Why salespeople should sell ideas: an FAQ
May 15, 2012 by Chris Koch · 2 Comments
We all know the increasing importance of ideas in B2B marketing. But idea marketing doesn't start and stop with marketers. For the program to be successful, those ideas must find their way into the hands of salespeople. And I'm not sure that salespeople share the same passion for ideas as we do. I think they need to be convinced. Please tell me if you think the following does the job: Relationships are what matter in selling. Why should I start selling ideas instead? Relationship selling … Read More
Why salespeople should sell ideas: an FAQ
May 15, 2012 by Chris Koch · 2 Comments
We all know the increasing importance of ideas in B2B marketing. But idea marketing doesn't start and stop with marketers. For the program to be successful, those ideas must find their way into the hands of salespeople. And I'm not sure that salespeople share the same passion for ideas as we do. I think they need to be convinced. Please tell me if you think the following does the job: Relationships are what matter in selling. Why should I start selling ideas instead? Relationship selling … Read More
Is “social media campaign” an oxymoron?
December 2, 2011 by Chris Koch · 5 Comments
If you had asked me a few years ago whether the traditional marketing campaign had any place in social media I would have scoffed. Just more evidence of marketing’s old-fashioned, ADHD-driven, love-’em-and-leave-’em approach. I would have had only slightly less disdain for the audience for these campaigns. Fly-by-night opportunists hoping to win your Facebook sweepstakes. Win or lose, after the contest is over, they’d ditch you as quickly as a toddler dispatching a fistful of … Read More
Should we stop marketing to the CIO?
October 12, 2010 by Chris Koch · 7 Comments
Technology marketers have spent the last 25 years trying to get and keep the attention of the people with their hands on the technology tiller inside multi-billion dollar organizations, CIOs. And for nearly that long, pundits have been predicting that the CIO role would become extinct, and that the strategic decisions about technology would be subsumed into the business. Those pundits have always been wrong. But this time, they may finally be right—at least about certain types of CIOs. … Read More
6 ideas for sifting the mobility chaos
March 12, 2012 by Chris Koch · Leave a Comment
For about 20 years (sad to say I was a journalist for even longer than that) it seemed that every white paper that crossed my desk began with some variant of this sentence: "As the world becomes more global and interconnected, businesses need a way to see through the complexity. [Hire us.]" But now the ubiquitous opening sentence seems to be: "Businesses are awash [drowned, buried, you get the idea] in data. In this increasingly global and interconnected world [hey, we can't deny the past, … Read More
The last of the anti-social marketing tactics
November 11, 2011 by Chris Koch · 11 Comments
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 truth, customers have never listened, except in a few cases of companies with the budget muscle to pound the tagline into customers’ heads over and over again though mass marketing and TV. 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 … Read More
Idea Marketing
Why salespeople should sell ideas: an FAQ
We all know the increasing importance of ideas in B2B marketing. But idea marketing doesn’t start and stop with marketers. For the program to be successful, those ideas must find their way into the hands of salespeople. And I’m not sure that salespeople share the same passion for ideas as we do. I think they [...]
How to write blog posts from a white paper
If you’re a corporate marketer like me, no doubt you’ve been put in the situation I faced this week: you have a white paper that an external content person created for the company and now you need to make that content social. It’s an important part of social media management. Let’s face it, there are [...]
Four reasons to hate thought leadership
You may have noticed that I’ve changed the name of my blog. I’ve changed it for two reasons. First, because I’ve left ITSMA and joined SAP, where I will focus on marketing the good ideas of the many subject matter experts there. I’m going to share my experiences in helping to build an engine for [...]
Social Media
Is “social media campaign” an oxymoron?
If you had asked me a few years ago whether the traditional marketing campaign had any place in social media I would have scoffed. Just more evidence of marketing’s old-fashioned, ADHD-driven, love-’em-and-leave-’em approach. I would have had only slightly less disdain for the audience for these campaigns. Fly-by-night opportunists hoping to win your Facebook sweepstakes. [...]
Does integrity make you a social media loser?
In three plus years of tweeting, I’ve picked up what I perceive to be the general etiquette for engaging on Twitter. I’ve also done research asking B2B marketers how they engage and how they educate their employees and SMEs to engage. I’ve rolled all that up into an approach that I doubt constantly. I don’t [...]
7 reasons why social media success has nothing to do with social media
This week I was asked to speak on a panel about social media to a group of B2B marketers in financial services. It was great getting the perspective of marketers outside of technology. But they call it “financial services” for a reason: They have all of the same struggles as technology services companies—with the added [...]
Customer Relationships
Should we stop marketing to the CIO?
Technology marketers have spent the last 25 years trying to get and keep the attention of the people with their hands on the technology tiller inside multi-billion dollar organizations, CIOs. And for nearly that long, pundits have been predicting that the CIO role would become extinct, and that the strategic decisions about technology would be [...]
B2B social media lessons from Steven Slater and Mark Hurd
At first glance, Steven Slater seems like a total crackpot—cursing out a passenger on the intercom and snagging a few beers on the way to a fun-house exit on the inflatable emergency slide (admit it, haven’t you always wanted to slide down that thing yourself?). But we’re in the era of social media now, so [...]
In social media, no one knows you’re an introvert
Image via Wikipedia Two interesting posts this week on how our personalities affect our online behavior. First, Paul Dunay (did I mention that Paul is my favorite B2B blogger yet today?) expresses shock that he turned out to be an extrovert on the Myers-Briggs personality test and wonders if you need to be an extrovert [...]
Mobile Marketing
6 ideas for sifting the mobility chaos
For about 20 years (sad to say I was a journalist for even longer than that) it seemed that every white paper that crossed my desk began with some variant of this sentence: “As the world becomes more global and interconnected, businesses need a way to see through the complexity. [Hire us.]“ But now the [...]
15 things marketers should stop doing and thinking in 2011
Here’s a list of things I wish we would stop doing and thinking as of December 31st: Social media Social media cause people to waste time at work. 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 [...]
Why serious games are a serious form of idea marketing
Image by Getty Images via @daylife I’ve been looking at the growing connection between gaming and thought leadership this week. I know, I know. It’s hard to utter thought leadership in the same breath as video games, avatars, and conversation balloons, but all of these pieces have converged. Turns out that video games have a [...]
Marketing Strategy
The last of the anti-social marketing tactics
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 truth, customers have never listened, except in a few cases of companies with the budget muscle to pound the tagline into customers’ heads over and over again though mass marketing and TV. [...]
6 lessons on how NOT to market to customers
Here’s the kind of pressure that social media puts on us: After not posting anything to my blog in nearly six weeks, I feel compelled to offer an explanation. Isn’t that sad? Hey, but that’s how it is. Social media are like a school of sharks; keep moving forward or sink lifelessly to the bottom. [...]
How to measure influence in social media marketing
Measuring influence is the new obsession in the social media world—adding another layer of anxiety to the dark cloud of existential dread that is marketing ROI. Social media present us as individuals seeking status within a community, which is something that humans have been working at since our days as monkeys. Indeed, science tells us [...]
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