QUICK PAY: THE FULL GO-TO-MARKET & LAUNCH PLAN.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.

Double Quick Pay from ~$1B to $2B in funded volume and 120 to 240 customers in Year 1 by building the marketing engine behind a product that already works. The constraint isn't economics — each account funds ~$8.3M/yr of recurring, compounding volume — it's acquisition: a 3–4 person sales team built the first $1B with zero marketing support.

The plan in five moves

• Fix the website first. At 0.36% vs. a 2–5% benchmark, lifting conversion toward 2% quadruples hand-raises on traffic already arriving — zero new spend.
• Run two motions, one brand. Digital ABM for the operators a database can reach, and an offline / partnership / referral motion for the large share it can't — both converging on the same proven sales floor as "From the Oilfield, for the Oilfield."
• Amplify the sales team, don't replace it. Feed reps warmed, scored queues and air cover so the operator has heard of Bison before the dial — and make the one unblocking hire: a demand-gen / growth manager.
• Sequence 30-60-90 — instrument, then spend. Crawl (fix + measure), Walk (amplify + hire), Run (distribute the brand, operationalize the moat). No paid dollar before pixels fire.
• Compound on credibility. The testimonial / referral flywheel, EnergyLink distribution, and a first-mover land grab on an open intent SERP no competitor is bidding.

What we need from the executive team

Max out Quick Pay: double the book from $1B to $2B in funded volume on 120 to 240 customers in Year 1 — the first leg of a doubling that, at the $4B / 500-customer vision, is still only ~1% of the market.

Bison's stated goal is explicit: "Double revenue every year. That's the only goal that matters." This plan does exactly one thing well — it builds the marketing engine behind Quick Pay, the live product, while RCA stays a secondary partner-distributed lane and JIB / Online Payments remain pre-launch and are never marketed as live. The doubling is reachable, not aspirational: the site already runs 3,613 sessions/mo (+196%) with 57% direct traffic, and a 3–4 person cold-calling / door-knocking team built Quick Pay to $1B with zero marketing support.

The constraint is acquisition, not economics

Each Quick Pay account funds ~$8.3M/yr of compounding volume — front-loaded and recurring — so the Target-CAC ceiling comfortably funds acquisition. The bottleneck is execution capacity: the outside-in assessment grades Bison's marketing maturity a D (zero paid, a 35-keyword branded-only organic footprint, broken conversion pages, no marketing roles). The single highest-ROI fix on the board is the website.

The market reality forces a two-motion architecture

The ICP is oilfield-service SMBs ($1–50M revenue, 2–200 employees, 100+ service categories) across seven basin states — TX, OK, NM, CO, ND, WY, LA. They are "very offline, very analog," they don't search for invoice funding, and they buy on word-of-mouth, social proof, and credibility. Critically, a large share of this market never appears in any B2B database — the database-reachable, NAICS-style universe is on the order of ~9K across TX/OK/NM (~15K US), while many more operators are too offline for any data provider to surface. We don’t yet know the exact split, which is why the plan runs two motions rather than betting on one number.

• Motion A — Digital ABM / demand-gen (database-reachable set): fixed conversion site, LinkedIn, ABM lists seeded from Bison's proprietary customer/underwriting dataset + NAICS 213112, intent SEO, first-mover paid search.
• Motion B — Offline / partnership / referral (off-database majority): an amplified sales team with warmed, prioritized queues, field-authentic direct mail, basin presence, EnergyLink embed, and a referral + testimonial flywheel.

Both motions converge on the same proven sales floor under one operator-credible brand — "From the Oilfield, for the Oilfield." We compete on credibility and speed, not price: up to 95%, next day. The rep or the referrer is the conversion event; marketing's job is to warm and prioritize for them.

The approach — Crawl, Walk, Run over 30-60-90

Customer outcomes already prove the engine works: operators report being up 500–600% YoY, one growing $350k → $7.5M in three years, another seeing double growth in 90 days. Those are the verbatim proof points the entire program is built to amplify.

The database-discoverable oilfield-service TAM is roughly ~9K across TX/OK/NM and ~15K nationally — the precise, qualified universe that NAICS-style targeting can actually reach.

Before any media spend, the size of the prize has to be precise. Broad industry-level filters overstate this market — they sweep in adjacent sectors (construction, trucking, utilities, environmental) that aren't oilfield-service vendors. Gating the pull to oilfield-service-specific firms produces the defensible number: ~9K discoverable across the core basin states (TX/OK/NM) and ~15K nationally.

From candidates to funded customers

The funnel below is the honest path from raw pull to a Year-1 target. Each step sheds noise — and the drop-off is the point: a broad industry pull is mostly the wrong companies.

Why the industry filter targets the wrong slice

The root cause is a taxonomy mismatch. Crustdata indexes the LinkedIn "Oil and Gas" tag, which skews to capitalized, digitally-present players. A live 25-row pull of the "pure O&G core" returned mostly operators and E&Ps (Birch Resources, Colgate, Citizen), midstream and pipeline (Navitas, Lucid, Goodnight), and VC-backed energy tech (SeekOps, Seismos) — only ~3 of 25 were the blue-collar service SMBs that are the Quick Pay ICP. The real customers — water hauling, hot-shot trucking, roustabout, frac sand, disposal, fabrication, rental — either aren't on LinkedIn or self-tag as Construction or Trucking.

