Transcript

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So, a quick note to our listeners, I want to let them know that Jeff picked today’s topic and it took us a half an hour to get to conclusion. So, today’s topic, we are going to talk about the shift in Thought leadership from having more of a brand building role into more of a sales enablement role and how that shift is happening, why it’s happening and what we think it means. What do you think? Want to do that?

Jeff McKay:
If I must.

Jason Mlicki:
You picked the topic. All right. So, where do we begin? So, here’s my thoughts, the place I started was, I just started to think about why firms historically invested in Thought Leadership in the first place. And the notion of brand building is a little bit vague in this context, but it does kind of come back to maybe there’s their original objectives, maybe create visibility, build reputation on a topic or a reputation as being smart in a certain discipline. Maybe it’s about creating awareness for a certain practice or a certain set of capabilities or their point of view.

Jason Mlicki:
I know when we started our journey into the world of Thought Leadership, which I would say started about 11 years ago when we started blogging, which I would not classify as Thought Leadership anymore, but certainly that was the framework that we used. Certainly it was to do some of those things, really to carve out a position in the marketplace as experts in certain areas, generate leads, create conversations with new prospective clients we’d never heard of anywhere in the world that needed our expertise. So, that was sort of the lens that we had from the very beginning that it was the front side marketing engine for our business development efforts. And we had the inbound movement, right? That said it was all about inbound. So anyway, historically I do think that that’s where a lot of firms started in terms of thinking about Thought Leadership and whether or not it was something that they wanted to invest in. But let me just pause there and let you, that was the first thing that came to mind to me.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. It’s about demand gen, positioning around some expertise and demonstrating your point of view on it. So, yeah. And I think most firms are still there, most firms are still there and they probably should be to a large degree. If they don’t have established brands or more importantly, as we’ve talked about before, they don’t have relevance in a given market with a particular buyer around a particular issue. That makes perfect sense to be there.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. Oddly enough, I would say for me it was a bit of a blind spot. I mean, we had thought about Thought Leadership under that lens forever. I mean, from our earliest stages in the journey of working in this discipline and working with firms that have Thought Leadership programs or are investing in Thought Leadership, we were always narrowly focused on, I guess… Well, we always talked about the primary objective being educating and informing the potential client on issues that really matter with the desired output being new leads for firm, new leads for the business. In our conference, in the last November, our Thought Leadership marketing conference. The thing I noticed, and this came out in the presenters that I helped frame who chose spoke and why they spoke, but so I guess to some extent I engineered this, but it also was a topic of conversation that a lot of them brought to me when we started talking about who was going to speak, was definitely a shift towards sales enablement, sales activation.

Jason Mlicki:
How do we use our Thought Leadership to help our salespeople or our leaders be successful in their work? And that was a big topic of the conference. In fact, we dedicated a whole half of a day to that. So, I do sense that there is a shift in that direction that Thought Leadership is being used and I think there’s a couple of reasons why that would be the case. And those came out of our conference as well. And I do think it also changes the dynamics a little bit in terms of what firms need to be doing with how they develop and publish and promote that leadership, so.

Jeff McKay:
And that’s what I love about this topic and why I chose it, and we talked about this a little bit earlier on, it was last week’s podcast or the one before that. Your concept, which I absolutely love, thinker seller versus the seller doer and what that means in terms of both marketing and sales strategy, driven by how you’re developing Thought Leadership and distributing it and for what reason. So, I want to hear these three reasons. Did you say there were three? Three reasons, right?

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t know. Let’s see. I know there’s at least two. Maybe there’s a third. I might have just lost track. So, the first one-

Jeff McKay:
Okay. Hang on listeners. We’re going on a stream of consciousness from [crosstalk 00:04:51]-

Jason Mlicki:
We are, hang on.

Jeff McKay:
… we don’t know where this is going to end up.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, I can use the old home alone, A, two and D, right?

Jeff McKay:
Okay. So A, we had a great talk at our event this fall from Maria Boulden, who’s a sales leader I guess over at Gartner, former sales leader at DuPont. And she talked a lot about Gartner’s new research around selling, but one of the things she talked about was, and I love this refrain she gave in the opening of her talk, she’s basically says, “Hey, all you Thought Leadership marketers, you did a great job. You’ve been so good at what you do in the last seven years that you’ve created so much noise and clutter that clients have no clue where to turn.” And she said basically, and the premise of her talk was like, so look there’s so much noise out there. Ultimately the client is now turning to the salesperson saying, “Help me make sense.” That was the word she used, “Of all this chaos.” And she talked a lot about sense making and selling, which is the crux of some of Gartner’s newest research that extended out of the Challenger Sale.

