Hugh Macfarlane, Author at align.me

How to produce high quality video blog on limited budget

Many people are discouraged to produce their own video blogs at the risk of looking cheap and nasty. However, video production technologies have improved so drastically over the past few years that it no longer requires large monetary or time investments to produce high quality video blogs. No longer can the excuse of poor production capabilities be used as an excuse not to tell your story! Direct from Frankfurt, Germany, Hugh demonstrates first-hand the ease and effectiveness of producing video blogs on a limited budget. He shares with you an array of products, tools, and tips you READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to get buyers interested in your business brand

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what buyers think about you or your brand, if they don't think about you or your brand. It doesn't matter how much better you think you are than your competitors, and it certainly doesn't matter how enthusiastic you are about your own business and products. So the question remains, how DO you get buyers interested in your brand? The answer - you don't. In this blog, Hugh explains why you need to get buyers interested in a conversation, rather than in your brand. Earning the right to help your buyers with their READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to position your brand in the category

We get this wrong all the time. Businesses seek "brand awareness" in order to position their brand prominently in a given category. Unfortunately, while this is all fine and dandy in theory, it is inevitably followed by salespeople complaining about the marketing departments feeble attempt at positioning the qualities of their products and services relative to competitors. Getting your image right sounds like the over-riding priority, but the issue for many businesses is having their brand considered by buyers at all.. In this blog, Hugh helps us think about positioning a little differently, and suggest two approaches and eight tactics we READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy, Tactics|

How to find contact details for your ideal target market

I want leads, I want their names, and I want it now. There's a strategic piece to this and a tactical piece to this. I'm going to show you today some of our favourite tactics for finding the right names and the right buyers. But along the way I am going to argue very strongly that you need to get the strategy right first and then I'll show you how we get the names. Well there's a strategic piece to this; of course, I need to have the right buyers - people who are likely to have READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Tactics, Velocity|

How to choose content to get buyers across your funnel

Do you lead or do you demand? I read a great article from the Content Marketing Institute asking whether we should focus on lead generation or demand generation. I'm going to show you how to answer that question for yourself. In the article, the Content Marketing Institute - a very highly regarded organisation by the way - argue that your content strategy can't deal with both Lead Gen and Demand Gen. Lead Gen is all about names and Demand Gen is all about shaping behaviour. Well, I'd argue content strategy must deal with both. What about positioning, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to assess the health of your Sales funnel

Have you been to the doctor lately, The Funnel doctor? Do you go to keep your funnel healthy? Or do you wait until your funnel is really sick before you see the doctor? Your funnel has some basic indicators of health. But, we often ignore those indicators. Today I am going to show you how to assess the health of your funnel and prioritise what to fix. Let’s start with what gets in the way of us seeing what to fix and knowing what to leave alone. Well, the first problem is random acts of marketing READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to size your funnel on the back of an envelope

“Perfect is the enemy of good.” So said Voltaire, an 18th century French philosopher. If we cycle forward to the 21st century, our problem is we drown in detail. We get so caught up in the statistics of conversion rates and click through rates and sales conversion rates that we lose the clarity of what is actually going on in our funnel. In most businesses you can ask the sales leader what their closure rates are, and they'll know and you can ask marketing what their click through rates are and they'll know that too. However, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

How to set quotas and improve the yield from Sales

What's a normal quota per sales rep? Half a million, 1.5 million per annum? Or is that revenue or gross profit? Is it lifetime value or one time value? Or somehow a one year value? If we want to improve our yield per rep, do we decide better ones? To me, quota setting is all a bit well kind of looking over the shoulder. Isn't there some better way to do it than that? When you look at what a normal sales quota is, and for a start I want you to think about sales value not READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

How to build a business case for content marketing

By now you should know that just because your buyer doesn’t want to progress right now, doesn’t mean they never will. Recycling is mandatory, and in order to make the most of your list and establish a successful funnel, leaked buyers must be carefully nurtured through this process. What many Sales and Marketing people don’t realise is that recycling can actually be the difference between a 2% and 20% share of the market. The reality is: if you aren’t doing it, you should be! In this blog, Hugh explains the four keys to effective recycling. He READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

How to close more deals by closing less often

The harder you work on closing, the less successful you are at it. That has always been true for sales and I am going to show you why it's true for marketing, as well. In a recent blog I showed you why trying to make your funnel flow faster is folly. Apologies for the alliteration, but basically, we can't go faster or slower than the buyer wants us to go and I showed you why that was the case in a recent blog. In this blog, I am going to show you why our focus shouldn't READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

About Hugh Macfarlane