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?

Five steps to excellence for thought leadership marketing

I am excited.

 I have just read Rob Leavitt’s article based on his impressions as a judge at the ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards, for submissions in the Thought Leadership Marketing category.

 If you only read one article on thought leadership this year , this is the one to read. 

You can view his full article here http://www.reputationtorevenue.com/2010/07/strengthening-thought-leadership-marketing-five-steps-to-excellence.html  but I do cover all his points below because I believe they are worth repeating.

B2B thought leadership gains pace

Most marketers know that while thought leadership is a massive opportunity in the B2B space they also know that what constitutes thought leadership varies widely.  Rob points out that until five years ago thought leadership marketing was mainly the domain of the top consulting firms,.  Few B2B firms took it seriously.

But based on what Rob has seen judging the entries at the ITSMA awards this year, this has changed dramatically.

Not only does he say that the thought leadership submissions reflect a substantial increase in spending but more importantly that there has been a significant shift in the application of thought leadership as a discipline which is reflected in its impacts on customers and market influencers alike.

He goes on to identify five areas in which the best thought leadership campaigns stand out. 

The 5 steps to thought leadership excellence

The reason I am so excited about his analysis is because they reflect what I have been saying on this blog in various posts for over a year.  They are:

1.    Focus and depth: As Rob points out there are lots of companies out there who practice “random acts of content”, including sending out the occasional white papers, articles, videos, blog posts.  His concern is that with little focus or depth they are really providing little value.  Companies or individuals serious about joining the ranks of truly helpful thought leaders need to pick one or a few issues, stick with it, and go deep.

I would like to add to this by saying that to be truly successful, thought leadership should become part of the culture of an organisation.  If one looks at companies who are innovative or have research as their backbone – they don’t bolt these on.  Rather, they are an integral part of who they are how they think and it consumes the entire organisation every day.  Thought leadership should be no different.

2.    Do the research: As Rob points out, a lot of the so-called thought leadership we see is merely opinion based on experience. However, customers want evidence, and evidence usually requires research.

From what Rob has seen in the entries he concludes that the best thought leadership programs are built around serious research, including things like an analysis of existing literature, new customer surveys, and in-depth case studies.

3.    Engage and empower internally: Your organisation and your colleagues are one of the most important keys to your thought leadership campaign.  They are and should be its best ambassadors.

Given the pervasive nature of social media, more and more of your employees are engaging directly with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders online. By engaging and empowering these employees with your thought leadership position you give them something valuable to talk about over and above the obvious product or service specs and sales pitch.  More importantly if you have done your homework you are providing information and insights that hit the right spot with your prospects.

4.    Leverage your best content:  Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversations, not just traditional publishing and speaking. Rob says that customers want to chew over and debate your ideas, often without you and often in the virtual room. To help make this happen, he points out that you need to leverage your best thought leadership content by publishing compelling and appropriate formats across the networks and channels where your customers congregate.

He gives the example of a white paper and how you could leverage that into a short video, a blog post, an article, a customer briefing, etc.

5.    Invest in expertise: Great thought leadership programs are built around experts in the subjects at hand but also experts in research, analysis, publication, social media, and collaboration.

Rob believes that the most successful programs invest in their people in at least three ways:

·         Funding full time staff positions

·         Recruiting for necessary skills and helping existing staff develop the right skills

·         Investing in partnerships for complementary capabilities (including brand recognition, as with prestigious academics, universities, and/or outside media and research organizations).

Finally, and this is something I have trumpeted for a long time, building a successful thought leadership marketing program is a long-term process.

Rob uses the examples of McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte who have spent years doing the research, building market presence, and refining what works. The common theme among them is that they pick key customer issues and stick with them.

They dive deep on these issues. And they invest in their people and programs. 

Rob, thanks for some of the best insights on thought leadership I have seen for some time.  I can’t wait to see the ITSMA results for the best thought leadership campaigns.

Thought leadership gems from someone who really stands out

For those of you who have never read My Name is Scott I suggest you do.  Scott has some refreshing views on the world particularly when it comes to marketing oneself.

In one of his recent posts entitled the ‘Approachable Leaders Handbook to being heard Vol 2’, http://www.hellomynameisblog.com/2010/07/approachable-leaders-handbook-of-being.html he gives six key tips to how you would go about being heard.  The beauty of these tips is that there are some real gems for aspiring and current thought leaders.

Scott makes the point that the world is not waiting to hear what you have to say.  And therein is the rub for thought leaders and it is why I constantly go on about thought leadership being a long-term commitment by the business or thought leader.  To be successful you need to make it part of your corporate make-up and you need to constantly work on your thought leadership position always looking at ways to share your insights.

Let’s look at what Scott had to say.  His five suggestions are as follows:

1.    Align your petitions with the self-interest of your audience. Find out what their success seeds are.

Absolutely – in fact one of the critical success factors of any thought leadership campaign is to understand the interests of your target publics.  Without these insights you run the risk of missing the boat.

Once you have this understanding, you need to identify how you are going to add value to their current understanding/knowledge.  In doing so you should strive constantly to stretch their minds and stimulate new thoughts, views and perspectives.

2.    Give clear direction of what you want people to follow. Make the audience your accomplice.

Absolutely.  Clear, definitive perspectives or insights about your topic make it a lot easier for your audience.  Furthermore if they are involved in the process, the stickiness you create with that target public is enormous – they feel vested in it and thus part of the journey.

3.    Build a listening platform. Demonstrate to the people you want to hear that they have been heard first.

The whole idea of thought leadership is to generate discussion and interest in what you have to say.  To test whether your thought leadership is being received in the right manner so that you can tweak it if needs be, you should, where possible, have a platform for two-way feedback.  This could include: one-on-one or group presentations; feedback forms; independent research; online polls; chat forums on line; feedback mechanisms online; round tables and the like.

