Sarge Summers, Sarge’s Industry Solutions, discusses the change in sales and communication methods.
He also talks about the sales cycle and how that has reinvented itself with social media and texting.
Interview was conducted on April 19, 2019. Sarge passed on Tuesday, February 8, 2022.
Obituary
The family of Marvin “Sarge” Summers will celebrate his life of 69 years at 1:00 PM on Tuesday, February 15, 2022, at the Trinity Church. His family will host a time of fellowship and remembrance from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM, Monday, February 14, 2022, at Lake Ridge Chapel and Memorial Designers. He passed on Tuesday, February 8, 2022. We invite you to visit www.memorialdesigners.net to view the live-streamed service, sign his virtual guestbook, and download his memorial keepsake folder to your device for printing. We also ask that you consider viewing his Life Tribute, a video of photographs set to his favorite music.
On December 29, 1952, Marvin Leon was born to Edgar and Cleo Summers in Wewoka, OK. He met Sandy in Hobbs, New Mexico, and married her on October 18, 1971. They were blessed with 49 years of marriage and had 3 children, 8 grandchildren, and 6 great-grandchildren. He was a blessed man who was lucky enough to find love again, after Sandy’s passing, he married Debbie Summers.
Sarge was bigger than life and never met a stranger! He spent his life in ministry to family, friends, and to his country. A retired Army NCO, he spent 21 years serving in the United States Army. After retirement, he spent 30+ years building relationships in the oil and gas business and founded Oilfield Connections International (OCI), an organization that has quickly grown into the single largest networking organization in the oil and gas business! His passion was for people and through his 40+ years of ministry in the youth boy’s organization Royal Rangers, he touched the lives of thousands of boys and men in a positive way by living the ‘Golden Rule’, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!”
In his later years, he developed a passion for politics and was running for Texas Railroad Commission. Most important to him was his love for God and family! He was a loving husband to his late wife Sandy Summers and his new bride Debbie Summers. One thing he always wanted you to remember is to “Be Somebody”.
Survivors include his wife, Debbie Summers; children, Misty (Tim) Eidson, Jason (Sarah) Summers, Jeremy (Lisette) Summers; grandchildren, Chelsey Nicole (Maurice) Lawles, Jimmy (Kristina) Sells, Jeremy (Alana) Summers, Jordin Summers, Nick Thompson, Jadyn (Cody) Walker, Taylor (Garrett) Miertschin, Madison Summers, Jason Summers; great-grandchildren, Kaiden Sells, Jaylin Sells, Matthew Summers, Sutton Summers, Rylee Jordin, Brynlee Miertschin; and his beloved pet, Houston; siblings, Michael Summers, Sonny Summers, Larry Summers, Gary Summers, Danny Summers; Margaret Hoffman, Barbara Bunke, Jolene Summers, Sandra Summers, Marilyn Roesmisch, and Kelley Summers.
He was preceded in death by father, Edgar Summers; mother, Cleo Summers; sister, Sharon Summers; wife, Sandy Summers.
Memorials
The family of Marvin Summers has designated the South Texas Royal Rangers for memorial contributions donated in his memory.
Previous article:
The City of Midland police say 69-year-old Marvin Leon “Sarge” Summers of Lubbock died of injuries suffered when his Cadillac Escalade struck the back of a tractor-trailer cargo tank in the 7200 block of State Highway 349 around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday.
According to the Midland Police Department, the truck was in the outside lane of the highway making a right turn onto a private drive. Officers determined the SUV did not slow down as the truck was turning and struck the trailer from behind.
To read the article with Tributes from The Crude Life, click here
Below is the raw, unedited transcript from our artificial intelligence translator.
Sarge Summers
This is Sarge Summers with Sarge's industry Solutions.
Jason Spiess
Perfect, perfect. And it's called Sarge's Industry Solutions is the name of your company.
Sarge Summers
That's right.
Jason Spiess
And what is that company sergeant industry Solutions?
Sarge Summers
Well, it started out as a consulting business but it's morphed over into more of a company where we represent different customers products and or services.
