Top of Mind Awareness in Oilfield Sales: The Science of Being the Name They Call

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Written by Unrth

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.

Top of mind awareness means being the first name a buyer thinks of when the need shows up. In oilfield sales, that's the rep who gets the call when a job goes sideways. Decades of psychology research say that name gets built the slow way: by being seen again and again, before anyone needs you. Here's what the biggest oil and gas sales voices said about it this year, and what the research says back.

What the Field Voices Said

The loudest lesson in a year of reading oil and gas sales voices was also the oldest one: show up, and keep showing up. Mark LaCour, founder of the Oil and Gas Global Network, shared a lesson in May that LaCour credits to a peer: repeated visibility beats one viral post or a big campaign budget, so pick a day and post on it every week.

Keith Stelter, a Permian sales leader, told a story in July about a stranger at dinner who asked, “are you Keith from LinkedIn?” Stelter's point was that people watch your posts even when they never like or comment, so build your reach before you need it. A month earlier, Stelter put the harder half of that lesson in writing: build your network while you're comfortable, not after a layoff.

Tanhee Galindo, co-founder of GKOS in Midland-Odessa, put it in ten words: “If you want the work, answer the call or text.” The oilfield runs on last-minute requests, and when a customer has a 911, so does the vendor. Nicole Hiracheta, who runs business development for a Midland service company, keeps posting about in-person rounds in any weather, food stops, and crawfish boils for customers. And Daniel Purvis, who leads technical sales at C3 Oilfield Services, shared a customer result in May (a multi-well Colorado job, more than 15,000 barrels of propane pumped safely) that drew about ten times the reactions of Purvis's own five-part technical series on condensate banking. The series is solid teaching for production engineers. The result post simply got more people to stop scrolling, which is a useful lesson in order: lead with the result, then teach.

Why I Read This Like a Scientist

I studied cognitive science, with an emphasis in neuroscience, and diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College from 2009 to 2013. Occidental is a liberal arts college, and it taught me to borrow from other fields. If you want to solve a problem in drilling, you don't want to think only like a drilling engineer, because that problem would have been solved by now. So when the field voices say keep showing up, I want to know what the research on memory and choice says about why it works, and when it stops working.

Seeing a Name Again Makes People Like It More

In 1968, the psychologist Robert Zajonc showed people made-up words that sounded Turkish and characters that looked Chinese, some once and some as many as 25 times. The more often people had seen something, the more they liked it, even though nothing about it had changed. Psychologists call it the mere exposure effect.

Robert Bornstein pulled two decades of these experiments together in a 1989 review, and the effect held. Exposures people never consciously noticed produced some of the biggest effects. That's the scientific case for the post someone scrolls past without stopping. It still counts.

A 2017 review by Montoya and colleagues, built from 268 curves in 81 articles, found the shape of it. Liking rises with repetition, then levels off, then falls. Hold onto that part. It matters below.

The Name That Comes to Mind Gets the Call

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed in 1973 that people judge how common or likely something is by how easily examples come to mind. In a buyer's head, the rep they can picture fastest feels like the obvious call, because picturing you was easy.

Buyers also don't weigh every option. Hauser and Wernerfelt modeled why the list stays short: every vendor a buyer looks into costs time and effort, so only a few make it into serious consideration, and the ones who arrive late pay a penalty. That's the same reason so many operators stick with the vendors they know.

The study that stings is Hoyer and Brown's 1990 experiment. People who recognized a brand mostly chose it. People with no brand awareness sampled more brands and picked the higher-quality one more often. Awareness alone beat quality at the moment of choice. If you're the better rep nobody has heard of, that's the research explaining your week.

Most of Your Audience Never Hits Like

Researchers call them lurkers: people who visit an online community regularly and seldom post. A 2014 review by Sun, Rau, and Ma sorted the reasons people stay quiet, from the setting and personal preference to their relationship with the group and plain privacy. None of those reasons mean they aren't reading. That's Keith Stelter's dinner story, with a citation.

Our own client data says the same. In the 13 months from September 15, 2025 to October 19, 2026, LinkedIn counted 270,955 impressions on the posts of a Permian founder we work with, and 2,088 reactions, comments, and reposts. That's fewer than one interaction for every 100 views. The single most-seen post drew 58,666 impressions and 132 interactions. Almost everyone who saw it said nothing, and they still saw it.