4.    Create a dialogue that draws people into the cause. Say things you haven’t said elsewhere.

Thought leadership is exactly that – leading with your thoughts.  That implies they should be new, fresh and provide interesting insights that no-one else has previously given.  To do so, thought leaders need courage, they need to be aware that not everyone will agree with their point of view.  But that’s OK because as a thought leader you want to provoke discussion and debate. 

5.    Invite layers of interpretation around your message. Allow people to add multiple dimensions to your ideas.

The whole idea of thought leadership is to seed an idea, insight, interpretation and then watch and participate as others get involved and share their views.  By provoking and promoting healthy discussion and at times heated debate, it serves to air your ideas and spread the conversation across multiple, interested audiences.  With the power of the web these ideas are global instantly.   

Scott concludes by saying that if you follow this process your voice will be heard.  What do you think?

Thought leadership is a culture not a tactic

Thought leadership is not and should not be a marketing or PR tactic – rather it is a culture.  Like companies who innovate, thought leadership too should be a way of doing things.

If it is not a function of corporate culture I can guarantee that most long-term thought leadership positions will not get across the starting line. Alternatively the company produces one or two ‘thought leadership’ campaigns a year that become part of the marketing team’s annual list of objectives and kpis and are ticked off as thought leadership but are really just PR campaigns to drive coverage.

The true test of thought leadership

The true test of a thought leadership campaign is to ask the following six questions.  Does your thought leadership campaign:

1.       Add real value to your public’s lives/decision making/business

2.       Position you as a trusted advisor engendering trust in your brand as the leader in that particular sector/area

3.       Help underpin sales

4.       Provide a content rich platform from which you can write, talk, publish online and share with clients valuable insights

5.       Position your people as the experts and ‘go to’ people in their field

6.       Move your brand from product and sales leadership to market leadership and in the process delivers long-term, sustainable advantage over your competitors.

If not you should be going back to the drawing board.

Thought leadership tops focus for B2B marketers

In 2009 thought leadership trailed behind email as the area of most significant focus for B2B marketers according to MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog.  If marketers are recognising the power of thought leadership and the management consulting industry has been using thought leadership as one of their most important lead generators for over a decade, why haven’t other companies jumped on the bandwagon?

From my experience it comes back to the question of whether it is part of their culture or not.  As I have indicated in previous posts, true, long-term, thought leadership campaigns need to align closely with the values of an organisation and needs to have the buy-in and ownership of senior management.  Historically, the campaigns that do this fly and those that don’t fail, or at best limp along, never quite realising their true potential. 

Thought leadership is about long-term reputation and trust

Unfortunately the pressure on CEOs, marketing directors and the corporate relations team to produce immediate, measurable results is a big dampener on deep-seated, long-term thought leadership campaigns.  The longer-term reputation and trust building resulting from this type of campaign does not satisfy the need for immediate results.

Ask any company which as at its heart a focus on innovation or research and they will tell you that the return on this investment takes years.  A culture of thought leadership is no different but the rewards are immeasurable.  Ask the multinational management consultancies, they know too well.

The sales pitch is dead

I love what Chad and Linda Nelson from The Basis Group have to say about sales and thought leadership in their paper “Thought Leadership is the New Sales Pitch.”  These guys absolutely get it.  It is a must read for anyone in sales and marketing.

In my all my research and writings on the topic I have come across only a handful of people who can articulate so succinctly the impact thought leadership has on selling a brand, product or service .  Dana vandenHeuvel and David Meerman Scott are two others who spring to mind.

Consumers actively seek experts

Chad and Linda point out that consumers no longer passively accept marketing information.  Instead, they actively seek experts who have answers or insights into their world and who through these insights help them manage better this world and the issues and challenges they face.  Consumers today crave relationships and resources in the form of knowledge and insights and herein lies the opportunity for selling differently.

While traditional marketing is still the bread and butter of many sales efforts, as  the Nelsons point out:  “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.”

Stop pushing products and services

Very true.  But before this happens, companies need to unlearn current habits of pushing products and services down their customers’ throats.  Instead they should start demonstrating their insights, knowledge and expertise in their sector and in particular the issues and challenges facing their consumers.

Underpinning this approach is thought leadership.  There are many positive outcomes of thought leadership, I have a table illustrating these in an earlier blog post, but the ultimate outcome should always be that your customers seek you out because they trust you based on the knowledge and insights you have shared so openly with them.

Thought leadership builds trust which underpins sales

While thought leadership may not result in a quick sell, what it will do is truly cement your brand with your publics in a way that has a far deeper stickability factor.  But this is what most marketers and salespeople have difficulty getting their heads around – thought leadership does not primarily drive sales.  Rather it builds trust, takes your conversations with customers to another level so that when the time comes to present your offering they are so vested in your brand that the sale is as good as done.

As the Nelsons point out:  ”you need to be out in your marketplace talking to people, learning what they know, discussing ideas, taking the pulse of the industry to see where it’s going, responding to concerns and expanding your understanding of what is needed.  This is the best kind of leadership because it demonstrates your intimacy with your audience and your industry.” 

While there is nothing new in this and the best sales people will tell you that the best selling is all about listening, the difference is how you interpret, articulate and then package and share your insights and information.

 Thought leaders have an abundance mentality.  They share openly and freely and understand that it is not first and foremost about the sale but rather it is first and foremost about being available and being generous with your knowledge.

Only this way will take your place at the head of your industry’s table.  The sales will naturally follow.