1. Your organization is prepared to back it up with substance.
2. It solves a problem or uncovers and opportunity (as Grant Butler the author of Think, Write, Grow insists)

Dell Computer recently executed a smart b2b direct response campaign by old fashioned mail.  But the execution is very effective because it offers advice and solves a problem.  The primary call to action in the campaign was to have a conversation about gettting more for less – trying to find ways maximizing your storage.  It is not a “product push”. Rather it solves a problem in a simple and immediate way.

What makes it work it the ability of the consultant in the call center to back it up with a smart conversation and quality advice.  This campaign offers a comprehensive report with recommendations of how much storage you might conserve (is it worth it) and practical ways you can go about saving it.   The conversation must not be painful and long.  Or make the client feel like they are being profiled or sold to.   And that’s not easy.  It takes alot of training and integration to sales.  That is the art of effective thought leadership selling.

To make sure your organization can deliver the advice to match a compelling offer like this requires skills, training and tools.   Organizations like Symantec, SunTrust and PNC make similar claims in their direct response advertisements and prospecting calls.  But they also invest significantly to ensure their tele-web channels can deliver a quality conversation and relevant advice if a prospect chooses to engage.

For example, Symantec Corporation makes a similar offer to business owners with their Small Business Check-up web marketing campaign.  To back it up they launched a new tool giving small businesses a holistic view of how they measure up against their peers in terms of information protection efficiency and effectiveness.   The Symantec Small Business Check-up tool is a simple-to-complete online questionnaire that enables small businesses to benchmark themselves against survey results from 700 small businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).  The comparison allows owners to assess their organization’s relative vulnerability to data risk compared to peer firms across the globe.  Then it provides them with an analysis of any gaps or inconsistencies that might cause additional exposure.

PNC and SunTrust make similar offers to help small businesses with their cash flow.  In both cases these quality organizations have invested in backing up the promise of good advice with training, tools and content to back up the promise and differentiate the client experience with education, advice and relevant solutions.  PNC CFO Options Campaign points clients to a tele-channel where they have trained bankers to be ready to offer consultative advice on the issues and examples highlighted on their web site.  Aligning and integrating their investment in training with marketing content and sales process is what makes this work.   Likewise, SunTrust smartly lined up their marketing dollars with advisory tools, content and training.   SunTrust ads and web promotions point clients to a web channels – backed up by a powerful tool called the Cash Management Evaluator and original thought leadership content on Cash Flow Management Best practices (The Financial Fitness Kit).  Bankers include these tools in their training so they are articulate in the issues when they come up.

• Extremely valuable to certain clients but not all (perhaps one in twenty customers needs it). But those customers that do need the solution can save millions of dollars if they use the product. So targeting was very hard.
• Extremely complex so it is very hard for brokers to understand and get confident in the product, much less explain to their customers why they needed it.  Also, training time and budgets were limited but the company needed to educate and train hundreds of brokers in very little time.

To solve the problem, this company deployed an innovative Multi-Channel Selling Tool from Profitable Channels that helped them cost effectively develop a stronger broker sales channel, target the best opportunities in their market and drive growth. They deployed a People Solutions Tool that helped their salespeople and broker partners with their day to day selling challenges by:

• Providing them compelling reasons to call;
• Making it easier to generate referrals for new business from third party distributors;
• Making simple to execute their targeting and segmentation scheme capture needs based profiles
• Helping them have quality conversations;
• And automatically deliver customized advice in the form of automated advisory reports;
• Suggesting relevant and meaningful sales follow up agenda, including materials to bring to the call.

This Multi-Channel Selling Tool helps AlphaStaff sell more for less because it directly supports every step of the customer engagement process – from initial contact…to discovering customer needs…to delivering advice…to recommending relevant solutions and useful resources in follow-up meetings.

