Learning to Roar: How Dan Tyre Showed us to Grow our Agency by Helping others

One of the most important challenges we have helped companies overcome for a while now as an agency is to increase their sales and generate opportunities to fuel their pipeline, but what about our own agency? This was a very hard question I struggled myself answering the past year, it has always been so easy for us to know how to increase the results and sales of our clients but we haven't paid so much attention to actually applying our own knowledge to the agency, until we partnered up with Hubspot.

Recently I had the honor to be part of the amazing Lionesses of 1506 in the Pipeline Generation Boot camp lead by Dan Tyre along with a few more great empowered, smart and talented women, and I say honor cause Dan not only refreshed my knowledge about b2b sales and the new techniques that blew my mind, but for the motivation tools and knowledge on how to shift from a cub to a lioness in only 8 weeks!

So here are the 5 key takeaways of my experience in the HubSpot Agency Partner Pipeline Generation Boot Camp, so you can apply it to your company this quarter.

1.Define a Focus and Stick with it

It’s normal as a CEO, VP of Marketing or Director of Sales, you want your product or service to appeal to everyone and reach every corner of the earth, and even though we know we have a "target" or "Ideal Buyer profile" if I learned one thing in this Boot camp was to focus and not feel scared of narrowing down even more to one of our specific expertise areas, cause 2019 and on is all about expertise, so pull out your Sales report ― And perhaps some market research reports to make sure you are making an informed decision, you'll be able to grow to other locations or areas in the future, but concentrate your efforts in one.

Narrow down your target market to an industry, a geographic area or target horizontally or by vertical, get super clear in what is it that you do and for who are you doing it for, to craft a really powerful positioning statement for your company, I know you probably already have a fancy one in place and this sounds a bit too basic for you as an advise, but you would be surprised how often we "know" what we should be doing and decide to skip it as executives.

2. Dare to Help others (Provide Value First)

It doesn't matter if you are a very talented sales representative, a beginner in sales or the CEO of your company, we are all uncomfortable with just grabbing the phone and make calls.

Show value first! Make sure you listen to your prospect and understand what are their challenges, you can know this from their inbound activity if you are using a CRM like Hubspot or by just grabbing the phone and calling them to have a conversation, get to know them more and understand what are they struggling with so you can help providing them material, tools or making suggestions on how they can overcome that specific issue.

I was particularly struggling with this area since our agency has always grown by referrals of our happy customers, so the complete idea of grabbing the phone was horrifying to me, I didn't want to "bother people", but as Dan explained in the new generation of b2b sales, where Inbound is the key to lead people that need you to help them, we are actually only reaching out to understand what's challenging for them and provide helpful content or tools that can help these companies grow and reach their goals, and this only explanation shifted the way I as a CEO, understood the complete pipeline generation process.

3. Leverage your Tools

When you first start involving yourself with a sales process, productivity is not something you'll manage, therefore you need to have a good CRM in place to make you accountable and help you understand your behavior a bit better, keep track of the progress and find the downside of your process, to iterate, improve and grow your results.

As a Hubspot Agency partner, we have the luck to understand how to leverage the power of the sequences and features it offers, so I was thankfully able to navigate through chaos and turn it into wonderland, becoming a game changer for our results.

4. Compromise, Pause, Stand Up and Breathe

Set some time aside on your calendar to keep you accountable and consistent in reaching out and help people, the more you help the more you'll grow as a person and as a business.

Trust the process: being consistent and persistent is important to reach success in any area of your life, so why don't apply it to sales as well?

Pause, pause, smile, stand up, breathe. Before the boot camp I never notice standing up was so important to relax and just let the conversation flow, at the end of the day we are just a human making a connection with another human.

5. Draw the Line in Professional Approach

We get it, you want to help as well as we do but there's a fine line you need to respect in order to get the most out of your time, you can't help those who don't want to be helped.

According to what we learned in the Boot camp, 4 contacts with the target account you want are enough to be helpful in a professional way, make sure to be consistent and follow up after 2 or 3 days of the last contact, to give them the opportunity to feel special and show your leads they matter to you.

Wrapping Up

This experience has enrich the way I see the whole sales process, as a business owner I know how valuable is for me to get involved in this area of the company, to lead the team to a successful understanding of what is it that we can do to help.

Becoming a Hubspot partner has shifted the way we do things, improved the way we interact with our clients and partners and increased the results of our Agency and our clients, make the leap and try the Pipeline Generation Boot camp weather you are an Agency or a company of any Industry, I highly recommend it.

Special thanks to Dan Tyre for all the knowledge, motivation and extra suggestions provided along the 8 weeks with that great big and friendly smile, until next time!