Why You Need Opinion Not Thought Leadership in Turbulent Times

One of my team recently posted something on LinkedIn. A friend of mine said “that should split opinion”. It did, and that was a good thing. 

We shouldn’t be afraid of polarising opinion, the people that agree with you, will buy from you, those that don’t agree with you won’t buy from you. It’s self qualifying, saves you time and makes your sales process more efficient and effective. On the basis that you don’t try and spend time with people who don’t buy, which you have to do if you use legacy sales methods. 

So how do you make your company a thought leader today? 

Traditionally Marketing got a journalist or a marketing agency to write a piece of thought leadership and job done. It does not work like that anymore. Nobody reads white papers, especially anything gated. We don’t have time and know it will be just an “advert” anyway. 

What you need to do is get your team (Sales, Marketing, Technical, Human Resources etc) to have great LinkedIn profiles. This is NOT profiles written by an external company, this is authentic profiles written by the people themselves. This is not about corner cutting, your customers are not fools. 

Get your employees to grow their networks. You need to move your territory online. A network of x colleagues and recruiters isn’t any good. You need to connect with prospects, customers and people who influence your accounts. 

BTW if you don’t have a great profile then people will think you are a spammer when you try and connect and you are pretty much wasting your time. 

The third point is you empower your team to write blogs. Just 300 – 500 words, and you suggest the subject or key words. What you will end up with is “a lot” of authentic, key word optimised blogs. This will give you SEO value, but it will also be seen by your (strong) network.

This will build your authority across social and the internet. When it comes from companies to vote which products to keep and which products to dump, people will believe in your product and vote for it.

(Don’t forget you will be the guys with the great authentic profiles, you will be connected to the people who will be doing the voting. They will have seen your authentic, educational, insightful content. Hopefully they will know you and love you. So will vote to keep you.)

You don’t need everybody to buy into this, but enough. Give them permission and start now.

Related: Executing Your Reimagined Go-to-Market Strategy