Accelerating B2B Growth: Co-Create Thought Leadership with External Industry Leaders
Thought Leadership-Focused GTM
It’s no secret that thought leadership is the backbone of nearly every B2B GTM strategy in the software and technology space, especially for the ambitious “category creators.”
When we speak about thought leadership, we believe it’s far more involved than a content marketing tactic and is more of an integrated approach that seamlessly weaves into every element of a modern GTM strategy.
Thought leadership is a strategic pillar of an effective go-to-market strategy that integrates industry research, insights, best practices, tactics, and real-time learnings from vetted industry leaders (trusted, credible, and experienced) into as many revenue-focused activities as possible: content, events, webinars, executive roundtables, podcasts, videos, etc.
The goal of thought leadership as a B2B organization should be to educate, inspire, and ultimately level up the individuals within your target market to improve their ability to solve problems and identify opportunities related to the problem space that your product and/or service solves.
We believe B2B organizations that combine this approach with a world-class product/service will experience the fastest growth and become category leaders.
B2B Thought Leadership Is (Mostly) Broken
The challenge is most thought leadership created by B2B marketing teams has become a hidden sales attempt and/or extremely low quality (focus on quantity over quality).
As a member of any B2B GTM team, it’s hard to overlook the amount of time, money, and sweat that goes into building incredibly complex marketing programs that yield minimal results.
It shouldn’t be much of a shock that B2B buyers don’t read your content if it’s all written by your marketing team or that RSVPs are low when you limit your webinars/events to a panel of employees from your own company (we see this all the time).
What if you could accelerate B2B growth by partnering with industry leaders that your buyers want to engage with and instantly transform marketing campaigns into world-class thought leadership experiences that position your company as the go-to-market leader?
There is a reason that category-leading organizations like Intercom, Salesforce, and LinkedIn have invested so much of their GTM resources into building world-class, thought leadership-focused libraries that feature an incredible mix of insights from customers, consultants, analysts, and most importantly external (third-party) industry leaders.
Thought Leadership Directly Impacts Revenue
According to the 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 54% of Decision-Makers say they spend more than 1 hour per week consuming thought leadership to stay educated on industry trends and to generate new ideas for their business.
On top of that, we see this percentage of decision-makers say they took the following revenue-focused actions after engaging with a vendor’s thought leadership:
42% — Invited the organization to bid on a project (when that firm was not in their original consideration set)
48% — Awarded business to the organization responsible for the thought leadership
53% — Decided to increase the amount of business they did with the organization
54% — Purchased a new product or service from the organization that they had not previously considered buying
As a member of the GTM team at your organization, there’s no denying that when done well, thought leadership can directly support your ability to close new business or expand revenue from existing customers. If buyers believe your organization is the most informed and connected to a specific problem space, your chances of winning their business are infinitely higher when combined with a strong product/service (most important element).
High-Quality Thought Leadership is Hard
With most decision-makers rating thought leadership as mediocre while still placing a high value on its influence in their buying process, this leaves a huge opportunity for B2B GTM teams to fill this gap and accelerate growth for their organization by simply enhancing their ability to deliver world-class thought leadership.
How can B2B marketing teams actually create better thought leadership? According to the LinkedIn-Edelman data, there is a very unique trend that executive buyers have identified when determining if thought leadership is worth their time:
80% — Includes 3rd party data and insights from other trusted organizations or people (this is exactly what we refer to when we say “partnering with external industry leaders”)
77% — Features deep subject matter experts delving into specialized topics (if your team doesn’t have access to these individuals internally, there are countless experts in your industry that fit this persona)
67% — Prominently features the POV of an identifiable author (B2B buyers want to engage with other people that can help them level up, not brands and marketing teams)
This data tells us that most B2B marketing teams have an enormous opportunity by simply integrating more third-party (external to the company) industry leaders into their thought leadership-focused campaigns. By co-creating thought leadership with trusted external industry leaders, B2B organizations can be seen as community builders and category leaders which generate more awareness, demand, and sales when coupled with a world-class product/service.
Our belief at Open Industry is that B2B organizations should “Go-To-Market with their Target Market” which simply means you must be partnering with external industry leaders in your target market to co-create thought leadership that levels up the entire industry and aligns with your organizations POV.
Co-Create Thought Leadership with External Industry Leaders
The most exciting part of this thought leadership-focused GTM approach is that any company with marketing resources can implement it right away.
Although the approach for engaging with external industry leaders with the goal of co-creating thought leadership can be a bit different depending on the thought leadership format (speakers for events vs. author for content), there are a few sources that you can tap into right away.
Why would an external industry leader want to partner with your company? It’s a question we get asked every day and after helping some of the world’s leading software and technology companies scale this strategy, we found there is a very straightforward answer. The majority of industry leaders in your target market WANT to share their expertise and insights to level up their professional community.
As the research shows, the majority of companies focus too much of their marketing efforts on promoting their product/service (vs. thought leadership) which will absolutely deter any external industry leaders from wanting to partner with your company.
If an industry leader visits your website and all of the webinars feature internal employees only, you may want to make some changes before you employ this strategy. If they see that your company publishes useful content regularly (research-backed or interviews with fellow industry leaders) or hosts community-focused events, this will make it much easier for an external industry leader to see that your company is investing in the betterment of their community.
How to Find External Thought Leaders
Speak with your executive team to find existing relationships
Some of your company leaders may have interacted with and have relationships with thought leaders in your industry. Most executives have industry mentors that would not mind sharing their expertise at your next thought leadership-focused event or webinar. Having your team members get you access to these leaders is one of the most effective routes to go, as it is the least resource-intensive.
Ask existing customers who are happy and highly engaged
Some of your customers could be influential people in the industry, and getting them to partner on thought leadership programs is a great way to deepen your relationship with them. You can also ask your customers for their input on who they consider a thought leader in your industry. Be sure to inform them that you are after thought leadership, not a promotion or case study. Most of the time marketing teams approach customers for case studies (for good reason), however, if you approach it from a thought leadership angle (and keep it focused on thought leadership!) customers will be more open to this and likely require fewer approvals.
Hire consultants or analysts
This is one of the most common and traditional forms of partnering with external industry leaders to drive the credibility of your thought leadership programs. We’ve all attended an event or read a report that is done in partnership with a consultancy or analyst firm. This approach still works if the buyers in your industry value the input from credible consulting and/or research firms. The challenge with this approach is that it can be very expensive, and time-consuming and some B2B buyers prefer to learn from individuals who are actively working in their industry (in the trenches).
Leverage an on-demand industry leader platform
Open Industry was created to make it easy for B2B GTM teams to find, hire and collaborate with external industry leaders to co-create thought leadership at scale. Industry leaders join our platform to share their knowledge when a thought leadership opportunity that matches their experience is needed, so your company gets access to top-tier leaders typically out of reach. Our network includes industry leaders from high-growth startups to Fortune 500 organizations to subject matter experts and top consultants across nearly every business function.
Accelerate B2B Growth with World-Class Thought Leadership
As your competition focuses on pumping out low-quality marketing campaigns with incremental results, you now have a unique perspective on how you can 5-10X the results of your efforts by simply giving your B2B buyers access to the kind of thought leadership they are asking for.
Over the coming months, we will be publishing content on more tactical ways that B2B GTM teams can partner with external industry leaders based on specific campaign types (events, webinars, executive roundtables, content, podcasts, etc.) and specific marketing objectives based on your role (account-based marketing, demand generation, field and event marketing, etc.).