The People Solution Tool makes it simple for every customer facing channel at AlphaStaff – third party brokers, inside sales reps, service reps and the company web site – to educate customers and generate measurable sales outcomes. Specifically:

• The People Solution Tool helps broker’s open doors with compelling ideas and relevant insights.  It has a landing page that provides a compelling reason to call, thought leadership content scripts, and pitch books that start the conversation and explain what a shared employment solution is.
• It helps brokers consistently ask the right questions that identify top customer needs – with a sales diagnostic tool that helps brokers identify the clients and prospects that would get the most value from this offering, and capture that information in needs based profiles.
• The tool automatically recommends relevant advice and solutions to customers with a custom generated report that ranks, quantifies and prioritizes that top ways they can save money, reduce risk and improve service quality.
• The tool generates custom reports that help set up follow on meetings and make a compelling economic case to meet a shared employment specialist.

This Multi-Channel Selling Tool helped this company differentiate its client experience with education and advice and demonstrate to insurance brokers they were committed to the channel.

You can learn more about the Multi-Channel Selling Tool by contacting Profitable Channels.

Some of the key points we feel strongly about include:

• High quality thought leadeship content is critical to providing customers with compelling ideas, insights end education differentiates the sales experience – which is a key driver of loyalty.
• Tweets and real time updates are popular – but remain “top of the sales funnel” tools that do not generally drive measurable sales outcomes. Marketers need deeper content to support the bottom half of the sales funnel where conversations, consideration, advice, execution and relationships happen. There is very little focus here by most companies, plus at some point humans will need to be involved in that conversation which is another problem.
• Excellent thought leadership content is needed to drive quality conversations. Tweets generate interest, and are perhaps good conversation starters, but are not entirely effective at setting up human meetings or conversations that last more than two sentences.
• Quality thought leadership content is needed to support sales coaching, needs based selling, cross sell without product pushing and a whole range of high quality selling activity.
• Quality thought leadership content can make low cost selling channels (with humans like call centers, retail, or distributors or influencers) much more effective and valuable.

With this opportunity comes the potential for misdirected content marketing efforts and outright waste. Most organizations create selling videos, papers, collateral, articles, case studies, blogs and other educational resources in a highly fragmented fashion.  As a result, the selling content they create is often inconsistent, expensive, and not aligned with the sales process.  The consequences of this approach are duplication, inconsistent quality, poor client interactions and inefficient sales.

Organizations can fix the problem and “sell more for less” by reengineering the content supply chain. This involves putting in place a content architecture and disciplined processes for creating, aligning, distributing and reusing content.  This is worth considering because it can significantly reduce spending on wasted content that does not directly support the client engagement process or generate measurable sales outcomes. 

For example, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company advocates that if organizations adopted a “disciplined content supply chain” it would cut costs by 30%, halve the rate of content volume growth, and double the rate of customer engagement.  The article suggests taking a publisher’s discipline to curb costs:

“Supporting the consumer’s decision journey requires a vast and growing range of content—well beyond advertisements.  As companies chase digital opportunities, most have slowly but steadily begun publishing everything from static content, such as product descriptions, to games and other multimedia. Most companies have now essentially become publishers, with a more complex set of cost and quality concerns, yet continue to behave like simple advertisers.  Most marketers, failing to adopt the discipline of a multimedia publisher, don’t realize that deep within their operations, they are facing rapidly escalating production costs, unnecessary duplication, inconsistent quality of content, and second-rate interactions with customers.”

Specifically, reengineering the content supply chain would achieve several important goals:

1. It would improve sales process alignment and support, ensuring content generates measurable sales outcomes and justifies its expense. 
2. It would expand distribution of content to customers, prospects and influencers.  Most content is stuck at the “top of the sales funnel” in digital, social and mobile channels.  Except in e-businesses, very little of this content is being delivered through primary or “human” sales channels which drive deeper into the sales funnel and generate the lion’s share of actual sales.  By packaging, parsing and distributing content through more channels, it impacts more customer interactions, and significantly improves return on investment.
3. It would help control content in a resource efficient manner ensuring the quality, execution, consistency, control, scalability and reuse of marketing content across the organization.  This would significantly reduce costs and make the most of management time by leveraging, repurposing and reusing and refreshing assets.  It will also reduce marketing management and field management workload in execution and delivery.
4. It will help grow more for less through additional leverage by increasing market reach with the same level of resources in terms of number of quality interactions and people touched.

