Filigree Consulting

You can’t add value to content by calling it thought leadership…

Al — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:38:12 +0000

Thought leadership is about providing knowledge to your customers that can change the way they do business. It’s not just good, new, fresh, or a thousand other adjectives, content. In our opinion, thought leadership content shares knowledge of the highest value possible. Think of the content your company is providing its customers using this test: “Will this piece fundamentally change how they do business?”

Not all good content is thought leadership. It doesn’t have to be. Sometimes you are providing useful information on how to install your products or where to get some help. Valuable yes; but probably not thought leadership.

Unfortunately not all thought leadership content is good content. Some of the most boring knowledge transfer (even the term is boring) is thought leadership. Try the exciting and frequently thought leading content in the MIT Sloan Management Review sometime.

I’ve been reading many articles that have latched onto the notion of thought leadership as way to add value to their content simply by using the term. Perhaps the SEO professionals are at work here. I have seen many things called thought leadership that (a) seem absolutely without significant value, (b) were not particularly thoughtful and (c) lead to nothing but wasted time.

Trying to define thought leadership may be a lost cause. So we can either consider thought leadership just another lost term buried in the babble of blather or we can take steps to define it. The damaging thing is that at some point we will run out of language. First we will run out of numbers.

The first thing that will happen is a modifier: some bright and witty person will call it Thought Leadership 2.0 (oops, I already tried that – ok 3.0) By the time we get to 4.0 (since everyone is already using 3.0 on a bunch of things) we’ll use a noun modifier – something like “Leveraged Thought Leadership”. It’s no wonder that some NFL football announcers (you know who I mean) can’t utter two sentences without saying “he’s the BEST ___ in the league”.

So back to the initial point. Thought leadership is about providing knowledge to your customers that can change the way they do business. Let me give you an example. One of our clients recently developed an assessment that tests the maturity of the IT “requirements definition” processes. The put it on their site and have driven over 500 completed assessments in about six months. The assessment (using a set of questions designed to provoke thought) teaches best practices. It causes IT organizations to rethink how they manage application requirements. It is thought leadership.

So I am begging for responses to this blog that do not simple push a URL and some meaningless machine generated text. Something that indicates you actually read my ranting. Tell me, please, what do you think thought leadership is?

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Exceptional customer experience isn’t magic. It’s the result of a lot of good execution.

Al — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:21:18 +0000

Its starts with exceptional insight into customer needs; that insight is turned into products and services that address needs. The purchasing experience is flawlessly delivered.

People can easily access the information they desire. Providing useful content along with products and services is expected. The sales approach ensures the best customer solution.

All of the knowledge and behavior implied by these actions is integrated into the operational and administrative aspects of the business – it is measured, managed, continuously improved and institutionalized.

Simple stuff.

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A powerful content strategy is critical to the challenger sale.

Al — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 10:42:23 +0000

The Challenger sales model (www.executiveboard.com/challenger/) is based on three core activities:
• Teach for differentiation
• Tailor for resonance
• Take control of the sale
The basis for the sales model is a substantial research project that isolated five behavioral clusters in sales professionals and related the clusters to sales results. Challengers out perform all of the other clusters. It’s a compelling analysis. We strongly recommend the book.
A great deal of work has gone into the development of skills in sales professionals to support the model. The approach has been gaining traction with a number of solution providers.
One of the important ideas that the book communicates is the need for the model to be embraced by the entire company. If embraced by only the sales organization it will likely have limited success or fail.
The reason is simple: sales professionals do not necessarily have the skills or resources to develop the content that is necessary to “teach for differentiation”. Even if individual sales professionals did have the capability expecting them to do it themselves is an enormous sub-optimization. This is where marketing organizations supporting a thought leadership content strategy and organizational learning capabilities come in. We expect organizations moving towards the Challenger model all feel this. Many will recognize the need and adopt Thought Leadership 2.0 as their back office capability in support of Challengers.

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High performance content is usually about solving customer problems

Al — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:21:02 +0000

High performance content is usually about solving real, significant and lasting customer problems; something worth solving. Look to the people in your company who solve customer problems for insight. People who perform implementation services for your company (assuming such services are necessary) often have keen insights into the real problems your customers experience and how your products/service fit into their businesses.
Build hypotheses about what customer problems could be addressed. Then test the hypotheses with research.
What do you think?

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thought leadership is more important than customer experience.

Sandra — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:34:46 +0000

Filigree Consulting has developed an overarching hierarchy for value creation.
Our model’s fundamental concept is based on our experience that it is very difficult to be 
successful at a higher level practice without mastering the lower levels of practice.
Thought leadership, as we define it, depends on a high quality customer experience, which
depends on delivery, ease of use and product and service quality.  The hierarchy isn’t about
what a company can attempt to do. It’s about what companies can do successfully.
It’s about what customers will accept. Some readers will object to the placement of thought
leadership on a level higher than customer experience. This is not a value judgment about importance; it is a
statement about dependency. We believe that for a set of relationships engaged in a trust/knowledge
sharing cycle to flourish (thought leadership 2.0) that the more basic needs of exceptional
interaction and respect for individuals (customer experience) must first be served.
What do you think?

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What happened to thought leadership 1.0?

Sandra — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:28:59 +0000

Ok, so what’s the new news? Thought Leadership has been around for a long time and it has not really
 had a great uptake. The initial Thought Leadership concept was to “provide information of value to
customers to build and strengthen relationships”. This is an exciting and important goal.  We
have seen a few successes and a few more lukewarm results.  There are a number of reasons why the
approach fails to achieve its potential. Most often they have to do with immature relationships:
if your products or services don’t work, achieving relationship nirvana with your customers is
unlikely.  The other driver is that it takes a fair amount of work to develop the intellectual
property you wish to share.  Thankfully, some already have a great deal of knowledge but need
to capture and monetize it.

The result: a proliferation of “thought leaders” without enough leading thought.
Thought Leadership became a way to push information of moderate value to broad audiences.
In this role it remains a branding practice of many high tech companies today.

What do you think?

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Social media listening, not just the first step

Sandra — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:26:20 +0000

If you have recently been contemplating social media next steps or you don’t know
where to start, you might have noticed that there are quite a few social media maturity
models or capabilities assessments available out there.

The majority of these models suggest that “listening” is an early stage of social media
progression or maturity. We agree that social media listening is a critical early step to any
organizations B2B social media strategy. However, we believe that listening is a critical
success capability at every stage of an organizations social media strategy.

Does your organization, department or social media program only have one level of listening?