About This Blog

The notion of thought leadership marketing has emerged as a top priority with sales and marketing executives, in particular business-to-business marketers.  Growth-starved sales organizations are looking for ways to differentiate their customer experience with new ideas, education, relevant advice, and solutions that address unmet customer needs.  Sales executives realize these are the things that really open doors, create quality customer conversations, and drive deeper relationships and profitable cross selling.  And, as marketing executives watch traditional marketing approaches lose their effectiveness, they are learning that ideas, education and a strong point of view are essential to taking advantage of high growth media channels such as interactive, social, mobile, out-of-home, and e-mail.

Despite the growing visibility and importance of thought leadership as a sales discipline, it receives more lip service than program dollars in actual practice.  Most organizations fail to put “muscle” behind the idea by executing disciplined thought leadership programs and promotions.  There are several good reasons for this:

• First, thought leadership marketing is a relatively new discipline pioneered by professional services and technology industry leaders such as McKinsey, IBM, Cap Gemini and Apple.
• Second, most organizations lack processes for creating original selling content, managers to lead cross functional programs, and the agility to execute fast enough to lead the market with fresh ideas and insights.
• Finally, the traditional advertising agencies that sales and marketing executives look to for support cannot generate the depth of content or the level of sales process integration necessary for these programs to succeed.

This blog is to explore how sales organizations are actually creating and executing Thought Leadership Selling programs that immediately generate more quality customer meetings, referrals, profiles and conversations.  It will provide best practices, examples and practical steps leading sales organizations can take to execute sales programs that consistently deliver new ideas and relevant solutions to customers.