The defensible build: Top-500

Rather than widen industries bluntly, we built a precise list — broad keyword-gated pull, then Claude-based relevance classification. Of 3,009 candidates, only 575 classified TRUE (19%), with a confidence median of 0.85. The keyword gate was decisive: broad terms gave 2% precision, service-specific terms gave 22%.

The sample TAM set

A classified, contact-appended account universe sits behind these numbers — a Top-500 verified ICP list (ranked, classified at confidence ≥ 0.7) drawn from a fuller pool of ~1,000 AI-classified candidates, ready to load into the CRM and ABM tooling as the digital-motion (Motion A) seed and paired with Bison’s first-party supplier dataset for the off-database reach.

Thirteen competitors across five tiers all advance "up to 95%" — so rate is not a wedge; Bison wins on fit, speed, specialization, and operator credibility.

The field around Quick Pay maps cleanly into five tiers, ordered by closeness to the buyer. The structural tension Bison exploits runs through all of them: generalist factors understand money but not oilfield risk — they penalize the customer concentration that is normal in the field — while oil & gas software platforms understand the workflow but don't put capital to work. Bison is the only player credible in all three motions for oil & gas specifically.

EnergyLink — the dual-edge crown jewel

EnergyLink (Enverus-owned, Blackstone-backed) is simultaneously Bison's single greatest asset and its single greatest structural risk. The installed base reaches 2M royalty owners moving $200B/yr in royalties — exactly where RCA is distributed, inside the tool where owners already read their royalty statements. The channel demonstrably works: the RCA page already draws 1,876 views/mo and EnergyLink runs 1,087 active LinkedIn ads — but with zero measurement, the failure mode Bison must not repeat.

The open flank: no competitor bids the high-intent terms. eCapital and Riviera run Google Display only — all image media, zero search keywords — and only oilfieldfactoring.com runs real text ads. The commercial-intent SERP for "oilfield factoring" is fully open for first-mover paid search, once measurement is instrumented.

The four defensible wedges

Durable growth is engineered into the foundation, not hacked at the channel layer — and for Bison, four of five pillars already lock tight around an analog, credibility-driven, uncapped market.

Demand Curve's Foundational Five is a test of alignment: the five pillars must reinforce each other, not merely exist. Bison reached ~$1B in Quick Pay volume across ~120 customers on a 3–4 person cold-calling and door-knocking team — a strong acquisition motion bolted on without a marketing foundation underneath it (website converting at 0.36% vs. a 2–5% B2B benchmark, organic search branded-only, content and email absent). That is the textbook pattern: product-market fit and hustle, but no engineered foundation to scale on. Bison owns its Product, Model, and Brand; it does not own its Market or its Channels. The owned pillars must be built to fit the two it cannot control.

Alignment check — where the five reinforce

The stronger the alignments, the faster the growth. For Bison, three reinforce powerfully:

• Product ↔ Market — proven PMF. Up to 95%, next-day, no concentration limits is a precise antidote to banks penalizing normal oilfield concentration. $1B / 120 customers on a tiny sales team is the proof.
• Brand ↔ Market — authenticity is conversion. An analog market that trusts no outsiders, met by an operator-to-operator, humble-champion story carried by verbatim peer testimonials — "Up 500–600% YoY," "$350k → $7.5M in 3 years," "double their growth rate within their first 90 days." Rare in the competitive set.
• Model ↔ Market — uncapped headroom. A volume/fee model against a ~50,000-company market where Bison serves ~120 (and would be ~1% at $4B) is constrained only by acquisition. Every customer compounds via expansion and referral.

Quick Pay's economics already work — the only thing standing between Bison and a doubled customer base is reaching, and earning the trust of, the next 120 operators.

Part 1 — Guardrails

Good strategy starts by shrinking the problem. Bison's stated goal is unambiguous: "Double revenue every year — that's the only goal that matters in this company." That means the Yr-1 leg this engine owns is $1B → $2B in funded volume and 120 → 240 customers — a doubling of the customer base on a cash-generating product that already has product-market fit. This is not raise-and-burn growth; it's a doubling cadence on a known entity. If Quick Pay revenue could triple tomorrow — no new product, no variability — that is the trade worth taking. The job is to add the next 120 customers, not chase pre-launch products.