Jeff McKay:
And so, I think that’s the first driver, is just the sheer pervasiveness of Thought Leadership and the amount of voices, the amount of places that contents coming from and the inability of a solid process at all has made essentially the need for sales to step in and help guide the client through this chaos more valuable than ever if and when they can. So, that was driver number one. So, that was A.

Jason Mlicki:
And that is so important. We could have a whole podcast or series on that one alone. I wrote a blog post about this a couple of weeks ago. I’ll put it in the notes but this is such an important topic, or point that you make, or the Gartner makes and our listeners should not lose it. And if they haven’t seen that, jump in there because that is a great place to jump in. All right, keep going.

Jeff McKay:
The second one I had lumped in was just, we’re just seeing certainly increased pressure to prove ROI on Thought Leadership investments. So, “Hey, we’re making all these investments here, what am I getting for it?” And I think that years ago there was maybe a little less pressure on that. It’s kind of like that old adage around advertising, that line from the 19th century retailer who said, “I know half of advertising works, I just don’t know which half.” And I think that that was the general consensus on Thought leadership too. It’s like we’re making these big bold investments, we know they’re valuable, we know that they’re creating conversation, we know they’re making an impact, but I don’t really know what’s working and what’s not. I do see more and more firm leaders putting more pressure on editorial leaders and Thought Leadership marketing leaders, and CMOs, to answer that question, is this a good investment for us? What’s it doing for us?

Jeff McKay:
And that of course facilitates them to say, “Well, okay, wait a minute.” It’s a great question and it’s often hard to make a direct one to one connection between, we published this research study, we published this piece of Thought Leadership and we won this piece of business, that’s sometimes hard to do. It’s much easier to reach inside the sales teams and reach inside the sales functions and say, “Okay, how is this influencing your work? How is this helping you accomplish? How is this helping you win? How is this helping you accomplish what you’re trying to do?” So it’s a natural progression when that ask is made to go there to say, “Okay, let’s go to where we know we can influence the most.” So, that was the second reason that I see this is going on. I guess I don’t think I have a third. If I said, “There were three.” I apologize, maybe you have a third that’s just not jumping out at me right now.

Jason Mlicki:
I’m still thinking about your second item here. I did have a third, I didn’t write it down and my ADD got the better of me because I really liked what you had to say on this, on the second one.

Jeff McKay:
So, I have a question for you-

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
… instead of giving you a third. So, this is my-

Jason Mlicki:
And I have an answer.

Jeff McKay:
… this is my distraction until my third comes back to me. This is relevant. These people are being asked to justify Thought Leadership investments. In other words, how is it turning into revenue? Who’s doing that well? I mean, was anybody in your room, at your event, able to say, “Oh, yeah. We’ve got that figured out. We know how to do that, here’s how we’re doing it.”

Jason Mlicki:
I don’t want to share specifics because that would not be fair to them as presenters and certainly as their role in being a key speaker at our event year in and year out. But McKinsey does this exceptionally well and the thing I will say that I love about their approach to it, without giving away all the details, is that when most firms think about measurement, they think tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, where are the leads? What’s the funnel? What’s the revenue? It’s a very, how do we automate this? I mean it’s a very kind of get into the weeds conversation and theirs is just a lot more holistic. It’s a lot more conceptual and holistic and it’s about direction. And there’s a certain elegance to it that comes out of everything that I ever see McKinsey do. There’s just a certain elegance to that to everything they do, that really proves the point.

Jason Mlicki:
So, they do it exceptionally well. They focus on simplicity and they focus on direction and if I had advice to people trying to measure Thought Leadership, those would be the things I would be thinking about. I would be not so fixated on which article performed the best necessarily or which research report generated the most leads. I think those are the conversations that get in the way of really knowing whether something’s valuable or not. I mean, it’s really just that old saying that you’ve heard said many times is, “Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean that it should be measured.” Or that it necessarily counts, that was important.

Jeff McKay:
I think that’s a great point. The direction I was going in terms of thinking about ROI, when I posed that question. The question generally is linear and it’s focused on sales and marketing efforts in a traditional funnel approach.

