Dove’s thought leadership platform changes face of advertising

Dove's FB campaign shows how thought leadership can drive innovation across a variety of platforms

Despite the obvious benefits, the beauty of a great thought leadership campaign is the spin off it can create for that person or the brand.

Take Dove for example.  Their Campaign for Real Beauty is one of the best examples of a consumer thought leadership campaign I
have seen (see the case study I wrote up about it here).  It has spawned a content-rich environment for them around this topic to such a degree that they pretty much ‘own’ the discussions around real beauty.

Dove displays innovation driven by their thought leadership position

Their next move announced this week is brilliant – a ‘Dove ad makeover’ Facebook app, which allows Facebook users to displace existing advertising messages on their pages with positive ads from Dove.

This is great innovation driven by a thought leadership position on real beauty.

Check this brief You Tube clip out to get the idea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhI3Wzs2gJA&feature=player_embedded

I’d be interested in your thoughts.

 I’m a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  Please check out my book: Brand Stand: seven steps
to thought leadership,  follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.

The sale has changed forever

I was recently invited by Dan Levy, the editor of Sparksheet (an ward-winning media and marketing magazine), to submit an article on thought leadership.  This article first appeared on Sparksheet this week.

For some years I have been banging on about how thought leadership is the new sales Trojan Horse i.e the way to equip sales teams with the game-changing insights they need to have the conversations with their clients that differentiate them from their
competition and set them up for the sale.  Then a few weeks ago I came across a wonderfully evocative phrase – “Content is digital bait”.

My first reaction was I wish I had come up with that. Of course I did, whenever something or someone validates our point of
view our natural reaction is to love it.

It appeared in WPPs Atticus volume 17 as a summary of The Future of Selling white paper produced by OgilvyOne Worldwide (NY) and Ogilvy & Mather (NY).  The paper delivers a telling insight into how the world of selling has changed – brands of choice are now those brands that show, through providing useful, insightful content, they understand their consumers’ issues.

From consumer to ‘contsumer’

The selling game has changed irreversibly.  The sheer weight of information available to buyers these days means the buyer is in
control.  They are less reliant on sales people and they build trust in the brand long before they come into physical contact with it.

I call them ‘contsumers’ and Sparksheet has called them ‘prosumers’.  ‘Contsumers’ are hungry for information, they seek out online as much information as possible to help inform their decision making process. And given the information available on the company website, competitors’s websites, consumer and consumer group reviews, media reviews and the like they have as much control over the flow of information as salespeople.  They have conversations with their brands via twitter, the web, FaceBook, LinkedIn and blogs let alone other consumers thus creating their own path to purchase.

Unfortunately this means salespeople are no longer in control.  Their role has changed. They need to identify where the customer is on this journey of discovery and help them.

It is the brands that best understand their customer, the issues and challenges they face and then provides them with useful, insightful content where they consume it, who are the ones rapidly becoming the brands of choice.

Content vs thought leading content

There is a distinction though between useful content and thought leading content.  Hints and tips for example about health and wellbeing, insurance, savings and retirement, the pitfalls of cross border mergers and acquisitions, etc falls into the useful content bucket.

Thought leading content is not peddling an opinion, putting out a list of hints and tips nor curating other people’s content. Instead it is a new, fresh perspective, preferably based on empirical evidence that delivers value beyond the product or service.

Thought leadership and sales

For brands to lift their content from useful to thought leading content, marketing and communications department needs to be working with their sales teams.

The better understanding the marketing team has of the day-to-day challenges the sales team faces and critically the questions their customers are asking them and their key issues and challenges, the better the thought leadership piece will be in the long run.

As the Ogilvy Paper says:  “Selling may have once been an individual event, but now it is a team sport.”

Successful selling has always been about the customer and that should never change but tomorrow’s successful salesperson is the one who anticipates their customers’ changing behavior, analyzes their needs and finds ways to solve their problems.

This goes to very crux of what thought leadership content should provide to a brand’s audiences – information that delivers insights to help them solve a problem or view their challenges in a different light all the while positioning you as the ‘go to’ expert.