How we grow is fenced by one non-negotiable trust rule — "They don't trust anyone from the outside" — and a hard discipline on authenticity: "The only thing worse than us not being from oil & gas is us acting like we know oil & gas." The constraints below are filters, not blockers:

• Audience is offline & analog. Owner-operators and finance leads at oilfield-service SMBs ($1–50M rev, 2–200 employees) don't search for invoice funding — they buy on word-of-mouth, social proof, and credibility. LinkedIn, mailers, and phone land; Facebook/IG are effectively irrelevant.
• Niche & concentrated. ~50,000 companies nationally, clustered in TX, OK, NM, CO, ND, WY, LA — and only a fraction are discoverable in any B2B database.
• Trust-sensitive & credibility-over-discount. Bison wins on being the most credible industry partner, not on being cheapest — which forbids price/rate promotions and spammy, aggressive remarketing.
• SpaceX-industrial aesthetic discipline. Pumpjacks, rigs, hardhat crews, welding, trucks — never iPads, suits, posed stock, or fintech jargon. Direction: "From the Oilfield, for the Oilfield."
• Regulatory. Never quote a fixed APR; "largest" only ever reads as largest invoice-funding company in U.S. oil & gas; never market JIB/AFE or Online Payments as live; never blur Bison Payments with Bison Technologies / getbison.com.
• Channel-dependency. EnergyLink is both a distribution asset and a dependency risk for RCA — leverage it without becoming hostage to it.
• Team maturity graded D (zero paid history, broken conversion pages, 437 LinkedIn followers, no blog) — offset by a proven 3–4 person sales team and a coherent vertical brand.

The financial physics make the case obvious. Bison advances up to 95% of an oilfield-service invoice, funded next day, and earns a take on the volume it funds — so each account is worth roughly its funded volume times that take.

Part 2 — Growth catalysts

Three compounding catalysts explain not just whether Bison grows, but how fast and how far.

Part 3 — Motions

The engine is configured as sales-led acquisition, assisted by ABM and demand gen — never replaced by them. Because only part of the ICP is database-discoverable, the acquisition motion runs as two parallel sub-motions that converge on the same proven sales floor.

PLG is excluded by design. A self-serve fintech flow is irrelevant to a buyer who is "very offline, very analog," won't trust a sign-up button from an outsider, and buys on a handshake and a referral. Trust is the gate, trust is human, and high-touch underwriting (up to 95% with no borrowing bases, covenants, or personal guarantees) rests on relationship-and-data judgment, not a swipe.

Monetization

Transactional and embedded — Bison earns its take on every invoice funded, starting on day one and recurring every cycle. Expansion is built in: as customers grow, funded volume rises and so does account revenue, without any new sale.

Retention

Structural and self-reinforcing. SMBs on 30–90 day operator terms have a recurring, structural need to fund invoices; switching cost is high once the cash-flow rhythm depends on next-day funding. Retained, fast-growing customers become the testimonials that spin the credibility flywheel — the most credible new-customer source is a thriving existing one.

Quick Pay is bought inside a small oilfield-service SMB where one or two people make the call — so we build for two: the owner who signs on trust, and the office manager who vets on friction.

A persona here is a job + pain + language cheat sheet, not a demographic sketch. Dale and Brenda feel the same core problem — 30–90 day operator terms versus payroll now, with concentration-blind banks shutting the door — but they buy for different reasons, in different words, reachable in different places. Marcus is the secondary, higher-volume lever. Sandra is a forward-looking sketch for a pre-launch lane, never sold as live.

Persona 1 — Owner-Operator Dale (Primary)

Runs a water-hauling outfit out of Midland — 14 trucks, 22 guys, started with one truck and a handshake. He IS the company: dispatches, bids, signs the checks, loses sleep over Friday payroll. Came up from the field. The economic buyer and final yes.

JTBD

"Make payroll Friday without begging a bank that doesn't get my business" — convert a 60-day invoice into cash this week, no PG on the house, no covenant he can't read.

Top pains

Concentration used against him ("the bank called me concentrated like it's my fault"); 60-day terms vs. payroll now; banks won't fund the box; growth he can't take — turning down well sites he can't float; outsider fatigue.

Triggers

Won a second operator and can't staff it; a bank just yanked his line over concentration; a buddy at the yard says "Call Bison — funded next day, no PG." Word-of-mouth, not search.

Objections

"Who are you and why should I trust outsiders with my money?" (the #1 objection); "What's the catch?"; "Factoring is for companies in trouble"; "You'll call my operator and make me look broke."

Reach

Referral first (the flywheel is the engine), phone + door-knock, direct mail. LinkedIn secondary; Facebook/IG irrelevant. He does not search "oilfield invoice factoring."

Persona 2 — Office Manager Brenda (Primary)

Runs the office for a wireline/roustabout company — bookkeeper, AR clerk, payroll runner, and the one who opens the mail. Often the owner's wife or longtime right hand. Dale signs; Brenda finds, vets, and lives with it daily. Reaching her is the faster path in.

JTBD

"Stop fronting the company's cash flow out of my own stress every month" — smooth cash flow so she stops deciding which vendor waits and stops chasing operators' AP for 60-day-old invoices.

Top pains

She's the human cash-flow buffer; chasing operator AP forever ("net 60 turns into net 75"); payroll panic on repeat; onboarding dread — the 12-page application, tax returns, three weeks of back-and-forth; protecting the boss.

Triggers

A payroll run at risk this week; a morning lost on hold with operator AP; the owner asks her to "figure out the cash" for a new contract; a peer admin recommends Bison; month-end close exposes the gap again.

Objections

"How hard is this to set up and run weekly?" (friction is her objection); "Will it complicate my QuickBooks?"; "Is this legit, or another outfit that doesn't get O&G?" — she's the gatekeeper against outsiders.

