Let’s talk about oilfield sales tactics and what you can do to incorporate them into your marketing approach to convert more leads and close more sales.

No Pain, No Sale

Anyone who has gotten to know me over the past four years and our approach here at Tribe Rocket knows we are very big fans of Sandler selling and the Sandler Sales approach.

Sandler Rules! No pain, no sale!

What Sandler means by no pain, no sale is that if you don’t discover or uncover the real problem, the personal problem that your prospects are dealing with, you are not going to close a sale.

Even if you’re not in sales, you already understand this intuitively. Because you have more than likely sat down with amateur sellers who listen to you for about 30 seconds and then immediately start selling you. They’re not concerned with solving a problem so much as selling you something and getting you to sign on the line that is dotted.

As important as it is to get your customers to sign on the line that is dotted, you will not get there unless you get to the level of how it personally affects them.

And I keep pointing back here so let’s just walk through the three levels of pain real quick.

The Continuum of Pain

The three levels of pain, or as Mark Lacour would say, problem. I like the way Mark focuses on problem vs. pain because problem makes it a bit more concrete. Pain is a bit, I don’t know, esoteric.

But you have the surface, the business, and the personal.

The surface is very easy to understand because that is what people tell you when they call to look for services.

Back when I worked at Quicken loans they started by asking, “What is the interest rate? I need to know the interest rate.” Thankfully, Quicken taught us how to pivot around that question and dig into the real problem.

But we’re not selling mortgages in the oil field, so let’s take an oilfield sales tactics example from a seismic services company.

Earthshattering Oilfield Sales Tactics

Let’s say you sell seismic services out in the Permian Basin. A geologist gives you call and says, “I need to understand the subsurface rock we are drilling in this acreage we just acquired. There are some raster logs and other things, but I need a much better understanding.” All right, right now we understand, we got to his surface problem.

Even an amateur seller can stumble across the business problem. Some professionals think the business pain is where you stop. But the true professional knows you need to dig deeper. You need to understand how this affects them personally.

Let’s go back to our seismic company example. This geologist called you up and you understood he needed seismic services. Now you know that he has “X” dollars and needs the work done in 30 days.

Let’s Make Things Personal

One layer deeper we get to the personal pain or the personal problem.

How is this impacting this person personally? What are the stakes for him or her? What does he or she stand to gain or lose by not taking action and solving the problem?

That is the true core of personal pain and in uncovering the personal problem.

Going back to our seismic services example. Since we already know that he has “X” budget and needs it done in 30 days, we have to dig one layer deeper. If we do so, we might discover he’s a geologist for a venture-backed company.

When they got started, they were having a pretty good success rate in drilling wells. But they’ve recently had a bit of a dry streak. And if they hit another dry hole, they’re going to start to lose the confidence of their investors.

If they lose the confidence of their investors, then that puts the whole company in jeopardy, which puts this geologist’s job in jeopardy. And, of course, it’s the geologist’s job to tell people “Hey, this is where I think we should be drilling.”

Using the right oilfield sales tactics, we can understand this is how it impacts him personally.

Don’t Fear The Pain, Bring The Pain

The funny thing about understanding personal pain is amateurs, and even some professionals, are afraid to dig to this level. But this is what your customers and prospects want from you. They want you to understand the problem so you can give a good diagnosis. So you can get an accurate diagnosis about how to solve the problem they are dealing with.

Once you understand how this impacts your prospect personally, you have a very good understanding of why they need to solve the problem. And the why is what we’re after. Why are they struggling with this problem?

Because they don’t always realize just presenting the surface problem is not going to solve the whole problem. Often times, prospects come to us with symptoms. It’s up to us to uncover the real problem and give a cure.

What Do Oilfield Sales Tactics Have To Do With Marketing?

So what is all this pain talk and what do oilfield sales tactics have to do with your marketing?

In the same way customers appreciate you digging into the problem and trying to give a real solution, a real cure to what ails them in a one-to-one sales conversation, that’s what they’re looking for when talking about your products and services.

So when you look at your website, when you look at your social media, when you look at Twitter, LinkedIn, emails that you send, are you communicating with your prospects at the surface level? Are you taking it a bit deeper down to business? Or are you really digging into the personal impacts they are dealing with and trying to solve their problems?

It’s not possible to translate every individual personal problem into your messaging across the board. However, it is possible to interview several customers and then start to correlate those personal problems once you start to see trends. So you can put your business in that language, put your sales copy and that language, and put your blog posts in that language.

Any time you interact with customers and prospects, if you get to know them better then you’ll be able to message to them better. This way, you’ll be able to convert them to leads and close more sales.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Bring Me Your Pain

So I hope this was helpful. If you’re listening via the podcast feed you can go to https://triberocket.com/ogm9 to get the transcript and all supporting links. Because you might need some supporting links to explain this whole Sandler Selling thing.

If you have any follow-up questions on Sandler Sales, anything covered in this video, or anything we haven’t gotten to yet, leave a comment below with your question. Or email me at [e-mail].

And if you liked the video, you can subscribe on YouTube or go to our site and subscribe to get them sent to you via email every single day.

But, even if you don’t want anything to do with me ever again after you watch this, whatever you’re doing out there in the oilfield, I hope you go out there and consistently apply the basic fundamentals.

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