Companies use thought leadership to demonstrate their own expertise. But done right, thought leadership can actively generate new sales. Advisory head Mark Elsner explores the four-step process we use to help Oxford Analytica clients generate conversations that lead to sales – all through outstanding thought leadership.
Thought leadership informed 80 percent of CEO buying decisions in 2021. Done well, it helps generate a return on investment of 158 percent, 16 times higher than the average traditional marketing campaign, say researchers from IBM’s Institute for Business Value. So it is clearly a powerful sales tool.
But what constitutes ‘done well’ in this context?
It’s clear what bad thought leadership content looks like. Only 15 percent of decision-makers rate the thought leadership they consume as good. The majority put it firmly in the ‘blah’ category — mediocre, low-stakes, or a superficial rehash of what everyone else is saying.
Missing the mark with your thought leadership is more than just a wasted opportunity. Per Edelman’s 2020 Thought Leadership Impact Study, 38 percent of decision-makers said that reading low-quality thought leadership decreased their respect for an organisation, and 27 percent said that it directly led them not to award business to an organisation.
It would be tempting to believe that good thought leadership content – the kind that ramps up engagement with prospects and provides a direct link to top-line growth – is the direct opposite of this: Anchored in research, trustworthy and valuable. But while that is undoubtedly true, our experience at Oxford Analytica shows this is only one half of the story.
If you wish to drive revenue with your thought-leadership content, the process by which you create it is equally critical.
Thought leadership’s impact on sales
Thought leadership material refers to content — for example, research reports, white papers, by-lined articles, webinars, videos, live presentations and podcasts — that organisations use to establish authority on a subject and get the brand name out there.
Most companies believe that thought-leadership content can indirectly lead to enquiries and sales. The content is typically created by the marketing department in isolation from the sales team, drawing on the insights of their top executives. Once published, the sales team leverages the collateral as a “reason to call” potential customers. Or more passively, they wait for the thought leadership to influence the buyer’s journey, and expect the prospects to contact them further down the line.
What’s often overlooked is the extent to which thought leadership can directly influence sales delivery.
The key here is to co-create your thought leadership together with clients and prospects you really want to reach, drawing on their insights and opinions as well as those of your own executives and external subject matter experts.
This helps generate original data that is often of genuine interest to your audience, which is rarer than it sounds in an environment where every company is producing reams of thought-leadership content. But it also empowers the sales and marketing teams to have meaningful two-way conversations with the right set of prospects at multiple touchpoints, both during and after the production of the content, directly building your relationship with them and increasing the chances of a sale.
Breaking through the noise
At Oxford Analytica, our Advisory team applies a four-step approach to develop thought leadership for our clients that drives their sales engine forward. It begins with choosing a topic that fills the white space in your industry:
#1: Build your case from evidence.
The press loves using data points to tell a story and new data makes your content original by definition. The best-in-class thought leadership we do at Oxford Analytica brings together quantitative modelling and qualitative analysis of survey results, interviews with external subject matter experts, insights from your own executives, in-depth desk research and other publicly available data. External subject matter expertise is drawn from Oxford Analytica’s worldwide network of more than 1,500 experts.
Modelling the data shakes out the “big numbers” that empower PR teams. It also gives the research shelf life and establishes credibility with prospective buyers.
#2: Interview the right people.
Interviews are more than just a tool for gathering insights — they serve as your first touch point with prospective customers. It’s a noisy world out there. Seeking out representatives of the organisations that you are most interested in building relationships with and involving them in your interviews is a natural way to kick-start valuable relationships and get quality engagement from the get-go.
For a single piece of thought leadership, we might survey hundreds of participants and interview 30-40 executives to help contextualise the results. That’s 30-40 opportunities to have two-way, relationship-building conversations with the people who matter most to your organisation.
#3: Use the interviews for lead generation.
As an external partner, we bring objectivity and legitimacy to the interview process that in-house thought-leadership creation may not. But the research we gather does not have to be siloed from your sales efforts.
Conversational interviews – ones that prioritise high-quality dialogue over Q&A-style surveys – can be eye-opening both for prospects and for your salespeople. They regularly uncover synergies between your prospects’ challenges and real-world needs and the solutions your company offers. For example, conversations around technology trends might expose use cases you hadn’t thought of, technologies the prospect is considering, and key uncertainties that your offer could address.
In addition to contributing to ground-breaking thought leadership, these interviews can give a finely tuned sense of each prospect’s challenges and value drivers. Savvy businesses use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch in follow-up conversations.
#4: Promote and activate.
The way you promote your content can make or break its impact, and most companies (rightly) take a multi-channel approach. However, one technique outperforms the others as a sales enabler – re-engaging with the people you interviewed.
This is another opportunity to connect with your high-value prospects. You already made them insiders when you leveraged their voices in the content. Picking up the phone to share the results is a natural segue to more strategic conversations around your offer and future relationship.
These personal touch points lead to conversations that lead to sales. For any company creating thought leadership, including more of them in your process represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.
You can also leverage the content in other ways to improve the context for these all-important conversations. For example, we helped our client, Dell Technologies, organise a series of roundtables to support their thought leadership on the topic of sustainable procurement in the EU. Policymakers, NGOs, private sector players, academics and Dell executives were gathered in one room, and we were able to facilitate an insightful and constructive conversation on agenda-setting matters of real importance.
Case study: How we helped our client generate sales through thought-leadership
Our client engaged us to develop a piece of thought leadership on the topic of Chief Information Officer (CIO) perspectives on digital transformation. The primary questions were: How is the CIO role changing and why are CIOs becoming ever-more critical to their institutions?
The project included deep-dive interviews with several dozen CIOs in seven countries and resulted in four separate reports, focused on different geographies. As we followed the four-step process outlined above, the engagement turned out to be a source of gravity that pulled customers to the organisation. They were genuinely interested to hear the insights collected from their peers about the challenges being faced, and ideas for solutions.
The thought leadership was so successful that we won an internal award within the company due to the sales impact of the project. The reports were subsequently launched at a leading industry event, generating additional buzz around the content.
Examples like this show that thought leadership excellence isn’t just a big-splash PR tactic — it’s a sales-enabling, deal-winning tool. More than that, it’s the gift that keeps on giving: Starting conversations that lead to long-term relationships that lead to deeper engagement and cross-selling over time.
Contact us today to find out more about our thought leadership and advisory services.
