Sales and marketing planning Archives

Buyer-centric go-to-market strategy (with a little help from Geoffrey Moore)

This article is something of an essay on my current thinking about buyer-centric go-to-market strategy and has been shaped by a recent conversation with strategy luminary Geoffrey Moore. Why buyer-centric go-to-market strategy? And why now? As a high-school drop-out, I was in a customer service role from 1980 and earned my first sales role in 1983. I was lucky enough to start my career in sales at a company with a deep commitment to soft-skills training, and to work for managers committed to nurturing any skills they'd helped me acquire. I did very well. Not through any READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Here’s why the buyer’s journey isn’t dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TtNWA3IjvM Earlier this month, our co-founder Hugh was interviewed on the Pathmonk Presents podcast by host and design/UX expert Lukas Haensch. The Pathmonk podcast is a fast and effective show to sharpen your growth marketing skills. Hugh was interviewed to cast more light on recent statements purporting that the buyer's journey is dead. And as an expert on marketing and sales funnels, it was clear that Hugh could help bring more clarity as he discussed why this statement is categorically untrue. From here, we get an unfiltered view of Hugh's expertise on buyer-centric thinking, the READ MORE ›

By Alice Antonov|Strategy|

A Leaders guide to optimising your technology, people, and supply chains

Over the past few years, the align.me team has been regularly holding events for leaders (both our clients and their guests) to share and collaboratively workshop growth insights. Our objective is to create new networks, refine best practice in B2B marketing and sales, and give a little thank you to those who have entrusted us with referrals over many years. When we brought this group together late in 2020, the global economy was climbing out from the depths to which it had plummeted. And, locally, we were dealing with the aftermath of the early lockdowns. At the READ MORE ›

By Brett Bonser|Strategy|

The missed link between tactics and strategy

We know that if you change your strategy, you need to change your tactics. But the reverse is just as true: If you change your tactics, you might be changing your strategy (or at best, contradicting it) unintentionally. In my November blog, I argued that as we start to emerge from a torrid 2020 into an uncertain 2021-2, we have to be ‘OK’ about a seeming contradiction: that stability was still crucial, but we need to be comfortable pivoting both strategically and tactically. I want now to argue that we have to be very intentional about those READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How the budget, grants, and changing markets will affect business (plus the 4 steps to growth in uncertain times)

In 1966, Robert Kennedy said: "Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty, but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged - will ultimately judge himself - on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort." If Kennedy were alive today, I wonder what words he would use to describe the time we share and the world we live READ MORE ›

By Brett Bonser|Strategy|

The cool winds of change won’t stop blowing any time soon

Well, who'd have picked that? Growth was certain. In January 2020, the International Monitory Fund (IMF) expected global demand to rise from the 2.9% we saw in 2019 to 3.3% in 2021 and 3.4% in 2022. Globalisation was still accepted to be obviously good in most advanced economies. Certainly, the US was heading into a period of uncharacteristic insularity, and the UK was busy extracting itself from Europe. But those shifts were already 'priced in', and there was a strong chance that the US would strike a trade deal with China in early 2020. Fast forward ten READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Marketing on a Budget: What to keep and what to cut

Why is it that marketing is one of the first things to get cut when budgets tighten? The conception amongst B2B business owners is that positioning is a long game and that demand response is low, so taking a hiatus from both forms of marketing won’t make much difference. You could be forgiven for thinking too, in the current climate where online traffic has increased, we're 'over'; webinars again, and content creation is reaching saturation point, that your voice would be drowned out in the digital noise anyway. Sure, customers are reducing spending on 'non-essentials' so minimising READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

6 lessons we learnt running workshops remotely

Virtual workshops can be measurably better than physical workshops if you have the stamina of a bull, can work in three time zones simultaneously, and have the technical dexterity of a 12-year-old. For the rest of us, there’s work to be done to master the craft. For context, we've been building go-to-market plans for B2B companies, large and small, around the world for 20 years. This planning is usually carried out in a workshop setting; we've done about 500 physical workshops (or ‘Funnel Camps’) - usually 2-3 days in duration - in some 30 countries. We’ll typically READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Take your Sales and Marketing Processes to a whole new level

We're going to help streamline your Sales and Marketing process, every step of the way If you’re a B2B sales and marketing consultant, you’ve probably already got some pretty strong insights into what works and what doesn’t. But you likely also know that poor alignment is one of the most common causes of an underperforming sales and marketing engine. Our clients often feel they can solve all of the world’s problems. And getting them to boil it down to just one problem that Sales and Marketing agree to can really help them improve their sales closure rates READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment|