Thought Leadership Selling Flipbook
Report | 19 pages
Thought Leadership Selling Page 1 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
HOW TO SYSTEMATICALLY DRIVE MEASURABLE TOP LINE GROWTH WITH EDUCATION, INSIGHTS AND IDEAS What is a Thought Leadership Selling Program? Thought Leadership Selling Programs take a systematic approach to delivering new ideas, relevant advice and compelling solutions to prospects and customers through sales, marketing and media channels. A Thought Leadership Program provides your sales and marketing team with a sustained stream of education and advisory content that helps them open doors, make more effective sales calls, differentiate your organization and deliver trusted advice. A Thought Leadership Program is: • Based on a strategy that integrates sales process, communications, branding and product sales goals • Built upon a well thought out set of thought leadership assets including advisory content, tools and resources • Delivered to customers using disciplined multi-channel programs and coordinated customer touches This report will explain why Thought Leadership is so important to sales success and practical steps your marketing team can take to drive measurable sales outcomes deep in the sales funnel with ideas, insights and education. Thought Leadership Selling Page 2 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
THE EMERGENCE OF THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AS A SALES AND MARKETING DISCIPLINE The notion of establishing thought leadership has emerged as a top priority with sales and marketing executives. Growth-starved organizations are looking for ways to differentiate themselves with new ideas, education, and relevant solutions that address buyer pain and influence their perceptions of value. The bar on content quality is rising. As buyer’s experience content saturation and information overload, the notion of establishing thought leadership has emerged as a top priority with sales and marketing as the best way to differentiate their brands and ensure marketing effectiveness. Marketing executives are learning that subject matter expertise and a strong point of view are now essential to success in the digital, social, and mobile channels that buyers use during the majority of the buying process. Sales executives realize original research and compelling insights make it easier to open doors, start quality customer conversations, generate referrals and cross sell solutions. Despite the growing importance of thought leadership to top line growth, it receives more lip service than program dollars in actual practice. Most organizations fail to put “muscle” behind the idea by executing disciplined Thought Leadership Selling Programs in sales, marketing and media channels. This paper outlines how your organization can create Thought Leadership Selling Programs that immediately drive top line growth by generating more quality customer responses, meetings, referrals, profiles, and conversations. It will teach you three practical steps your organization can take to execute a systematic program for delivering compelling ideas and relevant solutions to your customers. Three Steps to Executing a Thought Leadership Program Why Thought Leadership Is So Important to Sales Success? A chorus of consultants and business leaders are emphasizing the importance of thought leadership to creating sales success. • Thought leadership is now critical to differentiating the brand and driving engagement in earned media, owned marketing and direct sales channels. Selling stories, ROI models, and customer case studies are essential to supporting “value conversations” that accelerate sales, drive margin and change minds.5 Thought Leadership Selling Page 3 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
• The quality of marketing content impacts the ability of marketers to drive top line growth with digital, social, native advertising and mobile channels. For example, 61% marketing executive’s view earned media – driven by thought leadership marketing, influencer marketing, and content marketing – as a primary driver of top line growth in their company. 1 Marketing executives are learning that subject matter expertise and a strong point of view are now essential to success in the digital, social, and mobile channels that buyers use to during the majority of the buying process. Sales executives realize original research and compelling insights make it easier to open doors, start quality customer conversations, generate referrals, cross sell, and influence buyer perceptions of value. An ounce of thought leadership is worth ten pounds of “me too” content when it comes to improving marketing effectiveness, differentiating your brand, and giving customers the relevant insights they are seeking. • Senior executives regard finding ways to differentiate the customer experience in social, mobile and digital channels as being vital to achieving growth goals as media fragmentation and changing buyer behavior diminish the value and effectiveness of ad impressions.3 Regardless of the medium, one message is becoming clear – investing in creating thought leadership has become essential to driving growth in sales, marketing and media channels. If you want to improve sales effectiveness, differentiate your brand, and give customers the engagement and insights they are seeking - invest in a Thought Leadership Selling. Every successful business has unique intellectual property and subject matter expertise. The problem is most of this institutional knowledge lies “between the ears” of your employees – product managers, top salespeople, solutions specialists and executive leadership. The new marketing challenge is to devise a scalable thought leadership strategy to productize this