Most professional firms operate in crowded markets – their competitors appear pretty similar, with equally qualified professionals claiming the necessary capabilities to provide great advice on similar fees. In such a market how does a firm stand out with a distinctive reputation that helps it create new business relationships and grow profitable new work?
“Thought leadership” is one such approach and refers to the highly beneficial practice of establishing a clear lead through identifying major trends early, aligning services with meeting the consequences of these trends, and creating a reputation as the market-leaders. As the term suggests – it is also about having interesting and leading insights and sharing these with clients and prospects – marketing material such as brochures, repackaged old ideas and thinly-veiled sales pitches are not thought leadership.
Traditionally, professional firm marketing tends to be around promoting features such as capabilities, technical expertise, service levels and convenience to the client. Few firms are ever going to stand out!
By contrast, developing and sharing ideas with clients and opinion-formers about emerging trends demonstrates that the firm understands its client’s marketplace, and can provide invaluable, perhaps unique, insights. It is about helping to sell existing services, but also about shaping them for the future and should go in the budget as “R&D” not marketing!
Thought-leadership is not something that is reserved for bigger firms who can afford research agencies. Smaller firms, especially those competing against teams in large firms, have the most to gain by combining their nimbleness, lack of client conflicts and coal-face insights to help them stand out.
A great example of this is expense management outsourcer Global Expense which each year publishes an employee expenses benchmark report based on its own data. In its four years this initiative has generated front pages on the national newspapers, interviews on the BBC, hundreds of items of coverage and, with supporting marketing, helped the company acquire numerous clients.
Firms should not see thought leadership as equating to doing an opinion survey or other forms of research into emerging issues. Certainly surveys are good ways of getting strong material and demonstrating the credibility of your views, but if you can’t afford opinion research there are other options such as dinners where colleagues and clients discuss industry trends or important problems. Not only are these easy to do and convivial, the insights from these will be hugely beneficial.
Thorough desk research (reviewing publicly available research) is also important. It will throw up ideas, it may well provide useful data, and will help you avoid investing in research that someone else has recently done! A great example of a company using this approach is BDO’s half-yearly FraudTrack survey, which uses publicly-available data to measure corporate fraud trends in the UK. It is the practice’s main business development initiative and regularly secures prominent coverage in the quality newspapers and business magazines.
Whether your thought leadership channel is an event (seminars, roundtable discussions, Q&A panels, speakers), a report or both, many firms fail to get the most out of them and overly rely on press coverage to generate leads.
However, we strongly recommend to our clients that such initiatives need strong marketing support – such as through prospects being invited to a seminar (and chased by phone to make sure they attend). Similarly partners are busy and often forget (!) to present the material to their prospects – a coordinated programme with meetings being booked by a professional telemarketing team will make sure partners get quality meetings with their targets...ensuring both have now taken the all-important first step to converting a lead into a client.
