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.

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