Marketing Matters

Archive for November, 2008

With everyone trying to be a thought leader these days, I have to wonder, who exactly is supposed to be thought-following?

Most marketers and CEOs will tell you that you can best differentiate your company by being the smart guy in the room, the one everyone listens to. The logic is something like this: “People are inundated by messages these days, so if you show people you’re smart, you’ll cut through the chatter, they’ll listen and you’ll make money.”

There are a bunch of problems with that. Here are just a few of them:

If everyone’s doing that (and everyone is trying to), there’s no rising above the chatter because the chatter is now just different chatter than it was before it was important to be a thought leader.

Not everyone is smart enough to be worth listening to. Sorry to be blunt, but not everyone can really have pioneering thoughts on a subject. And nothing is worse than someone who’s not that good demanding they be listened to.

Unless you’re very careful, by positioning yourself as a thought leader, you’re effectively telling your clients and customers that they’re not as smart as you. Call me crazy, but that sounds like a bad way to win people over.

But even if you are able to overcome all of those pitfalls, you still may not find thought leadership beneficial to your business. Why not? Because most decision makers (whether they’re making those decisions about which doughnuts to buy or how to allocate their $500 million budget) want to feel in control and lead themselves (which is exactly how thought leadership became the popular idea it is today).

In other words, it doesn’t matter what decision someone is making, they want to make it themselves. What they want is someone who can help them make the best decision they can by being a sounding board for them and brainstorming with them.

The key, then, if you want to sell your expertise, is to be a thought partner. Be the one decision makers turn to in order to have some help along the way. Being a thought partner means you’re sharing the load, it means you’re reliable, present, thoughtful and, most importantly, listening. It means you’re a catalyst that helps great ideas come to life.

Thought partnership is like great jazz improvisation. Someone starts a riff and you and a group of people jam on that and create some incredibly complex and beautiful music. Your being the room makes that music soar, but you don’t create it alone. Of course, not every meeting will sound like Coltrane, but it will be a lot better than if you insist on playing solo while everyone else in the room waits for you to sit down and be quiet so they can play a note, too.

So be a real thought-provoker. Be a thought partner.