Jason Spiess
Okay, I see. Are you kind of like a salesman then as kind of a sales marketing, a connector, that sort of thing, Open doors, you close them to, you know, everybody, everybody loves a closer ... what now, what kind of sales did you start at five years old?
Sarge Summers
You know, I started selling newspapers on the street uh, in a small town in Oklahoma, I was one of 16 members of our family and so we all started working at a very early age. In my case I was five years old.
Jason Spiess
Yeah, I can relate. I was 10, I started a newspaper, wrote myself obviously did some odd jobs before then but in terms of consistent pay and I still attribute that to a lot to today because what that taught me at a young age was distribution that the newspaper industry really had a heck of a distribution system. They were going door to door, just like the mail men were And yeah and so what I did was I think I was 12, I started handing out flyers that I would cut
lawns while I deliver the newspaper and look at that turned in multiple revenue streams by the time I was 12 years old. Now if I could only learn what I knew then what's going on.
Sarge Summers
So yeah,
Jason Spiess
let's talk about that a little bit actually. That's one of the reasons why I brought you on the program today is to talk about the dynamics and the changing everything that's happened in sales. Especially I read an article the other day where the number one preferred way for people to communicate now is text or email before they even and phone was like 100 to call somebody on the phone was like listed after, you know, um singing it in song.
So I mean it was, it was just almost people try not to talk or go face to face anymore and I was wondering if this was a that much of a growing trend in the sales world to, or if that's like just a case of millennials today or what's going on. Um So what are you experiencing in in your world in terms of how people are communicating our people picking up the phone and talking or do they like the text and email first.
Sarge Summers
Either that or interested messaging. Um and you know at one time that was considered taboo, there was no way in the world that you would send a text or a customer or a perspective customer, but that has definitely changed over time. And, and I know a lot of texting, you know, and I'm also if you will and I'm 66 years old but have been in the industry now for 27 years after a full military career of 21 years in the army. But yeah, texting is the way to go. I think
Jason Spiess
so that's one of the things I've noticed is the evolution of just the whole sales call if you will from the old days of, you know, door to door sales. And then of course it went to phone sales and then now it seems like, so is is there texting, what one of those robocalls is their robot texts going on? I suppose there probably is, isn't there? Um in
Sarge Summers
terms of oh,
Jason Spiess
is there? Really? I was being ridiculous, but
Sarge Summers
yeah, no, we're starting to, we're starting to see some of that as well unfortunately. And one of the things that you didn't mention was the cold calls and uh that doesn't, that doesn't work real well these days, it used to used to be fine and I still do it on occasion, but on a very rare occasion, you
Jason Spiess
know, that is one thing I think a lot of people have really forgot is the art of selling and how much has changed. And nowadays it's almost, it almost seems really important to get people face to face because if you can get them face to face, there's probably a pretty good chance you can get their business these days because it's so hard to get people face to face.
Sarge Summers
Absolutely, you know, I believe that the phone uh is a tool just to get the appointment. And that's that's all I use the telephone for uh is to get the appointment and then once I get the appointment and and I have that face to face, it just seems to work so much better. Yeah,
Jason Spiess
it really does. And of course you've worked in the oil and gas industry and, and talk about an industry that's still bill wants to press the flesh and you know, and and see your eyeballs at least once a year. Huh? Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that because um you know, we talked about the general sales part of it, but um in the oil and gas industry, that whole industry has changed hydraulic fracturing, um you know, horizontal drilling has made businesses rewrite their their
business plan. And then I talked to the saltwater guy yesterday and their numbers keep coming in more projected higher than they thought. So that industry still tweaking a little bit, of course you got the frac sand that got competitive boy, these environmental guys, they're gonna kill each other by the end of the day that's turning into the Hatfield McCoy industry. So, you know what I mean?
It's like, it's like it's the whole industry is going through these ripples of changes. So I thought having a sales guy to talk a little bit about, You know, we we have to do things a little bit differently in sales now too, would would maybe help some people out. So, uh, talk to me about how you've approached the oil and gas industry specifically when it comes to sales over the last 10 years.
