Hugh Macfarlane, Author at align.me

A B2B Marketing Qualified Lead is whatever Sales wants it to be

There is no 'correct' definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). For your business, negotiation and alignment between Sales and Marketing is key. Together, you need to negotiate how qualified the leads need to be before Marketing hands the leads over to Sales. In other words, at what stage sales takes over. All the way through the funnel, there's a trade-off between quantity and quality. In this video, Hugh gives some key points on what an MQL really is and how to frame this negotiation.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

B2B marketing strategies for choosing between branding or demand generation

How much energy should you spend on positioning versus demand versus channel? 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 READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to make your funnel flow faster

Yes, you can speed up the time it takes for a potential buyer to make the purchase of your product or service. But not by skipping steps along the buyer's journey. You do it by looking closely at the time they take to move through each step - the lag - and helping them to progress faster through one or two of these stages. An analysis of this process - or journey - will result in knowledge of when a buyer is gone and should be "leaked" and when they are in need of another tactic READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Velocity|

How to find a needle in the haystack

Mature marketplaces provide clear targets for new growth - the firm demographics have already been mapped. But how can you segment or target for growth in the virgin territories where little is known of who's buying what and why? In "early adopter" markets, the number of potential buyers is initially small, and finding a business with the right profile is like a combination of "blind man's bluff" and finding a needle in the haystack. That is, you don't yet know what you're looking for, and even when you do they are hard to find. The surest way READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to choose measures you can act on

If you don't know what's working, how do you know what to change? So measure inputs (not outputs), measure buyer progression, and - don't measure what you're not prepared to change (or can't). To most ears, "Measuring Sales and Marketing effectiveness" sounds like a low priority. It may be on your B or C list, even on a good day. If you're feeling less generous, you might even call it an academic indulgence and not consider it a priority at all. But if you don't know what's working, how can you know what to change? If you READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Velocity|

How to size for sales success – know thy funnel

Most sales teams have an inherent awareness of how many customers they need to see in order to make a sale - in other words, the key ratios that affect their business. One business will tell you confidently that they win one sale from every four proposals. Another will say that it takes around three phone calls just to get a meeting. But how many drill back into their statistics to determine the total number of activity steps needed to achieve a result? And how many in this age of quarterly reports bother to work out the READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Velocity|

B2B lead generation: Why Sales and Marketing alignment produces better leads

The sales department wants the marketing department to provide more leads. But they want them to be "better qualified". The real question is, "qualified according to whom?" We all know the cliché that a suspect is not a prospect. If someone fills out a form at a trade show it doesn't mean they are interested in your products or services - just that they visited your stand or gave their contact details in order to pick up a trinket for the office. The big issue is that Sales and Marketing are not looking in the same direction. READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

How to generate B2B marketing content

What is the best way to gather and generate new content for white papers, blogs, videos, presentations or other marketing collateral and tactics? We got inside the heads of two leading content generators – Hugh Macfarlane, Founder and CEO of align.me and author of The Leaky Funnel and Adam Posner, Founder and CEO of Directivity – to find out how they come up with new, exciting, and relevant content. If you’ve ever attempted to start a blog, prepare collateral, or build a presentation, you’d know that generating content is not always easy. There are obstacles and READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Why you need to find your market’s pain point

If a prospect has a need, they may be willing to spend time with you. But that’s probably all they’ll really end up spending. On the other hand, if they have a problem – that is; too much of a bad thing or too little of a good thing – they may then be willing to actually spend money… and this is the kind of prospect you want to be spending your time on. A problem is a bad thing for the prospect, but an opportunity for you – a gap, deficiency or impediment, even a fear READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to align your B2B marketing to your buyers’ journey

A common lament of marketing teams is that they often find themselves acting as a service desk to the sales team. In B2B marketing, it is a consistent dilemma. Marketers are often asked to run an event, advertise a product or produce giveaways to support a sales campaign. There may be merit in trying to re-educate sales, but marketing is better advised to align itself to the buyers' journey rather than arguing with the sellers. Specifically, marketing should own the overall plan and contribute to its execution selectively. Marketing can take the lead in mapping out the READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment|

About Hugh Macfarlane