Hugh Macfarlane, Author at align.me

Product marketing strategy – 6 questions and 2 bold actions [video]

What's needed for great product marketing strategy? I'll answer that in eight basic steps. To form your product market strategy, ask six questions: What problem are you trying to solve (most)? Who most has this problem? What will you offer to solve this problem - for that market - better than anyone else? How mature is that market then they buy in this category of product / service? What is your profit strategy? How are you trying to position your brand with that market? I'll explain why, but there's two more steps: Build, price and articulate a READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Sales funnel management – which mistakes hurt the most

Which of these 10 mistakes in sales funnel management could hurt you the most? What can you do about them and how can you improve? [av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lqj_aMB_CW4' format='16-9' width='16' height='9' av_uid='av-4bcezr'] The consensus view is that there are 10 common flaws in sales funnel management: Not segmenting their list of buyer and prospects properly. They often do not end their follow-up communications with potential customers with a ‘call to action’. No balance between lead generation / lead management Centering the sales funnel management on the seller instead of the buyer Involving salesperson too early in READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Velocity|

Good marketing plans for B2B. What makes a plan ‘zing’

[av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/V3y4qX0PICs' format='16-9' width='16' height='9'] What do good marketing plans look like, what's in them, and how do you build them? Good marketing plans are buyer centric. They're all about the problem that the buyer has and that you solve. They're built together. They're complete. They're benchmarked compared to the market. They're compared to actual performance, or the plan versus actual, and they're constantly iterated. To answer the question, we went Googling and we found five articles. We always look for five, so there's four from Google and one from BuzzSumo because we want READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Marketing plan sample and a clever free tool

No marketer worth his or her salt would ever copy a marketing plan from one company and hope that it works for their own. Equally, we'd be fools to not look at a marketing plan sample or three before beginning. My recommendations: Assemble a library of marketing plan samples that you like for whatever reason. Build a sales and marketing plan, not separate plans. Keep it short Use our marketing plan sample at FunnelPlan.com as the basis of your next plan. Let me show you a few marketing plan READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

A basket full of nurtures – our favourite tactics for recycling [VIDEO]

[av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/4lwElgCZYEs' format='16-9' width='16' height='9'] How do you get those recalcitrants - the nervous nellies and those past failures - into your funnel as quickly as possible? A part of the answer is you probably don't want them there quickly. You want them there confidently. You want, for them to want, to really be in your funnel. In this week's show we're going to explore the difference between nurturing and recycling, and some of our favourite tactics for carrying that nurture message.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Marketing Planning – Winning B2B plans in 10 steps

Marketing planning forces you to think about the market, what problem you most want to solve and how you solve that better than the rest. To choose your focus in terms of companies, roles, sales channel, to identify the messages that you need to take to market and how you'll take those messages to that market and communicate all that to the team, that's the why. Let me now show you the how of great B2B marketing planning. The first step of how is to get your team together, at least sales and marketing, but try for READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Business Buyer Behaviour to follow and teach [video]

[av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/oGj4RwdPrvA' format='16-9' width='16' height='9'] Business buyer behaviour seems to be well understood by people in the field yet poorly understood by those who presume to teach them. I’ll explain a framework for understanding business buying behaviour that allows you to teach with, and use in the field. There are three big frames you need to have in your mind. 1: How mature is the market? Are we at a stage in the market's development where we will be selling to: Early adopters or nervous pragmatists? Confident pragmatists or infrastructure buyers? Blind buyers (basically at the READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Sales and Marketing Plan – 8 steps to alignment

[av_video src=’https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yq3545alSdA’ format=’16-9′ width=’16’ height=’9′] What’s the best way to build a Sales and Marketing Plan? I’ve pulled up five articles to help answer that question. Whilst none of them actually got it right individually, collectively they did a great job. Your path to building a Sales and Marketing plan has eight steps. Build your business plan first – your Sales and Marketing plan defines how you will win the business mandated by your business plan Do your homework before planning. Include research, market and competitor analysis, extract sales objectives from revenue targets). READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to create a Marketing Plan for B2B [video]

Imagine a perfect list of the normal elements in a marketing plan, and then: Break acquisition and retention into two plans, or risk blurring the two messages and offers Put the buyer in the centre. Specifically: what problem they have that you solve? how you solve it? who most has it? who else solves it? Separate strategy from tactics Insert velocity in between AS velocity informs your choice of tactics Do it all on one page rather than summarising a too-wordy document This week we're in familiar territory - how to build a marketing plan. We READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Channel Partner [video]

Do you want sell through a channel partner? Or build a program for recruiting and managing multiple channel partners? Let me share with you six steps for finding and managing the perfect channel partner. First, understand that a channel can refer, or sell, or distribute, or implement, your product or service Focus on different types of channels at each stage of market maturity. I'll go into this shortly, but for example, in the early market we want direct channel, that is our own salespeople, whereas later in the maturity of the market, we want to be READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales|

About Hugh Macfarlane