Sarge Summers
Okay, well, one of the thing is that one of the things that I do is I make sure that I attend all of the important, uh, you know, trade shows and, or conferences across the United States, especially those that are in oil and gas, shell play areas like west texas, the Permian basin, up in the bake in the marcellus and the Utica down in the Eagle ford shale, down in south texas.
And so I think it's important that what we do is stay in front of those clients at all times at all levels and that's, that's where a lot of salespeople or business development people really miss out is they believe that they only need to call at one level in the strata if you will, but they need to be calling at all levels, because what happens is, you've got, uh, you know, you've got influencers maybe at the very lowest level out there where they're drilling, you know, at the drill
site, where they're, where they're spreading in the well, and so those individuals influence the decision that the corporate folks make. I know there's different layers along the way, different levels of leadership if you will, but it's important that we call on all the different levels and that we use all the influence that is available to us in our sphere of influence.
Jason Spiess
How well do you use social media, that's how you and I connected was on social media. How's that working for somebody in the world of sales?
Sarge Summers
Well I think it works extremely well. When I first got into it about six years ago I had a young engineer that had graduated from the Air Force academy and gone on to the University of texas and and received his M. B. A. And he kept saying to me Sarge the way that you like to mentor young people you need to be on linkedin. And I said no no I don't. I said I looked at it as being something like at that time Myspace or facebook and I said I'm not interested in that.
Well he stayed on me and I was president of the Society of American Military Engineers for the now Nashville Tennessee post at that time. And so he finally convinced me and I got on there and I said well I'll just give it a test because what happened there was a customer, I don't guess I'm allowed to say the name of the customer but I had a customer in the oil and gas industry that I wanted to do some work for but I couldn't get past the gatekeeper and so what I did is I went ahead and got on
linkedin And I got got an appointment, went over to San Antonio had the appointment walked away with a request for quotation and it ended up getting a job for over $20 million 11,000 connections on linkedin.
Jason Spiess
I tell you I was the same way with Lincoln. I I purposely didn't go on linkedin until I want to say a little over a year ago, 2018 was the first year I was on Lincoln and the same reason I was not a big social media guy and you know, I was you know, being in the media a lot of times we, we had to just draw a line in the sand and figure out, okay, I'm not getting paid by anybody to do this.
But yet now I gotta do 50% of my day to this, this is not adding up. Right. And so we just kinda went off it, we did, you know, we, we made some changes because we went through a number of changes. In fact, we don't even do advertising anymore. That's how we made our change in our business model was we don't do advertising anymore. We, we were focused on distribution and content creation.
So yeah, and so we had to come up with something completely new and social media really helped us linkedin is what opened my eyes to that as as it did with you was, it was not like the other social media is this one actually helped your business and people wanted to be there and they wanted to use it for business reasons, not, you know, to show how their, you know, their dog's latest trick is doing, which I don't mind by the way.
But you know, people, people leave that off of linkedin. They don't seem to put those on there. But so the social media, you found to be pretty, pretty advent a cious. But the one thing that I found was that Lincoln was primarily heavy on oil and gas users versus the other social media platforms and sounds like you experienced the same.
Sarge Summers
Yes, yeah, I took took full advantage of that and I'm really amazed sometimes that the people that will respond to your linkedin request for example, uh, there was one gentleman who at one time was the president of, one of the major oil and gas companies here in the United States and I just thought, well, you know, it won't hurt to send him an invite. And I put little note with it and told him that I was a military veteran and that I would love to connect with him on linkedin.
