“They told me I had to become a thought leader or I’d never achieve great success as a professional.” This is what a leader at a professional services firm told me recently that a marketing consultant told him.
He didn’t say this to me matter-of-factly either. He said it with a mix of fear, skepticism, sadness, and hope.
- Fear. Because he can’t write and doesn’t have much “new” to say, and neither do the rest of the folks on his leadership team.
- Skepticism. Because he didn’t think it was true that thought leadership was now a requirement, but he was starting to hear it so much he thought maybe the tide had turned and it now was.
- Sadness. Because he liked his job selling, delivering, and managing and didn’t want to become, as he put it, a “professor type”.
- Hope. Because he was hoping I’d say what he wanted me to say: that it was not true.
He was…
…right! It’s not true. Ludwig Feuerbach* noted, “A being without suffering is a being without being.” Given the drumbeat of advice to professionals to become thought leaders, you might be convinced that a firm without thought leadership is a firm not worth a damn.
Some industry watchers and consultants these days are downright dogmatic in their belief that, to achieve all you can achieve as a professional, you have to become a thought leader. And to differentiate your firm, you have to become a thought leader. Same for generating leads, raising prices, and competing for the best clients.
False. Not true. El wrongo.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of thought leadership, partly because as a member of the faculty at Babson College I am a “professor type”, but mostly because of what good thought leadership can do for a firm.
Thought leadership helps with:
- Lead generation
- Fee maximization
- Branding
- Winning deals
- Drawing the best candidates to work at your firm
- Repeat business
- Confidence of the thought leader
And the list doesn’t stop there. No question, thought leadership is helpful, but is it necessary?
Let’s say you need heart surgery. All you know about your two potential surgeons is that one pioneered and is most widely published regarding the surgery you need, and the other is in the prime of his career and has performed the surgery 1,500 times but has never published.
Let’s say you need much greater efficiency in your supply chain. One consultant wrote the book on it, and while the other hasn’t written a lick about it, she and her firm have a long track record of success getting done what you need to get done.
Let’s say you just got word that another company stole your patent. Which lawyer do you hire, the one that writes most often about winning the type of case you want to win, or the one that has won the most?
It’s likely most buyers would prefer the latter in each. Perhaps you might have said to at least one of them, “Well, I don’t know!” In either scenario, you prove the point: thought leadership isn’t necessary. As some of you might have hoped, you may not have to devote time, energy, and money into becoming the leading thinker in your space!
But you probably do have to spend time, energy, and money on something else if you want to outfox the thought leaders and benefits that thought leadership bring to them. Here are a few thoughts that can get you started on how you might do it for your firm.
1. Most buyers aren’t persuaded by thought leadership per se, they’re persuaded by authority. The concept of thought leadership implies originality in thinking. Not only does good thought leadership not have to be original, you really don’t have to add anything at all to your field to establish yourself as an authority. What you have to establish is expertise in the subject, and proof of your ability to perform successfully in the subject area. You can do this through publishing case studies. You can speak at conferences and events with your clients at your side about the work you’ve done and the value it delivered. You can become a leader in a professional association and be seen as a fixture in the industry. All these things create authority, and you don’t necessarily have to have one original thought in your head to do them!
2. Buyers buy helpfulness. Perhaps you’re an innovation consultant, or compensation consultant, or a lawyer. In your marketing process you can demonstrate your helpfulness through a host of methods such as case studies, client testimonial videos, clear and logical service descriptions and packages, email newsletters that highlight (but don’t introduce) new thinking in the industry, professional development seminars, and so on. In your selling process you can demonstrate your helpfulness by listening, uncovering needs, crafting a strong solution, and delivering value even before they start working with you. You can do all of this without a book, white paper, or article to your credit.
3. People buy consistency and quality. I don’t know about you, but many times I’ve simply wished a service provider did what they said they were going to do, and did it to a high standard. We don’t always need new thinking, but we need to trust that people can deliver when they say they can so we don’t have to worry about it or do it all over when it comes out poorly.
4. People buy who they like best. In Mastering Rainmaking Conversations, we tell a story about how a CFO friend of ours chose one of the Big 5 (at the time) accounting firms to take a company public. The long and short of it is that, while he publicly justified it with an analytical argument, he told me privately that he hired the firm whose staff he liked best.
Another key argument in the you-must-be-thought-leadery-or-else camp is that you can’t differentiate without thought leadership. I agree that thought leadership is a good means to differentiation, but it’s not the only means.
For example, imagine you’re all of the good things (consistent, likeable, helpful, etc.) noted above. Develop a reputation for these and you’re setting yourself apart right there. You can also develop a compelling service package that will seduce people with your value and stand out from the crowd. As we wrote in Professional Services Marketing, Bain uses the Profit Hunt service well in this regard. We use the Revenue Growth Benchmark Assessment. There’s no reason you can’t offer your own.
Yes, thought leadership can help you stand out, but you don’t need thought leadership to stand out. You can convey, without being a thought leader, what sets you apart from others as well as how hard it would be to substitute your firm with another provider. I’m not saying it’s easy to convey these things, but then again, anything that’s worthwhile to pursue is likely not to be easy.
The truth of the matter is that not everyone can or should be a thought leader, and that does not make them second-class professionals. As helpful as thought leadership might be in the right situations, you can achieve fabulous success without it.
* Everyone’s favorite Marxist philosopher, of course.
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