There are three essentials to identifying, packaging or creating effective thought leadership assets: • Quality – When it comes to establishing thought leadership - quality matters more than quantity. Content marketing should not be confused with thought leadership. One original, compelling, and well supported insight can outperform an avalanche of content marketing. In fact, compelling insights and ideas are essential to engaging customers as marketers flood social and digital media channels with content and a clutter of messages. • “Channel readiness” – Most of the content created by marketing is not used by salespeople. This is because the marketing assets are often hard to find, difficult to access on mobile devices, or not formatted to be useful in face-to-face selling situations. Your content assets need to be packaged into “bite-sized” and easy to consume pieces so they can be easily used in in a variety of sales, marketing and media channels. We have published guidelines to help marketers create “channel ready” content that is actionable, targetable, useful, “trackable”, and reusable. • Alignment – Most marketing content fails to generate enough leads, meetings, and cross sell opportunities. This largely a design problem. Brand communications, ad impressions, and product collateral are not always designed to open doors or start conversations. To effectively support top line growth, your content needs to be specifically structured, targeted, and packaged to support demand generation, solution selling, social selling and predictive targeting programs. Thought Leadership Selling Page 13 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022