Thought Leadership Beyond Professional Services

Rob Leavitt (a Bloom Group affiliate) and I gave a presentation this morning to the Boston chapter of Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI), a professional group that assembles people from two camps, one of whom is often from Mars (sales) and the other from Venus (marketing).

The topic was thought leadership marketing outside of professional services -- in companies that sell products (e.g., software) and services (e.g., telecommunications) to other companies.

It was a small group. But our message seemed to resonate. We explained how showing customers that you know a great deal about a problem of theirs that your offering addresses wins many points -- especially if you can show how you solved the problem at other companies, with big ROI.

Despite the current hype, I don't see thought leadership as a panacea for all marketers -- only those whose customers are desperate for insights on issues that the marketer can address. I don't expect Dell or Lenovo to give me advice on how to write better articles on their laptop computers (nor would I listen to them if they did). I wouldn't expect a payroll service to advise me on how to structure pay packages for my employees. Those problems are just too far afield from what these companies do.

But I would listen to Dell or Lenovo advise my company on how to protect the security of my firm's laptops. And I would read advice from ADP or Paychex on how to make sure my firm is never out of compliance with payroll regulations.

At the same time, those firms still need good, old-fashioned marketing to tell me why their laptops are of better quality and why their payroll services are more cost effective. That marketing isn't thought leadership marketing.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Time to Scour for Your Online Op-Ed Opportunities

One of the newest and best opportunities for thought leaders in professional firms to get their views in front of clients and prospects is the online world – specifically, the digital space that an increasing number of top-tier business and trade press now provide to outside columnists.

For many years, the print side of such business publications as The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week and the dozens of top-tier trade press offered scant opportunities for op-eds and columns by people who weren’t on staff. Consultants, lawyers, accountants and the like had to focus their pens on academic journals in their fields (Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, etc.) and their firms’ own publications.

No longer. Both general business and trade publications have woken up to the fact that their online publications have unlimited news space – and that attracting thought leaders can be a good way to build online traffic.

Just look at the range of columnists at the websites of Business Week and Forbes:

• Business Week. Features such outside columnists as Dov Seidman (CEO of a consulting firm called LRN), Paul Bennett (creative director at design consultancy IDEO), Jim Champy of Perot Systems, Ram Charan, and many others. Take a look here.

• Forbes: Harvard Business School innovation professor Clayton Christensen is among the outsiders showcased here. Looks like Forbes.com is serious about attracting other Christensens. The online publication just hired Tunku Varadarajan (former Wall Street Journal editorial features/op-ed editor) to attract top-flight columnists. He has already landed 16 authors.
  

Many trade publications are doing similar things.

Publications are watching their print circulations plummet and online viewership rise. Needing to generate even more traffic to the websites to generate online ads, many publications are hungry for good online content.

I’ve wondered for awhile why business publications weren’t more aggressive at getting outside experts to write for them. They don’t have to pay them anything. They only need to ensure the quality of their columns is high, and that their columns don’t become thinly disguised sales pitches.

Every marketing department in a professional firm should devote significant time developing relationships with the key online publications in their fields and getting their thought leaders’ articles in there.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

From “The More You Sell, the Less They Buy” Department

I just became aware of a 2007 Economist Intelligence Unit survey of 141 executives on marketing at companies that sell products and services to other businesses, so-called B2B firms. (I hoped that dot-com era term would have gone away like the thousands of Internet businesses that flamed out, but it obviously didn’t. I guess the term "industrial marketing" was just too 20^th century.) The survey respondents apparently were not just professional services firms, although I couldn’t immediately find a breakdown by industry.

The EIU report made a number of interesting points. Thought leadership had become a highly favored marketing technique of business marketers. After “building new business,” survey respondents ranked “positioning our company as a thought leader” as their second most important marketing objective over the next three to five years. Another recent EIU survey of more than 800 buyers of business services (including professional services) found that the three most effective marketing techniques were thought leadership techniques: conferences, original research and surveys/white papers.

The report also took advertising and PR firms to task (read page 17), saying those firms know little about thought leadership.

