By the time a prospect reaches out to your firm, the most important conversation is already over—and you weren’t in it. It happened in open browser tabs, internal threads and “who do you know who handles this?” texts. By most estimates, 80% of the buying decision is made before a firm even knows it’s in the running.
If you’re relying on that face-to-face conversation at your local Chamber meeting, you’ve already lost.
The old business development playbook isn’t working anymore
Today’s buyers of B2B services are, to use an old term, “digital natives,” but a lot of firms continue to lean on the sales and marketing playbook written before those buyers graduated from middle school. Look, we get it—networking lunches and local sponsorships are tried-and-true approaches that can still pay dividends.
But this is also limiting, especially when the folks you meet at that Chamber of Commerce mixer spend a chunk of their workday online looking to solve the challenges they face. Sure, they might like you because you’ve had drinks together, but will they trust you when they have a business problem that needs solving? Just because our kids are on the same Little League team doesn’t mean I’m hiring your firm for my ERP implementation.
| OLD WAY | NEW WAY |
|---|---|
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| FOCUS: Geographic visibility | FOCUS: Digital presence |
| KEY METRIC: Lunches with prospects | KEY METRIC: Share of voice in AI engines |
Face-to-face and IRL connections still matter, but in today’s perpetually online world, the fastest way to grow is with digital thought leadership.
If you’re selling, you’re losing
Your prospects don’t want to hop on a call or sign up for a free consultation that they know is a sales pitch. They want to spend time with your thinking. Yes, they value human relationships, but their job demands that they solve whatever challenge they are facing and sometimes, hiring a friend creates more tension than it’s worth.
That means it becomes important to elbow your way into those internal conversations with your thought leadership, referrers and other reputation-building activities.
In order to grow, you must build a reputation for your firm. A great reputation gets you short-listed. It’s the shortest path to higher-level sales conversations. It makes the actual “selling” easy because your credentials are established and the prospect believes that you have the expertise to help them meet their challenge. Their confidence and trust have already been established.
Building your firm’s reputation with thought leadership
What is your team’s point of view? The best professional services firms have something unique to say because they have a unique way of solving client problems; they aren’t saying the same things as all the other firms, based on all the same keywords.
Thought leadership marketing requires consistently publishing and distributing your team’s point of view. Don’t confine yourself to thinking about this in tactical terms, as a certain number of blog posts or social posts. Great thought leadership is all about your ideas—the big, bold, provocative concepts that get your future clients’ attention and maybe change the way they’re thinking.
Once you have those ideas, you need to go beyond publishing them on your website or keeping them trapped in one-on-one conversations. Thought leadership is the fuel for:
- Media coverage
- Speaking engagements
- Published research
- Third-party recognition
- Recommendations from trusted sources
Focusing on distributing your thought leadership through these channels raises your firm’s brand awareness and has a major impact on how you show up in AI search.
Using AI: You can’t manufacture thought leadership
While your thought leadership will appeal to AI and influence how you show up in AI searches, please don’t use AI to generate thought leadership content. AI-created content is always an unsatisfactory compromise—a mix of many people’s ideas that really doesn’t change anything.
You can’t manufacture thought leadership. Use AI, but use it judiciously.
It’s rather comical that services firms that are very proud of their intellectual brainpower when it comes to helping their clients are so willing to outsource their thinking to AI.
You still need taste. You still need judgment.
Your clients hire you for your judgment and, if you’re using AI slop for all of your marketing content, you’ve just demonstrated a significant lack of judgment.
Thought leadership needs to come from your subject matter experts working on the frontlines, the folks who roll up their sleeves and solve problems and help clients realize opportunities.