What is thought leadership exactly?
If you do a quick Google search on thought leadership, you will find a very sensible definition on Wikipedia (Dec 2022). It reads:
“A thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognised as an authority in a specialised field and whose expertise is sought after and often rewarded.”
At first glance, it feels intuitively correct and it is probably how most CEOs, sales, or marketing folk would think of it. The problem occurs when you try to connect this definition to marketing execution.
The questions that arise when you dig further into this definition are:
Who do we want to be recognised by? How do we measure authority? When will we be sought after? What is the reward? How do we get that reward exactly?
You can see the challenge. It’s not that simple to work out how to become a B2B thought leader in a way that reflects the strategic goals (or sales plans) of a company.
For more than 30 years, I’ve been working almost exclusively with companies that sell complex, high-value products and services to small, medium, and large private and public organisations.
These solutions are often technology-centric software, hardware, or services, or a mixture of each. Or, they are professional and corporate services such as management consulting, accounting, or consulting engineering.
To characterise these kinds of companies further: they sell solutions that are complex to understand, often not just in terms of how the solution works, but how they integrate or support pre-existing business solutions or processes, and how the benefit they deliver is measured.
Complex solutions have unique marketing challenges
To illustrate, a mobile phone is a technical device and most of us can’t explain how the processors and circuits work in any detail. We understand the point of it, how to use it, and most of the functions without education and training.
The monetary value of a mobile phone is low.
In contrast, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software – used to manage everything from complex supply chains to financial performance for large organisations – is also a technical product, but its monetary value is comparatively high.
Again, most buyers won’t know exactly how this software is put together behind the user interface. It’s millions of lines of compiled code.
The difference is that this technology that can change the competitive profile of the company that deploys it.
Everything from customer experience, inventory efficiency, and improved product quality, to more reliable distribution and even payroll error rates, can be impacted by this kind of software (positively or negatively). It is complex AND high value. It’s not uncommon for up to USD1 billion or more to be paid for a large-scale implementation of this type of solution in a global enterprise.
The common theme for B2B organisations selling complex, high-value solutions is that educating the buyer (the collection of stakeholders in an organisation) and de-risking the purchase to improve the cost-benefit ratio are critical to make a sale.
So, how do we go about doing this in a repeatable, scalable, intelligent, and effective way? It’s the question that thousands of business leaders around the world struggle with every day as they attempt to carve out their niche in hypercompetitive and fast-changing markets.
This series of articles will go some way to answering that exact question as I share the ideas, insights, and frameworks that underpin much of the work I and the team at The Recognition Group deliver to clients.
To get us started, we need to make two assumptions when we discuss thought leadership programs for organisations selling complex, high-value solutions.
One, thought leaders programs are mostly relevant to organisations that sell to mid-tier, enterprise, and government customers. It is a B2B-centric play.
Why? Because these firms need to educate the buyer as a key step in the sales process. Price and product features are not the leading considerations early in the buying cycle.
They’re obviously hygiene factors, but you won’t get to discuss price or features if you can’t connect your solution to a business need (or create one). Education, de-risking the purchase by demonstrating expertise, and experience come well before a price discussion.
In fact, if you’re talking to a prospect about price early in the sales process, there’s a good chance you’re struggling with your customer value proposition and are likely to lose the sale.
Two, thought leadership is often regarded as commentary about the industry. It’s outward-facing, not inward-looking.
Occasionally you will see a firm discuss how it has implemented its own software or used its own consulting methodology and – surprise, surprise – the benefits were amazing. It’s rarely convincing.
In contrast, outward-looking thought leadership programs demonstrate to buyers that the seller is aligned to the sector and has domain expertise and unique insights they can share. As Tom Prizeman elegantly says in in his book, The Thought Leadership Manual, “If you want the market to talk about you, talk about the market.”
A quick note on business to consumer (B2C) brands that we might consider as thought leaders.
I contend that consumer brands are rarely considered as thought leaders or, if they are, it’s transient.
Often, people will point to brands like Uber, eBay, and Airbnb as contradictions to this idea. I would argue that those examples all prove my point. The difference with these firms is that you won’t see thought leadership-oriented content being generated about their products.
That’s because, once their products became understood and widely adopted, it no longer made sense to keep educating the market about them. The thought leadership phase persisted for as long as they disrupted accepted industry norms.
The core value proposition was actually very easy to understand: Uber, a taxi service delivered differently; eBay, a classifieds marketplace delivered differently; Airbnb, hotels delivered differently; and the list goes on.
How they operated and the benefits their operating models offered large numbers of consumers was the thought leadership part of the story and part of their first-mover (or first-mass-scale commercialisation) success. After that, we all understood the product and they largely behaved like any other B2C organisation and focused on brand exposure, customer experience, product line extension, and strengthening their core product offering.
They don’t need a B2B-grade thought leadership-led marketing program to walk their buyers through the awareness, education, and consideration phases before purchase.
Contrast that with software that helps programmers of website chatbots on high-volume e-commerce sites react more sensitively to sentiment in real-time customer engagements. There is no sale of this software without education.
In the next article, I’ll look at the two most common myths of thought leadership that many smaller B2B firms have about their ability to compete: The two myths about thought leadership that challenger brands waste time worrying about.
Adam Benson,
CEO
The Recognition Group
This article is completely generated by the author. No artificial intelligence tools were used to create or edit this copy.
Other articles in the thought leader series include:
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- The two myths about thought leadership that challenger brands waste time worrying about.
- Seven thought leadership strategies B2B marketers need to know
- Recognition and authority – the two drivers of thought leadership
- What is people-led thought leadership strategy?
- Thought leadership marketing for companies that sell a process
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This article originally published on LinkedIn here: HERE
