Hugh Macfarlane, Author at align.me

Buyer-centric go-to-market strategy (with a little help from Geoffrey Moore)

This article is something of an essay on my current thinking about buyer-centric go-to-market strategy and has been shaped by a recent conversation with strategy luminary Geoffrey Moore. Why buyer-centric go-to-market strategy? And why now? As a high-school drop-out, I was in a customer service role from 1980 and earned my first sales role in 1983. I was lucky enough to start my career in sales at a company with a deep commitment to soft-skills training, and to work for managers committed to nurturing any skills they'd helped me acquire. I did very well. Not through any READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Saying “no” to opportunities can get you 13% more sales

I want to talk to the topic of sales effectiveness and, in particular, argue why walking away from a bad deal early is a good idea. I could come at this conversation from multiple angles. I could explain why employee satisfaction would be higher if we walked away from bad deals. I could talk about why your market reputation is enhanced by walking away from bad deals. I could mount countless other legitimate arguments. But on this occasion, I want to mount my argument by looking only at the numbers - in particular, resource numbers. I'm going READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Being authentically useful with your content marketing

As a company, we're pretty successful sales and marketing specialists (if I do say so myself). As part of our everyday offering we: plan the sales and marketing for many large and small companies globally contribute to a part of the marketing for a handful of large companies - also globally do (almost all of) the marketing for around 50 smaller Australian businesses. But at the same time, our own marketing often suffers. We don't have enough time, worry that we don't have enough worthy ideas, and sometimes struggle with a consistent brand voice. We work super READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Why getting sh*t done doesn’t have to mean busting your chops

More than ever, we need to get a lot done. We’re facing higher output expectations, but most of us don’t have endless resources or huge budgets; we also don’t have a workforce willing to work 60 hours a week. None of these are necessarily bad or wrong, but are they perhaps incompatible? Can we really get more done with less and without burning our staff? I had occasion recently to reflect on this imbalance. I’ve tried to clarify my own thinking rather than ‘cheat’ by ripping pages out of Covey’s 7 Habits (which was the Christmas reading READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

The missed link between tactics and strategy

We know that if you change your strategy, you need to change your tactics. But the reverse is just as true: If you change your tactics, you might be changing your strategy (or at best, contradicting it) unintentionally. In my November blog, I argued that as we start to emerge from a torrid 2020 into an uncertain 2021-2, we have to be ‘OK’ about a seeming contradiction: that stability was still crucial, but we need to be comfortable pivoting both strategically and tactically. I want now to argue that we have to be very intentional about those READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

The cool winds of change won’t stop blowing any time soon

Well, who'd have picked that? Growth was certain. In January 2020, the International Monitory Fund (IMF) expected global demand to rise from the 2.9% we saw in 2019 to 3.3% in 2021 and 3.4% in 2022. Globalisation was still accepted to be obviously good in most advanced economies. Certainly, the US was heading into a period of uncharacteristic insularity, and the UK was busy extracting itself from Europe. But those shifts were already 'priced in', and there was a strong chance that the US would strike a trade deal with China in early 2020. Fast forward ten READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Building a B2B marketing plan for COVID normal

The shape of 'COVID normal' for your business will undoubtedly continue to change through the year ahead and will also depend very much on the countries in which you market. But what's abundantly clear is that your B2B marketing plan needs to change for 2021 – and you should be planning for the change now; preparing for it over the next few months. What do we know will change? Some of your market has already disappeared or will over the next year. While we can expect some recoveries in 2021, the OECD expects 2020 to be ugly. READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Marketing on a Budget: What to keep and what to cut

Why is it that marketing is one of the first things to get cut when budgets tighten? The conception amongst B2B business owners is that positioning is a long game and that demand response is low, so taking a hiatus from both forms of marketing won’t make much difference. You could be forgiven for thinking too, in the current climate where online traffic has increased, we're 'over'; webinars again, and content creation is reaching saturation point, that your voice would be drowned out in the digital noise anyway. Sure, customers are reducing spending on 'non-essentials' so minimising READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

6 lessons we learnt running workshops remotely

Virtual workshops can be measurably better than physical workshops if you have the stamina of a bull, can work in three time zones simultaneously, and have the technical dexterity of a 12-year-old. For the rest of us, there’s work to be done to master the craft. For context, we've been building go-to-market plans for B2B companies, large and small, around the world for 20 years. This planning is usually carried out in a workshop setting; we've done about 500 physical workshops (or ‘Funnel Camps’) - usually 2-3 days in duration - in some 30 countries. We’ll typically READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Double down, go halves, pivot, or panic? Marketing during a crisis

In March, our overriding priority was to get our teams settled in their various homes, and to act with haste. We had to, right? Not panicking, but acting fast. In April, many of us tried to reset to some sort of sane mode of working. In May, we hung on to the systems and processes of that semi-sanity, waiting for the peak. And in June and July, we realised that this is going to be a long, slow dance and the idea of a ‘peak’ was a fancy. We looked for bigger, better ideas. What's Marketing's role READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Strategy|

About Hugh Macfarlane