In this next era of B2B marketing, firms face a new challenge to driving demand.
Historically, marketing leaders have been tasked with aligning the wants and needs of a firm’s clients with the current and emerging capabilities of the firm itself. At this intersection lies the firm’s thought leadership strategy.
As trust in brands and institutions decline more and more clients are looking to individuals for guidance. This shift adds a 3rd dimension to the mix – the need to align the unique individual POVs and thought leadership platforms of a firm’s experts with client needs and firm capabilities.
What was a two-dimensional challenge just became much more complex. Why?
- Subject matter experts often work in silos; encouraging them to connect their individual expertise with the firm’s broader capabilities can be tricky.
- Translating technical knowledge into client-facing content has always been an art that requires specialized expertise.
- Industry trends and changes often outpace client relationships. An expert might work with a handful of clients in a year; are they getting enough repetition to see best practices?
- Billable hours have always and will always compete with thought leadership efforts. When the effort was spread across a wide group of people it could be managed. But what if we need more time and energy from a handful of our best experts?
Yet the rewards for overcoming these hurdles are immense. When firms elevate their experts, they drive brand preference and demand over time.
To help tackle all three of these dimensions at once, we’ve developed a 4-step framework that brings together your clients’ needs, your experts’ POVs, and your firm’s capabilities.
The 4-Step Framework for Aligning Thought Leadership
Our framework consists of four critical steps:
- Conducting a client needs audit
- Mapping internal subject matter experts
- Developing thought leaders
- Aligning with firm capabilities
Each step builds on the previous one, creating a cohesive strategy that connects all three aspects together. Let’s dive into each step in detail.
Step 1: Conduct a Comprehensive Client Needs Audit
The foundation of effective thought leadership is a deep understanding of your clients’ wants, needs, challenges, and priorities. A comprehensive client needs audit provides this critical insight. Here’s how to conduct one:
Gather Insights from Multiple Sources
Start by collecting information from various approaches:
- Conduct qualitative interviews with clients and client-facing personnel
- Seek out industry trends (e.g. read companies’ SEC filings to see what’s going on)
- Conduct secondary online research (tools like ChatGPT and Spark Toro can really be your friend here)
- Access internal data from pipeline reports and won business (what are clients really buying right now?)
Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to get a well-rounded view. Don’t rely solely on what clients say they need – look for underlying pain points and emerging challenges they might not yet recognize.
Analyze and Prioritize Key Issues
Once you’ve gathered information from multiple sources, analyze it to identify recurring themes and prioritize key issues. Look for:
- Common pain points across multiple clients
- Surprising finds that might indicate future emerging trends (look for those “canary in the coal mine” insights … an unusual comment or client inquiry … that are harbingers of things to come).
- Areas where your firm has unique expertise or solutions
Create a prioritized list of client needs and challenges. This will serve as the foundation for your thought leadership strategy. If budget, and time permits, conduct an online survey of prospects and clients to gauge interest in the topics that emerged.
Create a Client Needs Map
Visualize your findings by creating a comprehensive map of client pain points and priorities. This map will be invaluable as you move to the next steps of the framework.
Step 2: Map Internal Subject Matter Experts to Client Needs
With a clear understanding of client needs, the next step is to map your internal experts against these priorities. This ensures the thought leaders you choose to elevate are grounded in the wants and needs of your firm’s best right-fit clients.
Create an Expert Matrix
Develop a matrix that visualizes the intersection of expert knowledge and client priorities. This should help you:
- Identify which experts are best suited to address specific client challenges
- Spot gaps in your expertise that may need to be filled
- Recognize opportunities for collaboration between experts
Your matrix should include all relevant subject matter experts across different practice areas and their areas of deep knowledge.
Assess Depth and Breadth of Experts
For each identified client need, evaluate the depth and breadth of your internal experts. Consider factors like:
- Years of experience in the specific area
- Notable client successes or case studies
- Published works or past speaking engagements on the topic
- Unique methodologies or approaches we’ve already developed that we could pull from
This assessment will help you prioritize which experts are best suited to develop as future thought leaders.
Identify Expertise Gaps
As you map experts to client needs, you may uncover gaps where you lack the necessary expertise to address certain client priorities. These gaps represent potential areas for:
- Professional development of existing staff
- Strategic hiring to bring in new expertise
- Partnerships with other firms or industry experts
Addressing these gaps ensures your thought leadership strategy is comprehensive and forward-looking.
Step 3: Developing Thought Leaders
With client needs identified and internal expertise mapped, the next crucial step is developing your thought leaders. This process transforms subject matter experts into recognized authorities in their fields.