To help you take action, Profitable Channels has outlined a five step process that leading organizations are putting in place for creating, aligning, distributing sales content assets:

1.       Document the Customer Engagement Process.  Many organizations do not have a formal sales process in the first place.  So to begin, document (or create if necessary) a client engagement process, from generating awareness and interest to delivering advice and closing business.  This needs to be a cross-functional picture of all marketing and selling channels (sales, partner, retail, call center, interactive channels).  Be sure to include downstream relationship development calls and human sales meetings (which make up most sales contact).  An advanced exercise includes adapting the process to illustrate how it addresses specific customer segments and show the mix of channels used in each step or interaction. Finally, to keep focused on business impact, include a definition of the customer experience and needs, speed of engagement and key performance indicators/metrics.

2.       Conduct a Marketing and Selling Asset Inventory Assessment.   As a next step, create a map of marketing and selling assets to determine how well they support the customer engagement process and target customer needs.  Do this by conducting a “marketing and selling asset inventory” that aggregates and organizes all existing sales tools, programs, selling content and collateral by type, engagement process step and selected channel. 

3.       Align go-to-market content assets with the sales process.  Assess how well existing selling assets map to and support the multi-channel customer engagement process by aligning existing go-to-market assets and resources with the steps of that process.  This will help identify ways to leverage and repackage existing assets to support day-to-day selling, create more sales events and interactions, and generate measurable sales outcomes. It will also allow versioning of assets so they can be delivered efficiently through web, e-mail, influencer and face to face channels.

4.       Create a thought leadership agenda and content architecture.  This is a plan to direct the development of new content and the repurposing of existing assets.  It ensures that new assets will support segment, messaging and sales process objectives. Equally important, the thought leadership agenda is a centralized control point to ensure any assets created are differentiating the sales experience from the competition with education, relevant advice and ideas. The content architecture is a framework for directing the development and repurposing of selected proprietary thought leadership assets designed to fill gaps in the process, address unmet owner needs and directly support sales and marketing objectives.

5. Put in place a programmatic and multi-channel delivery approach.   Using the thought leadership and content agenda as a guide to create a portfolio of core content assets, including but not limited to educational videos, case studies, reports, seminars, pitchbooks, blog posts, interactive tools, retail selling tools, e-mail “ready” advisory assets, and face to face workshops. The creation and approval of these assets should be controlled centrally, either in house or with a dedicated partner. The distribution should include channel owners and regional sales organizations.

Ideally, these five steps will help the organization document and quantify the business case to maximize return on investment in marketing and selling assets, channels and resources by improving the go-to-market process.

To get help putting in place a thought leadership agenda and content architecture or for examples of how leading organizations like HP, DuPont, and Intel are reengineering their content processes, contact Profitable Channels.

Thought leadership has become a top priority for executives who sell high value products to sophisticated clients - such as technology,  insurance, B2B solutions, health care or advisory services. The majority of marketers have increased their spending on custom thought leadership content because new ideas, education and relevant advice are fast becoming the key to differentiating the client experience, opening doors and profitably developing their highest value customer segments.  Despite this focus and investment in third party advisory content and marketing materials the standard for education, new ideas, and useful advice is remarkably low in most industries in the eyes of the customer.

In this session of the Profitable Channels Growth Webinar Series, partner Stephen Diorio will interview leading Thought Leadership Marketing expert Grant Butler to discuss:

• How top sales organizations such as IBM, SunTrust Bank, CBS, and DuPont have been able to differentiate and grow their business with thought leadership selling assets
• 6 practical keys to successful thought leadership selling
• How to profitably focus your organization’s thought leadership efforts to drives sales results and eliminate waste
• How to write, source and package quality thought leadership assets from inside and outside your company

If you are you interested in how to differentiate and grow your sales, then click here to listen to our recent webinar discussion on Using Thought Leadership to Different and Grow Your Sales.

