Jason Buffington .com

Are you thinking about Q1 SKO’s? We are.

If you want to rebuild Q1 pipeline or fuel new narratives through Thought Leadership for a February SKO, then work backwards and the math gets uncomfortable really fast; content creation in December … narratives and GTM strategy in October … data alignment in September … and here we are in August.

If that content isn’t already locked down, this week’s vlog unpacks how DPM fits into that timeline.

video transcript

If your Q1 SKO includes external content designed to jumpstart the replenishment of your pipeline because your sellers & partners closed every deal they could in Q4, then have you thought backwards about where thought leadership fits into your plan?

If you’ve got a February SKO (or a PAC or CAB), then … would you want new thought leadership content to drop about the same time? If so, you’d want enablement sessions during kickoff to make sure your sellers, marketers, and event planners are all aligned on the narratives. The report could launch around the same time as SKO, but you probably want a couple weeks after kickoff for people to heal up and for your teams to support audience acquisition for the webinar or launch event.

If that’s going to happen in February, then:

• Assume that January is about getting back up to speed after the holidays and getting ready for SKO, so you’ll really only have bandwidth to queue up your near final content.
• That means, December is really content creation time. And since some people are going to take vacation, we probably want to get content started in November.
• So then, October is for narratives and go to market strategy, which means September is when you’re really looking at the data or whatever else you’re going to be using to fuel that thought leadership.

And … here we are in August!

So, if you’re thinking about thought leadership as part of your SKO and pipeline replenishment for Q1, then now is the time to talk about where that content is going to come from. At DPM, we can help you with:

• Organizational Resilience: how orgs are aligned (or not) across the BC/DR/RM/IS continuum
• Cloud-Powered Resilience: what IT decision makers want from their MSPs across the range of BaaS > DRaaS > CRaaS capabilities
• AI-Enhanced Resilience: where AI is differentiating within IT backup, DR, and cyber resilience solutions, as well as customer confidence in their ability to ensure the resilience of their production AIs
• Resilience Architectures: and later this year, we’ll be in the field on what types of storage, services, and form-factors IT buyers want, as well as how their hypervisor and hyperscale strategies will affect their 2027 resilience.

If you’re thinking about SKO’s in Q1, let’s have a conversation now on how we can help.

Leave your thoughts on the LinkedIn article.