Three key challenges facing thought leadership

After working in thought leadership for many years across multiple sectors, writing about it, researching it and speaking to a wide variety of people across a spectrum of industries, I believe the key challenges facing thought leaders or a thought leadership campaign boils down to three things:

1.       1. Thought leadership Engagement – are your senior leaders/executives engaged in your thought leadership position?

If not you will have a problem as the campaign is bound to be short-lived, it will miss the gravitas of senior commitment internally and externally, you will struggle to excite the target audiences for whom the thought leadership is intended, you will make limited inroads into making thought leadership part of the culture of your organisation and you will battle to convince your executives about the efficacy of thought leadership as a client and new business engagement strategy.

2.       Thought leadership Connectivity – is your thought leadership campaign enabling your key client-facing people to connect with their clients and prospects?  Did you include them in the journey?   Do they feel part of this campaign or is it content that is thrust upon them at the last minute and they have to make use of it? 

The risk to all of these questions that you can run the risk of your thought leadership material being perceived by your own people as ineffectual in helping them connect with your client or prospects resulting in them merely paying lip service to it at best and at worst not using it at all or dismissing it.

3.       Thought leadership Packaging – are you maximising the opportunity to leverage your content as much as possible across every possible client or new business touch point?  Have you researched your target audiences in terms of where they source their information, how they like to receive it, what they read, where they go online, whether they like face-to-face, etc?

These are critical questions that will guide you in deciding how you cut and dice your content for maximum effect.  Furthermore, and only if relevant, are you packaging your content online for maximum search engine optimisation so that a) people can find you, and b) you feature on page one of Google for those specific search terms?  

If you have any more to add to these I’d be delighted to hear from you.

David Ogilvy’s greatest tip for thought leaders

One of the best navigating lights for identifying your or your brand’s thought leadership position comes from one of the luminaries of the advertising world, David Ogilvy.  While I have always been a strong advocate for PR leading the thought leadership charge I have to admit to being a bit of a thought leadership pirate i.e. I believe in stealing the best ideas no matter the discipline from which it originates.

There are some great marketing, advertising, social media, research, academic experts out there who know an awful lot about their subjects and who, in many cases, have superb insights into how thought leadership can work for a brand.

So when I saw Ogilvy’s bespoke ‘big ideaL’ concept, I quickly latched onto what I now call David Ogilvy’s greatest tip for thought leaders.

It’s all about helping you identify the thought leadership position you or your brand should take and while it sounds very simple, coming up with the answer can take a lot of soul searching to get it right.

The big ideaL’s premise is to simply ask yourself the question:  X (your brand) believes the world would be a better place if…

I use a few examples courtesy of Ogilvy to illustrate this:

·         Dove believes the world would be a better place if women were allowed to feel good about themselves.  Now think about the Dove campaign for real beauty and how perfectly this is informed by their big ideaL

·         Scrabble believes the world would be a better place if we loved words more

·         Coca Cola believes the world would be a better place if we saw the glass half-full not half empty.

Ogilvy offices around the world have spent a lot of time and effort turning this principle into workshops and there is a lot of strategic thinking that goes into it.  While I can’t do it any justice in this post, in summary the big ideaL is about having an interesting and attractive world-view, one which goes to the root of why the brand exists.

But Ogilvy is also very realistic about what it a big ideaL can achieve and as a result they are very clear that it is merely a starting point – one which won’t make your decisions for you but one which will help make better ones.

The same certainly applies to your thought leadership point of view which, if informed by the right big ideaL, will mean that you end up with a thought leadership position strongly aligned with the very essence of the brand.

Ideally your big ideaL should have some sort of higher purpose.  So too should your thought leadership campaign, for it is these campaigns that capture the imagination and attention of your clients or prospects.

 After all thought leadership is all about underpinning commercial outcomes and you want to get it right from the outset.

Your thought leadership is like a Christmas tree

Reading a white paper from PR Newswire entitled Marketing is Content, it struck me that content can be compared to the presents under a Christmas tree.

But imagine presents with no tree.  Not quite the same is it?

And herein lies the crux of your content marketing.  The tree is critical to your content, it represents the core theme i.e. your thought leadership position – it is the focal point around which your content should revolve and which gives your content a sense of direction and purpose.

And the decorations?  They make the tree look attractive, think of them as the myriad of channels you have at your disposal to share your content with your market.

