Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
Imagine you developed the perfect formula for reversing and preventing grey hair, one that really works and doesn’t require FDA approval or prescriptions. You’d make billions. But not if you didn’t have a way to get it into people’s hands—no way at all. If you can’t manufacture it at scale, if you can’t ship and fulfill orders, your formula wouldn’t matter.
It sounds obvious that your idea would fail to earn even a single dollar until you had working production and distribution. You’d need both.
But somehow, many companies planning thought leadership initiatives are similarly incapacitated. No qualified production resources. No realistic distribution plan.
Closing the Production Gap
The production gap seems closable easily enough. Just go hire a writer and have them interview your thought leaders. Of course, in reality, it’s not so easy at all, especially when it takes industry knowledge to ask the right questions and emphasize what makes thought leaders’ ideas relevant to real-world decision-makers.
Institutional finance is an excellent case in point. A writer absolutely must understand asset classes, how assets are created, how their lifecycle unfolds, how transactions happen, and the global regulatory regimes that cover them. Going back to my initial comparison, you wouldn’t try to outsource your grey hair formula production to a garment manufacturer or widget producer. For producing institutional finance thought leadership, most freelance writers and content agencies might as well just be fabricators in bulk.
Planning Your Distribution Climb
Distribution is more like a mountain than a gap in thought leadership planning. Ideas-Led Growth is one of the few resources financial institutions and fintechs can rely on to produce bespoke “couture” assets. Or to find a way to replicate the molecules needed for your formula. Choose your analogy.
Still, I’m often surprised how many clients start with a focus on making the thought leadership rather than planning how to get it into people’s hands, let alone executing those plans. It’s often why thought leadership falls flat. Getting to the summit feels like a steep climb.
Assuming you solve the thought leadership production problem, distribution doesn’t mean just posting it online, stacking up a few social posts, and setting up a drip campaign to an email list. While you can do those things for basic visibility, virtually 0% of that visibility translates into commercial results (i.e., buying decisions made by senior stakeholders). You might as well be tossing flyers off the roof of your office building.
There are better ways.
Level One: You Have More Own Channels Than You Think
WhiOwned channels don’t stop with web, social, and email. Every touchpoint between your company and a buyer matters.
The first step is to start with processes for thought leaders, senior executives, and other company employees to share assets. You can at least maximize your digital distribution. Create post text that is easy to share and post with clear guidelines for what can and can’t be included to personalize the post.
You also have other channels at your disposal. For example, each piece of thought leadership contains multiple conversations your sales team can start with prospects at various stages of the buying journey. Never publish thought leadership without creating a simple sales enablement guide of talking points and questions. Salespeople can easily use those materials to reach out to new prospects, those already in the sales process, and even those who dropped out by saying “no” or “later.” However, salespeople need to know that thought leadership exists and understand what to do with it before that can happen.
Many companies also underutilize their internal communications channels. When you publish a significant piece of thought leadership, more employees should know about it. Beyond sales, anyone in a client-facing role should know about the core ideas you’re using to go to market. The same is true for anyone responsible for anything related to product development.
Some roles need even more than awareness—they need to be accountable for understanding the basic premise and headlines from your thought leadership. The most effective thought-leading companies create constructive mechanisms to identify, incentivize, and track engagement within those core strategic roles.
Many companies similarly underutilize their client communications channels. Don’t let your client communications devolve into product updates and issue reporting. If the insights in your thought leadership matter, they should have clear and direct relevance to clients as much—if not more so—as to prospects. You can create new client communications processes to share good news. If your clients interact with you digitally, you can even use the platforms they use to share thought leadership news, provided you don’t interrupt their workflows or otherwise turn it into a source of irritation.
Level Two: Thought Leadership Should Create Internal Change
If you have a point of view on a better way to handle certain regulatory reports, streamline the settlement of certain transaction types, execute workflows, or manage risk (just to name four examples), you have to show it, not tell it.
I’ve seen companies creating thought leadership that directly contradicts or undermines the way they currently do business. Let’s say your thought leadership emphasizes straight-through processing and machine learning. If your current platforms force your clients into manual processing without plans to deploy more automation, you’re sending the wrong message. Instead, thought leadership should be a signal of how you are reorienting your own business.
Thought leadership CAN be a step or two ahead of your offering, but not more than that. If your insight is that a particular way of working is better, then you need to be working that way, or at least heading that way, for your thought leadership to have value.
Level Three: One-to-One is a Better Ratio Than Onne in 10,000
As I’ve said, most thought leadership plans focus on mass distribution and racking up engagement data. But when only one data point in 10,000 translates into commercial impact for your business, there’s nearly no point at all.
Because some marketers are addicted to data, they want the numbers. They find this idea shocking. But what if you made a list of the 100 decision-making executives who matter and developed a plan for getting your thought leadership to them?
This direct, one-to-one outreach would be to people who could actually sign a high-ticket, high-stakes deal with you. Your thought leadership should be written to influence the way those people understand their challenges and the possibilities for improvement and growth. The other 9,900 don’t necessarily matter (fair enough to object that many stakeholders influence the decision).
The trick is finding and reaching them. When your thought leadership puts forward your thinking in a way that leads real-world decision makers to change their decision criteria, that’s when you get thought leadership impact.
On Top of Mount Distribution
Making the most of your owned channels and creating new ones, reorienting how you do business, and adopting a one-to-one mindset can seem like steep and jagged ridges to get over. You may find a few organizational crevasses along the way, too.
But as you climb, you get closer and closer to the peak of thought leadership. Once you reach the summit, your thought leadership delivers the two things it promises: thinking and leading.
Three Grace Notes
“If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political.” — Timothy Snyder, On Freedom
“All words are at best transitory and soon enough become archaic, ceasing to belong to language at all and instead becoming the property of data sets that after a further time return only dead URL links, so many 404 errors. In this sense, all words are at best IOUs that if not immediately redeemed fail to deliver on their initial promise.” —Richard Flanagan, Question 7
“As long as our kind exists, you cannot completely die. So the only thing that should fill you with fear, rather than your own tiny death, is the extinction of us all, a world without a future, without children, because then nothing makes sense.” —Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum
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