knowledge, and monetize it with customers, prospects and influencers. “Any successful organization, from a tire business to a research lab, has experts who can help customers solve problems and teach them useful lessons”, according to Grant 4 Butler, author of the book Think, Write, Grow. Marketing executives are slowly learning that white papers are more than a tactic for social and earned media channels. The most sophisticated marketers in the consulting, technology, and financial services industry have realized that the publishing process has become the backbone of their go to market strategy. These marketing leaders are distinguishing themselves with channel strategies that amplify the impact of their thought leadership content in their sales, marketing, and media channels and support every step of the go-to-market process. These market leaders wrote the playbook for using thought leadership assets to: • Cut through the advertising clutter and more effectively take advantage of high growth media such as social networks, online video, mobile applications and search engine optimization; • Drive sales with compelling ideas that open new doors and provide relevant reasons to continue to call on high potential customers; • Differentiate their offerings and value proposition from the competition by educating customers, delivering good ideas, and providing a unique perspective; • Demonstrate that they understand the needs, preferences and behaviors of their top customers; • Increase ROI by better leveraging their marketing content in the go-to-market process; • Make it easier for content to be consumed in media, marketing and sales channels. Thought Leadership Selling Page 4 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
Practical Steps to Executing a Thought Leadership Program An effective thought leadership program is hard to describe and even harder to execute because it is a new management practice that requires a unique blend of art and science. Marketing executives often confuse thought leadership marketing with “content marketing” or “storytelling.” Sales executives call it “value selling,” “trusted advice” or “challenger selling” but are hard pressed to define a program to make it happen. Based on our experience executing Thought Leadership Key Success Factors Selling Programs for over a one hundred market leaders such as Adobe, CBS, DuPont, EY, Intuit, Intel, Microsoft, 1. Focus on quality over quantity – Focus on Oracle, PwC, SunTrust Bank, and Tableau, we define a creating original ideas and proprietary research Thought Leadership Selling Program as taking a that opens doors, breaks through clutter, and programmatic approach to delivering new ideas, relevant changes buyer perceptions of value. advice and compelling solutions to prospects and customers 2. Go-to-market alignment – Make sure your using sales, marketing and media channels. A successful marketing content is designed to support every Thought Leadership Program will provide your salespeople step of the revenue cycle – from brand awareness, to demand generation, sales with a disciplined and coordinated stream of advisory engagement, value selling and proposal content that helps open doors, make more effective sales generation to customer retention and expansion. calls, differentiate your offerings and deliver relevant 3. Create a structure – Put a person in charge of advice. Specifically, there are three steps to designing and documenting a thought leadership strategy that executing a Thought Leadership program that will help articulates an institutional point of view and addresses client concerns, sales priorities and your sales force generate measurable sales growth in the your brand positioning. next sales quarter: 4. “Channel readiness” – to drive sales outcomes 1. Define a thought leadership strategy that aligns with in marketing, media and sales channels, your your growth strategy thought leadership content needs to be actionable, targetable, useful, trackable, and 2. Publish thought leadership assets that enable the go- reusable across many channels and devices. to-market process 3. Engage customers using a mix of marketing, media and sales channels These three steps are outline below with examples and illustrations to make them more tangible. To move faster you might consider asking for help in outsourcing aspects of the process. Three Steps to Designing and Executing a Thought Leadership Program Thought Leadership Selling Page 5 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
STEP ONE: DEFINE A STRATEGY The critical first step is to define a thought leadership strategy that directly supports your “go-to-market strategy”. This ensures your program will: • Directly support your sales and marketing processes; • Align with your communications, branding and product sales goals; • Drive the right sales outcomes; • Receive funding and cross functional support. Based on hard-earned experience executing world class Thought Leadership Selling Programs, it makes sense to create a strategic foundation for your program. Over 90% of B2B marketers fund content marketing initiatives. But most do not have a strategy to direct that investment, a plan for how it will generate top line growth, or measures that ensure meaningful sales outcomes are achieved. And as a practical matter, organizational integration almost always proves to be one of the most difficult parts of executing a successful program. So investing time to integrate market research on core customer needs, communications priorities, and sales objectives across many different sales, marketing and product organizations will pay off with a strong Thought Leadership Strategy. The picture below outlines the different ingredients that go into developing the basis of your Thought Leadership Selling Programs. Six Benefits of a Thought Leadership Strategy 1. Establish a consensus institutional point of view that reflects customer, brand, sales, and product perspectives 2. Create a blueprint to plan, source and package marketing content 3. Ensure your marketing content supports the entire revenue cycle 4. Define content to “connect” the brand message you communicate to the solutions you sell 5. Provide a framework for aggregating and organizing content 6. Agree on business objectives and engineer in activations and measures of ROI and CLV Thought Leadership Selling Page 6 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