As a parent with two kids, my wife and I do our ‘research’ well before Christmas.  We pretty much know their interests and then cunningly ascertain what they want and what’s hot in their lives.  It’s a combination of knowing them well but also sense checking because what was hot six months ago is old hat today.  Can you imagine their disappointment un-wrapping a handful of presents on the day that in no way reflects their interests or shows scant foresight of their environment, sex and age group?  Perish the thought.

Likewise perish your brand if you attempt the same with the content you provide to your customers and your prospects.

Without a deep understanding of their sector and their business needs don’t waste your time and money.  Moreover don’t waste their time with irrelevant content.  Just because it’s content doesn’t mean it’s useful and just because it’s content doesn’t mean you are a thought leader.

Thought leading content is the stuff that really adds value to your customer’s lives, it’s content that positions you as the expert in that field.  Best of all it’s content which keeps them coming back and which ultimately underpins the sale.

By now, give or take a few disappointments along the way my kids pretty much trust Father Christmas’ judgment.  There is a strong brand promise and a level of excitement that the content under that tree meets if not exceeds their expectations.  They’re happy ‘customers’ who keep coming back year after year.

And if we really get it right, guess what?  They tell all their friends.

Remember, Christmas is not the same without the tree, the presents and the decorations.  I haven’t even begun on the higher intent, the very raison d’etre of Christmas which I equate to your values and the way in which you do business and your guide as to how you relate to your customers and how you conduct business with them – but another time for that.

Merry Christmas everyone. 

Podcast on thought leadership

I was interviewed by the Australian Businesswomen’s Network the other day on the topic of, you guessed it, thought leadership.

You can click here to listen  http://tiny.cc/g9vsm

Thought leadership’s magic cube

Your thought leadership campaign should comprise four sides.  Tick the box on each and like a cube, your thought leadership will present a complete and strong face.   

The four sides should include the following:

1.       It should be eye-catching and topical

2.       It should say something new

3.       It should be founded in some sort of research i.e. be evidence based

4.       It should create a link to your brand

This is a short post so I am not going to go into huge detail on each but will cover the key points briefly.

1.       Thought leadership material should be eye-catching and topical

How much thought leadership material do you see that is eye catching or topical?

Why not? I think it is for three reasons:

·         Not enough thought is put into it

·         It is often merely regurgitated, repackaged content

·         Some companies believe their own PR, think their stuff is great and don‘t give enough thought to the audience and how they will benefit from it.

2.       Thought leadership should say something new

Very often this is because not enough attention is paid upfront to researching the client or their issues and challenges.  The deeper you understand your client’s issues the more likely it is you will provide something that means something to them and adds value to their lives new insights.

In the process you should also be researching what else is out in the market so you don’t already enter a crowded space.

3.       Thought leadership should be evidence based

Everyone can have an opinion.  There are thousands of companies out there sharing their opinions based on their knowledge and expertise in a particular sector.  Nothing wrong with that, many companies are paid top dollar for their insights.  However, to truly offer something valuable to your clients and prospects, insights should be supported by robust research – preferably third party research.

Think about your business – it is a lot easier to make decisions or convince your board about decisions based on evidence or strong research as opposed to opinion.        

4.       Thought leadership should create a link to your brand

Be warned.  Don’t get this one wrong.

Your thought leadership campaign is not an excuse to talk about your products and your brand too overtly.  In fact the opposite applies – you should avoid pushing your products and company in the early stages of your thought leadership campaign.  Only talk about it once the prospect starts opening the door to chat to about their issues and specific solutions off the back of what you have presented.

Remember the mere fact you, your colleagues and your brand are associated with the thought leadership piece means that you are aligned with it anyway.  The psychology of this is that if you are perceived to be deeply understanding of your chosen thought leadership field you must be the expert and ‘go to’ company in that space.

Make sure though that your thought leadership material is clearly branded with your company and contact details and try wherever possible to get in front of your prospects to share the information.

Avoiding sales’ seven deadly sins – thought leadership

This is the fourth in a series of articles on how thought leadership underpins the new sales approach.

Type ‘sales mistakes’ into Google and it will spit out close to seven million articles.  Everyone, it seems, has advice on how to avoid the many and various sales traps that await the unwary sales person.

