Hugh Macfarlane, Author at align.me

Discover your sales CR in 10 steps, and why lag is death

Ask any Sales Manager, and she will tell you that her team closes 1 in 4 (or 3 or 10, whatever it is, they usually know the number). Ask a marketer what his click through rates on emails are, and again, he will know (maybe 4-5% of successful sends). But ask them how many names they need to add to their 'engine' next month, and how many deals need to close that month, and you'll probably get a "good question" response. Ask them to give you conversion rate by stage in funnel, and they'll blink and READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Velocity|

Seven ways to distribute your content widely

If you followed our tips from last week's Funnel Vision you now have loads of great digital content for your B2B marketing. You've got white papers, videos and webinars from your own great ideas, and great ideas from others who have a view that supports your own. How do you get that great content out into the hands of yourtarget market? And is there a way to leverage others to do some of the work for you? Maybe a key partner or two, your sales people, and your audience itself can help to get the word READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Five steps to leveraging 3rd party content

With the best will in the world, you will never be able to create enough content to meet all of your market's appetite for content. So are asking your audience to read widely. Those other sources include your competition, as well as others who might not be competition, but definitely are not arguing a view of the issues and solutions that helps your case. In today's blog, we'll show you five steps to leveraging 3rd-party content so you can meet more of your audience's demand for content, without having a huge content team, yet still select content READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Six steps to building a content roadmap for years of killer content

Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog! Get your copy of our 2014 Sales and Marketing Alignment Report Building great blog content scares many away from content marketing. They'll say something like "I don't have that much to say about it (the topic)." Others blog regularly, but their topics are chosen randomly and don't build any kind of brand or slowly sway opinion. The purpose of any blog should be to remain positioned with your market, and to subtly concept-condition them. That is, if your blogs do their job, you'll enjoy inbound leads READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to build a marketing message that creates opportunities that only you can win

Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog! We're all somewhat in love with the products and services that we take to market. And we can all tell good stories about why that product or service is fantastic. A couple of challenges to that. Firstly, what if the buyers that you're communicating with aren't really looking for a solution like that just right now? So certainly, to deal with that first issue, certainly, we need to create messages that talk about the challenges and the needs that the buyers have to stimulate that READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Sales and Marketing Alignment Showdown

Sales and Marketing alignment and effectiveness vary wildly between countries. Which country do you think has got this most right? I'll bet you a fine red wine your guess is wrong. Mine certainly was! Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog! We looked for extreme differences between respondents from the five main countries. We didn't delve as deeply here as we did in other areas of our survey, so don't take these findings too seriously. That said, the Canadians were our performance poster child in this report – let them READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales|

B2B Marketing tactics with high closure rates

Want to receive more blogs like this? Subscribe to our twice weekly B2B marketing insights! In B2B marketing, Marketing tactics early in the journey have more effect on closure rates than sales tactics later in the journey (which is why search beats social, blogging beats traditional, and it doesn’t matter what tactics the sales team uses). What affect do various tactics have on closure rates at each stage of the buyer's journey? If you have listened to some of my recent blogs, you know that in 2005 we published the first of our landmark reports into alignment. READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics|

Demand beats Brand (but only to a point)

Get your copy of our 2014 Sales and Marketing Alignment Report In B2B marketing, demand is more important than brand, but only to a point. So, can you have too much demand? If you have listened to some of my recent blogs, you know that in 2005 we published the first of our landmark reports into alignment. What we learned then has shaped much of the debate on the topic of alignment ever since. In 2014 we published the 2013 refresh of the landmark alignment research. What we learned about training, process, automation, structure, tactics, demand generation, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics, Velocity|

5 B2B sales funnel statistics you need to master

We need data to drive our businesses. But more statistics won't necessarily deliver a better business. There are five sales funnel statistics that you simply must know (and manage). In earlier blogs I have argued you need only four statistics to build a back of the envelope model of your funnel. In this brief blog, I'll shift to measurement, and detail the five sales funnel statistics that you need to know, sweat, and improve. In 'How to size your funnel on the back of an envelope' I argued that you need to know just four statistics from your current READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Velocity|

B2B marketing strategies and our loose use of common terms

In last week's blog on a B2B marketing definition, I defined B2B marketing as "the planning, execution and measurement of the strategy and the tactics needed to sell a product or service to a business". So the clear point here - apart from the B2B-ness of the definition - is that planning, execution and measurement are separate, and that strategy and tactics are also separate. If you work at McKinsey and like little boxes you could draw this as a 3 x 2 grid. In this blog I'll get into the actual B2B marketing strategies a little, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Velocity|

About Hugh Macfarlane