About Hugh Macfarlane

Hugh Macfarlane is founder and CEO of align.me. He's the author of 'The Leaky Funnel', and hundreds of video blogs, papers and ebooks and a handful of research reports on all things alignment.

How to beat the competition [video]

Today we're going to have a look at how to beat the competition, and I'm going to show you why the best way to beat the competition is to completely ignore them and focus instead on your customer and the problems that they face. How to beat the competition? Here are my recommended six steps: 1- Understand your customers before worrying about understanding your competitors. 2- Be blisteringly clear about what problem you're solving for those customers, the market. 3- Be just as clear about who that problem most affects. You should really only be targeting READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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Go to Market Strategy Example [video]

A go-to market plan needs to articulate the solution that's on offer, its price, what's unique about that solution and how you position that difference, who your target, the channels you will use to reach the market, and the tactics you will use to take that offer to the market through that channel. As I've been doing recently, I went looking for five sources of a great go to market strategy example. Truth, I only found three good ones, so after I've given you the conclusions, I'll give you two more align.me go-to market strategy examples. READ MORE ›

By |Sales, Skills, Strategy, Velocity|
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B2B marketing terminology and definitions – the best 50 [reference list]

When George Bernard Shaw said that England and America were "two countries divided by a common language", he might as well have been talking about Marketing and Sales. In fact, he might have been talking just about different marketers themselves as a profession. Marketers are shocking for using the same phrase to mean very different things. A personal favourite is the confusion between branding and positioning. More on that later. We're going to have a go this week at building the definitive source of B2B marketing terminology and definitions. We'll offer up some phrases, READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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Lead Generating Funnel [video]

Lead generating funnel is all about creating leads out of early, nascent, vague interests. For those who argue the funnel is dead, they need to read these five excellent articles I'm going to walk you through today. A lead generating funnel is all about nurturing prospects and creating leads. Here is the essence of what five B2B authors argue about lead generating funnel, with which I totally agree. Number one, content is all about progressing the buyer, not selling, or at least not yet. Test, measure and refine your tactics. Don't be afraid to build many READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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Landing page experiment and 5 big lessons for B2B

Have you ever run an AB test or an experiment? We do them all the time, but in B2B marketing there’s a few little traps that can catch you because the data can tell you lies and you’ll form the wrong conclusions. I’ll show you how to avoid those wrong conclusions and to use tests to optimize all of your marketing. The first thing I want to address is why we do these tests and why we take them through to the conclusion of trying to be statistically significant.  First, we can get really big improvements READ MORE ›

By |Tactics|
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Marketing plan template [video]

Hi, this week we're having a look at marketing plan template. I'll show you five marketing plan template sources we’ve found.  I'll analyse them, synthesize them, draw a few conclusions, offer our own conclusions, and then give you a couple of free sources of marketing plan template. Let me start with the conclusions. You can obviously get this from the end, but let me give the conclusions right now, and then I'll build up a case for these. A great B2B marketing plan template includes: objectives, the market problem, your target market, solution, channel, your velocity, READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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What to tell your clients when you’ve made a mistake

Hello. We all make mistakes. Hopefully not too often, but mistakes do happen. How do we decide what to tell your clients when you have made a mistake? That's what I wanted to explore today. I had a really high value conversation with a client just this morning, and I want to share with you lessons that he and I learned from that conversation. Tell the affected clients everything. Tell them the value that you hold as a business, and what that means to them as a client. That you did make a mistake, what you're READ MORE ›

By |Tactics|
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How to find contact details in 6 steps [video]

</div> How to find contact details when you can't get them from a list broker? Today I'm going to review 5 blogs with really practical tips, and then I'll trump the lot of them with a way better approach. This is how to find contact details. It's great. For B2B, we often begin with a list you can buy from a list broker. Frankly, this is almost always a good idea if it's complete enough, up to date enough, and narrow enough. The problem is that we often want a pretty niche list like people who READ MORE ›

By |Tactics|
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Difference between B2C and B2B marketing [video]

Hi. B2B Marketing certainly has a lot of similarities with B2C Marketing, but it's also different in some really fundamental ways. Today I want to distil those differences down to 4 big differences, and then give you 2 "so what?" insights into the differences between B2B Marketing and B2C Marketing. The first point is about motivation; B2B marketers are trying to fix, accomplish, or avoid something. It's not about wants, it's about needs. More particularly, it's about the problem that gives rise to the need. What are they trying to fix, or avoid, in order to READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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