Identify Potential Thought Leaders
Not every expert will become a thought leader. Look for individuals who possess:
- The unique combination of deep subject matter expertise and a “learn-it-all” mentality
- Strong communication skills; you need people who are either comfortable in the spotlight or could be with a little help
- Courage; becoming a thought leader requires thick skin; pick people who aren’t afraid to speak their mind even in the face of dissent
- A selfless mentality and a willingness to share knowledge; the best thought leaders are most interested in finding a better solution to a problem regardless of its source
- Ability to connect their expertise to broader business implications
Translate Technical Knowledge into Client-Centric Content
One of the biggest challenges in thought leadership is translating complex, technical knowledge into accessible, valuable content for clients. Help your experts by:
- Pairing them with skilled writers, editors, and producers who know how to shape a compelling argument
- Establishing content quality standards and an agreed upon process for maintaining them
- Providing training for both experts and content developers on how to apply that process and achieve those standards
- Encouraging experts to bring much of their “whole selves” to the task by sharing personal stories and using real-world examples and case studies
The goal is to make your firm’s expertise relatable and applicable to your clients.
Raise Experts’ Profiles
By definition, becoming a thought leader requires building a collection of followers. Otherwise, it’s just content. Help your experts build their followings by:
- Developing a strong LinkedIn presence for them through publishing a regular mix of posts, articles and videos
- Securing speaking engagements at notable industry events
- Establishing an expert news program that generates article placements in respected industry and business journals
- Building a relationship between them and the market through a personality-driven email newsletter
Balance Thought Leadership with Billable Work
One of the biggest challenges in developing thought leaders is balancing these activities with billable client work. Address this by:
- Setting clear expectations for time allocation
- Encouraging senior leaders to become involved in the program
- Integrating thought leadership into performance evaluations and compensation structures
- Creating efficient processes for content creation and dissemination
- Leveraging client work to inform thought leadership (and vice versa)
When done right, thought leadership enhances client work rather than competing with it.
Step 4: Align Thought Leaders with Firm Capabilities
The final step in our framework ensures that your thought leadership efforts directly support your firm’s business goals and service offerings.
Map Thought Leadership and Thought Leaders to Service Offerings
Create a clear connection between your firm’s experts, their thought leadership topics and your firm’s specific services. This helps:
- Demonstrate the practical application of your expertise
- Guide potential clients towards relevant service offerings
- Support cross-selling efforts
Encourage your thought leaders to stay within their lanes. Help them think with frameworks and tell your firm’s best client stories time and again. This consistency in message helps them become known for the issues they want to own and helps clients see how your firm can help.
Support Business Development
Align your thought leaders with your business development efforts by:
- Keeping business development professionals and other client-facing personnel aware of the activities and POVs of your thought leaders as they emerge and evolve
- Developing sales tools that business development professionals can use to talk about a thought leader’s insights with a client in a one-on-one setting
- Encouraging thought leaders to make themselves available for conversations with prospects and clients on an as-needed basis; this helps the firm close business and the thought leader create a feedback loop
Maintain Strategic Alignment
As your thought leaders evolve, make sure your firm’s strategy evolves with them. After all, your relying on your experts to lead the firm to “where the puck is going.” Make sure you occasionally review and adjust your focus areas to keep up. This could include:
- Evolving service offerings to keep up with best practices
- Developing new services that emerge from a thought leader’s research or POV
- Making shifts in target markets or industries
Implementing the Framework: Overcoming Common Challenges
While this framework provides a structured approach to aligning thought leaders’ POVs with client needs and firm capabilities, getting and staying on-course always presents challenges. Here are strategies for overcoming common obstacles:
Navigate Internal Politics
Address competing priorities and potential resistance by:
- Securing buy-in from top leadership
- Clearly communicating the benefits of a program like this to individual experts and to the firm as a whole
- Creating cross-functional teams to drive implementation
- Celebrating small wins to build momentum (placing an article in a notable publication could be a small win)
- Recognizing big wins whenever they occur (winning new business with a coveted client could be a big win)
Manage Resource Allocation
Make the most of limited resources by:
- Starting with a pilot program focused on high-priority areas
- Leveraging existing content and expertise where possible
- Exploring partnerships with external content developers or agencies
- Implementing efficient content creation and distribution processes
Ensure Consistency and Quality
Maintain high standards by:
- Developing clear content quality standards
- Implementing a robust review and approval process and ensuring everyone understands it
- Providing ongoing training and support for both thought leaders and the content developers they work with
Generating Demand
Implementing a systematic approach to aligning the POVs of your thought leaders with your clients’ needs and firm’s expertise will be the blueprint for generating demand in this next era of B2B marketing.