About the presenters

Grant Butler,  is the author of the soon to be released book: Think, Write, Grow: How to Build Your Business By Writing Thought Leadership Material (Assets) and the CEO of the Editor Group, a firm that creates thought leadership content assets for dozens of top sales organizations including: IBM, PWC, Oracle, and SAP

Stephen Diorio is a managing partner at Profitable Channels.  He has deployed thought leadership selling programs and tools at top sales organizations including: Intuit, CBS, Oracle, DuPont, Wells Fargo and SunTrust Bank.

As some background, here is an article I wrote recently on how you can write thought leadership material – particularly if you’re working within a professional service firm.

In case you’re wondering, I’m based in Australia and run a corporate writing firm called Editor Group. That means I write (and think) at lot for leading thought leaders here in Asia Pacific and around the world. Hope you like this! 

WALKING THE LINE

Where on earth is the pizza? It’s pushing 8 pm and for the past three hours I’ve been sitting in a conference room with about 10 fast-talking, frightfully well-informed professionals, plus more on video-conference, grappling with the minutiae of 600 pages of some just-released climate change legislation. Ordinarily there would be food on tap from the firm’s in-house catering, but we’re in the midst of the financial crisis so all those niceties have been cut to the bone. And the pressure is on – we’re just one of several crews around town holed up in the top of large office towers trying to make sense of the new laws and produce a uniquely valuable summary to send out to clients. In fact, some other firms have already got theirs out, so we’re under pressure to deliver something phenomenal.

Finally we hit ‘send’ on a draft for the partners to review at about 3:30 am. It’ll be picked up, read, corrected, circulated, laid out and sent to clients by about midday the next day, which shows how agile large firms can be when they want to produce an important piece of thought leadership material. But as the writer, I’ve got to confess that anything written after midnight won’t necessarily be my best work.

So, what are some simple guidelines for quality writing that you can keep in mind while walking the tightrope of generating thought leadership within a professional service firm? How do you ensure material is produced on the right topic at the right time and written well enough that it is positively received by clients?

What is thought leadership?

Let’s start by taking a step back – what is thought leadership material and why is it so crucial in service firm marketing?

Wikipedia defines ‘thought leader’ as “a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognised among peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights”. The online encyclopedia goes on to say that the term was first coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, Editor-in-Chief of Strategy & Business magazine, which is published by Booz & Company, to describe a group of figures such as Charles Handy and Paul Romer who had contributed new ideas to business.

‘Thought leader’ has since spread into other fields beyond management to capture the idea of any individual or organisation that progresses the thinking in a field. Along the way, it has seemed to vacuum up the good old-fashioned term ‘expert’. In many ways the two terms are synonymous, but ‘thought leader’ is a bigger concept because it says that someone is both an expert and that they want to change other people’s views. This gives it an evangelical edge that can be easily seen in the likes of property developer Donald Trump, self-help guru Anthony Robbins or the famous economist Paul Krugman.

The benefits

In practice, thought leadership material typically includes articles, books, white papers, columns, speeches and research studies. The benefits of producing such items are myriad. They build a person’s or firm’s profile, telegraph expertise, establish credibility, start new conversations with clients, bust into other people’s accounts through novelty of thought and shape agendas. Thought leadership can play a powerful role in building trust between your firm and its clients.

Andrew Lumsden, a partner at national law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth, says he finds value in writing occasional newspaper columns. In late 2009, he wrote an article called ‘Son of Wallis – disclosure for the 21st century’ that was published in The Australian Financial Review, discussing how the global downturn may have raised the need for a new inquiry into Australia’s finance system.

According to Lumsden, writing such pieces helps him stir debate. “Usually it doesn’t take too long to write it,” he says, adding it might take him four hours to write a column. “Polishing is the hard bit. Op ed–style pieces are tricky; it’s 800 words and you’ve got to try to make a point quickly and in a way that’s interesting and topical. “My main thing is make it interesting! So much of the stuff I see is just dreary. If you don’t get people captured by the first three paragraphs, they’re moving on.”

Structure: capture, convince and close

A first key principle is that almost all persuasive material should capture the audience’s attention, build a convincing case and then close in a way that motivates the reader to some course of action – from simply changing their mind to making a phone call.

