PetroSkills: Client Story

From Fragmented to Focused: PetroSkills’ Marketing Transformation

PetroSkills at a Glance: 

• Company size: 217 employees
• Industry: Professional Services / Consulting, Education, Energy / Environmental / Sustainability
• Business model: Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, e-commerce, SaaS / Subscription
• Headquarters: Tulsa, Oklahoma
• Authentic Growth Drivers: 
  • Sharpen Market Focus and Value Proposition / Brand Messaging
  • Expand Brand Awareness and Create Demand
  • Increase Engagement and Generate Qualified Leads

The Problem

The Competency Alliance (TCA) is the umbrella for a portfolio of workforce development and consulting brands in the energy sector, most notably PetroSkills, which provides learning and development training, as well as consulting, software, and community services to the Energy sector and beyond.. Over time, the brand ecosystem had become increasingly disconnected. Each business line operated semi-independently—with separate websites, fragmented marketing efforts, and lacking a unified customer experience.

PetroSkills sought the help of a fractional CMO to streamline and unify their brands, revamp their customer experience, reimagine how marketing drives the e-commerce (D2C) and business development sales channels (B2B), all to deliver profitable business growth. 

The Solution

Authentic’s fractional CMO started by gathering data and identifying the highest-impact opportunities, then building a targeted, strategic marketing roadmap. This helped PetroSkills to: 

• Realize a more valuable internal and external House of Brands: Through an input driven process involving customers, internal and external data and stakeholder workshopping unified:
  • Clear brand definitions, inclusive of differentiators, value propositions, and visual brand elements
  • Realize clear Customer personas, based on actual customers and customer input
  • Illustrating the Brand Hierarchy and the relationships between them
  • Internal cultural shift impacting which brands were supported, what they meant and how they should be communicated

• Enhanced customer experience: Bringing a renewed and consistent brand to all marketing and product materials, while creating connections between brands and products to highlight customer value and align to customer needs. A significant part of this was a website revamp that brought in the new brand elements, improved navigation and conversion rate, and provided increased traffic through SEO improvements.

• Delivering growth through e-commerce and business development: Detailed improvements to the website included internal linking that increased product page views, revamped checkout flows to improve conversion rate, and optimized content for search enabling a greater share of organic search traffic. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager were reconfigured to capture the right metrics, attribution and dashboards, giving the team confidence in the data, building essential skills, and providing metrics on the efficacy of our website and marketing.

Complementing e-commerce growth was developing a system for effective lead generation and lead management to fuel B2B business development. We developed a lead capture process for our marketing channels, a lead scoring model to assess the quality and urgency, qualifying (MQL/SQL), and efficiently routing leads to the appropriate sales team members for follow up. To drive our analytics and measurement we implemented attribution enabling visibility throughout the sales funnel, establishing ROI and effective analytics.  

Finally, new and improved marketing channel initiatives were rolled out including a strategic events plan, a webinar calendar, revamping a technically oriented blog to illustrate thought leadership, initiating paid search campaigns, and more effective use of email.

The Results

The impact of Authentic’s CMO at PetroSkills has been significant: 

• E-commerce revenue is up significantly, +59% YoY
• Organic search has overtaken direct as the top website traffic channel, and is nearly tied with direct in revenue contribution. 
• Generating ~400 sales qualified leads to the business development team, after only 4 months of implementing the new lead gen and management process
• The marketing-to-sales handoff is now trackable, with a clear process for lead routing, lead qualification (marketing and sales qualified), and connecting leads to the offline sales funnel for attribution and analytics.