Reach

LinkedIn strongest digital channel (validated 6.7% engagement); email (net-new, high-fit, build it); peer admin circles; phone; direct mail to the office.

Persona 3 — CFO / Finance Lead Marcus (Secondary)

The first real finance hire at a $10–50M fabrication/welding/multi-basin outfit that's outgrown owner-runs-the-books. He's done a bank line; he knows what a borrowing base and a covenant package feel like — and how badly they fit O&G. Fewer accounts, far larger funded volume each — the lever for the $2B → $4B volume goal.

JTBD

Fund growth without a covenant-laden line that treats operator concentration as a red flag.

Top pains

Covenants and borrowing bases that shrink when he needs them; concentration penalized at the institutional level ("concentration is the business model"); lumpy, AFE-timed receivables; scaling AR into a function.

Triggers

A renewal with tightening covenants or shrinking base; a step-change in backlog; board pressure to fund growth without over-levering; a lender review surfacing concentration risk.

Objections

"What's the actual cost vs. my bank line?" (most price-sensitive persona — never quote a fixed rate; compete on fit, speed, no covenants); "Is it scalable at our volume?"; "Will this affect my lender relationships?"

Reach

LinkedIn ABM (title-targetable, clearly discoverable) and BOFU search/content — the one persona who does research "oilfield receivables financing," the keywords currently ceded to generalists.

Forward-looking — Operator AP Lead Sandra (pre-launch, not an active target)

Sandra runs AP and joint-interest billing for a small-to-mid operator — the side of the market that pays Dale and Brenda. Her job: pay vendors and distribute to working-interest owners without drowning in paper JIBs ("month-end JIB is a paper avalanche"). She belongs to Online Payments, which is pre-launch — used here for product/positioning planning only, never marketed as live, never built into the Quick Pay funnel.

Bison Quick Pay wins on credibility, not price — the oil & gas–native funder built where banks and generalist factors can't follow.

What the buyer chooses instead

April Dunford's rule: you're not positioned against the market you wish you were in — you're positioned against what the customer would actually do if Bison didn't exist. For the owner-operator waiting 30–90 days on operator terms while making payroll Friday, there are four real alternatives. None of them is a rate problem — advance-rate parity at "up to 95%" is near-universal. Rate is not the wedge.

What only Bison has — and rivals structurally can't copy

Target segment & market category

The focus buyer is the owner-operator, CFO, or finance lead at a $1–50M oilfield-service SMB across the U.S. energy basins (Permian, Anadarko, Williston, Gulf Coast). Critically, they are problem-aware but solution-unaware — they feel the pain acutely but are "very offline, very analog" and don't search for invoice funding. They buy on word-of-mouth and credibility, and trust people from the field, not bankers or outsiders. That's why the GTM runs two motions: digital ABM for the operators in any database, offline/referral for the off-database majority.

External tagline: From the Oilfield, for the Oilfield.

One sandbox, said in fresh clothes: get paid now, on terms that fit the field, from people who are from it — and every asset leads with Quick Pay.

The core story & the kernel

We exist to keep oilfield-service companies funded so they can make payroll and grow — while operators hold their cash for 30–90 days. The throughline never drifts to a price story; we don't win on cheapest, we win on being the most credible partner in the field. Everything compresses to one kernel: "I get paid now instead of waiting 90 days, without a bank treating me like a risk for doing normal oilfield work."

The six value props

VP1–VP5 are Quick Pay and lead every asset; VP6 (RCA) is secondary and partner-distributed. VP1 and VP3 are the sharpest, most-ownable wedges — competitors can't credibly claim "from the field + no concentration limits."

Copy hooks that earn the click

• "Still waiting 90 days to get paid for work you already did?" — pain-spotlight, VP1
• "Your bank says you're 'too concentrated.' We say that's just the oilfield." — contrarian, VP3
• "Banks call one big operator a risk. In the field, we call it Tuesday." — contrarian, VP3
• "Customers up 500–600% YoY. One went from $350k to $7.5M in 3 years." — social proof, VP5/VP1
• "No borrowing base. No covenants. No PG. Just next-day cash on your invoice." — speed/ease, VP2

Funnel message map

Every stage stays in the same sandbox, with an (A) digital-ABM variant for the database-discoverable set and a (B) offline/referral variant for the operators no database reaches. CTAs escalate with readiness — never "sign up" everywhere.

Verbatim proof — attributed as customer outcomes

Voice & compliance checklist — run on every asset

• Leads with Quick Pay — JIB/AFE and Online Payments never shown as live
• No fixed APR or rate quoted anywhere ("up to 95%, next day" is fine)
• "Largest" only as "largest invoice-funding company in U.S. oil & gas"
• Operator-to-operator, plain-spoken, concrete — never glossy, jargon-y, or bank-like
• From-the-field credibility, never posturing as oilfield insiders
• Field-authentic imagery only (rigs, pumpjacks, crews, trucks) — never iPads or suits
• Two-motion ready: digital-ABM variant + offline/referral variant
• Never blurs Bison Payments (fintech) with Bison Technologies / getbison.com (data)

This is not "which ad platform" — it's a Bullseye worked inside-out, where credibility, not ad spend, is what reaches the analog operators no database touches.