Selling has changed irrevocably

“The future of selling” paper saw Ogilvy research over 1,000 selling professionals in the UK, US, Brazil and China.  One of the key findings was that 73% of those surveyed said that selling will be radically different in the next five years.  What the study found was that the key is information asymmetry – in other words the number of online and information channels a brand owns allowing it to gain a head start on another brand.

The paper says: “The new skillset required by salespeople involves creating content as digital bait, deploying social media and partnering with marketing.

“Your customers and prospects are throwing off billions of digital buying indications every day.  They signal their intentions through the search key words they use, the blogs they read, the white papers they download and the shopping baskets they fill.”

Brands not driving new content or exploring thought leadership as an option, will come second.

I am a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications.  You should check out my book: “Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership” Please follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.

Thought leadership = emotional connections on steroids

Thought leadership creates an emotional connection

This is typically the first question I receive when speaking to companies about their thought leadership program.  While I can talk passionately about this and rattle off numerous benefits, there is one sentence I read the other day which I think absolutely captures it.  It is from well-known blogger Gary Vaynerchuk , who said:  “You will not catch up with money, because the people who have the emotional relationship will stay ahead.”

In this one sentence, Gary sums up the very essence of why thought leadership or valuable content is so important to a company’s marketing efforts.

It’s about the emotional connection!

How powerful is that – we all know what happens when we have an emotionally rewarding experience with a brand.  Not only do we consciously say to ourselves: “These guys really get me/make me feel special…”  but we tell other people about our experience – we become brand ambassadors.

Thought leadership is the extra mile

We hear ad nauseum about going the extra mile for the client, adding that magical quality ‘value’, and the need to differentiate ourselves.  Well I’ve got news for you – the right thought leadership content aimed at the right audience and preferably information that addresses that audiences’ major business issues and challenges delivers all three in spades.

What better way to engage with your clients, imbue loyalty and position yourself and your company as the ‘go to’ expert in your field.  

I have a list of 70+ thought leadership benefits in an earlier post but the stand out return is the emotional connection it creates. 

It’s amazing how much easier the sale is once an emotional connection has been established.    

Thought leadership blueprint and tips for 2011

Don’t you love the start of a new year?  Hopefully you’ve had time to reflect on your personal and business goals.  The question is whether you are doing anything differently for your business?  The way you sell?  The way you market including your advertising, PR, direct, online, etc?

If you are one of those fortunate businesses that has done exceptionally well year on year don’t read any further – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

However, if you are wondering whether you could be doing things differently, particularly with your customers or potential customers, read on.

The path to thought leadership – questions companies should ask

Companies wanting to market themselves differently or those wanting to make a difference should start by asking the following questions:

1.       Are we happy with the sales and marketing culture of this organisation?

2.       What are the values of our organisation and can these, in any way, guide our marketing philosophy/approach?

3.       What are we good at and for what do we want to be known?

4.       What are the key issues affecting our customer’/consumer’s lives and do any of these align with what we want to be known for?

5.       Can we provide insights or content that helps our consumers/customers with these issues?

6.       What brand perception do we want to leave with our consumers/customers when it comes to these issues?   

Start formulating a thought leadership position

Once you have answered these you can start formulating a thought leadership position.  A good starting point would be to apply the START IP methodology to add some real rigour to your process.  This is covered in more detail in this blog but briefly it includes:

• Scanning the media and social media sites for issues impacting your brand or sector.
• Tracking your competitors’ share of voice to make sure the thought leadership approach you want to take is not already ‘owned’ by a competitor.
• Analysing and understanding the ‘true north’ of your company i.e. its values, in order to define better the thought leadership areas you should enter.
• Reviewing your current intellectual property (IP) – you may very well already have the makings of a thought leadership campaign within your existing IP.
• Trend spotting to identify the forces that could potentially shape your audiences lives now and in the future and aligning your thought leadership with this.
• Identifying a thought leadership champion to lead your campaign.
• Panel.  Consider appointing a panel of outsiders who could bring fresh perspectives and a more robust sounding board to your ideas and your campaign.

