Hugh Macfarlane

In his last real job, Hugh was responsible for the Internet business of Digital Equipment Corporation in the South Pacific. At Digital, Hugh's team of sales/marketing, technical support and consulting personnel helped Digital's customers and partners capitalise on the potential of the Internet and its commercial capabilities. In doing so, Hugh grew Digital's annual revenues from this segment from $2 million to $35 million over 18 months.
As founder and managing partner of MathMarketing, the Australian sales and marketing effectiveness company that advises AAPT, Aviva, AXA, Citibank, Colonial, Compaq, Computer Associates, GE, IBM, Optus, Oracle, Perpetual, Telstra, Zurich and others, Hugh has now led over 150 marketing strategy projects for businesses pursuing growth.

He has learned from and provided advice to some extraordinary individuals over the last 20 years. They have been investors, Boards, CEOs, Directors of Sales or Marketing, and other senior managers of global and local corporations leading in their fields of computer hardware and software, telecommunications, and financial services. Their businesses market products and services with sales cycles ranging from short and highly transactional, to long, complex and strategic.

Hugh holds a Bachelor of Business Marketing Degree, attained Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM) status and Fellowship of the Australian Marketing Institute. He is an executive mentor with Indicum and a member of the American Marketing Institute.

Author & speaker
The Leaky Funnel is the marketing strategy book authored by Hugh Macfarlane. This business novel is packed with fresh, key arguments for a major change in the way businesses organise and manage their combined Sales and Marketing resources.
The central argument, that a new framework is needed for the aggregate Sales and Marketing force, is based on Hugh's 20 years-plus experience, and has now been well proven in many leading businesses as a means of accelerating the effectiveness of their endeavours to earn more customers.

Hugh Macfarlane is an experienced and entertaining public speaker on a range of sales and marketing topics, from ecommerce and business-to-business marketing. His favourite topic and passion is the sales funnel - Macfarlane is "the funnel guy." He has delivered over 50 conference addresses, seminars, and keynote presentations on these topics to thousands of people since 1996, normally voted #1 or #2 speaker at multi-speaker events.

His message to business is simple: Earn more customers by aligning sales & marketing to the way businesses buy.

Current Topics
"Getting Sales and Marketing aligned" - Aligning Sales and Marketing has been identified by the American Marketing Association, and global marketing leaders like Professor Don Schultz as the number one issue for businesses today. Why? Because the two disciplines have evolved separately, don't integrate, contradict each other, confuse the market, and waste money. Marketers are generally held in low esteem by Sales people, who in turn are seen as sloppy and unprofessional by Marketers. In the best-run companies, these two functions work tightly together to find, condition and earn new customers.

"The buyer's journey: Understanding how businesses buy" - Most tactics used by Sales and Marketing are low yield for a staggeringly simple reason: They totally ignore the buyer's journey, focusing instead on the sales process. Tactics like advertising and sales cold calls are like jumping out from behind a rock and saying, "I'm ready to sell, are you ready to buy?" Businesses need instead to recognise how businesses buy, and to coax them from one stage in that process to the next.

"Measuring sales and marketing effectiveness" - In an environment of constrained expenditure, businesses only invest in initiatives with a near-guaranteed return. Except when it comes to