The Foundational Five verdict reduces the whole growth problem to one engineered tension: an analog, outsider-distrusting ICP versus the digital channels that scale. Every channel below is scored for this ICP specifically — not its generic potential — and graded on whether it feeds the proven 3–4 person cold-call / door-knock team that built Quick Pay to roughly $1B and ~120 customers, preserves operator credibility, and moves the Year-1 leg from $1B → $2B volume, 120 → 240 customers.

The nine candidate channels, scored

Intent and Context fit are weighted highest — they determine market-/product-channel fit, and starting on a poor-context channel invites the false-negative trap (declaring a channel dead when it was doomed by mismatch). That rule is decisive here: there is no Meta/TikTok/Facebook line at all — max scale, near-zero context for this ICP.

Sequencing — Kickstarter → Linear / Booster → Flywheel

The guardrails support going straight at the flywheel — a fast inside-out ramp, not a long stepping-stone path.

Both motions converge on the same sales floor under one operator-credible brand. Sales is the flywheel; every channel here is the accelerant — and credibility, not ad spend, is what reaches the off-database majority.

A single linear funnel would lie about Bison's reality — so the engine runs two motions that converge on one sales floor, both sized backward from a single number: +120 net-new Quick Pay customers in Year 1.

Per the TAM analysis, a check against Bison’s own book shows a large share of real Quick Pay customers don’t appear in any B2B database (against an estimated ~50,000 oilfield-service companies nationally). Many are too offline/analog for any database to touch — the exact share is unknown, so we run both funnels rather than bet on one. Two acquisition sub-motions therefore feed the same proven 3–4 person sales team that already built $1B in funded volume. This is a sales-led motion assisted by ABM — never replaced by it. The reps and referrals are the conversion event; marketing's job is to warm and prioritize.

The five-stage funnel — terminal event is the first funded invoice

Stages are shared across both funnels; the mechanics of each transition differ (digital vs. human). Quick Pay revenue is transactional and recurring — the customer funds invoices on day one and keeps funding every cycle — so the funnel ends at Funded, not at a signature. Stage 4 deliberately offers a lower-friction hand-raise ("See what you'd qualify for" / "Talk to someone from the oilfield") rather than demanding a financial commitment cold.

Stage-to-stage conversion benchmarks

These are the planning rates the bottom-up model uses — deliberately conservative for digital, strong for offline, because Bison's edge is human credibility, not click-through. Track actuals and recalibrate quarterly.

Bottom-up model — how touches become 120 customers

Target split: ~75 from Funnel B (offline) and ~45 from Funnel A (digital) — illustrative planning targets, weighted toward the offline / referral motion where this market's trust actually closes. These are starting assumptions to recalibrate as real conversion data comes in, not a fixed read of the market.

Funnel B's ~114 meaningful field touches/month — door-knocks, qualified calls, EnergyLink/Mineral Answers referrals, word-of-mouth intros — sit squarely within the demonstrated capacity of the team that already built $1B. The credibility flywheel (retained, fast-growing customers → testimonials → referrals) feeds that funnel for free and compounds across the year.

The CMO dashboard — by altitude

120 funded customers × ~$8.3M average funded volume delivers the $1B → $2B doubling — and that understates it, because retained accounts grow their own funded volume (proof: "$350k → $7.5M in 3 years," "up 500–600% YoY," "double growth rate within 90 days", as reported by Bison customers), so the back half of the year compounds.

Fix the funnel, amplify the proven sales motion, then distribute the brand — a strict crawl-walk-run sequence that turns demand Bison already has into Quick Pay applications without spending a blind dollar.

The competitive assessment graded Bison D — not on strategy, but on execution capacity that does not yet exist. So the roadmap follows fix → amplify → compound. The Year-1 leg it is built to move: Quick Pay invoice volume ~$1B → $2B and customers ~120 → 240. Quick Pay leads every phase; JIB/AFE and Online Payments are pre-launch and are never sequenced as live.

Crawl · Walk · Run

Quarterly view toward the 120 → 240 doubling

The through-line: acquisition is the bottleneck, not economics. Crawl unlocks demand Bison already has at near-zero cost. Walk multiplies the proven engine — the sales team that built $1B — with warmed lists for the database-discoverable set and an offline motion for the rest. Run builds the compounding layers that pay off through Q4. Throughout, spend stays credibility-preserving: operator-to-operator, no fixed APRs, no glossy stock, and never live before measurement fires.

Quick Pay is an enterprise-grade account value living in an SMB body — so we work named accounts, not audiences, with two lists, two motions, and one operator-credible brand.

Why ABM is the only build that fits Bison

Three facts force a non-standard account-based build. First, account value is enterprise-grade in an SMB body — roughly $8.3M funded volume per customer per year, with the Year-1 leg moving 120 → 240 customers and $1B → $2B in volume. At that value and that few logos, acquisition (not unit economics) is the bottleneck, and a 1:1 / 1:few named-account motion is correct. Second, the market doesn't search and distrusts outsiders — they buy on word-of-mouth and credibility, trusting people from the field, not bankers. So every touch has to transfer operator credibility; the warmest touch (a peer's referral) beats any ad. Third, a large share of real customers aren’t database-discoverable — a single digital list can never reach the whole market.

Two lists, two motions, one brand

Both lists feed the same sales floor and run the same tiers, scoring, proof, and brand — a Dale reached by mailer and a Frankie reached on LinkedIn must experience the same Bison.

Account tiering — where attention goes

Tier reflects revenue potential × ICP fit × reachability, and Bison's economics push effort to roughly 20% Tier 1 / 50% Tier 2 / 30% Tier 3 by attention — even though Tier 3 is largest by count, because one whale equals dozens of long-tail logos in funded volume.

The account-scoring model

A composite score routes each account to a tier and sets priority, built so the dataset does the heavy lifting and no single firmographic field can fake fit. Score = Fit (0–50) + Signal (0–50), behind hard ICP gates: NAICS 213112 or adjacent, a U.S. energy basin (TX/OK/NM/CO/ND/WY/LA), and $1–50M revenue / 2–200 employees.

Trigger signals on the watchlist

Signal score recomputes continuously (triggers are time-sensitive); fit refreshes monthly on enrichment. Tier assignments lock for the quarter — except auto-promotions out of Tier 3 on a hot signal, which the team works immediately. The digital signals depend on the website fix + GA4/GTM/pixels; until that's live, Motion A runs on firmographic + field signals, which are the ones that actually predict this market.

The engagement ladder

Across every tier, accounts move through the framework's stages — the system arms the proven sales team, it never replaces it.

• IDENTIFIED — in the list (dataset / NAICS), no engagement
• AWARE — ≥1 contact engaged; begin tailored, signal-based touches
• ENGAGED — multiple contacts engaged; pull in the owner, layer 1:1 touches
• CONSIDERING — decision-maker in, meeting requested; make the meeting happen
• OPPORTUNITY → SALE — sales works the deal; marketing supplies peer references and one-pagers

Proof runs verbatim across every touch and both motions — "$350k → $7.5M in 3 years," "up 500–600% YoY," "double their growth rate within 90 days" — always as customer outcomes. No fixed APRs. "Largest" only ever as the largest invoice-funding company in U.S. oil & gas. Credibility, not ad spend, is what reaches the off-database majority and what makes the database-discoverable set convert.

One coordinated account-based campaign with a single job: make oilfield-service operators hear of Bison before a rep ever dials, then convert that warmth into funded Quick Pay accounts.

The flagship motion is "From the Oilfield, for the Oilfield" — the Quick Pay ABM Launch. Quick Pay is the cash cow: LIVE, roughly $1B in invoice volume across ~120 customers, and the goal is to double revenue every year. The strategic call is simple: if Quick Pay revenue could triple tomorrow — no variability, no new product, known entity — that is the trade to take above everything else. This campaign maxes it out. Marketing is accelerant, not replacement — a 3–4 person cold-calling and door-knocking team built Quick Pay to $1B, and this plan warms the list reps dial and supplies the air cover so the operator has already heard of Bison before the conversation starts.

Two motions, run in parallel

A large share of the ~50,000 oilfield-service companies never appear in any B2B database — the exact share is unknown. Many are "very offline, very analog" and unreachable by any data provider. So the campaign never runs one motion before the other.

Goal, KPI & ownership

The primary KPI is funded Quick Pay accounts and the pipeline that produces them, on an attributable funnel: site CVR 0.36% → ≥2.0% (~6x more leads from the existing 3,613 sessions/mo at no new spend), a measurable lift in rep meetings sourced from the warmed list versus cold dialing, all tracking the 120 → 240 customer / $1B → $2B Year-1 doubling. The DRI is the Demand-Gen / Growth Marketing Manager (roadmap hire W1, reports to the COO); until onboarded, the COO holds the DRI seat through pre-launch.

Creative strategy — from inside the field

Every asset must read as if it came from inside the field. The brand reference is SpaceX-industrial: engines, fire, hardhat crews up close to the work, pumpjacks, rigs, welding, trucks. Never iPads, suits, posed smiling stock, or glossy fintech polish. The brand rule, never violated: "The only thing worse than us not being from oil & gas is us acting like we know oil & gas." Headlines run Poppins ALL CAPS with one green accent word:

Bison Payments is the largest invoice-funding company in U.S. oil & gas — Quick Pay advances up to 95% of your invoice, funded next day, no concentration limits, no personal guarantees. Proof points, always attributed as customer outcomes: "Up 500–600% YoY," "$350k → $7.5M in 3 years," and "customers typically double their growth rate within their first 90 days."

Channels, tiered to this ICP

• Tier 1 — Sales-floor ABM + the fixed QuickPay website + direct mail/phone. The close mechanism that built $1B, the primary capture surface, and the only path to the analog, off-database majority.
• Tier 2 — LinkedIn (organic + config-fixed paid) + email/CRM nurture. Air cover for the database-discoverable set; fix the underperforming $8.65-CPC lead-gen config while engagement holds ≥6.7%.
• Tier 3 — EnergyLink partnership + the testimonial/referral flywheel. Channel moat and credibility halo for the distrustful, off-database majority.
• Do NOT run Facebook / Instagram — explicitly "≈ irrelevant" for this audience.