The goal of your Thought Leadership Strategy is to draw on research, perspectives and plans from across the organizations to align your Thought Leadership Program with your growth plan. As an output of this workshop should be a content strategy that includes: 1. Establish a content targeting taxonomy to align thought leadership content with your go-to-market strategy and sales targeting practices. 2. A thought leadership agenda that articulates a consensus institutional point of view and selling themes that will help you differentiate your brand, better engage customers and drive sales outcomes; 3. A content architecture that aligns your marketing content with the sales and marketing process so you can assemble, organize, package, and measure the performance of your thought leadership content assets. These are outlined below: Establishing a Content Targeting Taxonomy Establishing a common targeting scheme (or taxonomy) is a necessary foundation for ensuring your thought leadership program will drive results in owned marketing channels and real sales conversations with customer lips moving. Untargeted content the one of the biggest reason content usage rates are low, and why salespeople waste time hunting for content as they prepare for sales calls, or don’t use it at all. Leading marketers understand that the targeting of content is a key point of leverage for leveraging content across as many marketing interactions and sales conversations as possible. For example, about half of marketing executives are targeting their content by either person (or persona).1 Most organizations are targeting content by person or pain point. Only 46% align their content with the customer journey or buying process - which is essential to finding the right content at the right place and time. An example of a content targeting taxonomy is below. Establish a Content Targeting Taxonomy to Align Content with Strategy Thought Leadership Selling Page 7 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
Creating a Thought Leadership Agenda A thought leadership agenda is a blueprint that helps your marketing team plan, source and package content that provides the basis of your Thought Leadership Program. The agenda should articulate your organizations unique value proposition to clients and thread all your offerings together elegantly. A good way to get started is to assemble existing market research, communications guidelines and sales process documentation into one place. The goal of this “inventory” is to draw on customer intelligence, market insights, and marketing plans from across the organizations as the source of the themes and ideas you will generate and deliver to customers. Then lead a group of marketing, product, sales and communications leaders in a brainstorming session that draws upon these different institutional assets to identify twelve to twenty-four topics that could drive your organization’s selling program. This list is the basis of a unique thought leadership agenda that outlines issues, ideas or topics where your company is (or wants to be) a credible authority, or where it makes business sense to create new expertise. A good thought leadership agenda will define a few core customer themes that address client pain points and critical issues your business can credibly address with experience, solutions and subject matter expertise. The agenda should expand these broad themes into thought leadership topics that can be supported by original research, client case studies, intellectual property, or best practices. These “tent pole” thought leadership assets can then be further broken down into assets that support tactical sales conversations, marketing campaigns and selling situations. The table below illustrates how a business banking organization defines the conversation they want to have with business owners. An Example of a Thought Leadership Agenda Focused on Business Owners Thought Leadership Selling Page 8 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
Developing a Content Architecture The second element of a Thought Leadership Strategy is a Content Architecture. A Content Architecture is an analysis that helps you assess how well your existing marketing content, promotions, collateral and other sales resources are supporting your salespeople and enabling a quality customer experience. The table below illustrates how a content architecture can help your organization: 1. Map exactly how and where your marketing content needs to support the marketing and sales process, including demand generation, sales meetings and proposal development; 2. Structure marketing content so it can be more easily planned, sourced, targeted, distributed, and reused across many programs, sales channels and devices; 3. Address the key points of failure in the go-to-market process where poorly organized marketing content limits the effectiveness of your sales, marketing and media investments; 4. Ensure your investment in marketing content generates measurable business outcomes. A content architecture is essentially a blueprint that creates clear linkages between value message and core selling themes created by corporate marketing, and the sales and marketing content assets that support value conversations at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Sophisticated marketers are able to use this blueprint to map exactly how and where marketing content needs to support the marketing and sales process, including demand generation, sales meetings and proposal. Content creators then use the blueprint to guide the planning, creation, and targeting of marketing content to maximize impact of content in terms of sales effectiveness and relevance to the selling situation. The secret to creating an effective content architecture is to define content that aligns the value messages and selling themes created by marketing directly with the solutions and services being discussed in sales conversations. A content architecture creates clear linkages between value message and core selling themes to the sales and marketing content assets and elements that support value conversations at every stage of the buyer’s journey For example, the Corporate Marketing Team at Tata Consulting Services uses a framework called the MVP Model – Message, Value and Point of View - to direct the development of thought leadership content across the company to ensure it is consistent with the overarching value message and core practice area selling themes. “Our content architecture provides swim lanes, guard rails, standards and guidelines for writing effective content” according to Raj Banerji the CMO of Tata Consulting Services. “It gives content producers within our practice areas horizontal themes that cut across silos, business unites, marketing programs and geographies.” The secret to creating an effective content architecture is to define content that aligns the value messages and selling themes created by marketing directly with the solutions and services being discussed in sales conversations. Few organizations do this well. Marketers generally do a good job defining and Thought Leadership Selling Page 9 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
promoting their brand message in advertisements at the front of the sales funnel. Product organizations are prolific at creating collateral about product benefits at the end of the funnel, but not customer value. The trick is to create “connective tissue” – such as sales playbooks, marketing automation templates, and conversation templates - to drive that value messages and selling themes deeper into the customer buying cycle and support day-to-day value conversations. According to Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer of Corporate Visions “The core ‘connective tissue’ that maps messages and themes to tactical content assets are conversation templates – which are frameworks for packaging content to support highly relevant sales conversations. Conversation templates like these help marketers execute modern sales and marketing program. They help enable targeting and personalization at the point of sale, leverage Marketing Cloud software, support sales enablement programs and establish a basis for channel measurement and behavioral based incentives.” Illustration of A Content Architecture Thought Leadership Selling Page 10 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
Specifically, your content architecture should help your marketing team define, compile, package or create: • Proprietary “flagship” content assets that credibly articulate your core selling themes, original ideas, and unique value to help generate response, referrals and meetings; • Templated content (Sales playbooks, landing pages, emails, pitchbooks) that assemble content assets and elements from many places to create (Sales playbooks, landing pages, emails, pitchbooks) turn customer interactions and meetings into opportunities by mapping ideas and insights to relevant solutions and subject matter experts and making it easy for salespeople to find the right content to advance a sales opportunity; • Content elements that can be easily or automatically assembled in to “channel ready,” highly relevant, personalized and targeted content assets. The core “connective tissue” that maps messages and themes to tactical content assets are conversation templates – which are frameworks for packaging content to support highly relevant sales conversations Thought Leadership Selling Page 11 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
STEP TWO: PRODUCTIZE CONTENT ASSETS The next step is to assemble, repackage and create “channel ready” content that directly supports your Thought Leadership strategy. A Thought Leadership Program needs to be based on a portfolio of well thought out content assets that can be effectively delivered through your sales, marketing and media channels. Thought Leadership Assets can include original research reports, case studies, assessment tools, infographics, or videos to convey ideas and insights to customers. The Content Architecture outlined on the prior page can help you define and prioritize exactly what thought leadership content assets are needed to fuel your program. To get started, inventory your marketing content to identify existing assets that can help drive customer engagement and improve sales effectiveness. From there you can identify content gaps where you need to repackage, source or create content to effectively support your sales and marketing channels. Orchestration of Thought Leadership Assets Across Channels Thought Leadership Selling Page 12 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
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
