Thought Leadership about Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership and the Organization

The virtues of Thought Leadership for B2B companies - particularly those that sell data and insights - are clear. Clients expect that you will deliver thought leadership value to them above and beyond the data that they pay for because you have a perch working across a broad swath of competitors, across different geographies, categories and industries. It drives leads from prospective customers. It enhances your brand in the marketplace. It showcases your data in action, revealing use cases clients hadn’t considered. It creates Social currency. It establishes you as a resource for reporters at trade publications that cover your clients’ industries, opening up earned media opportunities.

Despite the obvious benefits that accrue to companies with strong thought leadership presence in the market, it often doesn’t get done because more immediate priorities prevail and because accountability for creation and management of thought leadership content is often unclear in organizations that haven’t been, um, thoughtful about it.

In Episode 3, we will tackle two big questions around the ‘Who’ in Thought Leadership. Who are our thought leaders and who should manage the thought leadership function organizationally?

Thought Leadership Organizational Models

We use the term ‘Thought Leader’ as a job title (‘Sylvia is our Thought Leader’) and as a form of content marketing (Check out this new piece of thought leadership). On a personal note, I’ve had a Thought Leader job title in a few different companies and, frankly, haven taken a lot of guff from friends about it (‘Hey Ken, say something thoughtful!’). Explaining my job to older relatives evokes the sort of response that I might get if I told them that I was a Cat Shaman. My advice to Thought Leaders: Tell your relatives that you’re an Accountant, save yourself the puzzled looks, and you can be sure that there won’t be follow up questions.

Many vendors of data produce high quality thought leadership material created by people that have day jobs other than being Thought Leaders – a distributed model. Members of the Data Science and Product teams often have interesting things to say. Members of the Sales teams are often unable to turn off their Sales selves, leading to content that is often too transparently sales-y. Others, after achieving some scale, create a dedicated Thought Leader role. Some of the largest create multiple roles, aligned with either Product lines or with the vertical industries they serve.

The distributed model allows you to spread the work, showcase many voices within the company, and sometimes get into valuable methodological detail (Geekery, in my Thought Leadership framework). When your modes of disseminating thought leadership are webinars, conferences and written pieces, this can work, but requires commitment from the organization for it to work sustainably because of the time and skill that it takes to create. The most likely result of a distributed model is content of mixed quality that comes in spurts.

Dedicated Thought Leaders are costly. Authority requires experience and writing and presenting skills are rare and valuable. But when it’s someone’s only job, accountability for creation of content is high. There are two other virtues to a dedicated thought leader model that might be overlooked. First, they can be positioned as ‘on the client’s side’ – not trying to overtly sell anything. This can cause your buyers to shift from an us versus them, buyer versus seller mindset to a partnership mindset. Second, you can take a dedicated Thought Leader on the road to meet with clients to talk about the market, trends, threats and opportunities. Lunch-n-Learns with clients have been extraordinarily effective throughout my career in bringing people into the room that Sales ordinarily doesn’t get to talk to, including the VPs and SVPs that usually see your data only through the interpretive lens of their own team. If your Thought Leader causes your clients to dig into a new use case for the data they’ve already subscribed to, it is a huge win. And, of course, there may be opportunities for incremental sales that are triggered by a conversation with a big cross functional group that may not get together frequently.

For an organization that reaches the threshold that they can hire a dedicated Thought Leader, I love the ‘Player/Coach’ model, where the Thought Leader is responsible for creation and presentation of their own content, as well as fostering the creation of material from others in the organization – particularly the folks in the Data Science and Product disciplines.

Where should Thought Leadership sit Organizationally?

I’ve worked in organizations where the Thought Leadership function sat in Sales and others where it sat in Marketing. Neither is inherently right or wrong. One could argue that it makes sense in Sales because Sales is the organization that has the most direct contact with the customer. It makes more sense to me, though, that Thought Leadership sits in Marketing. The Marketing department contains other highly complementary roles (Events, Social, and Public Relations, most notably). And it owns responsibility for development of the brand and generation of Marketing Qualified Leads, the most measurable impact driven by the TL function.

The thing that especially resonates with me though is the idea that Marketing is inherently a cultivating function and Sales is inherently a harvesting function. The day to day, quarter to quarter pressure on Sales can squeeze out attention on activities that will pay off next quarter or next year. Marketing though, measures success on longer horizons, which are far better aligned with the CMO’s horizon’s than the CRO’s.

The CEO should be a Thought Leader

One final point: There is tremendous value in a CEO that is a Thought Leader in their industry. CEO’s can get on stages that others in your company cannot get on. They have a vantage point that no-one else in the company has. And, perhaps most importantly, clients’ CEOs are far more likely to agree to the top-to-top when your CEO has viewpoints beyond closing the next deal. Every CEO of a company that sells data should feel pressure to have thoughtful opinions about their clients’ businesses as much as their own.

That’s it for this week. Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday! If you’re a Thought Leader, give serious consideration to my advice that you tell your Uncle that you’re an Accountant. Or, if you’re going to admit to being a Thought Leader, perhaps you can share this Substack with your Uncle so that he can get as excited about it as you are.