12-week phased launch

Success metrics

Cold email and LinkedIn that amplify the reps who built $1B — warming accounts, teeing up named targets, and covering no-answers, never running ahead of the field team.

Target list — four concentric rings, best data first

A large share of real Quick Pay customers never appear in any B2B database — the exact share is unknown, and many are simply too offline for any list. We build outward from Bison's own field-true data, not database guesses.

Sending infrastructure

An analog, trust-driven buyer means low-volume, high-personalization beats blast every time. The setup protects the main domain and reads operator-to-operator.

• Separate sending subdomain — send as team@get.bisonpayments.com; the primary bisonpayments.com stays clean for business and the website.
• SPF, DKIM, DMARC configured on the subdomain specifically.
• Send as a real, named human from the field — a rep's or a Bison leader's name with a real photo. Never "Bison Marketing." This reinforces "from the field," not outsider fintech.
• 3-week warm-up before any cold send — week 1 internal/personal, week 2 to known contacts, week 3 begin cold to the most-researched Ring 0/2 prospects.
• Conservative volume ceilings: ≤10/day week 1 → 15–25/day weeks 2–3 → 30–50/day absolute max per inbox at week 4+. Never batch-send; spread across the day.
• Plain text only — no images, one link max, no shorteners or tracking pixels at scale.
• Best windows: Tuesday–Thursday, ~10 AM–2 PM local basin time.

The "From the Field" sequence — 3 touches, then stop

Two follow-ups max for the analog buyer. The win condition is a reply or a warm hand-off to a rep — never a closed deal in the inbox.

Personalization tokens

Reference specific company details, not just first name — generic gets screened as outsider spam.

Coordination spine + Do-Not-Contact

Every digitally-touched account is logged so reps see the history before they dial. The shared CRM status — Researched → Emailed → LinkedIn-touched → Replied → Handed to rep → Rep-working → Funded / Recycled — is the spine. No account is cold-called the same day it's emailed; none is emailed if a rep has it booked or active in the next 7 days.

The ICP is "very offline, very analog" — they buy on word-of-mouth and credibility, not ad spend, and a large share of real customers never appear in any B2B database; Motion B is the physical, peer-mediated machine that reaches them.

Owner-operators and finance leads at oilfield-service SMBs don't search for invoice funding and don't trust outsiders. Per the TAM analysis, a large share of Bison's real customers aren't discoverable in any database — the rest are too offline to appear anywhere (the exact share is unknown). No amount of digital ABM reaches them — but a 3–4 person cold-calling and door-knocking team built Quick Pay to ~$1B and ~120 customers entirely on this terrain. This motion doesn't replace the sales floor; it feeds it. Every program below is graded on one question: does it put a warm, credible reason-to-talk in front of the next operators so the rep isn't cold?

Four programs, ordered by leverage

Direct mail — tiered to the ABM tiers

Creative rules are the channel. SpaceX-industrial: pumpjacks, rigs, hardhat crews in teal/green duotone or desaturated B&W — never iPads, suits, or fintech gloss. Headlines in Poppins caps with one green accent word. Proof points run verbatim and attributed — "$350k → $7.5M in 3 years," "Up 500–600% YoY," "customers typically double their growth rate within their first 90 days" — because the operator trusts the peer, not the vendor. No APR figures, ever. One call to action: a named rep and a phone number first; QR second.

Field presence — where door-knocking meets brand

Show up in basin towns, not coastal conferences: the Permian Basin International Oil Show (Odessa), the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference, and regional trucking, water-hauling, and disposal association meetings where service-company owners congregate without a single outsider in the room. The booth looks like a job site — raw steel, work surfaces, duotone rig imagery — staffed by the actual cold-call and door-knock reps, not marketers in polos. The pitch is the proof: a funded customer at the booth outweighs any banner. Start with 2–3 anchor events in Year 1 and expand only if cost-per-funded-customer holds against the CAC ceiling.

The referral flywheel

Bison's customers are growing 500–600% YoY and doubling their growth rate within 90 days — walking, credible, motivated proof. The job is to operationalize word-of-mouth that's already happening (57% of site traffic is direct) into a deliberate, attributed engine. The ask is operator-framed: "Know another shop sweating a 60-day payment from an operator? Send them our way — we'll take care of them like we take care of you." The incentive is credibility-preserving — a fee credit on the referrer's next funded invoices plus field-grade gear — never points-and-prizes. The same machine stands up an operator-attributed testimonial pipeline (verbatim growth stories, field-shot video, named-operator logos) that feeds the mail, the booth, LinkedIn air cover, and the website. Each funded, growing customer lowers the trust-cost of the next.

Partnership channels — credibility as distribution

EnergyLink

The crown jewel — 2M royalty owners, ~$200B/yr already driving the RCA page to 1,876 views/mo. Move it from "announced" to an embedded in-platform apply/fund flow for RCA's "keep your minerals, next-day cash" angle. Quick Pay halo: being on the sector's rails signals "from the oilfield" to operators.

