Chris Koch

JULY 31, 2009

It’s difficult to parse out the contribution that marketing makes to a sale and it’s even more difficult to get salespeople to spend the time figuring out/checking the box/giving credit in the quest to determine whether marketing played a role in making the sale. So why do we continue to measure marketing separately from sales?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Work Management B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

JULY 31, 2009

It’s difficult to parse out the contribution that marketing makes to a sale and it’s even more difficult to get salespeople to spend the time figuring out/checking the box/giving credit in the quest to determine whether marketing played a role in making the sale. So why do we continue to measure marketing separately from sales?

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Work Management B2B Sales 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. So you have to start with the bigger process picture.

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. So you have to start with the bigger process picture.

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

The era of the sales process beginning with a lead is over. We have to come to terms with the fact that there is a stage of the buying process that comes before the buyers we are pursuing are ready to become leads. But they may be open to building a relationship that could someday lead to a sale. What do you think?

Social Media 100

Social Media Lead Generation B2B Thought Leadership Generation 100

Chris Koch

MAY 15, 2012

As buyers do more searching, they are stretching the buying process earlier and earlier, to the point where they may not have a specific product or service in mind when they search. So you’re saying there’s a part of the buying process that doesn’t involve salespeople? What does online search have to do with selling?

FAQ 100

FAQ Custom Publishing B2B Sales Work Management 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 15, 2010

Could have been bibles or vacuum cleaners, but they didn’t need sales guys for that stuff anymore. Assuming CIOs would be willing to accept the pay cut, and smart and determined as they are, I’m certain that few have the talent for or interest in the publishing process. Except that today many of those sales guys are gone.

Social Media 100

Social Media Work Management Marketing Management Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. If those pieces are missing, thought leadership will be left to marketing, where it will either mutate into thinly veiled sales content or die out altogether. Create a content development process.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. If those pieces are missing, thought leadership will be left to marketing, where it will either mutate into thinly veiled sales content or die out altogether. Create a content development process.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing Paper 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Then came the Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, who offered certain applications and business processes through their own servers. Another CIO archetype, the Transformational Leader CIOs that have been focused on using IT to improve business processes, may disappear as distinct IT leaders. CIOs’ power is rooted in complexity.

Marketing Management 100

Marketing Management B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 6, 2009

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales. But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof). Create an editorial calendar.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Planning Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 6, 2009

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales. But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof). Create an editorial calendar.

Planning 100

Planning B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

Companies that made commodity products would tell me with straight faces that even their financial processes were unique—GAAP be damned—and that they needed to customize their software to fit “our ways of doing things.” Every buyer wants to learn at all stages of the buying process. Create a content development process.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 22, 2010

And that is a huge change in the buying process. ITSMA’s annual survey of IT buyers found that this year, for the first time, a majority of buyers in the US—and 75% when you include other countries—are using social media in the purchasing process—especially the younger ones. Buyers are removing salespeople from the buying process.

Lead Management 100

Lead Management Marketing Management Automation Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 18, 2011

Now, you may think that because I’m using revenue and thought leadership together in the same sentence that I’m going to reveal some secret way to measure the link between the white paper you published last month and the complex solution sale you make six months from now. Alas, no such magic metric exists. We’re focusing on the wrong things.

Work Management 100

Work Management Thought Leadership Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 10, 2012

For customers in this realm, I think utility has long meant access to their peers and to expert advice during the purchasing and post-sales processes. I am concerned about the B2B side of things, though, for complex technology solutions in particular.

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer B2B Social Media Mobile Marketing 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 18, 2009

Social media seems better suited to B2C, with its larger scale and simpler buying process. 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. With good reason. But of course, no B2B marketing strategy does that.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

JULY 10, 2009

In the epiphany stage of the buying process, we should be offering people great information, not turning them off by trying to sleaze information out of them when they’re nowhere near being ready to buy. Sync your content to the stages of the buying process. Stop collecting this data.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 10, 2009

Thought leadership marketing is based on the academic research publishing model, in which academics created journals built around a peer review process. Thus, thought leadership is applicable to any industry with interest in competitive information and process improvement. Why did companies start focusing on it?

Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

APRIL 30, 2010

Could your salespeople benefit from mobile access to a sales enablement application giving them advice in the field for helping customers? Xerox Global Services (XGS) built a mobile application as part of its internal sales tool called Competipedia. By making its software development processes transparent within WikonnecT—e.g.,

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing Mobile Advertising Paid Search Agency Wiki 100

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

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

But the Forbes platform is an important step in helping companies understand that there is a time for selling but there is also a time (generally much earlier in the sales process) when customers and prospects are simply looking to be informed, educated and entertained.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 5, 2009

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. In times of crisis, research with the following groups is especially important: Customers and prospects.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2010

There has been no revolution—no breakthrough in process or practice to raise all boats. We know that in B2B, customers and prospects respond best to ideas, news, research, and how-to—not sales pitches. Customer intimacy has remained the poor stepchild. 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

It is a process for developing and disseminating ideas through various channels that build a relationship with prospects and customers. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Create a content development process.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 28, 2010

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. You need people who know how to create analytical processes and algorithms and all that stuff. Sales support is marketing’s primary role. Social media has ROI. Do you call that ROI?

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 1, 2010

It’s a warm-up for the great dialogues we’ll be having at MarketingProfs’ SocialTech conference later this month in San Jose, where I’ll be speaking about social media and the B2B buying process. Content is replacing salespeople in the earliest stages of the buying process. If you’re in B2B marketing, you gotta go to this thing.

Thought Leadership 100

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