There is a way to avoid these, have your company develop a strong thought leadership point of view. Below I touch on some of the more popular sales pitfalls and identify how thought leadership can overcome these:

1.       Not understanding your prospect – is the death knell of the sale, however, used properly, thought leadership can take you well beyond a superficial understanding of the challenges and issues your prospects face and provide you with deep, evidence-based insights into these and other aspects of their business/sector they will find very useful. 

2.       Not offering real value – A thought leadership campaign, one that really does aim to provide your customers and prospects with valuable information, overcomes this very easily.  In the process it positions you as the ‘go to’ expert in your field.  Ultimately prospects seek you out for your knowledge into their issues.  There’s no better way to fill your pipeline with qualified leads.

3.       Not providing them with enough information – if your sales team is only relying on product or service information they’re going to face an uphill battle.  On the other hand your thought leadership strategy should generate focused, customer-centric content to help you avoid introducing product or service talk too early in your client conversations.  Providing them with insights into an area of their business or sector positions you as a trusted advisor in that area.  Only once you have chatted about these issues do you need to provide the solutions-based product and sales material.   

4.       Talking too much about your product or service – we all know that feeling, the more you push your company, your product or your service the more you see your prospect’s eyes glaze over.  Why?  Because it’s not about them it’s all about you.

Good thought leadership content, on the other hand, will arm you with insights about their sector or an issue/challenge in their business that can become a game changer for them and for you.  The conversation is all about them and how you can help solve their issues.

Many experienced sales people do this as a matter of course but there aren’t many that do it as part of a larger company-led thought leadership campaign.

5.       Not asking the right questions – we all know good selling is about getting them talking.  Here’s the great thing about good thought leadership material – if it has been properly researched and if it touches the lives of your prospects you will have wealth of discussion points and areas around which to ask questions.  Not only will this display your deep knowledge of their sector but you will learn a whole lot more about the company which will help further for relationship building as well as identifying potential weak spots to assist you closing the sale.

6.       Not building a relationship before trying to ‘sell them’ – you can easily kill the sale by rushing the ‘sell’ before you have built trust.  Fortunately, if you have developed great thought leadership content and you shared it readily, you would have established yourself as an expert in your field.  This investment in establishing trust through thought leadership will help underpin all sales into the future.

7.       Not maintaining the relationship – how many times are customers left to their own devices post the sale?  The great thing about good thought leadership content is it is regularly updated therefore enabling you to keep in touch with your current and past customers with stuff they find useful.  When they are ready to buy again you are their first port of call and they are psychologically vested in your brand already.

While I know there are many more deadly sins for sales people, I wanted to focus on what I believe are some of the key ones.  Ones where a strong, customer-centric thought leadership campaign can make a massive difference to a company’s sales approach and the relationship it has with its customers and its prospects.

Elsewhere in this blog you will find articles offering advice on how to arrive at a thought leadership position as well as how to take your thought leadership proposition to market.

If you have witnessed the power of using thought leadership as your sales driver, please let us know how it worked/is working.

Thought leadership interview on RainToday.com

This appeared on the RainToday.com site and is an interview with me on my favourite topic – thought leadership.  You can click here to listen  and this is what they had to say as an intro:

Effective thought leadership—the kind that attracts prospects that eventually become clients—requires a strong platform that your entire company adopts, not “random acts of content,” says Craig Badings, author of Brand Stand: Seven Steps to Thought Leadership.

It’s about delivering new ideas and content to your target audience based on insight into the issues and challenges they face, he says. It’s also about differentiating you from competitors, establishing you as the go-to expert, and positioning you as a trusted advisor. And to make that happen, firms must have an organized and concerted effort that involves everyone in the organization.

“To truly take hold, [thought leadership] has to become part of the culture of the organization. In fact, I’d be as bold as to say that companies that have a sales culture should really be trying very hard to replace it with a thought leadership culture because in my view the sales pitches we know are really dead. It’s no longer good enough for companies to flog their products or services,” Badings says. “If thought leadership is not a part of corporate culture, then that thought leadership campaign is going to limp along and will never really achieve any great height.”

Listen as Badings, who also blogs at Thought Leadership, discusses:

• The four things that make a successful thought leadership campaign
• Firms that are excelling with their thought leadership campaigns
• How sales teams can incorporate a firm’s thought leadership platform to win more deals
• His methodology—START IP—for developing and implementing a thought leadership platform

Thought leadership – a marketer’s new value proposition

This is the second in a series of articles on how thought leadership underpins the new sales approach. 