And he came back and accepted that I was shocked. It took about a month and then, uh, and then I asked him if we could meet over breakfast. It took about another month and he came back and gave me two days, two times in two locations for a 30 minute breakfast and 2.5 hours later, uh, we walked out of there and he told me, he said, I don't normally accept invitations like this, but I just had to find out who that Sarge Summers guy was. So it, it works, it works
Jason Spiess
great. Yeah. Sarge summers, it's right in the name, alliteration, everything, of course. Everybody loves summer vacation. So it's got a good ring to it. And yeah, and we've noticed the same thing where we've, we've gotten access to a lot of Ceo, as a lot of presidents who followed our content and subscribe to our newsletters and things like that. That I don't think we would have gotten otherwise. Uh, I agree with you at the conferences, You know, after that 2012, 2013 when the,
when the kind of the rock star appeal of the shale play us a kind of went down. The executives, you had to start going to the conference is to find these guys now because they were not touring anymore. You know what I mean? They weren't, yeah, they weren't just kind of going, you mentioned, you had some business up in the box and we're at the back and were you doing business?
Sarge Summers
You know, uh, Williston primarily primarily in the Williston area. That's where we built four Above ground storage tanks and it was over $20 million 15 different companies currently. And so it was one of those companies and turned out to be a really, really great project for my client.
Jason Spiess
So what kind of, by the way, Sarge Summers Sergeant industry Solutions, uh, primarily is a connector. He's a door opener. He's a salesman, modern day, new new age salesman. Uh, what, what type of, you know, business, I guess. Do you connect? What type of clients do you serve? Just go ahead and give your, your yourself a plug for some of the things in oil and gas that you're doing.
Maybe some of the clients either you need, you're representing that may or may not mention their names up to you all that type of thing. But just kind of give people a flavor of what that sales side of things is.
Sarge Summers
Well, given the opportunity, I'd love to mention some of the names of some of my clients. I have caldwell tanks out of Louisville Kentucky and they've been in business for about 100 and 40 years and they do above ground storage tanks, A S. T. S. I call them my TVs, which is money in the bank. And so they do that, they do elevated water towers and pre stressed concrete tanks.
I have another customer out of Longview called Tri W Global and they built a sm a pressure vessel equipment for flow back out in the in the upstream and then I have four inspection companies. Each one does something different. I have a coatings and linings company and most of these companies that I represent are not in the Houston area and and Hence the need for representation here locally and with the with the relationships that I've built over the last 27 years, it's it's pretty
easy for me to get into the boardroom, get in with all of the key decision makers in order to introduce my my clients to to them and also get opportunities for projects and so that's what I do. I go out and get these requests for quotations for my clients and then they did the work and and then hopefully uh you know, hopefully they get the majority of that work and it's uh it's it's something that's a little bit knew I had the president of uh I. M. T. T.
Out of New Orleans. He called me early one morning and he said sorry you're the only guy Uh that I know that's doing what you're doing in the industry. And I corrected him just a little bit and I said no I'm the only guy doing what I'm doing the way I do it. And so I started my company a little over three years ago, I was 22 days shy of my 63rd birthday. And I figured if colonel Sanders could do it then I could do it. The difference is he had the recipe.
Jason Spiess
Yeah. Well that's about three or four years ago when I started seeing the need and the shift for specific sales companies because of a lot of times, you know, if they had access to certain people or a lot of times people just didn't have the time to do some of those tedious sales uh, skills that are needed. And so I've seen a couple of these companies like yours just pop up and then, you know, they've got a handful of clients.
But the idea is that, you know, they're basically a sales department and they're out there, they're hustling, you know, good old charlie hustle type of a thing because surprisingly a lot of engineers are more linear thinkers are not abstract thinkers. You know, especially, especially engineers. You know, we, we once had an engineering or sales company, he didn't sell a thing, but he told us the best way to, you know, um, travel with a vehicle if if you go over like 250 miles,
you should always rent it and he had it down to the penny, you know, some great, some great math, uh, delineation, but not much in the creative department, that's for sure. So
Sarge Summers
that's right. One of the things, one of the things too that I would, I would suggest as it relates to linkedin. What I do is I try to set my schedule for six weeks in advance. In other words, I'll say I'm gonna be in west texas with the Permian basin of the Delaware Basin or I'm gonna be in Dallas or Oklahoma city or the northeast or the northwest. And what I'll do is, I'll start, I'll just plug that into my calendar and then I'll start filling my appointment six weeks in advance.
