Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 6, 2009

The number of entries we receive in each category and the quality of those entries give us a sense of marketers’ shifting priorities from year to year and reveal general strengths and weaknesses of the profession (for example, we’re great at sales enablement and demand generation; we suck at metrics—just not in our blood, it seems).

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Budget Programs Business 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

Could have been bibles or vacuum cleaners, but they didn’t need sales guys for that stuff anymore. Marketers today are in the same position I was with that sales guy in 1995: Wondering how to explain the value and difficulty of creating clear, compelling content about a complex subject. This guy was a salesman. What am I paying for?

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

JULY 24, 2009

Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale. That lets them be more productive in marketing, by focusing effort and budget on the good stuff, and it lets them reduce the time to a sale by giving salespeople better tools to work with. A lead that both sales and marketing agree is ready to be pursued.

Lead Qualification 100

Lead Qualification Marketing Automation Services Lead Scoring Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

JULY 24, 2009

Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale. That lets them be more productive in marketing, by focusing effort and budget on the good stuff, and it lets them reduce the time to a sale by giving salespeople better tools to work with. A lead that both sales and marketing agree is ready to be pursued.

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

The estimates range from one third of the sales force, according to these academics, to as much as two thirds. I do think there is a gene for sales. Companies need to make it worth salespeople’s while to endure the longer sales cycle and lower margins that come with services. Now don’t get me wrong. Information.

Marketing Automation Services 100

Marketing Automation Services B2B Sales Consulting Marketing Automation 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

The estimates range from one third of the sales force, according to these academics, to as much as two thirds. I do think there is a gene for sales. Companies need to make it worth salespeople’s while to endure the longer sales cycle and lower margins that come with services. Now don’t get me wrong. Information.

Marketing Automation Services 100

Marketing Automation Services Consulting B2B Sales Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

You need to build an internal network that focuses on identifying internal thought leaders and building alliances with external academics and customers who can help develop and test ideas. A calendar helps marketing plan out the frequency and focus of its output.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

More importantly, they see smart people from SAP featured in it and that helps everybody. Proving that this kind of engagement helps make customers more likely to consider the company is the next big hurdle that marketers (myself included) have to cross. I’m Watching For… Great ideas to help businesses and IT.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 22, 2010

I wish I could say that social media leads to sales. 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. Did the social media impression really lead to the sale?

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 30, 2010

At ITSMA, we’re seeing four main reasons for doing it: Help. Is there a reason for you to offer whatever help you give to customers through mobile? Could your salespeople benefit from mobile access to a sales enablement application giving them advice in the field for helping customers?

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing Mobile Advertising Paid Search Agency Wiki 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 18, 2009

And while B2C marketers can use social media as a cheap channel for running promotions and driving sales, for B2B, social media does not provide a magic link to sales. B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. But of course, no B2B marketing strategy does that.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

APRIL 3, 2014

The NBA’s stats.NBA.com website, which houses player and team statistics from the league’s 67-year history, has helped double time spent on NBA.com while generating more than 9.5 Sales of family season ticket plans increased from fewer than 500 in 2009 to more than 7,500 in 2012.

Planning 100

Planning Paid Search Agency Work Management Marketing & Strategy 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 6, 2009

It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales. If we now have a system measuring how long it takes marketing to nurture a lead until it is sales ready, we will now also have a measure of whether the nurturing period increases or decreases over time.

Planning 100

Planning B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 6, 2009

It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales. If we now have a system measuring how long it takes marketing to nurture a lead until it is sales ready, we will now also have a measure of whether the nurturing period increases or decreases over time.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Planning Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 10, 2009

Especially in B2B, where the products and solutions are complex and usually need to be adapted/customized in some way, developing the relationship through knowledge helps demonstrate to customers that providers can go beyond the product specification sheet and help them with their business needs. Posted in Uncategorized.

Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

JUNE 5, 2009

They expected Ford to respond immediately to their requests for help. For example, when Oracle was found to have overstated its revenues in 1991, it removed its head of finance and brought in a new CFO, who announced that the company was changing its sales practices. Scope of response.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

JULY 10, 2009

In my experience, IT prospects tend to lie about their titles and their level of interest because they’re afraid that they won’t get the best content or treatment if they admit that they’re trapped on the help desk instead of wielding that big stick of decision-making. But is that lead totally useless? I don’t think so.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2010

We know that in B2B, customers and prospects respond best to ideas, news, research, and how-to—not sales pitches. I can’t help but think that as the different social media channels continue to evolve, customer intimacy is going to take a leap forward. We can do it with content. Social media reduces the incremental cost of content.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

And in Gartner’s defense, sometimes IT can be so complex and confusing that it really does help to have an acronym for talking about things. So I’d like to try, with your help, to nip TLM in the bud before it gains the power to make us all miserable. Marketing is potentially great at the latter, but it needs help with the former.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 28, 2010

But influence in social media isn’t purely a numbers game (though numbers can certainly help). Unless you are selling products, and inexpensive ones at that, it is impossible to track a tweet or a blog post directly to a sale. Sales support is marketing’s primary role. It’s also about the degree of interconnectedness.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 1, 2010

Ideas that educate customers and prospects about important business and technology issues and help them solve those issues—without selling. Another way is by picking themes to help guide your TL development. Smarter Planet helps SMEs at IBM focus. Marketing is helping develop offerings. Please add your thoughts!

Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2012

who is a veteran of corporate networking (he helped develop the first devices for connecting PCs on the corporate network). The problem is that this data sits in silos—and everybody’s silo says something different—sales’ is different from marketing’s, which is different from finance’s. But you can’t do this with one app.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Lock-In Marketing Management Paper 100