In this post, I conclude a trio of articles on thought leadership. In the first, I describe why developing thought leaders is good for your business and how they help you attract your best clients. In the second article, I explain how true thought leadership means giving away your expertise for free—and why the benefits far outweigh the risks.

In today’s post, I want to explore the relationship between thought leadership, marketing and selling. My thinking is inspired in part by Blair Enns’ excellent book, The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise.

When all three of these components of business development work in concert, good things happen. Selling is easier. Prospects seek you out and prefer you over your competitors. You attract more clients that respect your expertise. And because there is less distrust and friction during these engagements, your ability to help the client, your profitability and your work satisfaction rise.
But this kind of synergy doesn’t happen by accident.

But this kind of synergy doesn’t happen by accident.

Selling

At the pointy bottom of the marketing funnel is selling.* Selling is a one-on-one (or one-to-a-group, or group-to-group) process of convincing a prospect that your firm is the best qualified to solve their problem.

Firms that rely primarily on a selling-forward strategy face a big problem. They have to convince a skeptical audience to buy from them. Buyers must take their claims of expertise at face value, and chances are those buyers have been burned in the past.

Convincing people to buy in this way requires considerable skill and powers of persuasion. And even when you do close a sale, the client is likely to pounce on any misstep as evidence that they made the wrong decision.

Earning trust isn’t easy. Most professional services projects are long and complex. It’s not unusual for a relatively small mistake midway through an engagement to torpedo what little trust the firm has accrued—and impel the client to walk away.

Selling does have one big advantage, though: It’s personal. That means you can respond to objections directly. It also provides a way to introduce the prospect to one or more of your people so they can get a sense of your personality and whether you might be a good cultural fit.

Marketing

Marketing is focused primarily at the top and middle of the funnel. Marketing’s purpose is to expose your firm and its services to your target audiences.

Much of this exposure is to people who have never heard of your firm. Marketing messages make claims about your expertise and services that, like selling, must persuade the recipient without a great deal of evidence. Unlike selling, however, marketing is relatively impersonal. But it has the advantage of potentially reaching people multiple times, building familiarity with your brand. A marketing campaign can also be run quickly (think online advertising, for example).

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is teaching. And your prospects are your students. Learning is a slow process that takes place over an extended period of time. When your experts make a habit of regularly educating your clients on a limited number of issues, they—and your firm—can build a devoted following of prospects. These prospects not only look up to your experts, they also rely on them to educate them about their business problems and how they can be solved.

When you give away your expertise for free you allow potential buyers to experience your firm’s expertise. Most of these individuals eventually realize they can’t fix their problems themselves. They need a true expert. And the expert they know best is the one they have come to trust through repeated exposure to their writing, speeches and videos.

As buyers research possible providers, they place these experts’ firms at the top of their list. In many cases—especially if the decision makers are the ones consuming your content—they won’t even bid the project out to another firm.

One downside of educating, which I already mentioned, is the time it takes to build an audience’s trust over time. It also requires significant time from your top experts, who otherwise could be engaged in delivering work.

Putting it All Together

In the modern world, none of these business development strategies alone is enough. Those days are over. Each is much more effective when supported by the others.

For instance, if a devoted follower of your blog raises a hand and asks to move toward a proposal, you still need a talented individual or team to hold a meeting with the prospect and demonstrate that you are exactly who they think you are. You still have to close the sale.

Similarly, you can have the finest library of thought leadership in your industry, but if nobody is aware of your firm—or if you’ve done nothing to make your content visible to the right audience—you are wasting your experts’ time. Marketing is the key to building visibility and promoting your thought leadership.

You may apply different labels than I do to each of these functions. Whatever you call them, you must recognize that you need all three, and they must work together as a system. If your sellers don’t coordinate regularly with your marketers, you have a problem. If your thought leaders are writing whatever they want whenever they want, you have a problem. If your marketers are producing campaigns without a plan, you have a problem.

You are wasting resources, energy and money.

If this sounds familiar, you have two options. You can appoint an internal leader to bring these three functions together and develop a coordinated plan. This is not only the cheaper option, but it forces your firm to wrestle with and solve difficult issues. Often, however, finding the right leader can be difficult, the time required to fix everything is overwhelming or the inter-departmental challenges are insurmountable.

The alternative is to bring in an outside consultant to build the system for you. Outside specialists often have greater perceived authority than their internal counterparts, giving their ideas more weight. The right consultant also will be an expert in solving problems like yours, so they arrive with a great portion of the solution already in their heads. That can save a lot of time. In addition, they know what works and what doesn’t. They can also provide as much assistance as you need to deploy your new system.

Whether you handle everything in-house or lean on an agency to build and manage your system, be sure that all three functions—thought leadership, marketing and sales—are playing on the same team and by the same rules. Then everyone wins.