Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

Assuming that you’ve done the necessary research to understand your target audience, that change can be on a personal, organizational, or industry level. Marketing and sales must agree on the alignment of content to the various buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

Assuming that you’ve done the necessary research to understand your target audience, that change can be on a personal, organizational, or industry level. Marketing and sales must agree on the alignment of content to the various buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 22, 2010

In our research we’ve also seen consistently over the past few years that two-thirds of buyers prefer to research their buying options themselves rather than waiting for vendors to contact them. Indeed, research by Forbes and Google found that 80% of C-level executives perform at least three web searches per day.

Lead Management 100

Lead Management Marketing Management Automation Marketing Automation Services 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

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

They don’t want three different calls from three different sales areas of your company. Research by my colleague Rob O’Regan has revealed a few ways to develop cross-channel cooperation: Put someone in charge. Customers are demanding that we deal with them in a unified, cross-channel fashion. How Do We Stop the Infighting?

De-duplication 100

De-duplication Paid Search Agency Companies Wikipedia 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 18, 2009

In a recent post, I offered some hard research data to support the growing importance of social media to B2B. 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. But of course, no B2B marketing strategy does that.

Social Media 100

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

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. I say this even after discounting ITSMA’s recent research showing that marketers don’t see social media as being very effective components in their marketing strategies. Why B2B marketers hate social media (christopherakoch.com).

Social Media 100

Social Media Marketing Strategy Marketing & Strategy B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Research the need. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. The goal of thought leadership is not just to raise awareness of the company; it is to help make a sale.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing Paper 100

Chris Koch

AUGUST 21, 2009

Research the need. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. The goal of thought leadership is not just to raise awareness of the company; it is to help make a sale.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 11, 2010

This was the gist of a very controversial assertion made by a senior marketer from a very well known B2B technology company during dinner at our ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum (download highlights from the ITSMA Marketing Leadership Forum) when he said: “An overemphasis on leads is damaging our relationship with sales.”. We need one, too.

Lead Generation 100

Lead Generation Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Sales Qualified Leads 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

APRIL 3, 2014

Research by my colleague Rob O’Regan has found that hanging onto the kind of global popularity enjoyed by Man U requires focusing on four key channels: Social media. Sales of family season ticket plans increased from fewer than 500 in 2009 to more than 7,500 in 2012. More than 36 million people from the U.S.

Planning 100

Planning Paid Search Agency Work Management Marketing & Strategy 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. Use research to understand the context. But gaining the ability to be predictive requires research.

Paid Search Agency 100

Paid Search Agency Companies Work Management Ethics 100

Chris Koch

JULY 24, 2009

We know from our research that we in marketing don’t do much with analytics—i.e., Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale. One of them told me that it had used these analytics to reduce the average number of interactions needed to schedule a sales appointment in half. Lead scoring.

Lead Qualification 100

Lead Qualification Marketing Automation Services Lead Scoring Lead Ranking 100

Chris Koch

JULY 24, 2009

We know from our research that we in marketing don’t do much with analytics—i.e., Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale. One of them told me that it had used these analytics to reduce the average number of interactions needed to schedule a sales appointment in half. Lead scoring.

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Marketing Automation Services 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. Other companies have adopted pieces of the academic research publishing model for their own thought leadership marketing. Is it only focused in knowledge intensive industries?

Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

Recommend products and services that you haven’t thoroughly researched and you will most likely be out of a job. Primary and secondary research provides the inspiration for some ideas and the objective justification for others. The reason I say this is that another hard-wired part of us is the desire to learn.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 29, 2009

Even if we believe deeply in the power of social media, we all have that gnawing feeling deep in our guts that says that there’s little reason for a busy, intelligent person to want to receive frequent updates about our brands when those brands produce complex services and products with two-year sales cycles. The research confirms it.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management B2B Marketing B2B Thought Leadership Marketing Management 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. Research the reader.

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. Research the reader.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Planning Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency 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

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

Our group’s mandate is to research the business issues that SAP’s customers and prospects care about and write exclusively about those issues—not our products and services. As a practitioner of idea marketing at SAP, that’s music to my ears. The Forbes platform is Exhibit A for marketers who think what we do is a waste of time and money.

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. I really do. But I can’t. Jumping through ROI hoops.

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 30, 2010

According to a recent survey by ABI Research, 28% of respondents said that they access web sites from their phones at least once per day —up 75% in a year. 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

MARCH 12, 2010

We know that in B2B, customers and prospects respond best to ideas, news, research, and how-to—not sales pitches. I think so because social media is starting to give us a way to scale intimacy. We can do it with content. Social media reduces the incremental cost of content. Think of social media management as filling in the gaps.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

We need to do research. Here are the five important pieces: Research the need for ideas. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for.

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. CEOs don’t care about individual tactics; they want to know whether marketing in general reduces the time to revenue and improves the productivity of sales. Sales support is marketing’s primary role.

Planning 100

Planning Work Management Paid Search Agency B2B Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 1, 2010

Research them! ITSMA research shows that nothing comes close to peer networking and small-scale events. You will never track it through to a sale and if you do, you’ll never be able to separate it from other factors affecting the sale. How can marketers integrate thought leadership with traditional marketing tactics?

Thought Leadership 100

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