Chris Koch

AUGUST 13, 2010

The trajectory of Slater’s postings look a lot like the things that customers say about our complex B2B products and services, which have a much longer arc of relationship than B2C. Our customers aren’t going to do a United breaks guitars on us. Longtime customers look especially like Slater. What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Media B2B SME 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 6, 2009

For us, it’s an opportunity to build a closer relationship with the winners and generate some great thought leadership. If you haven’t considered creating an awards program for your target customers, you should. What is the customer need? Increase customer satisfaction. What are the motivating factors?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Budget Programs Business 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

Today, more salespeople are able to have business and strategy discussions with customers and take the time to listen to their needs. Marketing needs a better relationship with IT. Content creates relationships. But it means shaking up the PR department and our relationships with PR agencies. Buyers become approachable.

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 25, 2010

How can we help customers be extroverts? Those numbers look bad, but we have to think of them from our customers’ perspectives. I think for marketers, the issue is less about whether our customers will be more extroverted online—they already are. But how can we create more ways to share safely? What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Media Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

Relationship. This price is one that high-level executives have been calculating for years as providers woo them with memberships in customer councils and invitations to private events. And some companies have disclosure rules that make it hard for their executives to participate on customer advisory boards. Account history.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 29, 2010

Relationship. This price is one that high-level executives have been calculating for years as providers woo them with memberships in customer councils and invitations to private events. And some companies have disclosure rules that make it hard for their executives to participate on customer advisory boards. Account history.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking Lead Scoring B2B Thought Leadership Mobile Advertising 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 2, 2010

That’s what has led to the horrific vocabulary of mindless marketing speak that makes us utter things like “demonstrable value” with straight faces while deluding ourselves that it leaves an impression on customers. Hey, it was the best thing we came up with at the meeting, so why wouldn’t customers like it, too!?). all do that, too.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership B2B Marketing Marketing Budget Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 7, 2009

Posted in Customer Relationships Tagged: B2B, B2B marketing, CIOs, role-based marketing, Segmentation. Tags: Customer Relationships B2B B2B marketing CIOs role-based marketing Segmentation. Can you see how these different archetypes have different needs and interests? Have you tried to segment your CIO audience?

Planning 100

Planning Segmentation Work Management Gartner 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. Social media is another channel—one of many—for making the connection and building the relationship with customers. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase.

Social Media 100

Social Media Marketing Strategy Marketing & Strategy B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 18, 2009

B2B companies have fewer, more complex customer relationships and are often conservative and protective of those relationships. B2B customers tend to be high on the executive ladder and are usually reluctant to discuss their business strategies in public forums. With good reason.

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Social Marketing B2B Marketing 100

Chris Koch

MAY 15, 2012

Please tell me if you think the following does the job: Relationships are what matter in selling. Relationship selling skills matter more than ever. Every B2B company has subject matter experts (SMEs) who are working with customers to solve problems and have deep backgrounds in customers’ processes, industries, and functions.

FAQ 100

FAQ Custom Publishing B2B Sales Work Management 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 5, 2011

It’s yet another channel for reaching customers and the effort required to set up a Facebook page and create RSS feeds of your content to update it is pretty small. Relationships, right? And I just don’t see what’s good about Facebook for creating relationships in B2B. But let’s put this all in context. What do you think?

Facebook 100

Facebook B2B Marketing B2B Thought Leadership B2B 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 29, 2009

According to Razorfish, 44% of respondents said they were looking for exclusive deals or offers, while 24% said they followed the brand because they were customers and 23% said they followed in the hopes of getting interesting or entertaining content. At the heart of the relationship is the expectation of continuing value.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management B2B Marketing B2B Thought Leadership Marketing Management 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 18, 2009

What is a relationship model? The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? I call this the relationship model of social media—it’s the underlying driver that attracts people to use it. Permission model. Viral model.

Social Media 100

Social Media Viral Marketing Tools Media 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 18, 2009

What is a relationship model? The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? The big question to ask is: How are relationships formed through this tool? I call this the relationship model of social media—it’s the underlying driver that attracts people to use it. Permission model. Viral model.

Social Media 100

Social Media Viral Marketing Tools Media 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 10, 2009

Marketers began using thought leadership when they recognized that customers and prospects were growing weary of salespeople trying to sell them products without knowing about the business issues that customers and prospects faced. Early engagement builds credibility and creates a stronger relationship.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Work Management 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 11, 2011

Taglines are the last bastions of a classic, one-way marketing messaging strategy, preserving marketing’s perceived right to tell customers what to think. In B2B marketing, we’ve never been given the right to tell customers what to think, much less the budgets to pound a tagline into their minds. Image via Wikipedia.

Social Marketing 100

Social Marketing Tactics B2B Thought Leadership Enterprise Management 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 11, 2011

Taglines are the last bastions of a classic, one-way marketing messaging strategy, preserving marketing’s perceived right to tell customers what to think. In B2B marketing, we’ve never been given the right to tell customers what to think, much less the budgets to pound a tagline into their minds. Image via Wikipedia.

