Evergreen

5 Key Skills of a Marketing Manager

What skills does a B2B Marketing Manager need? Do a bit of research, and you'll discover this question is harder to answer than first thought. Everyone has an opinion - and it seems many of these are different. Cutting these skills down to just five really important traits? Even harder. A lot of the confusion stems from inability to differentiate between "Marketer" and "Marketing Manager". They're different roles and need different skills. Want to know what skills a great (digital) Marketer needs? We've outlined that here. This blog (and video) will focus specifically on the skills READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Skills|

How busy should your sales people be? [video]

How busy should your salespeople be? How many meetings should they have every week? More than they're doing at the moment, and less than you think. Let me explain why. https://www.youtube.com/embed/saucAqP7lcQ What are you overlooking in your calculations? Factor #1 Firstly, I would like to highlight why the number of meetings your sales people should be doing is less than you think. Below is the basic math for this calculation, taking into consideration what is often overlooked. You may live in a different country, whereby your holidays and jurisdictions are different, but the same READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Sales|

Sample go to market strategy for B2B

We want B2B marketing to be a respected management science around the world and we want to play a role in helping it get there. As a part of that, I went looking for samples of go-to-market strategies, but in the top 5 results I didn't find a single go-to-market strategy sample. What I found was loads of theory about the processes that you should use to form your plan. So if no one's willing to share theirs, I'm going to share my Go to Market Strategy. Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/QKcsjmK7vyo Based on the 4000+ plans we've READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Strategy|

Sales funnel management – which mistakes hurt the most

Which of these 10 mistakes in sales funnel management could hurt you the most? What can you do about them and how can you improve? [av_video src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lqj_aMB_CW4' format='16-9' width='16' height='9' av_uid='av-4bcezr'] The consensus view is that there are 10 common flaws in sales funnel management: Not segmenting their list of buyer and prospects properly. They often do not end their follow-up communications with potential customers with a ‘call to action’. No balance between lead generation / lead management Centering the sales funnel management on the seller instead of the buyer Involving salesperson too early in READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Velocity|

Would I lie to you? [Video]

There's not enough honesty in business. I want to tell you everything I know, exactly what I am doing, and why. And I don't need to be prompted to be that transparent. But is that really what you want? There is so much technology available to me as a marketer to track what you are doing and what you are interested in. Not you as a statistic in an average anonymous behaviour indicator in my analytics software, but you as an individual business. This week we're exploring just how much I know about you, and how much of READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen|

Crafting the perfect funnel model of your imperfect funnel

You work really hard for three years and does that leave you with 2% of the market or 20% of the market? How do you know? How much market do you need? We’ll explore how to make a perfect funnel model of your imperfect funnel in this week’s show. Here’s how the basic math works. Start at the bottom, how many sales do you need, work out what your leakage is by each stage and do the backward math. Now it can be that simple, but that invites all sorts of questions about what a good funnel READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Velocity|

How to prepare and run the perfect prospect meeting

Imagine that you’re in a prospect meeting. You’re meeting a client (or prospective client) for the first time ever, and you’ve got seven really cracking questions that you’re going to ask them. You might be using Spin Selling (which teaches us to use troubling questions) or Conceptual Selling (which is somewhat more of a bespoke for each opportunity). Still, whatever approach you’re taking, you’re certainly going into that meeting armed with some great questions that are insightful and penetrative. With a breath, you asked your first and wait – using golden silence. Your prospect considers your question READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Sales|

Hurry up and wait! How to reduce sales cycle length

In B2B marketing, we often fret over the length of the sales cycle - it's always too long. If the economy gets nervous the funnel slows even further. So we're asked something like "how do you make your funnel flow faster?", "how do you reduce the sales cycle?" and "how do you make buyers act faster?" - all variations on a theme. To answer this, we need to understand why and where the funnel is slow. And that means today we need to expore the mind of the buyer, the efficacy of tactics, buying roadblocks, and READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Velocity|

Buyer readiness stages: Making your content work more

The probability of closing a marketing lead is 46% higher for companies that let their marketers change their CRM to use customised stages. This goes up by another 28% if those renamed stages are buyer-readiness stages, not seller-activity stages. But only 24% of marketers make this change. Why? And what are the buyer readiness stages, anyway? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfrLc8gLgZY In our sales and marketing alignment study published a couple of years ago, we found that only 24% of marketers had changed the stage names from the out-of-the-box configuration given by the CRM vendors to buyer readiness stages (the stages READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Evergreen|

How to calculate your sales CR, and why speed kills

In last week's show, we offered 10 steps for calculating sales conversion rate. We also promised to show you why lag is death. In English, why a buyer who has taken longer than normal is unlikely to buy from you at all. So does that mean there is merit in using assertive marketing and sales techniques to speed them up? We all want to speed our funnel up. In a recession like the GFC, sales cycles typically blow out, meaning buyers are taking longer than normal to buy. This could be so - they might genuinely be READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Sales|