A great place to seek inspiration is journalism or the opinion pages of newspapers. Here, almost every article has been carefully constructed to hook you in and then keep you reading. From a writing point of view this means the linguistic equivalent of bright flashing lights: strong language, colourful anecdotes, unexpected statistics, thought-provoking questions, heartbreaking pathos and so on. And yes, this is possible even in rarefied worlds like law, accounting, management consulting or engineering.

An example is this elegant start to a long piece on consumerism by economist Henry Ergas that appeared in The Weekend Australian: “Will we run out of things to consume? John Maynard Keynes thought so. He explained his reasoning in an essay, ‘Economic Prospects for our Grandchildren’.”

Ergas went on to argue his case at length with various points, facts and figures – which was the convincing part – then closed with this matching bookend: “It is that tension, between private dynamism and public inertia, that will continue to frame our lives in ways not even Keynes could have imagined.”

Storytelling

From the Bible onwards, another powerful technique is storytelling. An excellent book here is The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (Wiley, 2005) by Australian-born Stephen Denning. Denning tells of his experiences trying to effect change within the World Bank and how he achieved breakthroughs by moving from stilted PowerPoints full of numbers and dot points to telling simple stories about real human beings and how the Bank’s work had impacted their lives.

The power of storytelling is twofold in writing. First, it helps to give material a flow and, like the Bible to Pride and Prejudice and Grey’s Anatomy, to embed information and morals in an easy-to-digest form. The second is that it forces an author to come up with an example of what they’re talking about – either drawn from their own life, the organisation or further afield. If a tax partner can’t list one business that has gone broke because of a particular law they’re arguing against, will anyone believe it’s a problem?

Use analogies and metaphors

Analogies and metaphors are key rhetorical devices for making complex ideas simple and memorable. They’re also great for humour, as the current Lord Mayor of London and often brilliant writer Boris Johnson uses to devastating effect. Here’s Boris talking about Tony Blair: “He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.”

Of course, it can be hard to be so colourful when writing within a large, blue-chip professional service firm. But even then there are plenty of word images and allusions that can be used to convey a point. A famous wielder of metaphors who, unlike Boris, has never been known to drink, smoke or make racist jokes, is Warren Buffett. For example: “In the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”

Harness history

As Henry Ergas showed, one of the most powerful techniques you can use to prove a point is to cite historical events or great figures, thinkers or institutions. This tends to show you or the person you’re ghost writing for is well read and has done their homework. It adds instant weight and is terribly easy to do these days because the Internet makes it so quick to find a related idea, quote or anecdote. As an author, it also tends to give you a great way to add ‘colour’ to an article or speech in situations where you can’t find a human story to illustrate a point that you are trying to make.

Show some style

Your copy should be succinct, to the point and precise. This means cutting out ‘flabby’ words which add little value, like ‘that’ and ‘in relation to’. It also means ensuring each sentence and paragraph provides valuable information, any facts are correct and your phrasing is unambiguous.

Such buttoned-down English can be very dull, so look for ways to add a bit of flair and retain your authorial voice. Try to ensure the piece has some underlying poetry (rhythm and alliteration and so on); avoiding tired words like ‘leverage’, ‘innovation’ and even up-to-date clichés like ‘new normal’; and spice up your copy with an occasional interesting or unexpected word.

Here’s an example from an article in McKinsey Quarterly about doing business in emerging markets. This author borrows the word ‘blowback’ from the military as a metaphor, and simply because it’s an interesting, onomatopoeic word: “In the days of the rudimentary pistol, unlucky shooters were now and then hurt when unburned gunpowder escaped backward toward their faces. They came to describe this unpleasant experience as ‘blowback’, a term that has subsequently gained wider application in military affairs – to any event that turns on its maker.

Blowback is an apt term for the unexpected consequences of Western companies’ investments in emerging markets.” You just know the article is going to be more interesting than something that starts, “In today’s ever-more competitive emerging markets where leverage and …”.

Follow a passion

No amount of great writing will hide a lack of passion on the part of your firm or the thought leaders it puts forward. Thought leadership is a tough grind that involves communicating often and with great fervour, and extensive background reading.

