Our colleague, Stefan went through the HubSpot Pipeline Generation Bootcamp and this is his experience.

  1. The riches are in the niches
    • Right from the start we were guided to do our Agency Positioning statement. You can’t be everything to all people, even though you might want to service as much people as possible. There will still be people who won’t be a good fit for you.
  2. The people who pick up the phone get all the contracts.
    • I did not know this was so true. I come from an engineering background and I have been programming for more than half my life.
    • “People-ing” wasn’t my strong point.
    • Getting involved in business forced me to reconsider this approach and also to upgrade “bits of my personality”
    • We had a certain number of calls we had to reach (~100) and this seemed doable during the 8 weeks I got involved
    • An interesting thing I did not realize happened: I had to recall over and over again the people that were interested. So then I started to count these encounters.
    • I noticed that by the end of the program, all the people with whom I’ve talked to for more than 2h in total, actually became our clients. I’ve talked with some people for 5 or 13 times before actually signing the contract, even though some of them came through referrals.
    • It takes time to build confidence
  3. Inbound is the kingdom. Content is king and distribution is queen
    • We lacked content on our site, so we were missing an opportunity here.
    • People’s interest for a product or service falls under 3 broad category: awareness, consideration and decision
    • We didn’t have content to showcase – but we started working on some usecases
    • This challenged us to hustle more, which has its benefits in the short term
  4. People are more likely to connect with you in covid-times
    • Believe it or not, this pandemic also had some good side effects. People are reconsidering their priorities and even their workflow.
    • It seems that for too long we lacked focus and were going on a hamster wheel without any precise destination
    • Covid-19 forced us to take a deep look at ourselves and our collaborators and decide a better direction
  5. People need your support to make the change happen
    • In these hectic times, we got to be there for each other, either as team members “sticking up for each other” or as part of the client’s team
    • Being involved in delivering tech solutions over the years, I noticed that it’s not the best solution that wins, but a combination of functionality and delighted clients
    • It takes time to create confidence in a relationship and it takes even more time to create the leap towards a better (and more digital) tomorrow
  6. Dan was the Chief Lion who supported his Lion cubs all the way. 🦁
    • He was awesome in supporting and encouraging us and he always reminded us about the basics
    • I learned to sit up straight, pause and always be helping
    • It takes a lot of time to get into the habit of calling people, so having a clear discipline will help
  7. Role-playing helped a lot
    • We did role-plays inside the team and used client feedback to actually improve our “script” for future client calls
    • We did a combination of video-emails, calls, meetings and I personally got great feedback for using video-emails – since it makes you look professional

I look forward to future interactions with Dan and I hope to stay in touch with the other participants I had the pleasure of interacting with.

Our next plan is to use video-emails as a prospecting tool. ✌️