So I know where I'm going to be six weeks from now. And so when I go on linkedin, I will go there in there and do a specific uh, filter search and I will find all of the clients that I have, for example, that are in the Permian Basin, which right now for me would be well over 1000 clients customers. And so I, I never heard and then if I have a cancelation, I'm able to backfill that cancelation.
And the other thing that I like to do is if it's within eight hours of my home base here in Houston or Kingwood, I like to make that drive because when I'm in the air at 37,000 ft in that airplane that was built by the lowest bidder. I'm looking down over areas where I really need to be stopping in and seeing customers. So I try to drive as much as I possibly can.
Jason Spiess
I agree with you on the driving a lot of windshield time. Of course, I love to hear that somebody who produces podcast because we've done very well with our podcast numbers in the oil patch because of those reasons, I mean, you know as well as I do, sometimes it takes 23 hours just to get to a well site, let alone let alone a meeting.
And you know, and that means there's a lot of executives as well as a lot of um you know, people who work on the well there's a lot of diverse people who are now open to podcasts and they need their hands in in my, you know, their eyes to drive. So it works out pretty nicely on that.
Sarge Summers
Absolutely, absolutely. I want to share something else with you if you, if you'll allow me, one of the things that, that I think about a lot and have for a lot of years is the sales cycle. We talk about the sales cycle and it involves everything and it's it's a, it's a never ending circle obviously and and follow up is one of the key things, I mean we talk about, you know, getting the appointment and showing up for the appointment during the power point presentation death by power point
in some cases, but everything right to the follow up and beyond. But one of the things that I like to do is I like to shorten or abbreviate things where I can and so I've come up with a formula called Phoebe to its F E B A fi ba and in the military that would stand for the forward edge of the battle area. But in the sales process it's facts, evidence, benefit and agreement and this is an easy way for a salesperson to calm their nerves if you will when they first go in to see a customer and also
keep them on track with their sales message. So you know they go in and they share the facts about the companies that they're representing. They give the evidence that can be anything, it can be brochures, it can be a website, it can be a power point presentation. Uh it can be a satisfied customer or anything like that. And then the benefits you want to point out the benefit to the potential client, you know what the benefit is to them and to their to their company.
And many of these guys receive their annual bonuses based on how much money they save their company. And so it's easy to to share, share that benefit. And then the last step and maybe the most important step is to get that person shaking their head north and south. In other words saying yes and so that's a that's a simple method that a lot of these folks can use, I do a lot of public speaking around the country and overseas.
And so I get to go in and do motivational talks for different companies and, and stuff like that. And, and I work, I work upstream midstream and downstream and I never, ever thought that would happen, but that's where I'm at today.
Jason Spiess
Anything that we missed, anything we want to reiterate, anything that, uh, you know, we want to make sure we talk about here before we get going with our other days. I guess, you know, that we're talking about when it comes to modern day sales, some of the changes that have happened and specifically, even when it comes to the oil and gas industry.
Sarge Summers
Yeah, I would just say the only, the only other thing that I'd like to mention at this point is never assume, don't assume, uh, that, that you're not going to get the opportunity to, to close a sale. And then also during the sales process when you're doing your trial closes and the customer comes up with an objection. Uh, the important thing there is not to shut down, but the important thing is to make sure that you've identified what the true objection is because a lot of times
they'll throw up a smokescreen and so you can just restate what they have given you as an objection and make sure that you've, that you've got the crosshairs properly on what the real objection is many times they just don't have the authority to buy
Jason Spiess
and sarge Summers, how can people get in touch and contact you if they want your sales services? And you're actually, it's a Sarge's Industry Solutions Services. That's right.
Sarge Summers
That's right. And they can reach me on my cell phone would probably be the best way that way they can either call or text. I love the text. My number is (832) 544 6836. And my email address is sarge at industry solutions. That's plural.com.
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The Crude Life Podcast: Sarge Summers, Sarge’s Industry Solutions