In turn, it’s vital thought leaders develop their material around topics that genuinely interest them or else they simply won’t read, write or speak enough – and with enough sincerity – to succeed. As US business and marketing thought leader Dr Martha Rogers says in a recent RainToday.com report: “You can’t put the cart before the horse … you don’t sit down and decide to become well-known for something. What happens is that you have this ‘something’ that drives you so hard, that if you have the energy behind it and any communication capabilities, you end up becoming known for it.”

Grant Butler is Managing Director of Editor Group. Editor Group provides writing, editing, proofreading and training services. gbutler@editorgroup.com.

These organizations set an example for all marketers because they get the fundamentals of thought leadership marketing right before the engage and agency or an engineer to create content. They do their research first.  And ask some fundamental questions.

1. What problems do our customers face that we can credibly solve?
2. What business opportunities can we illuminate for them?
3. What should our focus be – in terms of credibility, passion, voice and expertise?

It sounds simple, but very few marketers actually do it well.  It seems the engineers are teaching the ad folks how to do their homework and make thought leadership a profitable investment.  Some focus on their core strengths like GE and Siemens to establish thought leadership in their core area of focus.

GE has done an excellent job marshaling its traditionally Spartan marketing budget around the theme of clean and green technology.  GE is credible because they can “walk the talk” in terms of clean energy R&D and solutions in the nuclear, gas, solar and wind power.  As part of their Ecomagination messaging campaign they sponsor contests, substantive research and promote leaders in clean energy.

Siemens is a world leader in water treatment and purification technology. They package that leadership under the theme of “managing your water footprint” and even have a Facebook application that educates people about the issue.

Others – like DuPont and PricewaterhouseCoopers – use thought leadership to stretch the boundaries of their core markets and establish themselves in the middle of hot issues that are relevant, urgent and current to their clients.

DuPont is a chemical company that has carved out niche as the world’s leading authority on color.  A mantle you would suspect would be held by a fashion house in Milan.  But DuPont’s paint and surfaces divisions (which make countertops) have provided the Wilmington Delaware manufacturer the basis of being a leading authority on color trends.  And they translate that leadership into influence, referrals and sales.  DuPont regularly published color trends that are essential to marketers from cars, paints to home decor.  They have design studios in New York to influence architects that create leading edge buildings and spaces. And use color to remain relevant with consumers seeking to remodel their kitchens. 

And ironically, the “boring” accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have established themselves as the global leaders on the issue of growth, trumping every major advertising agency on an issue central to their value proposition. Using sound research, influential client relationships, customer focus groups and collaborative forums PWC hosts the dialog on business growth with clients, prospects and influencers.  Their annual Global Survey on Growth includes interviews, videos and insights from over 1,200 business leaders in 69 countries around the globe.

• Thought leadership helps win the battle for the best customers – by opening doors, eliciting better conversations, and most significantly building trust with sophisticated buyers;
• Ideas, education and advice can differentiate the client experience and help you sell more for less.  Business to business executives interviewed by the Economist Intelligence unit rank Thought Leadership as a top marketing priority because they view their top challenges as “positioning the business as a thought leader in the industry” and “standing out from the competition”;
• Quality ideas and thinking are the strongest currency in a shifting, digital and democratized media landscape.

Recently, the Custom Content Council provided a more pragmatic reason executives should care about thought leadership.  Custom content is becoming a bigger part of the marketing mix to a recent survey of Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) by the Council; marketers are spending over $40 Billion in 2011 on custom content.  Most CMO’s expect customized media and content to make up an even bigger slice of the marketing mix. A majority of CMOs believe that custom media and content will capture a larger proportion of marketing budgets over the next couple of years.  One third of CMOs’ even view custom content as the future of marketing.

And the RO on all this spending remains unknown at best.  According to the survey, over 80% of CMO’s would use custom content even more if they could effectively measure Return on Investment.  Reading between the lines it’s highly likely a lot of that money is wasted or not driving differentiation or measurable sales growth.  Our experience working with large selling organizations is that marketers don’t hold the folks that create and throw out advisory content – on the web, in workshops, webinars or publications – accountable for generating anything more than impressions or awareness.   Only the best organizations force their marketers to justify their custom content investment in terms of measurable sales outcomes – profiles, meetings, referrals, proposals, and actual sales.  Until they do, thought leadership get the growth results it has the potential to achieve.