Jason Mlicki:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff McKay:
What I see, and particularly with the client centric clients that I work with, is it very much is cyclical or circular. And that that Thought Leadership’s value does not end once somebody signs a contract and says, “Yes.” Or converts to an opportunity or whatever the case may be, but that that Thought Leadership should be adding value to existing clients who may already be buying your service, or solution, or platform, or whatever the case may be. But it also has the additional value of retention and success for those that are already there. And a lot of times I think firms think that Thought Leadership’s value ends at the water’s edge. I think that’s a very short sighted and limited way of looking at it. What would you say to that?

Jason Mlicki:
I agree. I really liked that line, that it ends at the water’s edge, and I’m just trying to think of examples. So, my friend Chris Parsons, who owns the software company Knowledge Architecture, I partnered with him to develop some Thought Leadership years ago. And his entire focus of everything that he really did was all about success. Everything that we talked about was, how do we make sure our clients are successful in their jobs, using our software. And anything that we produced and published had that focus and he just said, “Look, if we can make sure that we’re so sticky that we’re super valuable to our clients in every way. We have a really successful business. And the leads, and the end balance, and the inquiries will take care of themselves.” That’s a very healthy philosophy.

Jason Mlicki:
I’ve never worked at McKinsey, but I get the sense that they have a very similar philosophy in terms of when I hear them talk about Thought Leadership, how they approach it. It is really largely about trying to help their clients first and foremost and anything around that is added benefits. Well, I like your thinking a lot and in fact I think maybe the emphasis is on the wrong syllable, right? And in the whole world of Thought Leadership it’s, we always talk about marketing, and lead gen, and demand gen and all that stuff. Maybe we should be putting all of our time talking about, how do we enable the success of our client base? And if we do that really well with our Thought Leadership, we will be rewarded with their loyalty, we’ll be rewarded with their respect, we’ll be rewarded with great relationships and they’ll refer us into all kinds of new work. So, maybe the firms should think about that, changing the entire focus of the investment. I don’t know but it’s a great thought.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jeff McKay:
I honestly think, that to me is the answer and… Oh God, I love just saying these words, that the best Thought Leaders fall in love with the problem.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
Right. Another thing came out of your conference from one of your participants.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
I just used that the other day, I have to pay her a royalty-

Jason Mlicki:
Thank you [inaudible 00:14:05].

Jeff McKay:
… with a [crosstalk] company who is looking to be more strategic about their marketing. And I’m having a conversation with the CEO and he is, wicked smart guy, very driven, very humble and he’s like, “We’re just not doing marketing as well as I think we could.” And as we probe into his perspective on the issues, they have this incredible onboarding process. The SAS Platform is incredibly sticky, there’s very little churn. They know what causes churn or lack of engagement in the first 30 days of a trial. And it built this incredible team to help clients be successful in the CEO is a super nice guy and one of his favorite things is just connecting with the business owner’s face to face and having conversations with them about their business and the issues that they’re having and how they might help them solve them.

Jeff McKay:
And he’s telling me all this and I just start laughing and he thinks he doesn’t do marketing well. And those are all the fundamental building blocks to marketing and sales success because you have that passion of helping others succeed and you’re always open to thinking about that, via what we call Thought Leadership. I don’t think he would call it Thought Leadership, he would just consider it helping his customers be successful. And I just love that humility and passion for the problem and his clients. And I don’t think he ever thinks about, “Well this would be a good way to drive sales qualified leads.”

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
I don’t even think naivety is the right word for it. There’s a humility and passion around it that is so refreshing and talking about aligning Thought Leadership in a more circular fashion made perfect sense to him. It was like, “Well, yeah. I’ve never thought of it that way. But yeah, that’s how we actually think about it.”

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
And that’s hard. That’s hard and this company is a little bit smaller and he can kind of control culture and service delivery a little more than a mid size or large firm can. But it’s the same cultural ethos that you just described at McKinsey. It’s our clients and we are the best thinkers at this and we work with the best companies and the smarter CEO’s. Let’s help them think about what to think about, why to think about it, and then-

Jason Mlicki:
And how.

Jeff McKay:
… how to apply that thinking to their business. And that thinking application begins, and this gets back to your first comment about Gartner and all the content that’s out there that’s confusing people. The first step is how would I apply that? How would I implement that? How do I even sell that internally to my people to lay the seeds of change? So, that was kind of a ramble, but.