On the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast, a figure came up that about 4% of LinkedIn users create all the content, with the caveat that it may be dated. We couldn't trace it to a primary source, so treat it as a rough picture, not a fact. The research on lurking agrees with its shape: most people in an online community read and rarely post.

Show the Work in the Field

Jessie Mena, who works oilfield operations and business development in the Dallas area, gave sellers some blunt advice in April: “show the product actually working in the field,” not another selfie. Purvis's numbers back that up. So does a 2014 meta-analysis by van Laer and colleagues, which pooled 132 effect sizes from 76 articles on being pulled into a story. The more a story pulls people in, the more they take on its beliefs and attitudes. A result on location is a story. A spec sheet is a list.

We saw it in our own work. With the Permian founder we work with, the technical posts were doing fine at month three and nothing more. We moved to stories, and the founder approved a full quarter in the new style, writing back, “I love the new style. It is much more engaging and informative.”

Even my own feed agrees: my most-seen post from July to September 2026 was about my grandmother, ahead of a data post on Houston's economy.

And when a customer tells the story for you, it carries further. Kumar, Petersen, and Leone measured how much a client's reference sways B2B prospects, and found the clients with the most reference value weren't the same as the clients who spent the most. Your smallest happy customer may be your best voice. Across our clients, from individual owner-operators to large companies with eight manufacturing facilities around the world, their customers tell them they're up to date on everything. Even when those customers aren't ready to buy, they tell other people, “I know someone who does that. He talks about it all the time.” More on how that works in our answer on referrals.

What Consumer Brands Taught Me

Before I came back to oil and gas, I was Head of Marketing at Wetzel's Pretzels, with more than 300 stores and more than eight outside agencies to manage. Consumer brands have known for a long time that the name people see most is the name they reach for. My job there was the same job I do for oilfield reps now: get the name into people's heads before the craving hits.

For more than seven years I've also helped criminal defense lawyers in California win clients. Nobody shops for a defense lawyer on an ordinary day. People need one on one of the worst days of their life, and they call the name they already know or the one that shows up first. That's Tanhee Galindo's 911 in a different industry.

Inside oil and gas, the closest proof I have of rhythm is GMI Group. From January 6, 2025 to April 30, 2026, we wrote GMI's LinkedIn posts, one every Monday, and the page drew 73,201 impressions and 1,420 reactions in that time. Impressions aren't sales, and I won't pretend they are. But exposure is exactly what this research measures, and a weekly rhythm is how it builds.

Where the Science Has Limits

  • Repetition wears out. The 2017 review found liking falls after a point. So keep the rhythm and change the post: a new job, a new customer, a new problem solved. The same photo every Monday is how a known name becomes wallpaper.

  • Awareness cuts both ways. Being known can win even when you aren't the best option, which is great until a buyer gets burned. In the Permian, everyone knows everyone, so mistakes are public too. Being known only helps if the work holds up.

  • Most of these studies weren't run on company men. They used students, made-up words, symbols, and grocery brands. I'm borrowing principles that have held up for decades, not claiming anyone measured your yard.

  • One feed isn't a study. The Purvis numbers and our client numbers come from a handful of feeds. They point the same way as the research, and that's all I'll claim for them. They also show reach, not sales, and every account's results reflect its own timing and work.

  • This is slow. If you need traceable revenue in 90 days, look elsewhere. This compounds.

What to Do With It This Week

  • Pick a day and keep it. Same day every week, the way LaCour describes. Rhythm builds the exposure.

  • Change what you show. A job, a fix, a customer's result. Show the product working in the field.

  • Answer the 911. Being known gets you the call. Picking up keeps it.

  • Count the rounds. A visit in the rain is exposure too, the kind Hiracheta keeps writing about.

  • Start while you're comfortable. Stelter's advice, and the research agrees: the effect builds before the need.

  • Ask a small customer to vouch for you. Reference value doesn't track spend.

  • Be the name before the need. That's the whole idea behind The Warm Walk-In™, and our guide to getting known as an oilfield sales rep walks through it, along with what to post.

Follow Along

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 they look you up, get your Bison Walk-Around.

Sources and As-Of Dates

Peer-reviewed studies (each DOI checked on Crossref, October 30, 2026):

Field voices and client data:

The Warm Walk-In™ is an original method created by Amanda Leon and owned by The Valours Creative Innovation LLC.

Unrth https://www.unrth.com
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