We’ve often bogged about the many benefits of thought leadership, going back to one of our earliest posts. Recently, Chris Koch wrote a posting on his blog providing an actual five-step recipe for B2Bs seeking to attain thought leadership, which we felt was well worth a quick summary here (and a click over for the full article).
Research the need. Maybe the topics you hoped to “lead” on are already claimed by established experts that you can’t hope to compete with; or possibly your market can’t envision your firm moving into such a role. Or maybe you’re already there. Most likely, your current situation is somewhere in between; and you’ll need a more fine-grained set of objectives, down to specific areas of interest and appropriate vehicles.
Determine organizational readiness. For consulting firms, this is generally not a problem; their hiring is typically based on thought leadership. Others will need to build… an internal cultural commitment to the thought leadership mission, including strong executive support. Marketing can manage the program and disseminate the output, but it can’t reasonably be expected to have all the ideas.
Build a network. Identify your internal thought leaders plus relevant external bloggers, academics and customers, and stay in touch with them and their work. They can help provide ideas for research or analysis that can germinate into the output you need to keep generating.
Create a process. You should develop a publishing process and calendar across a number of vehicles, and align those vehicles as well as possible with the stages in your sales cycle. If you haven’t yet started a blog, do so; most B2Bs will find it becomes their most disciplined and highest impact thought-leadership asset.
Install systems and metrics. The point of all this is not only to raise awareness of your company or upgrade its image, but to help make sales; so you need to be able to track the consumers of your thought leadership material all the way through to eventual purchase. So if you don’t yet have a lead-tracking/nurturing system, start one …and be sure that it captures your prospects’ uptake of this material. If you don’t yet have a CRM (e.g., salesforce.com), get one; and make sure it’s integrated with your lead tracking system.
It’s a very coherent approach …which will always beat “ready-fire-aim.”
