Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

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. They identify a current trend, say a regulatory change, and offer perspective on what the trend means and how companies should react.

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership Peer-to-peer Loyalty Case Study 100

Chris Koch

MAY 15, 2012

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. Besides creating idea networks, B2B companies also have to become publishers. B2B companies that are serious about idea selling need to do the same thing.

FAQ 100

FAQ Custom Publishing B2B Sales Work Management 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 17, 2009

We’re always hearing that marketing and sales should be better aligned (whatever that means), but I see little practical advice about how to do that beyond the usual change management stuff. For a company’s most important (i.e., Marketing assigned her to work with sales to try to win the business of a major toy retailer.

Planning 100

Planning Process Work Management Verticals 100

Chris Koch

JUNE 11, 2010

What happens when you stake the value of your contribution to the company on something that you’ll never do as well as someone else? In my research, I’ve never seen anyone claim that marketing contributes anywhere near 50% of the leads that turn into sales. Why Marketing and Sales Need an SLA (myventurepad.com). Tweet This Post.

Lead Generation 100

Lead Generation Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Sales Qualified Leads 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 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

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

OCTOBER 12, 2010

First, that they must know more about their CIO audiences than ever, and second, they must rethink how they market to target companies. Cloud moves IT outside the company. A report from the Corporate Executive Board entitled The Future of Corporate IT predicts that up to 80% of application spending will move outside the company.

Marketing Management 100

Marketing Management B2B Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency Thought Leadership 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 22, 2010

This is where we as marketers need to provide more content—but not sales content. What is stopping your company from creating an automated lead management process? Tags: Lead Management Marketing Automation Automation B2B marketing Forbes Google ITSMA marketing Sales Social Media. That’s not possible manually.

Lead Management 100

Lead Management Marketing Management Automation 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. Two of the companies I spoke to for my report use analytics to determine which marketing tactics are working and which ones aren’t. Marketing can’t send every lead to sales, nor can it spend too much time qualifying leads. Lead scoring.

Lead Qualification 100

Lead Qualification Marketing Automation Services Lead Scoring Lead Ranking 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. Two of the companies I spoke to for my report use analytics to determine which marketing tactics are working and which ones aren’t. Marketing can’t send every lead to sales, nor can it spend too much time qualifying leads. Lead scoring.

Top of Funnel 100

Top of Funnel Lead Scoring Lead Ranking Marketing Automation Services 100

Chris Koch

DECEMBER 18, 2009

Giving up control of what is being said about your company is difficult for most marketers. The first hurdle for B2B marketers in developing a social media strategy is presenting a case for why their companies should be involved in social media at all. Social media is different. The focus shifts from messages to conversations.

Social Media 100

Social Media Peer-to-peer Social Marketing B2B Marketing 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. 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 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. 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 Network Marketing B2B Sales 100

Chris Koch

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

The guy who manages the platform at Forbes, Lewis Dvorkin, (if he also created the platform he’s a freakin’ genius) recently wrote about its power to disrupt traditional journalism , citing my new employer, SAP, as one of the companies that sometimes get more hits for the stuff it posts than Forbes’ own journalism. My Current Project.

Disintermediation 100

Disintermediation B2B Marketing Marketing Management Paid Search Agency 100

Chris Koch

JANUARY 8, 2010

In the course of hundreds of interviews with companies over my career, the “yes but we’re different” mantra was a familiar refrain. There is only one objective in social media and it is common across all companies—even across the infamous divide between B2B and B2C: Create learning networks. Not in our businesses, though.

Social Media 100

Social Media B2B Thought Leadership Thought Leadership Media 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. Audit content.

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. Audit content.

B2B Thought Leadership 100

B2B Thought Leadership Planning Thought Leadership Paid Search Agency 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

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. It’s tempting to say that because B2B sales are highly dependent on relationships, social media will eventually reign supreme. It’s too early to reach any definitive conclusions on effectiveness.

Social Media 100

Social Media Marketing Strategy Marketing & Strategy B2B Thought Leadership 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. Return on media impact.

Social Media 100

Social Media ROI Lead Ranking RSS 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. We can do it with content.

Social Media 100

Social Media Media Thought Leadership Work Management 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 10, 2009

See what you think of my answers: How did thought leadership initiatives in companies begin? Other companies have adopted pieces of the academic research publishing model for their own thought leadership marketing. Why did companies start focusing on it? The journals have boards made up of top academics in a given field.

Thought Leadership 100

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

Chris Koch

MARCH 5, 2010

One company’s mobile application is tied to a wiki-based sales enablement website that lets salespeople generate actions and updates and get updated information from the road. Will content appear in the application that needs to be acted upon immediately?

Wiki 100

Wiki Urgency Marketing Mobile Marketing Content 100

Chris Koch

APRIL 3, 2014

“A family receptionist would greet them and offer a surprise like a seat upgrade, a free gift, or a chance to meet a player,” says Mark Bradley, founder of The Fan Experience Company , a consultancy that worked with the club. 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

JULY 10, 2009

He offers a great example from a client: “For example, in our campaign with Level 3, a leading fiber-based communications company, we tracked whether prospects downloaded a vbook. PDF-checkers were hot leads, interested in Level 3’s solution, so we quickly passed these leads off to Level 3’s sales team to make the call in time.”.

Web 2.0 100

Web 2.0 B2B Thought Leadership Ideal Customer Profiles Thought Leadership 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. Is there a reason for you to offer whatever help you give to customers through mobile?

Mobile Marketing 100

Mobile Marketing Mobile Advertising Paid Search Agency Wiki 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

There’s little point in doing thought leadership if it’s something that the company can’t follow through on. The ideas should be presented against a backdrop of deep contextual understanding and experience. Can be delivered on. Backed up by proof. What else would you add to this list?

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Best Practices Case Study 100

Chris Koch

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

There’s little point in doing thought leadership if it’s something that the company can’t follow through on. The ideas should be presented against a backdrop of deep contextual understanding and experience. Can be delivered on. Backed up by proof. What else would you add to this list?

Thought Leadership 100

Thought Leadership B2B Thought Leadership Best Practices Case Study 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

Chris Koch

MARCH 12, 2012

Now companies can show off their brands and their wares in demos that are immersive, and repair people can find their way around a ship to a broken part (and a 3-D rendering of how to repair it) without help from anyone on board. Companies have had big data since the first mainframe. It requires thinking through the entire experience.

Enterprise Management 100

Enterprise Management Lock-In Marketing Management Paper 100

Chris Koch

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Marketing and sales need to 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 B2B Thought Leadership Gartner Planning 100

Chris Koch

OCTOBER 1, 2010

Why should B2B companies try to be thought leaders in their industry? traditional media companies. Marketing has more peer relationships with thought leaders inside the company than PR. What are some examples of B2B companies who are successfully using social media and thought leadership? Companies who aren’t?

Thought Leadership 100

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