Elements of a Thought Leadership Program Original Research Demonstrate the depth and quality of your unique insights, ideas and solutions with advisory publications such as research reports, white papers, or eBooks. The most effective marketers create advisory publications are based on original primary research with peer executives, respected influencers, and subject matter experts that offer clients, prospects and influencers insights that validate risks and opportunities and provide best practices for solving problems and creating value. Many organizations leverage third party partners as a source of validation. Selling Events Translate your thought leadership into tangible selling events using speaking engagements, client education events, event panel programming, or online webinars and videos. Best-in-class selling events leverage internal subject matter experts, external authorities, or client case examples to introduce issues, ideas, opportunities and relevant solutions to target clients, influencers and partners. Using original thought leadership to create selling events drive measurable sales outcomes by generating response, profiles, face to face meeting, and referrals. Sales Playbooks Get your salespeople engaged in the conversation with clients, influencers and partners and support solution selling, targeting, training, and cross sell objectives. Sales playbooks leverage your thought leadership and translate it into sales opportunities because they make if fast and easy for salespeople to access the best content assets needed to support all aspects of a specific sales interaction. Best-in-class sales plays will specify calling scripts, discovery guides, the right advice, most relevant solutions recommendations, and appropriate expert to follow-up. Sales Enablement Tools Put your thought leadership research and insights to work during the client engagement, lead generation, and validation stages of the go-to-market process. Best-in-class sales enablement tools include return on investment models, data visualization tools, and benchmarking assessments that leverage research insights to validate risks and opportunities and quantify the business benefits of an idea or solution to a client. The best tools allow clients to educate themselves about the value of an idea, or proposal in a self-directed or collaborative manner. Digital Marketing Assets Maximize the sales impact of your thought leadership investment by repackaging your content into compelling and “channel ready” elements that allow you to better leverage social, digital, and mobile channels. Best-in-class marketers are repackaging their thought leadership into “bite sized” digital marketing assets that are easy to consume and reuse across channels, programs and devices. The most effective assets include: video case studies, animated infographics, data visualization tools, special featured research videos, and image based mobile content streams. Subject Matter Experts Leverage the people within your enterprise who demonstrate your unique expertise using web sites, blogs, videos and landing pages that deliver your organizational “know how” in digital, social, mobile and face-to-face channels. Best practices include using digital contributor networks that allow subject matter experts to attract and engage more clients, prospects and influencers in an ongoing dialogue on the thought leadership agenda Digital Media Amplify your thought leadership investment with a larger audience by leveraging the digital media platforms. Best -in-class marketers are leveraging their unique expertise and original thought leadership research in new forms of digital media including: native advertising, special feature stories, targeted publishing platforms, and topic specific executive newsletters to maximize reach, objectivity and impact. Fueled by thought leadership content these new digital media platforms can deliver significantly greater earned media rankings, social media shares, report downloads, viewership, and mindshare than traditional advertising. Social Media Help your marketing team, salespeople, resellers, and media partners to amplify the reach of your ideas and insights by delivering your thought leadership assets using top social networks including Twitter, Linked-in as well as client sales, marketing. Best practices include leveraging partners that can provide objectivity and leverage using subject matter expert accounts to broadcast your message and expand your organic search engine rankings and reach. Thought Leadership Selling Page 14 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
STEP THREE: MONETIZE IN SALES CHANNELS The final step is to execute your Thought Leadership Program through a mix of marketing, media and sales channels to maximize customer engagement and generate measurable sales outcomes. “The ability to effectively communicate an idea to your customers using your sales, marketing and media channels is just as important as the idea itself,” according to Grant Butler, author of the book Think, Write, Grow (Wiley Publishing, 2012).4 Your marketing team should be delivering thought leadership content through subject matter expert blogs, social media, digital marketing campaigns and digital media platforms. Your sales force should be delivering thought leadership assets to your customers using customer selling events, sales playbooks and sales enablement tools. Delivering Thought Leadership through Marketing, Media, and Sales Channels Thought Leadership Selling Page 15 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
