Thought Leadership, Brand and Chasing the Pipeline
Establishing Brand Awareness to Generate Revenue
This week I had some interesting discussions on Pipeline Generation versus Brand Awareness and Thought Leadership. Some questions that came to mind include: Do we really need to make a choice? Are they not intertwined? What does the right balance look like and how do we address this?
Blending the Lines
Thought Leadership can focus on industry, product or be organizational.
According to Semrush, thought leadership enables you to (Source):
establish brand credibility and authority
generate backlinks, shares and mentions
attract potential customers
First Page Sage adds to this by stating that “ Industry leaders have more opportunities to partner with other high profile companies and consultants.” (Source)
In my experience, especially on the executive level, thought leadership can be a valuable tool when it comes to pipeline generation and sales acceleration but let’s not stop here.
According to Gartner, a strong brand strategy provides better ROI and efficiency across channels (Source).
The reason for this is that the “... messages are working together to support a larger takeaway. Instead of one-off messages, you will have communication with impact that builds as it goes.” (Source)
Having a larger takeaway and ongoing communication with impact is essential for lead and therefore pipeline generation. Firstly because you can attract the attention of your target personas and also target a number of these personas with the relevant version of the story.
In a B2B Saas Model, this impact can increase even more and ricochet as you start to build communities around thought leadership with existing and potential customers. In addition, it can highly influence your pipeline generation particularly if you are able to establish yourself and your company as an industry thought leader.
The effect here is two-fold:
With existing customers, expansion opportunities become more available as you establish not only brand awareness but also the reputation of being a facilitator and trusted advisor.
With prospects, including them in a thought leadership community with existing customers is a simple way to get organic customer referrals and advocacy and hence shorten the sales cycle to win net new logos.
Where to Begin
Starting a thought leadership initiative can be challenging. It is important to understand (i) what is happening in the world right now and (ii) what are we doing about it
One example - when Michael Coté and I were running executive roundtables together, although our product focus was around application development the topic we spoke about was Digital Transformation and the tools you need to transform your organization. This sparked many conversations around people and culture, especially during the pandemic when many enterprises struggled with sudden remote work and the unexpected digitalization boost that came with this.
Obviously in a post pandemic world, the story had to evolve but the concept remains the same.
Thought Leadership is key when it comes to pipeline generation.