Skills

Utilise your Digital Marketing as a competitive edge

A study by Deloitte’s Access Group highlighted that only 16% of Australian SME’s had fully grasped the power of digital marketing techniques. These forward-thinking business leaders were enjoying significant competitive advantage and revenue growth – upwards of 20% more annually than their less digitally enabled competitors. So if you are in the 16% of those enjoying these great returns – well done! But what about the rest of you? There is a staggering 1.6 million Australian SME’s who just can’t grasp it. You can bemoan the good old days, or try to bypass this digital age, but one READ MORE ›

By Brett Bonser|Skills|

How to build a Sales Funnel Spreadsheet [video]

Ever wondered how to build a sales funnel spreadsheet? This blog entails a few simple tips about how to build one, and some clever insights into your funnel. https://www.youtube.com/embed/MGO7R53Eqt0 In a nut shell, don’t use a spreadsheet. If you really must however, be sure to follow five important steps. Set up columns to track basic opportunity data including close date and amount Create a stacked bar chart with clever formatting including a hidden field 'spacer' to center your bars Add columns for each stage in the buyer's journey, including 'leaked' formatted for date to calculate lag by READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Skills|

Go to Market Strategy Example [video]

A go-to market plan needs to articulate the solution that's on offer, its price, what's unique about that solution and how you position that difference, who your target, the channels you will use to reach the market, and the tactics you will use to take that offer to the market through that channel. As I've been doing recently, I went looking for five sources of a great go to market strategy example. Truth, I only found three good ones, so after I've given you the conclusions, I'll give you two more align.me go-to market strategy examples. READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Skills, Strategy, Velocity|

Sales and marketing blogs [video]

Indexes of thousands marketing blogs are great for SEO. Make really sticky content. Today we're going to review five of those indexes and explain how, and why, the sites have created those indexes of thousands of marketing blogs. Let's start with I've concluded and then I'll explain why I've concluded that. Number one: find the best blogs that you personally enjoy reading. There's no point creating content that you're not personally interested in. That's inauthentic. Secondly, though edit that list with your audience in mind. Third, summarize the content and link fully. Don't steal copy. You're just READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Skills, Strategy, Tactics|

Content marketing training [Video]

Journalism isn't dead, but I wouldn't want my kids studying it at university. Consumers and brands are producing more content than journalists. Or you could say they're journaling more than journalists. But is your content any good? And how do you get good at writing great content? Today we're going to look at content marketing training. Today I'm going to show you over a hundred content marketing training options. We'll view them briefly, but let me give you first a framework for choosing what your content is supposed to be doing before you get good at READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Skills, Tactics|

How to do a webinar in 8 steps [video]

Webinars remain a super-popular tool for marketers to use, but very few low-budget, or I should say low-resource, marketers are using them well or often. I want to give you a practical guide on how to do a webinar. There's loads of content on why webinars are a good idea. I want to get very practical and talk about how to do a webinar, and so I began by Googling the very expression that I'm presuming to write about, "how to do a webinar". Here's what we found. There were four articles that I started with. I'm READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Skills|

5 key skills of a marketing manager [video]

Today I want to talk about the five key skills of a marketing manager. Now, if you're an individual contributor, that is you're just one person and you're working for the marketing manager, I'm really making this video for your boss. Also, if it's just one of you, again this is not really for you. I want to make really clear, I want to talk about the skills of the manager of marketing needs. Hi, we have met, I'm Hugh Macfarlane and I'm super passionate about B2B marketing and in particular I want to make B2B marketing READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Skills|

B2B Sales: You need to focus on the workarounds that aren’t working

In most “solution selling” methodologies, B2B sales people are encouraged to uncover their prospect’s issues, rather than leading with their products. But there’s a potential problem: any organisation, any stakeholder, always has many more issues that they would like to address than they could possibly have the have money, time, or inclination to deal with. That’s why so many issues stimulate so many apparently positive sales conversations that end up going absolutely nowhere. The prospect is interested enough to talk, but not motivated enough to act... One of the ways of dealing with this, of course, is READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Evergreen, Skills|

Sales and Marketing training lifts performance where you’d least expect it

Training your marketers does little to help them generate leads that are more 'acceptable' to Sales, nor does increasing the training of your salespeople improve their ability to close. If this is the case, why bother investing in training at all? In this week's blog, Hugh explains why investing heavily in training for Sales and Marketing does deliver benefits, but not where you'd expect. Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog!

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Skills|

20 Best Practices all B2B Sales & Marketing Organisations Should Adopt

What separates the top-performing B2B sales and marketing organisations from their also-ran competitors? What are the winning behaviours that enable them to create repeatable, scalable and predictable businesses? After observing many of these best-in-class organisations in action, I’d like to suggest 20 best practices that all B2B focused companies ought to think about adopting… These best practices appear to be particularly relevant to B2B organisations with complex, high-value products or services that involve extended sales cycles, and where uncovering better qualified opportunities, shortening sales cycles and increasing sales win rates can have a dramatic impact on revenues, READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Sales, Skills|