Having been in the enterprise software industry since 1988, Robert Eve, has probably done it all. Robert spent most of his career at the helm of multinational organizations, leading successful marketing go-to-market strategies, and guiding experts into thought leaders in their respective domains. Now, as an advisor, Robert shares his view on how thought leadership can shape customer relationships, and why leaders should’ve started yesterday.

What Makes a Thought Leader?

Thought leadership, simply put, is to express ideas that demonstrate expertise and knowledge by an individual or a group of individuals, sometimes on behalf of an organization or in specific domains. But what exactly does being a thought leader mean, and what does the role entail?

“The idea is that thought leadership is really about turbocharging their most important messages to your most important audiences.” Robert explains.

Thought leadership engagements are often associated with high-level strategic messaging, with the CEO of an organization speaking and connecting with customers and partners. While that may be the case for most organizations starting out, leveraging on a single individual to drive thought leadership is simply unsustainable. Instead, Robert illustrated the importance of having a stable-full of subject matter experts who can speak to various domains.

The best “thought leaders” often possess three key characteristics – breadth and depth of experiences, a great storyteller, and likeability.

Thought Leadership To Elevate Sales and Marketing

Often, thought leadership falls under the remit of corporate communications, separate from marketing, such as product marketing, and sales. Appointed thought leaders are sometimes seen as “the one who gets to do all the fun stuff”, while product developers, and frontline teams do most of the heavy lifting.

Photo by SHVETS production

While Robert agrees that such sentiments can happen, thought leaders actually shoulder the responsibility of being on the ground, understanding what customers want, and how market changes are happening. Instead of a competitive relationship, thought leaders can be a power resource to funnel customer needs back to internal stakeholders. For sales and marketing, a thought leader can be the additional executive level support needed to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to a customer.

In reality, a thought leader has to start building his or her own reputation internally, identifying opportunities to support sales, marketing and customer successes, while nurturing longer term relationships. And this is when the likability and positive energy of an appointed spokesperson really has to shine.

Your Go-To Kit to Start a Thought Leadership Program

So when’s the right time to start? Or when should an organization start to consider building out a thought leadership program? In Robert’s view, organizations should have started yesterday. While CEOs are the de facto thought leaders of any organization, there has to be a structured approach to managing thought leadership that allows for amplification and “supercharging”.

Robert sums up the steps to developing a regimen around an effective thought leadership program.

• Align your CEO + C-suite messaging with the rest of your customer-facing stories

While you should not be telling your CEO what to do, corporate marketing or corporate communications leads play the role to influence top executives in aligning their messaging with downstream communications.

• Develop complementary capabilities by identifying and appointing next-level leaders

Positioning thought leadership participation as a stretch-goal can be an incentive for next-level executives as part of their progression. With more hands on deck, messages supporting sales and marketing conversations are amplified.

• Supercharge your program by mapping the right thought leaders along the entire customer journey.

Thought leadership doesn’t start with just building existing customer relationships. By equipping thought leaders with messages catered to different stages of a customer journey, each customer engagement can become more impactful.

• Measure thought leadership success with demand

How do you measure success? Through demand generation. Once a thought leader has established his/her reputation amongst customers, prospects and the wider community, demand for participation should increase.