By Amanda Leon, founder of OilMoney.io. Houston-raised, came up in the Houston marketing team of Vallourec, and has run Unrth, a brand and growth studio for oil and gas and industrial companies, since 2017, with her boots on client locations in Midland and Odessa. Last reviewed October 30, 2026.
A lot of people tell oilfield salespeople how to sell. We wanted to know what the biggest of those voices actually said this year, and which of their numbers hold up. So we read a year of LinkedIn posts from ten of them, 1,171 posts and reposts between October 30, 2025 and October 30, 2026, plus 20 full episode transcripts of the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast and a targeted pass through the same people on X. Here's what they agree on, where their best data points, and the numbers we heard but couldn't trace to a source.
Who We Read
These are the voices our searches surfaced most often around selling into oil and gas, with their LinkedIn followers as of October 30, 2026:
Pat Hinds (40,988), who posts operator drilling and permit data for service company sales teams, drawn from OilGasLeads.
Matthew Bertram (28,799), president of ModalPoint, now part of EWR Digital, and co-host of the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast.
Collin McLelland (28,632), co-founder of Digital Wildcatters and CEO of Collide, which builds AI tools for oil and gas companies.
Mark LaCour (18,217), founder of the Oil and Gas Global Network and the podcast's other co-host. LaCour and Bertram co-wrote a book on selling and marketing to the industry.
Keith Stelter (14,477), a Permian sales leader who runs The Stelter Initiative, a volunteer cleanup effort in West Texas.
Chuck Yates (10,840), a longtime oil and gas private equity investor turned podcaster and software seller at Collide.
Nicole Hiracheta (2,741), VP of business development at K-Ray Energy Services in Midland.
Daniel Purvis (1,299), VP of technical sales at C3 Oilfield Services.
Jessie Mena (1,275), an oil and gas specialist in Dallas-Fort Worth with field operations and business development experience.
Tanhee Galindo, who co-founded GeoKimika, a Midland oilfield testing lab, and stepped away from the industry in October 2026 after almost 19 years.
How We Read Them
We loaded each person's LinkedIn activity feed for the year, pulled every post about selling, buying, budgets, or getting known, and read the strongest of them by hand. LinkedIn stopped serving older posts for three of the ten: one feed reaches back only to August 2026 and two to December 2025. The rest cover the full year.
Twenty transcripts from the Energy Growth Playbook site, which publishes the podcast's episodes with permission to cite them with credit, plus its guide pages.
On X, three grouped searches of the same people's accounts for sales terms, with a light hand, since X limits searching.
We kept these voices apart from our count of 98 rank-and-file posts. A large account can say something a thousand times without making it true for most reps.
Every number below is credited to the person who said it. Where they gave no source, we say so.
Most of the Drilling Sits With a Few Operators
Pat Hinds had the hardest numbers of anyone we read. A September 9, 2026 post from Hinds says that in Texas, 68 operators make up 9.4% of more than 700 accounts but control 82.9% of active rigs and 86.2% of the wells drilled in 2026. Hinds showed the same shape elsewhere: in the Rockies, 21 operators that drill every month control 75.0% of active rigs, and in western Canada, 19.4% of operators run 85.2% of active rigs. In October, Hinds counted 636 US operators that had drilled a well in 2026.
Hinds splits the market in two. One side is the active drillers. The other is what Hinds calls Maintenance Plus: mature-field operators who need artificial lift, chemicals, workovers, and repairs rather than new wells. If your whole pipeline sits in the first group, a handful of budget decisions can empty it.
The Engineer Picks, Someone Else Signs
Mark LaCour and Matthew Bertram's show puts nine out of ten engineered equipment decisions with the engineer, and then adds the catch: the engineer who loves your product usually can't sign for it, and the person who can has never heard of you. Chuck Yates, selling AI to operators this year, described the other side of that room. The CEO lights up at the pitch, he wrote, while "the engineer in the third row" quietly decides the tool is a threat, and no project survives that row. When Pat Hinds reviewed 2,500 operator contacts in September, most of them sat in supply chain and procurement.
My mom has worked in the oil and gas industry for more than 30 years, in procurement. A lot of what she taught me is still relevant today, starting with treating everyone with respect. In a buying committee, the person who signs often isn't the person you've been talking to.
Budgets Run on a Calendar
The Energy Growth Playbook built a budget calendar from its own episodes, where the word budget comes up 191 times across 49 shows. The short version: operators set next year's money in the fall, a request that misses October waits twelve months, and approved money often reaches the account in February rather than January. From March to September the year is spoken for, so you're asking to change a budget, not waiting for a new one. Their workaround when a buyer wants something now and has no capital line: lease it, so it lands in the operating budget.
On length, the hosts treat 24 months as a normal enterprise cycle in oil and gas, and their answers page gives a range of 6 to 18 months or more. Their argument for content is that answering a buying committee's technical questions before an RFP goes out can cut a 24-month cycle to 18 or 12.
Buyers Have Been Burned Before
The most honest post we read on this came from Chuck Yates in June. After two decades as an oil and gas private equity investor, Yates started selling software to operators, and he wrote that the skepticism he gets is worse than anything he expected. People he had known for decades, including companies he once invested in, asked him straight out whether he planned to run the usual vendor games on them. His team's answer was a written customer bill of rights with eight commitments. The same post on X drew 391 likes, against 88 reactions on LinkedIn.
