What Makes HANGAR49 Different from Other Demand Generation Companies?

What makes HANGAR49 unique is that we’re not “just” a demand generation company. We operate at that beautiful intersection where the latest technology and verified human-driven sales techniques meet to soar up revenue by helping you accelerate at what you do best – selling, not searching. In addition to rendering lead generation services to assist clients in building a prospecting pipeline, our marketing consulting services also include sales coaching, sales strategy, outreach refinement methods and marketing advice.

This article will go into further depth on how HANGAR49 is different from the countless other companies offering a range of services and promises of a better future. Let’s get right into it!

‍

WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES THAT BUSINESSES ARE LOOKING FOR WHEN THEY NEED A DEMAND GENERATION COMPANY?

So what are the qualities that businesses are looking for when they go on the hunt for lead generation companies? There’s a massive disconnect between reality and these idealistic promises that many Demand Generation businesses – especially the one-man bands out of Asia and across the US are providing, which offer “10 hot leads in your inbox daily or to ramp up your revenue by 20%.”

The promise on that front is to close some deals and get some business for this agency. And the reality is that it’s not quite as cut and dry. Firstly, is that even possible? Secondly, we have to compare the quality of what they are selling as Rolls Royce engines versus jet engines. It becomes quite a different method, and it becomes on the continuum of either a transactional engagement or a heavily consultative engagement to be able to close the deal. There are a lot of elements at play. So to say “we will increase your revenue by 20%”, or “I can guarantee you 10 leads in your inbox”, is allowing for a million things to go wrong. The problem is that on the buying side, the client wants to hear that and so they will want to buy into the organization’s promise that this is possible. The sales executive themselves probably don’t believe this is possible because they’ve almost negligently bought into these kinds of schemes so many times. And every time it fails on their part, it’s simply “back to the drawing board, let’s try other avenues and any number of swings and roundabouts”, and typically at the expense of their client.

‍

HOW TO FIX THIS?

A decent company will start the conversation on what the mission for your business is. And in doing that, a proper goal is created. An unrealistic offer being accepted by the client sets the foundation for disappointment.

There’s this adversarial relationship between marketing and sales because the objectives and framework are built out extensively at the beginning, and the end result is trash. And then marketing says “Well, we’re handing over so many prospective sales from our side”, but it’s a mix-up of third parties and cheap marketers getting involved to deliver quantity, but not quality.

It doesn’t help when the sales team also has numbers on the brain, and just want to hit targets without any thought on the source of them, or the long term growth behind it. With this commission-on-the-brain-thinking working both the marketing and sales division of a company, falling for fanciful promises of higher sales targets becomes a regular practice.

What is interesting is that there’s a noticeable difference between what an inbound lead versus an outbound lead will require, in terms of effort versus reward. So you’ve got leads that are inbound and much easier to convert, versus leads that are outbound, and those actually need to be measured differently. The remuneration around an inbound lead versus a non-lead ought to be different. Because an inbound lead is supremely much easier to convert and that typically takes a hell of a lot more time. So as a sales executive, you are naturally going to lean towards what’s going to get you some sweet commission and what’s going to get the business revenue.

‍

HOW DOES THE SALES TEAM DYNAMIC NEED TO CHANGE THEN?

Demand Generation or Outbound Sales is an ancient style of sales hunting. Certain types of people who are able to handle this style tend to do quite well, but there are a lot of guys who are not as good at being hunters, who believe that they need to be hunters when at best they’re farmers. And that’s why we actually have a great training program in place for our clients, sales teams, and especially our own marketing and sales teams on how to succeed regarding this section of the sales funnel.

Predominantly, sales guys tend to be quite junior and unsupported in their roles. They are given a company computer or a phone, some automation tools, and they get left to their own devices (literally), and we’re surprised when they don’t hit set targets or sales numbers. What’s worse is that they have no clue how to process any prospective leads handed over to them from viable sources that had high potential. They immediately start going for the hard sale through sheer force of will, scaring off the inquisitive prospect, with all manners of sophistication being thrown off the table.

Being able to navigate this sales gauntlet requires more work with a softer touch. And there’s a hell of a lot to be said for somebody who’s able to actually serve that conversation and navigate through all the pressure doing everything that’s needed to get results out on the other side. But these results are what is needed at the end of the day, and what companies need when they are searching for leads and a Demand Generation company.

‍

WHAT SHOULD A DEMAND GENERATION BUSINESS COMPANY OFFER?

What a company needs from a Demand Generation business is – and we say this in business ourselves, like a mantra every day – results.

RESULTS, RESULTS, RESULTS, RESULTS.

SO HOW DO WE OFFER THOSE RESULTS?

And at HANGAR49, what we focus on is taking a scientific approach, and utilizing that scientific methodology to be able to set up, build the plan, execute the methodology, and work from the feedback.

What does that look like? You set up the mission, then you build out what a hypothesis looks like, and from the hypothesis, you run experiments to determine what works. We analyze what comes back from the experiments and what we learned, and we pour that back into the original mission.

We believe that a client needs support from a Demand Generation business for its ambitions. We’re an outreach optimization company, which essentially means that we help our clients find people who they want to know, but they don’t know.

We do this in three specific ways:

By building fantastic databases.

Take prospects through nurturing journey programs.  

Feed this information back into the system to understand what’s working, and what’s not working along the way. What we chase down is immediately and continuously thrown over to our clients and sales teams.

We are an engine at the top of our client’s sales funnel. What our clients do is they plug into our system and we begin feeding their marketing team with great data that they need in order to do their work.

And we’re taking these prospects – who typically don’t know our clients – through a journey together, to be able to share the ideas, the mission, the knowledge, the authority of the space, etc, etc, with these prospects who don’t know, and initially don’t care, about our clients.