Making thought leadership a culture

Now for the tough part, we’ve all heard of a sales culture, a culture of innovation, a culture of safety, a client service culture etc.  Companies with strong cultures very often tend to do well.  Thought leadership should be no different.  In order for it to truly succeed and to take seed it should become part of the culture of the organisation.

Take a look at the management consultancies.  For years many of them have had an intense focus on thought leadership.  It is what has driven their client engagement and underpinned their sales process – it became part of the culture of many of what are now highly successful organisations.

Thought leadership is not for the faint hearted.  It needs time, budget, measurement as well as management participation and support. 

Critically too, it should not be the sole domain of the marketing or PR teams otherwise it may very well live and die there.  Instead it needs to become part of the DNA of the organisation and ingrained as part of the culture of the organisation.

You cannot be a thought leader without communication

Finally the big test is getting your thought leadership content to market – I’ve yet to meet a thought leader that doesn’t share their thoughts/ideas/content.

The question is how and which channels to use.  The answer I believe lies in your target audience.  How well do you know them?  Do you know what they read and where they get their information?   Do you need to use channels such as daily print, electronic and social media or is your audience a lot smaller in which case a one-on-one or small group engagement strategy may work better.

Please share your thoughts.  What’s worked for you in the past?  What do you intend doing with your thought leadership this year?

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.

How to fill your pipeline pre- and post-sale? Thought leadership is the answer

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

 Over the past few years, there has been an understandable spotlight on the sales pipeline.  Companies the world over have sent their employees on refresher and extra training courses while executives have focused intently on the health of the pipeline.

 The same questions have been asked over and over:  “What is the best way to fill our pipeline?”;  “How do we interest our target publics in our product/service during these tough times?”;  “How do we get in front of our clients and prospects and have conversations with them?”; and so on.

None of this is new.  Filling the new business pipeline is one of a company’s biggest challenges.

Most of us are aware of the 20-4-1 rule – for every 20 prospects you call, four will entertain your proposals and only one will bite.  When it comes to pipeline, we all know the drill – keep one step ahead, know your audience, have conversations, know the sector, find solutions, listen to the client, etc, etc.

The problem is that there is a new marketing and sales malaise – people are tired of being marketed and sold to in the traditional manner. 

Thought leadership will position you as the expert

What price then to have your prospects already vested in your brand because they recognise your company as the expert or ‘go to’ source for information in their sector?  This is probably not going to happen through traditional sales or marketing channels.  Rather to achieve this outcome you need thought leadership.

Thought leadership is about arming your team with the relevant insights about your or your prospect’s sector so that you can hold in-depth conversations with them about the most important challenges they face.  These conversations should be backed by a feast of interesting and relevant content backed up by supporting collateral as well as presentations, one-on-one meetings, roundtables, forums, etc.

Thought leadership is about valuable insights

What better way to drive your pipeline than by offering your prospects something they really value – information and insights about their sector, their issues, their challenges.  How refreshing to them and to your team to be able to drop the ‘hard sell’ and to have conversations that you know really matter to them and that develop even deeper insights of their business.

This is thought leadership in its truest form.  

For 10 years or more, management consultancies have filled their pipelines and generated interest from their target publics through clever thought leadership.  I’m not talking about putting out a bit of content here and there but rather through targeted thought leadership strategies that receive the right amount of senior management input as well as resources and budget.

Thought leadership delivers six key things

A good thought leadership campaign can deliver the following to your business:

1.       An alignment of your interests with your prospects showing your deep understanding of their issues

2.       Differentiation from the competition

3.       Increased credibility and an enviable position as a trusted advisor

4.       Less resistance to pricing and a vindication of their purchasing decision

5.       Creates brand evangelists from within your own customer ranks

6.       Delivers a longer-term, thought leadership conversation platform beyond the sale

Any business looking to fill its pipeline should think about taking the time and effort to invest properly into a long-term, strategic, thought leadership campaign.

A well-packaged, well-presented thought leadership campaign will deliver a refreshed and more relevant way of engaging with your clients as well as your prospects.  More importantly it will deliver a more sustainable and authentic way of filling your pipeline pre and post the sale.

Let me know if you have had any success changing from a traditional sales and marketing approach to one which is thought leadership led.  I’d love to hear from you.

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.