Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

The price is the forms we make people fill out to download white papers or sign up for events. If you download two white papers a week for a month, you should expect a call from a salesperson. And some companies have disclosure rules that make it hard for their executives to participate on customer advisory boards.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 22, 2010

It’s too difficult to track that relationship and know when someone is ready to do more than just read your white papers unless you have a process for lead management and can automate it. What is stopping your company from creating an automated lead management process? That’s not possible manually. What do you think?

Lead Management 100

Lead Management Marketing Management Automation Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. What types of thought leadership vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) Here are my thoughts on the big pieces.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing Paper 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. What types of thought leadership vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) Here are my thoughts on the big pieces.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 19, 2010

First, here’s what we do as part of monitoring: Track conversations about your company. You need to know what’s being said about your company online. Trouble is, we’re finding in our research that most companies stop here. Pretty obvious, right? There’s much more that we should and could be doing with monitoring.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Media 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

But I think the nature of B2B makes it harder for companies and customers to have a satisfying relationship that’s entirely virtual than it is for B2C companies. It’s tempting to say that because B2B sales are highly dependent on relationships, social media will eventually reign supreme.

Social Media 100

Social Media Marketing Strategy Marketing & Strategy B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2010

I can’t name the specific companies because we’re still in the midst of the judging process, but it doesn’t really matter because the stuff is so innovative. Another company is using automated algorithms to seek out and deliver targeted customer and competitive intelligence to salespeople—on a daily basis!

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2010

The theory is that every company competes in three disciplines: Customer intimacy. These are companies that go out of their way to build close customer relationships. Customers rely on these companies to deliver reliability and quality at a low price. Operational excellence. Product leadership.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 22, 2010

We need to believe that more engagement between our companies and the people we want to reach is a good thing that ultimately leads to sales—but down a long, narrow, winding path with a few jumps between cliffs thrown in there. Social media gives us ways to build relationships with customers that white papers or newsletters can’t.

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

But a white paper isn’t just content; it is data. That requires a culture shift in the company and new skills for marketers and employees. Employees, subject matter experts and marketers all need to represent the company, but in a way that is transparent, constructive, and cordial. It can be tracked and measured.

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Idea marketing is not purely about the nature of the content (Gartner’s definition sounds like it intends the output to be white paper to me). What types of vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) It is designed to move them through the marketing funnel more quickly. Create a calendar.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2012

For about 20 years (sad to say I was a journalist for even longer than that) it seemed that every white paper that crossed my desk began with some variant of this sentence: “As the world becomes more global and interconnected, businesses need a way to see through the complexity. But you can’t do this with one app.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Lock-In Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Companies have a long and pointless history of resisting new forms of communication. From Facebook to email to putting telephones on employees’ desks (remember, the telephone started as a “consumer” communication technology, too), companies think that every new wave is going to lead to gajillions in lost productivity.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100