Jason Mlicki:
No, it was good and we’re short on time but there was a couple things that jumped out to me that I thought were really interesting in there. I’m just going to leave them almost as things to ponder on. It struck me, a couple of things struck me, one is that this circular journey that you’re describing also mirrors with this idea of active listening. When we did that podcast talking about characteristics of exceptional marketing leaders, one of things we talked about was being an active listener and I wonder if it’s about having a culture of active listening. Not that any one person is a strong active listener, but everybody in the firm shares just a mutual interest in being good listeners. And you think about a firm where you’ve got salespeople that are just pushing, and pushing, and pushing, and waiting for their chance to talk. Let me tell you how great our product is versus ones who really want to help.

Jason Mlicki:
And I just wonder if you have a firm, the culture of the firm is to be great active listeners, and fully engage, and just trying to help your clients be successful on every level. If that wouldn’t yield better Thought Leadership programs, more effective sales leaders, more effective business and all and people, more effective client delivery, more effective product design. I mean, everything would flow from that very simplistic cultural attribute. I’ll leave that as maybe food for thought and if you want to chime on top of that but we can take this to wrap here.

Jeff McKay:
I love that. I love that and I just had this flashback. When I was at Anderson and we were doing the best practices awards for these emerging companies, we had several key partners helping us develop the benchmarking in the questionnaires for that. And I’ll never forget I gave a partner the questionnaire, I was with him in his office door was shut, I gave him the questionnaire and then asked him one or two follow up questions. And he lifted up his head from reading the questionnaire and then he said, “What you did right there Jeff, is just illustrative of the types of cultures that… ” And I think this was best practices, and customer satisfaction, and listening, “… that you just asked me for my opinion. You gave me something to read, but then you just kept talking to me and you didn’t give me a chance to digest it and formulate my own thoughts.”

Jason Mlicki:
I feel his pain man, I feel his pain.

Jeff McKay:
And I’m like, “You’re absolutely right. But so many of us do that.” I don’t do that so much anymore because that lesson, you just hit me upside the head with a two by four. But I think that’s what we do, we do not listen, we do not seek to understand. We want to get our Thought Leadership, our point of view just out there and beat people over the head with it and tell them why it’s better.

Jason Mlicki:
I mean, I guess another thought, and maybe this would be a true wrap, but when we thought about this notion of brand building to sales enablement, when I first thought about sales enablement, it wasn’t a landscape I had really spent any time on at all. And my first thought was, “Well, what are the tools that we give salespeople to be successful with Thought Leadership?” And now to your point, I guess my epiphany I had in the last six months, relatively obvious epiphany I’ll admit, is it’s not really about what tools we give them, it’s about asking them how we enable their success. What are the challenges you’re having in the sale? What are the ways that we can help you with giving you fresh, original insight that enables you to either start conversations, or extend conversations, or improve conversations? What are you trying to do with this stuff? And that’s to me really what it’s all about. So, it’s about trying to get underneath the sales experience and understand how you as the marketer, you as the Thought Leadership professional can, using the word, enable the success of that salesperson with your Thought Leadership, so.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. And maybe sales enablement isn’t even the right word. To me professional services is about two things. It’s about ideas, which we would call Thought Leadership, and it’s about relationship. And relationship is about building trust and being helpful. So, it’s almost like how Thought Leadership shifts from broad brand building to, how does it actually help you build trust and relationship with the clients or prospects that you want to have as clients instead of enabling a sale? How does it equip you to help our ideal client be successful? Which gets back to falling in love with the problem and serving the people that see the world the way you do. So, I love this topic. Boy, I’m glad I chose it after, I don’t know how long we’ve been recording 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of rambling.

Jason Mlicki:
That’s what I was going to say. I’m, I’m glad you chose it eventually. So, let’s end on that note. Good discussion, good topic. Hope our listeners took away a good key takeaway. So, I’ll talk to you next week.

Jeff McKay:
Hey no, those of you who are measuring ROI of Thought Leadership really well and want to share that on Rattle and Pedal, go to rattleandpedal.com/peerstories and tell us.

Jason Mlicki:
Jeff goes back into interruption mode. All right man. See ya.

Jeff McKay:
See ya buddy.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.