Social Marketing 100

Social Marketing Tactics B2B Thought Leadership Enterprise Management 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

We need to create a mix of these two types of thought leadership content to maintain strong relationships with their target audiences. Consultant Fred Reichheld didn’t invent the concept of customer loyalty, but by identifying the marker for it, he changed how many companies approach managing customer loyalty.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

We need to create a mix of these two types of thought leadership content to maintain strong relationships with their target audiences. Consultant Fred Reichheld didn’t invent the concept of customer loyalty, but by identifying the marker for it, he changed how many companies approach managing customer loyalty.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 11, 2014

The example I’m about to give focuses on the fact that if you think of sports fans as business customers, they are the most loyal in the world. Sports teams are looking to change this dynamic by embracing metrics that help them quantify the value of loyal customers beyond ticket purchases – and reward those customers for their loyalty.

Loyalty 100

Loyalty Eye-Tracking Mobile Marketing Stats 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

For these marketers, the pool of customers and prospects is small and many of them do not want to engage publicly in social media or are simply ignoring it altogether. For these target executives, peer relationships are everything, but for now anyway, most of those relationships are happening offline.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

For these marketers, the pool of customers and prospects is small and many of them do not want to engage publicly in social media or are simply ignoring it altogether. For these target executives, peer relationships are everything, but for now anyway, most of those relationships are happening offline.

Social Media 100

Social Media Allocation Media Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 7, 2009

Tags: Customer Relationships B2B B2B marketing CIOs role-based marketing Segmentation.

Planning 100

Planning Segmentation Work Management Gartner 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 19, 2010

Take an active role in social media by engaging with customers and influencers in the various forums where conversations are taking place. Monitoring can be used to discover customers and prospects that are most relevant for your offerings by observing the patterns and topics of their conversations. Here they are: Monitor.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

They have genetic tendencies towards extroversion, confidence, hope (some would say denial), relationship building, and the real differentiator: emotional perception—usually expressed as the ability to “read people” (and one’s self). I do think there is a gene for sales. Great salespeople truly are born, not made. Information.

Marketing Automation Services 100

Marketing Automation Services Consulting B2B Sales Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

They have genetic tendencies towards extroversion, confidence, hope (some would say denial), relationship building, and the real differentiator: emotional perception—usually expressed as the ability to “read people” (and one’s self). I do think there is a gene for sales. Great salespeople truly are born, not made. Information.

Marketing Automation Services 100

Marketing Automation Services B2B Sales Consulting Marketing Automation 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 12, 2010

That’s why increasingly, PR is going to become a matter of simply allowing your subject matter experts to be found rather than enlisting armies of PR people to try to force journalists and customers to find those subject matter experts. Push them to get lots of peer and customer recommendations and connections. Get them twittering.

PR 100

PR Peer-to-peer Press Public Relations 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 22, 2011

Social media aren’t even just for facilitating conversation and customer relationships. For CMOs, social media aren’t just for listening to what people are saying about the brand or pushing out messages. Social media are also for innovation, and marketing has a major role to play in making it happen.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Work Management Marketing Management Social Media 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 21, 2011

We have individual salespeople making calls and we have marketers establishing deeper relationships with existing customers through intimate channels like reference programs and customer advisory councils. We have built intimacy into the later stages of the buying process.

Social Media 100

Social Media Budget Programs Paper Stats 100

Chris Koch

MAY 1, 2009

Our research on Account-Based Marketing has revealed a few such tasks: Customer understanding. In B2B, both marketers and salespeople know the value of learning about customers’ business issues and needs. And both know how to gain that understanding. But it makes sense to collaborate. Sharing what works. Marketing can help.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Cross-Selling B2B Sales Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 8, 2011

I speak to many regulated B2B companies who (still) don’t believe their employees can engage in uncontrolled conversations with customers and prospects. The organization views social media as important to relationship building. The company I worked with this week no longer has that problem. Internal social media is thriving.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Paid Search Agency PR 100

Chris Koch

JULY 16, 2010

For example, in the three categories I’ve looked at so far (there are six categories altogether), we have one company using analytics to predict customer buying patterns (and this ain’t diapers or laundry detergent, ladies and gents—we’re talking six-figure jumbles of complex products and services here). What is a waking dream?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

MARCH 26, 2010

And while marketers can create some social media content, they can (and should) rely on their subject matter experts (SMEs) to create most of the stuff that’s going to build trust and relationships with customers. Get ideas from customers. Filter research. These people are your beat. Create an editorial calendar.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership RSS Enterprise Management Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

First, let’s define what PR means from the perspective of the customer (i.e., a journalist) and the customer’s customer (i.e., Your customer hates and avoids you. These aren’t the people you want talking to influencers and customers. And customers never read the releases. As in dead. Don’t do it anymore.

PR 100

PR Press Paid Search Agency Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 5, 2009

Geoff Dodds, Julie Schwartz and I brainstormed the different responses customers can have to a crisis and the steps you can take to address the problems. When a crisis hits, customers make a decision about whether the promise of a brand has been broken and whether the relationship can be repaired. Breaking the promise.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 7, 2011

You have to tweet ideas for solving customers’ problems. At the earliest stage of the buying process, marketing owns the relationship with buyers. A lot of B2C social media marketing can come out of the marketing group because consumers are looking for deals, product information, and peer reviews. Marketers can handle all that stuff.

Social Media 100

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