Hugh Macfarlane, Author at align.me

Funnel Plan January 2014 release

align.me is please to announce further enhancements to Funnel Plan for January 2014. Side by side simplified and complex Objectives Like we did for Funnel Math in December, you can now see Objectives represented simply and in a mroe detailed fashion side by side. This means you can start with simple objectives (this much revenue from this many deals growing this much annually), then get as granular if you want (change every month, quarter, year of the 4-year window), but can still see the net effect to make sure your fine-tuning doesn't miss the big point. As READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|News|

Aligning your CRM stage names to the Buyers’ Journey

If the probability of closing a marketing lead is 28% higher for companies that let their marketers change their CRM stages, and 88% higher if those new stages are buyer stages not seller stages, why do only 24% of marketers make this change? In this blog, Hugh explains the Buyer's Journey - a phrase he coined in 2003 when he wrote The Leaky Funnel - and makes concrete suggestions about how to name the lead and opportunity stages in your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Evergreen|

How much energy should you spend on branding?

Forget about the 4 Ps you learned about at University. It's simplistic and unhelpful. It's about 30 years old and it's a consumer concept anyway. Just erase it. I've got another very simple paradigm for you. You might say simplistic. I don't think it is but you be the judge. Marketers spend their effort on basically three things: Getting the market ready, getting the channel ready, and getting the two talking in B2B, in complex B2B, which is the world that you live in and I live in. Three things marketers do: We call the first READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to choose the right pain point for your market

Most salespeople understand that we need to understand our customers' pain points. Marketing does too, but not enough. Marketing likes to be the bearer of good news. This makes Marketing nice, comfortable, happy, but unproductive. Your ability to meet a need and solve a problem will be tested, and testimonials and case studies will play a key role. But that's very late in the buyer's journey, and is largely in the hands of your salespeople. Marketing's job should be to find the right kind of buyers, work out which of them are sufficiently troubled to act, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to build a strategy to defeat your competition

Your competitors want to eat your lunch so how do you stop them? Or better yet, how do you eat their lunch? Well let's start with ‘do you even have any competition?’ In the Chasm from Jeffrey Moore, we learned that in the very early stages of any kind of market, you just don't have any competition. You're the only one providing this innovative new solution, nobody else can. In that circumstance you just don't have any competition. So, the first question is do you have competition? The second question is who are your competitors? In READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to choose the best sales channel

So the Head of Sales says that she needs more salespeople and Head of Channels says you need more channels. Who's right and who's wrong? What I'm going to show you today is how to choose the absolute best channel for your chosen target market. You remember Geoffery Moore's Market Maturity Model, in which we learned you need to set your strategy according to what most of your buyers are ready for. Early market I want to talk more about sales channel. Imagine the very early part of the market. The market doesn't yet know how READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to design a buyer-centric B2B solution

Can you for once stop talking about a product and how good it is? Businesses use the term solution when what they really mean is a packaging of a product or service and not a solution at all. Today, I'm going to show you how to build solutions that customers can't resist. Start with the customer Of course, we're going to start by talking about the customer. Think about this, a vendor creates a product or service and they love it, they take it to market and they get a bit of traction with that product READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Why your B2B marketing plan may be worthless

Marketing creates a plan. It's a great marketing plan and any dispassionate viewer would say it's just a beautiful marketing plan, but it's completely and utterly worthless. If Marketing has a great plan but nobody else buys into it, then it's a useless plan. I'm going to show you today, how to get buy in to the plan and the planning process. In our research into alignment, we found that each department, if they own the planning process, they introduce different flaws. If Sales owns it, Marketing owns it, Finance, Operations etc. Each of them introduces READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to choose the right market for your business

If your growth is not what you need it to be, don't blame your product. It might be that you're selling to the wrong market. In B2B marketing, it's easy to blame your solution - it's too expensive, out of date, lack features, isn't competitive. In this video blog sales funnel guru, Hugh Macfarlane explains how to choose the absolute best market for your product or service, and how to get the team to buy into that strategy.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Choose the right problem to trouble the right buyer

Troubling the market about the wrong problem may actually help your competitor more than it helps you. Businesses spend money to fix problems or to avoid problems in the future, therfore buyers want a solution to meet their need and percieved problem. If they believe that they have a problem that a competitor solves better than you do they will go with your competitor. You may try to convince them that they actually need the solution that you offer but that will be very hard work and low yeild. Instead, it is best to change their concept READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales|

About Hugh Macfarlane