In my last blog I talked about how thought leadership is the new sales pitch because customers no longer want to be sold to.  Today I cover how thought leadership can create a compelling value proposition for your customers and how you take this to market.

Five years ago thought leadership didn’t even rank as a focus for B2B marketers.  Today across numerous B2B surveys thought leadership is ranked one or two as the area of most significance for marketers.

Thought leadership is the new difference

Every sales person needs a value proposition.  Without it why would people choose your product or service?  Typically the marketing and sales chain comprised the sales and marketing guys coming up with a set of key messages which would be incorporated into the advertising and marketing collateral.  Glossy brochures, presentations, press releases, adverts, web pages, product demos, etc would be trotted out to generate sales leads.

The problem is that most of us are tired of being sold to or marketed to in this way.  Many of our customers question the validity and authenticity of these company or product centric messages.  They know that they are being ‘sold to’ and it is turning them off. 

Enter thought leadership. It is very customer-centric but more importantly it should focus on evidence-based views and opinions that deliver insights and knowledge to the customer or prospect about the specific issues and challenges they face today and into the future.

Thought leadership has a customer not a ‘me’ focus

Thought leadership is not about you and it is not self-serving gumph about your product or service – rather it is about your customer and their issues.  The content you make available to your customers and prospects should facilitate their thinking around how they can transform their business and overcome their challenges and issues.  By illuminating trends and insights that will impact their business down the track you are saying very firmly to them that you can help them get there.

Your thought leadership point of view needs to be relevant to their world and in the process you should be shifting your culture from one of ‘Hunter’ to one of ‘Trusted Advisor’.

It is a big leap for many companies and in some instances and insurmountable one.  The key lies in how you arrive at a thought leadership point of view and then how you package it and how you take it to market.

How do you share your thought leadership with your market?

If you are no longer ‘selling’, how do you get your brand out there and known to your target publics?  Unfortunately there is no one simple answer.  What I will outline are a number of tactics you can use for sharing your thought leadership.

The first step should be conducting detailed research into where your primary target publics consume information.  Without this, you can waste an awful lot of time, money and resources trying to reach them.

What follows are a list of tactics you could use – the ideas is to choose those that best match the way your target publics prefer to be communicated with.

They could include:

·         Research – driving evidence-based findings to back up your opinions on an issues which you have chosen to speak and write about.  Depending on how you frame your research, this will give you lots of great content

·         Writing – having a number of compelling written stories on your thought leadership point of view gives you a host of options including: books, press releases, opinion pieces, letters, white papers, newsletters, research summaries, fact sheets, background papers, blogs, web content and social media content for things like webinars, etc

·         Talking – great thought leadership content will arm your thought leadership champion as well as your sales team and the rest of your employees with compelling talking points centred on the issues of your customers.  It also delivers content for presentations, speeches, roundtables, one on one meetings with customers, etc.  Depending on your thought leadership point of view, you may even consider going on the speakers’ circuit.

·         Online – today much of your thought leadership content should be searchable online for two reasons.  To push you up in the search engine rankings and to position you as the expert in that field.  This should not be restricted to your website but you should examine how to leverage your content in other channels such as You Tube, Flickr, Digg, Stumble Upon, microsites, forums, Face Book, Twitter and Linked In to mention a few

·         Third party endorsers – depending on your thought leadership content you may consider employing the services of a third party endorser – someone who already carries weight in their field but who is prepared to add to the debate with qualified comment

The sale

Despite sharing all this great thought leadership material you still need someone to close the sale.  The only difference is the map of how you’ve arrived at the sale has changed irrevocably.  Thought leadership is the new way to charter the path to the sale and done well it a) distinctly differentiates you from the competition b) creates less resistance to price c) vests your prospects psychologically in the brand before they purchase, and d) vindicates their purchasing decision.

Thought leadership post the sale

Importantly good thought leadership delivers sustainability to your customer relationship that the normal sales process and marketing collateral does not.  It gives you a great platform to go back to them with new, useful information and in the process it builds advocates out of your customers. 

Question:  Are there any sales and marketing people out there who have differing views or alternatively have experienced the shift from hunter to trusted advisor?  I’d love to hear from you. 

Thought leadership – sales new Trojan Horse

This is the first in a series of articles on how thought leadership underpins the new sales approach. 

