6 Tips for Cutting Through the Noise in 2019

“If you cold call me without research or understanding,

I will never buy from you and my network will never do business with you”

The stakes are high. Welcome to 2019. Open discovery is dead. “Always be selling” is dead.

2019 is about making your prospects feel known, understood, and cared about; and only calling/emailing to help them.

Sales roles are declining, 2019 is noisy as ever, and everyone is busy and distracted. Fortunately, Dan Tyre, Senior Leader of HubSpot and Co-author of Inbound Organization, joined me on The Industrial Executive

In this episode, Dan offers 6 proven tips to cut through the noise, create opportunities, and have amazing sales calls in today’s environment.

The 2 Questions Dan Gets Asked Constantly

When Dan asks organizations what their biggest challenges are two questions that emerge often are:

1. “How do we generate more opportunities into the pipeline?”
2. “Do we really need to pick up the phone?” “If so, how?”

Virtually everyone wants more opportunities and deals with questions around doing effective sales calls.

There’s one major obstacle in today’s environment: Noise.

In today’s environment unlike what some consider the good old days of 2006-2008:

• People don’t want to answer the phone.
• They don’t want to talk to you.
• They start conversations disappointed, skeptical, and annoyed.
• They want to get to time to value as fast as possible.

In light of that, here are 5 tips to get more opportunities and have great conversations with prospects.

1: Top the funnel

When practicing the inbound process, one thing you need to do is leverage technology to connect with more people interested in your product. Here are two things you need:

1. Make sure your website includes top of the funnel offers.

Offer research on the popular questions of your audience for free. Things like:

• “The Checklist Saving 10% on Your Shipping Costs in 2019”
• “The 3 Things I Learned in 2018 that Would have Saved Me 10% on My Deliverability”

This is valuable content that’s instantly recognizable by your demographic. It says “wow this guy understands me” and you give it away for an email address.

1. Use chat bots.

Statistics show 47% of consumers would prefer to have questions answered by a bot than by a human being.

Some argue that for particular industries this advice doesn’t apply but the research says otherwise. Statistically, this holds true for industrial executives, dermatologists, and virtually everyone else.

If your website isn’t tricked out with these top of the funnel things in 2019, you’re missing opportunities.

2: Why you have to specialize in 2019

“In 2019, the riches are in the niches.” - Dan Tyre

If you want more opportunities in the funnel, you have to focus on a very specific target demographic.

This is controversial and especially hard for entrepreneurs because traditionally lots of people have been generalists.

But in today’s world, when someone gets a stomach ache, they don’t want a general practitioner; they want a gastroenterologist.

People want to work with those who specialize specifically in the particular need they have.

3: What’s a persona and how to do it right

Once you identify the companies are ideal for your product, there's a person or a persona within that company that is the decision maker.

Sometimes its a committee, not just one person, but typically there's one or two, maybe three people within the company that is the model of who you're talking to.

So when you're creating marketing, when you're creating a sales plan and process, it's not for a company, it's for this person, this human being.

The reality is people are all unique and different. Personas are guidelines. Look for the 80% of commonality among people who fit your persona and that is what you direct your marketing collateral to.

“If they’re not named Growth Gary or Marketing Mary, and you don’t talk about them all the time, you haven’t done the persona work yet.” - Dan Tyre

4: Single View of the Customer

Now you need to have a single view of the customer. Keep track of and understand what each customer has done previously.

In today’s world, people will get all excited, they’ll swarm your website, make 15 phone calls, be active in the process and then all of a sudden stop abruptly.

That process is indicative of busy folks who've got a lot of things on their plate and are trying to manage priorities.

But when those people call back 10 days, 9 months, a year later, you remember and understand that lead.

This is also called lead intelligence, and it’s about making sure that you have a deep understanding of the behavior of that person right up to three years ago.

5: Quit Cold Calling, Start Warm Calling

If you call someone and say “So tell me about yourself, Todd.” like it’s 1991, hairs will stand up on the back of your prospect’s neck so fast. Angry hairs.

Open Discovery is dead.

If you don’t want those hairs, do an hour of research and find out that Todd’s a managing consultant for industrial manufacturing companies and he’s written a book.

Now start your conversation with:

“Say, Todd, tell me about the book that you wrote in 2008”

So to answer question 2 from above, yes you need to still call in 2019. But you need to:

• Understand that cold calls will ruin your reputation
• Do warm calls
• Don’t just call once
• Call, send an email, call again, leave a voicemail, send another email
• Put a personalized video in the email, a statistically proven tactic

In all of this; your intent is most important, and it’s the final tip:

6. Help not Sell

If you’re going to be this persistent it can only be because you want to help. This is not about your agenda, it’s about helping your prospect with theirs.

“The only thing you want to do is help.” - Dan Tyre

Leave a voicemail like:

“Hey Todd, I'm trying to track you down because I’ve got some information on your website and on your books I would want to share with you.

I'm not going to take a lot of your time, but I know you’re looking to get more podcasts listeners in 2019 and I think I might be able to help.”

You need to be diligent and professional in your outreach every time. Have a smile on your face and stand up when you make these calls; Dan says outreach is a contact sport.

To get more information on how to cut through noise to market and sell in 2019, check out HubSpot.

This post is based on an interview with Dan Tyre of HubSpot and Inbound Organization. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Industrial Executive.