All well and good. (Whew, I think I’m in the right business.) But here’s where the EIU’s research report goes wrong: It turns into a sales brochure halfway through, on page 12. It thus erodes the credibility it created in the first 11 pages. On page 12, EIU shifts gears and discusses why it should be your “360 degree thought leadership partner.” Page 13 then tells you how good EIU is as a thought leadership partner. By page 14, they’re back to the survey statistics, which indeed are interesting.

My point is this: By inserting in a direct sales pitch in the middle of a research-based white paper, EIU committed one of my top 10 sins of thought leadership: Shifting too soon from an educational message to a sales message. Thought leadership marketing (when done well) lures prospects to you because it demonstrates your mastery of an issue they care about deeply.

Let your display of knowledge on an issue do your selling.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Understanding the Ecosystem in Which Thought Leadership Creates Demand for IT

The growth of the consulting industry is flat. Many IT service and technology companies are reporting slackening sales. Even the white-hot expansion of the Indian outsourcing firms has softened.

Yet businesses need productivity improvements more than ever. The need for breakthrough ideas about how to make business more efficient is even greater today. But if the demand for consulting and technology industries is slack, doesn’t that suggest, as a whole, that the consulting and technology industries are having a hard time convincing customers they have what industry needs to become more productive?

I say this because during the early days of business reengineering (early 1990s), we saw the same dynamic going on: the U.S. was in a deep recession, the consulting and IT industries were in the tank – except for reengineering (and the demand for information systems that reengineering generated). Reengineering spread like wildfire, and the consulting firm (Index Group) I worked for grew rapidly.

So why was reengineering hot when many other consulting services were not? And why was there strong demand for the technologies that were often critical to reengineering (e.g., SAP's enterprise resource planning software) when demand for many other technologies was tepid?

It's because the "IT ecosystem" in which reengineering operated was firing on all cylinders. What do I mean by IT ecosystem? There are four elements:

• The business gurus who create management concepts that implore managers to make business process changes that require new technology (e.g., the late Michael Hammer, Tom Davenport, etc.) ;
• The consulting firms that create services that execute the concepts in corporations (i.e., help design the business process changes);
• The IT services firms which install the computer technology that the new business processes require; and
• The technology vendors that make that software and hardware, and which magically see demand for their offerings accelerating.

My firm is launching a study on this next week to shed light on this phenomenon (“How Big Management Ideas Move Technology Markets”). Bloom Group affiliate Rob Leavitt (ex-ITSMA), who is working on the study, and I see the research helping consulting, IT services and IT firms work better together to create the next blockbuster concept.

We’ll be looking for sponsors among the consulting, IT services and technology world starting next week. We’re aiming to begin the research in November.

What aspect of this issue would interest you? What would you like to know about such an IT ecosystem? Let me know.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Michael Hammer, R.I.P., But His Impact (and Reengineering) Live On

It is hard to believe that Michael Hammer, Mr. Reengineering, is gone. Yes, I knew he was in serious condition the last two weeks after an accident while vacationing in the Berkshires. (His website had posted such a note since Aug. 25.) But today’s death notice was still shocking.

He was only 60, and he had many more years to contribute to his calling since the mid-1980s: teaching businesses how to become far more productive through process change and information technology. More important, he was a devoted family man, and his wife and four kids have suffered an enormous loss.

Mike taught many of those who had the fortune to know him (including me) the importance of relentless questioning of conventional wisdom, deep research of innovative practices in businesses to understand what really works (rather than research by literature search or shallow survey instruments), crystal clear communication, and personal integrity.

Michael Hammer was the most brilliant consultant and best business speaker I have ever met. To my knowledge, his approach to researching and developing management concepts – which enabled him to become the thought leader of the business world in the first half of the 1990s -- has never been studied. It needs to be, for two reasons. First, because his impact on the business world has been immense. Second, because I have not seen any professional services firm come anywhere near to replicating his approach to thought leadership R&D (which, in short, was in-depth, case study research comparing leaders and laggards on a very specific business issue). (Mike’s approach to thought leadership will be studied very soon; check back with this blog space in the next week.)