Customers no longer want to be sold to.

Instead they gather their own information through the web, social media and talking to friends and family – an approach that has fundamentally changed the way we sell.

As a result, our job as sales people should be focused on helping these customers and prospects find us when they search and then to engage them along the way with insightful, useful content that helps them manage their world and their business challenges better.  Done properly, when you do present your product or service, these customers or prospects are so vested in your brand that the sale is as good as done.

To achieve this, you first need to establish the customer at the centre of your universe.  As a starting point, you should establish a deep understanding of their needs and map out their buying personas.  Only then should you deliver the relevant insights and information this understanding has given you.

Do it properly and you will develop an intimacy with your prospects that goes well beyond the traditional sales conversations.  How?  Thought leadership is the way to achieve this.

But critically thought leadership is not about delivering your sales or marketing messages.  We all know how cold that turns us.

It’s the customer that matters not your product or service.

It is important to do everything possible to communicate your ideas in your customers’ language.  This means learning their language, their issues, their fears and their priorities.  Once you understand these you have a much better chance of delivering insights and knowledge that intersects your desire to sell with their desire to grow or find solutions to their business challenges. 

And thought leadership is the vehicle to achieve this.

Thought leadership needs to take the sales lead

To differentiate yourself from your competition and to underpin your future sales, thought leadership needs to take the lead in positioning the company as the go to source of expert information – and ultimately position you as the trusted advisor in your field.

In a paper entitled: “Thought Leadership is the New Sales Pitch”, Chad and Linda Nelson from The Basis Group point out that consumers actively seek experts who have answers or insights into their world and who, through these insights, help them manage better the world and issues they face.

Nelson says:  “When you begin your marketing efforts by establishing trust and demonstrating thought leadership, you create a new more effective entry point for your brand message.”

Thought leadership builds trust

The premise of thought leadership driving the sales lead is that customers eventually start seeking you out because of the trust they place in you based on the knowledge and insights you have shared which position you as a clear authority/trusted advisor in your field.

It is very difficult for sales people to generate a steady stream of qualified leads week in and week out but if your company or your service has been positioned as the expert in that field it becomes a lot easier to attract and nurture these leads.

It is at this point, however, that the sales person plays a critical role – converting that trust and interest in your brand or service into a sale.   

I’d love to hear about your sales experiences.  In particular I’d like to hear your stories about conversations you’ve had with customers or prospects when you were talking from a position of insight and knowledge about a challenge/issue or topic vs when you were trying to sell a product based only on the product specs? 

The next article in this series will cover how thought leadership can create an enticing value proposition and the tactics you can use to take this to market.

The internal power of thought leadership

Thought leadership delivers huge internal organisational benefits

In fact, used properly, it can also be a very powerful vehicle to motivate and inspire an organisation’s employees.

I have written before in this blog that thought leadership is not and should not be a marketing or PR tactic – rather it should be part of the culture of an organisation the same way that sales or innovation are part of the culture of some organisations. 

Thought leadership should be “a way of doing things around here” and from my experience, true, long-term, thought leadership campaigns typically closely aligns with the values of an organisation.  In order to do this it needs the buy-in and ownership of senior management.

And herein lies the rub.  If it is part of the culture, if it is aligned to the values of the organisation and if it has the buy-in and ownership of management then the rest of the organisation’s employees should be part of the thought leadership campaign.

Employees will become a thought leadership campaign’s best ambassadors 

If an organisation does plan strategically to take its employees on the thought leadership journey, it will find that they in fact will become its best thought leadership ambassadors.   Communicated properly, this will become one of the most effective ways to get your thought leadership material out there.  It will also be one of the best forms of word of mouth you can hope to get.

It gives employees something to talk about over and above the products or services you sell while at the same time delivers to them a deeper sense of pride about where they work, what they do and the difference the brand makes to other people’s lives.

It also has the habit of instilling longer-term behavioural changes that come as a result of the organisation being viewed as ahead of the game.  This has a whole heap of benefits from increased morale, a magnet for top talent, increased sales to mention a few.

All powerful stuff.

Furthermore, not only is the business benefitting externally but internally it further entrenches thought leadership as a way of doing business – it becomes a habit.  This in turn can foster the emergence of other thought leaders thus creating a virtuous circle.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and whether any of you have seen this in practice?