Mineral Answers

A second royalty-owner platform (~$12B/yr) — replicate the embedded-RCA pattern. Pursue deliberately as a concentration-reducer that diversifies away from single-partner EnergyLink dependence.

American Factoring Association

A board seat / active membership for a Bison principal — institutional legitimacy with sophisticated finance-lead buyers, a room where factoring referrals form, and a platform to be known as the oil & gas factoring specialist. A credibility asset, not a lead-gen channel.

Referral nodes

CPAs and bookkeepers (who see the 30–90-day squeeze first) and equipment dealers / lessors (who know which shops are growing and cash-strapped). A node's recommendation carries near-peer trust. Lender Marketplace tie-in keeps the relationship intact when Bison can't fund a referred SMB.

The owned air-cover layer: leadership-led LinkedIn manufactures credibility so the operator has heard of Bison before the rep ever dials, while a first-mover land grab on an open SERP turns the one search channel nobody else is contesting into category authority.

This is the demand-creation half of the two-motion GTM — built to reach the database-discoverable buyers the 3–4 person cold-calling/door-knocking team can't touch at scale, and to stop ceding every commercial keyword to generalist factors. The Quick Pay buyer is "very offline, very analog": they don't search for invoice funding, they buy on word-of-mouth and credibility, and they trust people from the field, not bankers. So LinkedIn here is not primarily demand-capture — it is the digital extension of the door-knock, and every asset must pass the test: would a water-hauler in the Permian trust this?

1 · LinkedIn — two tracks, one ICP

Today Bison has 437 followers and ~$1,047/mo in paid. Organic engagement is already strong at 6.7% — it outperforms; the problem is reach and lead-gen execution, not the channel.

Leadership post themes

• Banks vs. the field — the core wedge. "A water-hauling company doing $4M lost its bank line because 80% of revenue came from one operator. In the oilfield, that's not a red flag — that's Tuesday."
• Real operator stories — the verbatim proof as content: "Up 500–600% YoY," "$350k → $7.5M in 3 years," "customers typically double their growth rate within their first 90 days." Always attributed as customer testimonials, never Bison's claim.
• From the field — SpaceX-industrial humanity: rigs at 5am, hot-shot drivers, shop floors, North on a lease. The "why I built this." No suits, no glossy stock.
• Plain-English education — "What advance rate actually means," "Why factoring isn't a loan." Each repurposes directly into an SEO article.
• RCA / mineral-owner angle — secondary, partner-distributed: "keep your minerals + next-day cash + 5-min onboarding." Quick Pay always leads.

2 · Content & non-brand SEO

Bison's organic search is branded only — 35 keywords, ~430 traffic, graded F, and contaminated by other "bison" brands. It cedes every commercial term to generalists. But the whitespace is unusually winnable.

Strategy: win the vertical, not the category. Own "oilfield / oil & gas funding" completely rather than spreading into generic "invoice factoring" where eCapital (18,226 keywords) and Riviera dominate. Build the three HIGH commercial clusters first.

Foundation first, then 5–8 pages

Nothing scales without measurement — fill the empty GTM container with GA4 + Insight Tag + Search Console, disambiguate Bison Payments from Bison Technologies / getbison.com, and fix the homepage that converts at 0.36% vs. the 2–5% B2B benchmark (the #1 fix). Then build the money pages: /oilfield-invoice-factoring, /oil-and-gas-invoice-factoring, the "QuickPay vs. bank LOC vs. generic factoring" comparison (the single most important narrative), the working-capital pillar guide, the bank-concentration wedge article, the RCA page, a templated service-category cluster, and a JIB waitlist-only page. Each page is the long-form home for a LinkedIn theme.

The heart of the content strategy is the "From the Oilfield" series — real operators, real numbers, real field work. One artifact lives on five surfaces: case study → leadership LinkedIn post → testimonial paid creative → website case-study page → referral asset the offline motion uses. The proof assets are today's biggest untapped lever.

Eight production-ready assets — field-authentic, brand-exact, and shippable the day the campaign opens.

A strategy is only as good as what an operator can actually put in market. Every asset below is built and ready to ship — from the live Quick Pay landing page to a value-first outreach page wired to Bison's proprietary data. They span the full motion: the inbound pull (landing page, ROI calculator), the rep's hand (one-pager, email sequence), the demand engine (LinkedIn, direct mail), and the orchestration layer (campaign brief). Together they cover acquisition end to end without inventing a single new claim.

One number rules the scoreboard — +120 net-new Quick Pay funded customers in Year 1 — and every other metric below is a leading indicator of whether we hit it.

Bison's stated goal is "double revenue every year." The Year-1 leg of that is +120 net-new Quick Pay customers, split ~45 from Funnel A (digital ABM-assisted) and ~75 from Funnel B (offline / partnership / referral). At an average ~$8.3M funded volume per customer, that 120 is the $1B→$2B doubling — and it understates the result, because retained accounts grow their own funded volume and compound the back half of the year. Quick Pay is the live lead product; this scoreboard is built around it alone.

KPI master sheet

Measurement cadence by altitude