‍

HOW DOES THIS JOURNEY BEGIN?

We do this in a very elegant kind of way, by keeping it below under the radar while telling the story in a lighter style. And then if the prospect is interested in learning more, they will reach out to find out more. We don’t sell at this stage, there’s never selling – more a discussion of an opportunity. There are a lot of businesses out there that sort of go in guns a-blazing and say “This is who we are, what we do, dial this number, click this link, etc. etc.”, which we’ve found turns people off caring about your pitch immediately.

We base a lot of the work that we do on some strong outreach. This psychology is quite comparable to meeting someone who catches your eye at a club or a bar where you go over to them and try to get their attention in a non-invasive way. But how do you do this in a non-annoying and non-creepy way? If we aggravate people, then then we’re just going to break the potential for a relationship along with our reputation. We try to avoid all of that with frank discussions of “Hey. I see you, you see me, we’re both in a similar space, let’s geek out on some stuff that we’re invariably both mutually invested in and actually have a stimulating conversation.”

That’s our methodology, and it takes up a fair amount of time to build up an easy-going conversation, to inevitably find these potential clients for your sales team to then build a relationship with and develop rapport to ultimately close the deal. Those deals are laborious and so what we’re bringing into the mix is a touch of psychology along with a touch of technology to bring people together while telling a story.

We then build out a sample to see the kind of data that we’re seeing from this series of experiments. And then we can empirically validate or invalidate the results.

We examine the messaging along the journey, where we determine which journeys are working better than others. Are your landing pages converting? Your messages working? Are people interested? How about using the right vocabulary? All these questions come together and we break those things down into the hypothesis piece.

Then we move onto the next experiment – where we’re wiring up all of these bits and pieces underpinned through the hypothesis and begin testing them. We see what works, what comes back with great results, and what falls to the wayside. This method of outreach got positive feedback? Great, let’s lean more towards that approach! We do an in-depth analysis of our outreach’s impact, taking conversion ratios into account and refining all our methods along the way.

‍

SO WHAT DOES A COMPANY NEED FROM DEMAND GENERATION METHODS?

Gentleness, trust, technical capacity to get you on the other side, integration into your organization, an environment that recognizes a longer-term program where rapid experiments are happening every sprint and where the results speak for themselves.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU COME TO HANGAR49 FOR DEMAND GENERATION SERVICES?

Fans are happy to give us an opportunity, as long as we’ve got results. And that’s ultimately what we pride ourselves on and what we promise to deliver on.

And we do this in a multitude of ways – we’ve ensure to design our package structure to support clients either very specifically or to a more broad market. We’re scalable in that if you’re a client, you need more capacity in terms of the prospects that you’re reaching out towards. We package ourselves to deliver to you or clients, which is what they’re expecting, needing and wanting from this program. Our clients demand results, and they will get results.

We’ve progressed quite far over the years to train our marketing teams and help with even highly senior marketing teams. One pattern we’ve consistently found; we’ve entered into conversations with certain clients, and they’re writers, storytellers, and they know how to tell the story of the business very well. But I’ve often seen that they’re not so savvy with the required psychology to interrupt people while being respectful and elegant in creating that communication.

So what do our clients need? They need to see results that show we’ve brought in success, which is a detail we’re pretty proud to display.

‍

HOW HAS H49 EVOLVED TACTICS OVER THE YEARS?

The short answer; we started off using a single marketing tool and evolved our way up from there.

Back in the early days, quite a few years ago, it was just a simple HubSpot tool. We initially kicked off with it, and found it didn’t suit our work at the time. There was no integrity around the stylization at that point with the templates. And the copy and pasting were tragic because there was weird stylization coming through, such as links not being propagated effectively, and you know, we worked on that. We evolved to include another couple of tools. And we found through trial and error that tool A could do it better in one way, but tool B was more effective in a different field. And after some time, we started working with a partner company doing Mail campaigns and LinkedIn, which was excellent business and produced terrific results.

We started finding the current system of work annoying because it became intrinsic to our work progressing, and we didn’t own that essential part of the process, removing all aspects of customization. And then there were slight miscommunications along the way, and the service provider did some things that didn’t tally up, and as a result we lost an important account due to this lapse.

It turns out though, that error was precisely what we needed to push us to build our own system, that provided all the services we knew were required but weren’t readily available.

We started building out our own competency tools and systems, and it all began with the realization that we needed to track who’s been clicking on what. And that was just the start of crafting the beautiful system we utilize to this day. It turned out to become a really extensive system controlling the entire value chain of our content marketing.

‍

SO HOW HAS THE WAY WE WORK CHANGED?

Historically we used to do the content for clients by building up the journey, but the amount of work and pain for the results was so one-sided that we stopped it.

And so we these days we’ve got preferred suppliers who make up more of a partner network. Our product has turned more into a conversation set-up while teaching them how to have said conversations.

We used to do the landing pages and all the messaging settings – the full agency package deal. In the end, we found that this took away from our core business and abilities, which was helping our clients find the people they want and need to know but don’t yet. This hand-holding style was not turning out to be beneficial to any of the parties involved. Truly, nobody can tell our client’s stories better than themselves.

From our side, we’ve taken our process and synthesized it carefully over the years into a beautiful system. A series of systems called Control Tower, which essentially manages the whole journey and gives us incredible feedback and visibility in terms of the various campaigns working and records what they’ve done so far and where the prospect is in the journey and point system.

Over time, we’ve manage to evolve by bringing in a robust competency of psychology into the messaging and utilize how we structure things. We are guiding the marketing for our clients to enhance their storytellers’ abilities.

‍