Reading Time: 7 minutesNAPE Summit is the premier oilfield expo for anyone looking to close upstream oil and gas deals, and NAPE Summit 2017 is upon us. 10,000 attendees, 700 exhibitors, and 400 prospects are set to descend upon the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas for a week of straight-up dealmaking.
That’s right, folks. It’s NAPE week! Get excited!!
But more than getting excited, you need to get prepared. As Yogi Berra states above, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” If you invested money in attending or exhibiting at NAPE, I’m guessing you want to end up holding freshly-inked agreements and work orders. That won’t happen without a proper plan.
You could thumb your way through the Exhibitors book, take notes in your FranklinCovey Planner, and add everything you need to attend to your paper calendar. But that’s so 1987! Why put in all that work when the good folks at NAPE have done the yeoman’s work and made you an easy-to-use iPhone app?
The NAPE Expo iPhone app is one of the most underutilized tools the conference organizers provide. You can use it to save time, map out your plan of attack, and close deals.
Let’s take a tour through the app and put together a workflow for your sales team to crush it at NAPE Summit 2017.
The Basics
Once you open the app, you are greeted with a call-to-action for anyone who still needs to register. Beneath that, we see a rotating carousel of sponsor logos, “Next Event”, and “View Schedule.”
“Next Event” displays the next event on the NAPE calendar along with the time.
Beneath that, we find “Home”, “Schedule”, “Map”, “Exhibitors”, and “Prospects”.
“Schedule” contains an interactive calendar with the full NAPE events schedule. “Map” provides an interactive map of exhibitors on the main oilfield expo floor. “Exhibitors” gives you the full list of all 700 exhibitors. “Prospects” offers a complete list of acreage for sale this week.
Let’s take these one at a time.
Schedule
Tap the purple time button with the time on the “Home” screen — in this case, 7:00AM — to view details about the event, including location and more. Tap the “Notes” field to add notes you would like to remember about the event.
Before navigating away to automatically save your notes, tap “Add to Calendar”.
This opens your iPhone Calendar. Tap “Add” to add the Event to your calendar.
After you add an event, tap “Back” to view the interactive calendar of NAPE events.
Swipe up and down, left and right through each day’s events and tap each you would like to attend. Add each to your calendar with the appropriate notes.
Now that you know exactly where you need to be throughout the week, let’s start mapping out our sales strategy. Tap “Map” to view the interactive map of the oilfield expo floor.
Mapping Your NAPE Sales Strategy
After tapping “Map” you see a collection of booths and corresponding numbers.
Each booth is color coded according to the exhibitor’s business type. Tap “Legend” to see what each color represents.
Tap “X” to view the full map again. Pinch and zoom to reveal exhibitor names. Tap exhibitor booths to reveal the “Go” button.
Tap “Go” and let the fun begin.
There are a bunch of tools here to supercharge your NAPE sales process. Let’s take a look.
Tap “Add to Favorites” to add the exhibitor to your list of “Favorites” under the “Exhibitors” tab. Tap “Mark Visited” to remove exhibitors from the “Unvisited” list found in the “Exhibitors” section. More on these in a moment. Tap “Find on Map” to locate the exhibitor on the map. This seems silly since we just came from the map, but as we’ll see this is very helpful when your workflow begins at “Exhibitors”.
In the middle of the screen, we see the company’s contact information. In Drillinginfo’s case, there is not a central contact listed. However, we have the company’s main number, address, email, and website. Click “Add” to add the company’s contact information to your address book.
The app will ask your permission to access your contacts. Tap “OK” to add the contact and again when the success notification pops up.
Add notes about the prospect you need to visit at the booth.
From here, click “Back” or “Map” (depending on your workflow) at the top of your screen. Swiping around, you can find plenty of other helpful places around the oilfield expo floor. Need a charging station or a snack to tide you over until the liquor starts flowing at Happy Hour? NAPE got you!
The map is perfect for finding your way around the YUGE exhibition floor. But for my money, this isn’t the fastest or most effective way to build your list of prospects (the sales kind). To really kick it up, let’s move on to “Exhibitors”.
Oilfield Expo Overdrive: Exhibitors
Now we’re talking! Tap “Name”, “Booth”, and “Type” to sort the list of exhibitors by category. If you tend to think linearly from A to Z, start your prospecting by name. If you’re lost on the oilfield expo floor and just need a quick booth number to find your way, sort by booth number. If you need to fund a project, you’re in luck. Capital vendors come up first under “Type”, and there is no shortage of exhibitors.
If you know the name of the company you need to visit and don’t want to waste time swiping, enter it into the Search field at the top to quickly find them.
One more point on the contacts here. More often than not, when companies provide a contact person they are not the person you are looking for … unless you’re me 😉
A quick search on LinkedIn shows us Abby Peterson is Head of Brand & Marketing Communications for Statoil. Perfect prospect for me. If you’re selling oilfield equipment, not so much. Be sure to do your research ahead of time so you can know who to ask for when you arrive at the booth.
Back to the top of the screen, swipe right to reveal the Filters. Here we see the companies we added to “Favorites”, a full listed of our “Unvisited” booths, and – perhaps the most helpful – “Has Notes”.
With “Has Notes” you get to reap the fruits of your labor. Once you find your target exhibitors, locate them on the map, and add the appropriate notes you now have everything in one place. You can move quickly through the show floor asking for the right person at each booth, and then add more notes after your meeting.
Prospects – The Drilling Kind
If you’re new to oil and gas, you might be doing your best Allen Iverson, “We talking about Prospects?!”
In the oilfield, prospects are twofold; the kind you want to sell oil and gas services to, and the kind you want to drill. Since this is the North American *Prospects* Expo, NAPE is clearly on point here.
Just like the “Exhibitors” tab, tap “Basin”, “Exhibitor”, and “State” to sort the list accordingly.
Once you find drilling prospects that look interesting, tap to reveal details. Some are loaded with information, while others simply list the location and acreage.
If you’re at NAPE to pickup drilling prospects or acquire acreage, the win here is obvious. If you are here to sell services this information might seem insignificant. But you wouldn’t think that. You’re a kickass seller. You know prospects (the selling kind) love when they come across a true sales professional who has done their research.
Leverage the information listed here to quickly connect with your sales prospects. Demonstrate you’re not just another guy trying to make a sale, but a professional who understands their business. If you work a particular sales territory, use this tab to find everyone doing business in your area.
Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail
The energy at NAPE is infectious and unique. It’s the only oilfield expo filled with dealmakers.
Download the NAPE iPhone app, map your sales strategy, take good notes, and get to know your way around the oilfield expo floor. The faster you do, the quicker you can walk away with those signed agreements and work orders.
Sell Well!
Call to Action
Can you tell how long it took to write this article? Throw your guess in the comments below. I might give you a free Sales-Driven Marketing Assessment if you’re close.