Collin McLelland told a matching story in July: a large operator had already tried two vendors for the same job and watched both fail, and McLelland's team won the contract by building the product first to prove it worked. Tanhee Galindo, who co-founded the Midland testing lab GeoKimika, put the price side of it plainly. A December post named the race to the bottom on price as a bigger threat to oilfield testing than any competitor, and a January post set the goal as being the most trusted option in the room rather than the cheapest.
Being Known Still Moves the Work
The best field evidence came from the smaller accounts. In a July post, Keith Stelter described being recognized at dinner by a stranger who knew the posts from LinkedIn, and made the point that people watch your posts even when they never like or comment. A June post traced a Saturday sale to the cleanups: a midstream construction manager needed an odd safety item fast, every supply house was closed, and the person who had it was someone Stelter had met picking up trash. Stelter's rule, from a June post: "The time to build your network up is when you are comfortable," not after a layoff or a move out on your own.
Nicole Hiracheta of K-Ray Energy Services posts from the road almost daily, rain or shine. A September post on professionalism in oilfield sales drew more reactions than anything else in that feed all year, and it carried a line worth keeping: "Know your worth. Know your product." Galindo's rule fits here too: "If you want the work, answer the call or text." And Mark LaCour, twelve years into podcasting in the industry, passed along a lesson from a peer in May: repeated visibility does more than one viral post or a big campaign budget.
Matthew Bertram added a warning about where buyers now look. Bertram's team asked five AI engines the same questions 12,778 times over 164 days, and ChatGPT returned the same set of cited sources twice for an identical question 0.06% of the time. One snapshot of what AI says about your company tells you very little. Showing up again and again in the places it reads is what holds.
Numbers We Heard but Could Not Verify
Some figures came up in podcast conversation without a source. They may be right. We aren't using them until we find where they came from:
That 70% to 75% of a buyer's research now happens before talking to a salesperson. The host gave it from memory on air and said the exact figure might differ (July 29, 2026).
That more than 80% of buyers say salespeople don't listen (a guest, December 17, 2025).
That about 4% of LinkedIn users produce all the content. The guest said the figure might be dated (December 24, 2025).
That a professional headshot makes a LinkedIn profile 14 times more likely to be viewed and 36 times more likely to be messaged (a guest, March 11, 2026).
That a good sales process lifts deal flow 15% to 20% (a guest, December 31, 2025).
What Nobody in the Top Ten Is Teaching
Read side by side, the biggest voices sell something specific: operator data, AI software, marketing services, or a media network. All of them are useful. None of them built a following by teaching the rep in the truck how to become the name an engineer already knows before the call-out. The closest is Keith Stelter, a working seller. The other field-level proof in this read came from Nicole Hiracheta and Tanhee Galindo, whose followings are a fraction of the big six. That's the gap OilMoney was started to fill.
What It Means for Your Week
Know where the rigs are. If a few operators run most of the work in your basin, map them by name. Permian Basin operators: map your territory shows how.
Get known by the signer, too. Engineers pick and procurement signs. Selling to a whole buying committee covers who else is in the room.
Ask before October. Check when operators set next year's budgets before you plan your fourth quarter.
Expect the skepticism. If buyers stick with names they know, start with how to get chosen anyway, and see how AI is changing the way buyers find vendors.
Be the name before the need. That's the whole idea behind The Warm Walk-In™.
Follow Along
We'll keep reading these voices and add what changes. Want the short version in your inbox? The Tailgate is one letter a month from the patch. Sign up at the bottom of any page. If you'd rather see what a buyer sees when he looks you up, get your Bison Walk-Around.
Sources and As-Of Dates
Follower counts: LinkedIn people search, checked October 30, 2026.
Pat Hinds, LinkedIn posts of August 26, September 9, September 14, and October 13, 2026.
Energy Growth Playbook, Oil and Gas Industry Basics, Budget Calendar, and Answers, read October 30, 2026.
Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast transcripts: Justifying Your Marketing Budget to the CFO (August 19, 2026), Mastering Buyer Champions (July 29, 2026), Transforming Headshots in a Virtual World (March 11, 2026), CRMs: Deal Engines, Not Data Graveyards (December 31, 2025), From Committee to Close (December 24, 2025), and From CRM Chaos to Closed Deals (December 17, 2025).
Chuck Yates, LinkedIn posts of June 1 and August 4, 2026, and his June 1, 2026 post on X (likes counted October 30, 2026).
Collin McLelland, LinkedIn post of July 9, 2026.
Keith Stelter, LinkedIn posts of June 14, June 21, and July 8, 2026.
Matthew Bertram, LinkedIn post of September 18, 2026.
Mark LaCour, LinkedIn post of May 31, 2026.
Nicole Hiracheta, LinkedIn post of September 9, 2026.
Tanhee Galindo, LinkedIn posts of December 8, 2025, and January 6 and May 18, 2026.
Daniel Purvis and Jessie Mena, LinkedIn activity feeds read October 30, 2026.
Our coding sheet, with every item we pulled, its date, and its source, is available on request.
The Warm Walk-In™ is an original method created by Amanda Leon and owned by The Valours Creative Innovation LLC.