I started to get to know Mike when I joined Index Group in June 1987. (To be sure, I was not close to Mike then or since, but we probably met 20-30 times over the last 20 years to discuss marketing issues. I am honored to say I ghostwrote a couple of articles for him in his early consulting years.)

In his days with Index, he had his own company, Hammer & Co., which was basically Mike and a couple of assistants to run his conferences and book his speeches. His office was located within the offices of Index at 5 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, Mass. He and Index were partners in a research business called PRISM (Partnership for Research in Information Systems Management), which was sponsored by more than 100 companies at its apex around 1993.

It’s actually unfair of me to call Mike “Mr. Reengineering,” even though I believe the concept is largely what he’ll be known for. It’s unfair because reengineering was only part of Mike’s thought leadership portfolio. To be sure, it was his blockbuster. But he had many other intriguing ideas that I saw during his research partnership with Index Group. Even still, reengineering does – and will – live on. Whether it’s called reengineering or another name, many companies worldwide continue to apply Hammer’s principles of cross-functional, IT-enabled process change.

My memories of working with Mike as a ghostwriter will never leave me. He was the only consultant I know who could sit down with you for 30 minutes, tell you the article he wanted you to ghostwrite for him, talk the piece out, and have the thinking nearly 90% polished while he was telling it to you. That is, a transcript of the discussion was nearly ready to publish. Not an extraneous thought, no ideas out of order, no debatable assertions unsupported. Uncanny.

If there is ever an award for thought leadership in the 20^th century consulting world, Michael Hammer would have to be among the finalists. My deepest sympathies to his family and friends. Rest in peace, Mike. You will truly be missed.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The Coup at Booz

I just read that Tom Stewart, who has been editor in chief at Harvard Business Review for the last six years, has joined Booz & Company to lead its marketing, intellectual capital and knowledge management activities. Here's the press release.

This is a coup for Booz. Tom is one of the best around at helping experts nurture and package their ideas, and at nurturing and packaging his own ideas.

But from reading about his responsibilities, I believe the job will not be easy. The greatest challenge for CMOs in professional services firms is one that many CMOs view as beyond their control: how to help the professionals in their firms produce great content – big ideas that turn into bestselling books, Harvard Business Review articles, captivating public speaking presentations, and so on.

Many CMOs I have talked to see themselves “stuck” with the content of the consultants, lawyers, accountants or other professionals in their firm. If that content is mediocre, not much can be done about it, in their view.

I see that as an unnecessary diminution of marketing’s responsibilities in a professional firm. Somewhere in the firm – and there is no reason it can’t be done in marketing – there needs to be an intellectual capital and service R&D function.

Given the description of Stewart’s role in the Booz press release, it appears he will own IC R&D. Now comes the hard part: figuring out how that R&D arm should operate – i.e., what business issues it should research, how it should research those issues and how it should develop ideas to solve them. The next big part is determining how R&D should work with the people at Booz who develop methodology and conduct training & development. A great idea that isn’t scaled up for wide-scale delivery in a professional firm means that only a limited number of professionals will be able to practice and master it.

When he was a Fortune magazine writer in the 1990s, Stewart was one of the sharpest journalists I had ever met. I know he will be up to the challenge at Booz.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Why “Increasing Marketing in a Downturn” is So Much Blather

Unlike most marketers, I don’t take it on faith that the best time to increase the marketing budget is during an economic downturn. I say that because too many chief marketing officers use that line to protect their budgets from the budget hackers.

In fact, many marketing programs in professional services should get hacked because they are ill-conceived. (Example: Fancy publications that don’t focus on a professional firm’s ideas, much image advertising, and most trade show booths.) Other undeserving programs may be worthy but are badly executed. Unless they are executed better, there’s no point in doing them.

In a downturn, marketing should scrutinize its programs and get rid of ones that aren’t working – i.e., aren’t generating real leads, market awareness (which can be measured in terms of press mentions, website visitors, white paper downloads and other metrics), or prospect inquiries. At the same time, marketing should then determine which programs are working.

Then marketing should increase its investments in the programs that work by reinvesting the dollars from the programs it killed.

Stop trying to defend your budget. Instead, determine what’s generating leads, market awareness, and prospect inquiries – and do more of it.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•