Our business-to-business clients are executing disciplined programs that amplify the impact of their thought leadership content in their sales, marketing, and media channels and drive sales results by supporting every step of the go-to-market process. For example, a major financial services firm executed a thought leadership program that used original research and best practices to solve a major client problem – improving cash flow. The program used digital marketing assets to drive hundreds of business owners to take a benchmark assessment on a digital marketing web site every month. They used selling events to get over twelve thousand qualified business owners to register for or attend face- to-face breakfast seminars. They used sales playbooks as an efficient way to teach five hundred sales representative easy ways to cross sell eight relevant solutions to these business clients. And original research reports provided a compelling reason to generate thousands of referrals and follow-up meetings with these prospects. Best-in-class marketers are executing disciplined programs that amplify the impact of their thought leadership content in their sales, marketing and media channels and drive sales results by supporting every step of the go-to-market process. Some of the most effective techniques include: • Owned digital marketing channel campaigns – Marketers are leveraging digital, mobile, and social media channels to engage buyers conducting self-directed research and consideration. They are using compelling, “easy to consumer” and “channel ready” digital marketing assets in marketing automation, LinkedIn and web marketing campaigns to generate leads and influence the decision- making process. Some of the most effective marketing tactics include: • Short video vignettes featuring customer case studies, expert commentary or research findings • Animated infographics, data visualization tools that bring research and benchmark data to life • Image based mobile content streams that make it easy to consume • Access to original research findings in exchange for profile information and opt-in. • Subject matter experts – Best-in-class marketers are leveraging their internal experts – product managers, product specialists, or practice area leaders – in more sales and marketing situations using subject matter expert blogs. A blog is a practical way to package and extend the reach of your in- house experts using social media networks and native search engine optimization. Leading authorities are giving experts resources, incentives and tools to publish articles, videos, webinar recordings and demonstrations that can be leveraged in social, mobile and digital marketing channels. The most ambitious marketers are dramatically amplifying the reach and SEO rankings of their experts by having them participate as guest contributors in digital contributor networks with established media. For example, publishers like Fortune, Forbes, HBR and Huffington Post allow select highly qualified experts to publish as digital contributors – which generates much higher search rankings, social media shares and views than in-house corporate blogs. • Digital and social media platforms - As the value and impact of ad impressions declines, sophisticated marketers are working with media partners to leverage their unique expertise and original thought leadership research in new digital media platforms to maximize reach, objectivity and impact. Emerging platforms include native advertising, special feature stories, targeted publishing platforms and topic specific executive newsletters. Fueled by thought leadership content these new digital media platforms can deliver significantly greater earned media rankings, social media shares, report downloads, viewership and mindshare than traditional advertising. • Selling Events – Customer selling events are sales programs that deliver education and advice through a series of high quality and coordinated customer contacts and face-to-face meetings. These programs use the educational workshops or webinars as a reason to call customers and prospects, but Thought Leadership Selling Page 16 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
also engineer additional customer touch points before and after the events to maximize customer engagement and face time. Creating a selling event series based on your thought leadership assets is valuable because customers are demanding more education a core part of the selling experience. The key to profitable selling event programs is to use customer education events as the basis of a coordinated stream of quality customer contact by sales. Coordinated events that deliver thought leadership have a much higher return on investment than standalone sales events or third party event sponsorships. Any investment in a sales event should give a salesperson a reason to contact a customer or prospect many times before, during and after the event in a manner that fits with your sales process. If planned properly, your thought leadership assets should be able to support this process by providing interesting ideas to generate attendance before the event, quality education about an important issue during the event, and relevant cross sell recommendations after the event. • Sales Playbooks - One of the biggest roadblocks to executing Thought Leadership Selling Programs is the amount of training and program management time required to deliver a coordinated sales program. Sales executives who seek more timely and frequent customer engagement on a broader set of solutions are using Sales Playbooks as a fast and efficient way to get salespeople to deliver fresh ideas and relevant content to their customers. Sales playbooks are a coordinated set of actions that ensures the desired outcome from a specific customer engagement. Best-in-class sales plays will arm the sales representative with “reasons to call” discovery guides, the right advice, most relevant solutions recommendations, and appropriate expert to follow-up. Sales playbooks avoid “product pushing”, increase utilization of your selling assets in sales conversations and help identify the content that most effectively drives sales outcomes. Sales