• Their marketing content does not support most steps of the selling process
• The marketing content does not help them open doors, or make repeat calls
• The marketing content is not tagged or customized to address the specific customer segments
• The marketing content is largely focused on products not customer needs
• The marketing content includes very little advisory or educational content.

Candyce Edelen, CEO and Founder of PropelGrowth wrote and excellent article about using Thought Leadership Content to Support the Entire Buying Cycle. In it, she raises several issues that hamper most sales and marketing organizations:

• Marketing content strategies are generally divorced from sales process strategy and any thought leadership agenda.
• What little advisory content they have is purchased from third party sources and neither original nor differentiated
• Most of this content does not directly support the steps of the business cycle.

Candyce gives one very practical and important piece of advice to organizations who want to stop wasting money on marketing content and collateral:

As you plan your budgets for 2011, I strongly urge you to do a content audit – figure out what you have that supports each stage of the buyer process, and budget for new content to fill out the stages. Look at this post on buyer personas to make sure the content is also relevant to the individual member of the decision committee,

At Profitable Channels we call this a Sales Process Enablement Roadmap. This is a “gap analysis” that tells you how well your existing sales and marketing content enables a meaningful customer dialog throughout the buying cycle, not just in the first meeting.

Conducting this mapping exercise will help you identify where you need to create thought leadership content, resources and  tools that will enable your sales process and support more meaningful sales calls.  To identify the thought leadership assets that can improve your particular sales process the most:

1. Outline your customer engagement process from initial impression all the way through relationship development.  This will give you a picture of the sales experience from the customer’s viewpoint, and identify how and where your different sales resources interact with customers and prospects at every step of the process.
2. Brainstorm where better selling content would make the sales experience more engaging, compelling and valuable to your customers.  For example, selling content could include either compelling “you should know” sales calls, proprietary insights and ideas conveyed in research reports, a well-placed cross selling conversation or a customer education event, case study or webcast.  Rank the places where the content gaps are the greatest or the opportunity to enhance the customer experience is significant.
3. Starting with your biggest opportunity to improve sales value and effectiveness, define specific thought leadership content assets.  Your overall thought leadership strategy should help keep these ideas directly aligned with your business goals, messaging priorities and sales model.

This exercise will help you define the highest return tools and selling content that will actually make a difference by identifying where and how they enable your sales process and support meaningful sales calls.

In 2005 the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America created a proprietary sales and marketing tool for its 3,000 financial advisors nationwide called the Living Balance Sheet. The Living Balance Sheet is a web based tool that organizes every piece of each account’s financial picture in one place, and updates the information daily. The tool has lots of features.  It can rebalance clients’ asset-allocation mix, develop wealth-accumulation strategies, alert clients when it’s time to revisit a particular area of their finances, determine the impact of inflation, taxes and debts on their net worth, and even track their airline reward programs and store copies of important legal documents in an electronic vault. Customized reports can be generated with a few simple mouse clicks, and can be accessed on wireless handheld devices.

The tool is useful because of this comprehensive list of features and functions – but not unique. There are other third party and off-the-rack financial planning tools that do many of these same things. What truly differentiates the Living Balance Sheet is that it is a sales and marketing tool that is designed to specifically:

• Support Guardian’s specific sales process, relationship selling goals and advisory culture.
• Help clients expand their view of their financial world with revolutionary technology and insight they haven’t heard before

The reason this is an excellent example of thought leadership selling is that while other financial advisory firms interpret delivering trusted advice as barraging their clients with retirement calculators, stock picking advice and newsletters, The Guardian has offered them something that is original, more comprehensive, and focused on customer needs.  The tool is now used by over 1,000 Guardian sales reps to:

• Differentiate their sales process with a unique tools and insights;
• Improve the quality, relevance and delivery of the marketing content and sales training material;
• Improve their sales productivity;
• Improve client retention.

You can learn more about how to build proprietary relationship selling tools like this at the Profitable Channels web site.