The Trust Factor in Technology: Why Nobody Writes You Into the Deal Until You’ve Earned the Desk

The best customer Total Stream ever landed didn't come from a trade show booth or a marketing campaign or a cold call. It came from a phone call between two operators who knew each other. One of them had been working with us for about a year. The other one called him up, asked what was different about his operation, and the first guy said, "You should talk to these guys. Here's what changed for us."

That's it. That's the whole strategy. Somebody who's seen the results picks up the phone and tells someone they trust. No pitch deck in the world carries that weight. No demo. No feature comparison. Just one operator telling another operator, "This worked for me and I think it'll work for you."

I've been in this business long enough to know that word of mouth goes a long way in the oilfield. It always has. But when Eric Fidler sat down with us on Wisdom at the Wellhead and started talking about what it actually takes to reach mid-market operators with new technology, he confirmed something I've believed since the day Bob Baldwin and I started building this company. In oil and gas, the relationship comes before the rollout. Always. If you skip that step, it doesn't matter how good your product is.

What Eric Learned Selling to the Middle Market

Eric told us he struggled with this when he had a startup. The mid-market was his target, the smaller operators who are watching their nickels and dimes and need every technology dollar to prove its worth immediately. And what he found was that there were really only two things that worked.

First, you had to figure out where they were going to try to learn what they needed, and you had to be there. Not at the big national conferences where the majors dominate the floor. At the small, local industry events where a guy running fifty wells shows up because he's trying to solve a specific problem. That's where the conversations happen that actually lead somewhere.

Second, you had to engage in what Eric called outsource marketing. Getting desk time with them. Sitting down in their office, understanding their operation, understanding what they're growing toward. Not pitching. Learning. Because the magic in that market, as he put it, is approaching people who are growing by acquisition. They're putting together deals. They're figuring out how to make the next acquisition work financially. And if you've done enough legwork with them, if you've earned enough trust through showing up and understanding what they actually need, they write you into the next deal.

That phrase stuck with me. They write you into the next deal. That means the technology isn't an afterthought. It's built into the plan from the beginning because the operator trusts the person behind it enough to make it part of the deal structure. You can't buy that. You can only earn it.

How I Learned This the Hard Way

I wish I could tell you I understood this from day one at Total Stream. I didn't. Early on, I thought if we built something good enough, the product would sell itself. Engineers are rational people. Show them better data, better integration, better decision-making tools, and they'll see the value. Right?

Wrong. Or at least, not the whole picture. The product has to be good. That's table stakes. But the thing that actually gets a mid-market operator to change how they run their business isn't a feature list. It's trust in the person sitting across from them. Do you understand my operation? Do you know what I'm dealing with? Are you going to be here when this thing breaks at two in the morning, or are you going to disappear until the next sales call?

I had to learn that the hard way. We lost deals early on that we should have won on the merits of what we'd built. And every time, when I was honest with myself about what happened, it came back to the same thing. We hadn't earned enough trust yet. We'd shown up with a great product and assumed that was enough. It wasn't. The operators who said no weren't saying the product was bad. They were saying, "I don't know you well enough to bet my operation on what you're selling me."

My dad sold cucumbers out of a garden when I was a kid. He told me, "If you don't take care of your customers, you're not gonna have the results of it." He was talking about a vegetable stand. But he was talking about everything. The sale isn't the transaction. The sale is the relationship that makes the transaction possible. And in the oilfield, where people's livelihoods and safety depend on the tools they use, that relationship has to be deep before anybody's willing to make a change.

What Actually Moves People

Eric confirmed the pattern I've seen my whole career. He said when you win one or two operators, you sponsor them to talk about you. Because what moves this industry isn't advertising or demos or conference presentations. It's one operator looking across the road at another operator and saying, "What's he doing over there? He's doing better than me. I wanna win at this game too."

That's the competitive instinct that drives the oilfield. It's not fear. It's aspiration. See, the other guy did this and you didn't, and look how much further he is than you. That's how I've always talked to operators when I'm being straight with them. I don't scare people into buying technology. I show them what somebody like them is doing with it and let them decide whether they want to keep falling behind.

That only works if the results are real. You can't manufacture word of mouth. You can't fake a reference call. Either the operator who's been using your product will pick up the phone and tell his buddy it changed his operation, or he won't. And the only way to get him to make that call is to have earned his trust by delivering what you promised and being there when things got hard.

Why We Partnered With Sensia the Way We Did

Part of what attracted us to work with Sensia was that they think about this the same way we do. When you combine Rockwell's automation depth with Schlumberger's decades of domain knowledge, you're not just offering a product. You're offering credibility. And credibility is the front door to trust.

Eric made the point that the beauty of modern cloud architecture is that it makes real technology affordable for smaller operators. The DevOps, the spinning parts, the infrastructure, all of that gets carried in a shared manner. You pay for the share you use. That removes the cost barrier. But removing the cost barrier doesn't remove the trust barrier. The operator still has to believe that what you're putting in front of them is real, that the people behind it understand their world, and that somebody is going to be there when something goes wrong.

That's what we're trying to build through these alliances. Total Stream's reach into the mid-market, Sensia's automation and domain expertise, New Tech Global's people and field consulting. The idea is that a smaller company doesn't have to have everything in-house. But the people they're trusting with their operation have to have actually earned that trust through the kind of legwork Eric described. Desk time. Local events. Real conversations about real problems. And then results that speak for themselves.

What This Means If You're Trying to Earn Trust in the Field

Show up where they're already learning. Eric said it plainly. Find where mid-market operators go to learn what they need, and be there. Not with a booth and a banner. With knowledge. With answers to the specific problem they walked in with. The operators who matter most in this market aren't browsing. They're hunting for a solution to something that's costing them money right now. Be the person who can help them, and the relationship starts.

Earn the desk before you pitch the product. Get time in their office. Understand their operation. Understand what deals they're working on, where they're growing, what's keeping them up at night. If the first time they hear from you is a product demo, you've already lost. The demo should come after they already know you understand what they're dealing with.

Let your customers do the selling. The most powerful thing that can happen for your business is an operator picking up the phone and telling another operator what changed. You can't force that. You can only create the conditions for it by delivering results that are real enough and consistent enough that somebody is willing to put their own reputation behind recommending you. That's the highest bar in this business. It's also the only marketing that actually works.

Final Thought

When I was a kid selling cucumbers, if somebody came back the next week and bought from me again, I knew I'd taken care of them. That was the whole feedback loop. Did the product hold up? Did you treat them right? Did they come back?

The oilfield runs on the same loop, just with higher stakes. An operator lets you into their operation. You deliver what you promised. You show up when it breaks. You prove that what you told them was true. And if you do all of that well enough, they pick up the phone and tell somebody else. That's the trust factor. It doesn't come from a feature set or a spec sheet. It comes from a track record of doing what you said you'd do for people who are betting their business on it.

In this industry, nobody writes you into the deal until you've earned the desk. There's no shortcut for that. And honestly, there shouldn't be.

Eric Fidler built technology businesses in over a hundred countries and learned that the relationship always comes before the rollout. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, he shares what actually works when you're trying to earn the trust of operators who've been burned before, and why desk time matters more than demo time.