plays that turn meetings into opportunities by mapping ideas and insights to relevant solutions and subject matter experts, or case study to advance the sales process. • Sales Enablement Tools - Sales enablement, engagement and readiness solutions like Highspot, Outreach.io, Mediafly, Seismic, and Mindtickle make it simpler for salespeople to leverage your thought leadership and translate it into sales opportunities because they make if fast and easy for salespeople to access the sales playbooks and best content assets needed to support all aspects of a specific sales interaction. Sales enablement tools use AI and digital technology as a way to deliver the right content and information to the right client at the right time to advance the sale. For example, Hitachi Vantara, RedHat, and HPE are using sales enablement platforms to help front line sellers instantly access research, competitive analysis and sales information from up to 25 different internal sources in faces-to-face client meetings. GE Capital and TIAA calculate they have differentiated the sales experience while saved thousands of many days of expensive sales time by automating sales playbooks and advisor content in this manner. How we can help you become an industry thought leader To leverage our thought leadership selling best practices and move faster than the competition you might consider asking for help or outsourcing aspects of this process. The Revenue Enablement Institute works with top marketing organizations around the world to build and execute world class Thought Leadership Selling Programs that drive measurable sales results in one sales quarter. We design, develop and execute Thought Leadership Selling Programs that support your salespeople with a sustained stream of education and advisory content that differentiates your sales model, drives repeat sales calls, and delivers trusted advice. Thought Leadership Selling Page 17 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
ABOUT THIS BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH About the Authors Stephen Diorio is the Managing Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative. A leading authority in go-to-market transformation, sales and marketing performance management, and revenue operations, Stephen has helped over 100 organizations to reengineer their revenue operations to accelerate growth and become more data-driven, digital, and accountable. He has authored several books on commercial transformation including Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales & Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth (Wiley). Bruce Rogers is Managing Director at the Revenue Enablement Institute and a recognized leader in growth leadership, Mr. Rogers leads research and publishing initiatives focused on how today’s CXOs leverage technology and facilitate teamwork to create profitable growth. For the past 30 years, Bruce has been on the front lines studying and engaging the leaders of world-class growth organizations. He has profiled over 400 innovative CEOs, CXOs and entrepreneurs as the Chief Insights Officer at Forbes and the leader of the Forbes CMO Practice. He is the author of several seminal publications on growth leadership including Publish or Perish: A CMOs guide to Brand Publishing; Marketing Accountability: A CEOs Blueprint for Driving Enterprise Value; and Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Service Firms Become Thought Leaders.” About the Revenue Enablement Institute The Revenue Enablement Institute™ is an advisory and research firm that arms the next generation of target buyers, customers, influencers and senior growth leaders with solutions, skills, capabilities, and best practices they will need to accelerate revenue growth and adapt to the new market environment. Our faculty of academics and experts are actively working with owners, CEOs, and their growth leaders to help them transform sales, marketing, and service system into a Revenue Operations model that is more digital, data-driven, and measurable. Unlike traditional go-to-market partners - including analysts, PR, media, consultants, and resellers – the Institute has developed a proprietary go-to-market system that allows us to directly and measurably execute our customers positioning, go-to-market, and client engagement goals in a highly cost-effective manner. Our system combines our unique assets - brand, credibility, channels, research, intellectual property, relationships, and channels - to create preference, pricing power, and activation with customers while delivering superior, sustainable, and scalable program performance to our clients. Contact Us: 3 Cross Brook Lane Westport, CT 06880 (203) 227-6020 www.revenueenablement.com Thought Leadership Selling Page 18 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
Citations 1. The Revenue Enablement Institute, Ten Steps to Building a Brand Publishing Center of Excellence, Survey of 368 marketers, 2016 2. Erik Peterson and Tim Reisterer, The Three Value Conversations: How to Create, Elevate, and Capture Customer Value at Every Stage of the Long-Lead Sale”, McGraw Hill Professional, 2015 3. Forbes Insights survey of 321 senior executives, 2014 4. Grant Butler, Think, Write, Grow: Building Your Business with Thought Leadership Material, Wiley, 2012 5. CMO Council survey of marketing executives. 2014 6. Richardson, Content Marketing and Sales Effectiveness Survey, 2013, survey of 400 sales managers and representatives 7. Content Marketing Report survey of 634 business to business marketing professionals, 2014 8. Corporate Executive Board. (2011) The Most Important Number in B2B Marketing CONTACT US 21 Charles Street Thought Leadership Selling Page 19 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022
