Being a Thought Leader is Not Enough

Through our research of what drives customer loyalty (willingness to buy, willingness to continue buying, willingness to recommend), thousands of our members’ end-customers have told us that the thing they value most is for a supplier to provide insight around  that customer’s business and educate them on how they can compete more successfully.  Customers want insight.

And at the SEC, we’ve been talking about the importance of providing insight during the commercial interaction for a while now.  Along these lines, one of the things we’ve strived to do, is to define the term insight as precisely as possible.  To discuss in detail what it is, but also, what it’s not.

We have to ensure that the collateral we build, the scripting we create, the messages our salespeople are pushing out into the marketplace in the name of insight…aren’t merely just thought leadership.  We shouldn’t be satisfied with just telling the customer what they could be doing – they’re likely already aware of these things anyway!  That’s traditional thought leadership.

Instead, our job should be to convey a story around what that customer is currently doing.  And how what they’re currently doing…is wrong!  

That’s how we can challenge customer thinking in an effective manner.  We have to disrupt that customer’s status quo.  Our goal should be to educate customers on how their current actions are costing them money, preventing them from making money or mitigating a certain set of risks.

Most salespeople we talk to are so excited to show customers the “new idea”, the “shiny new object” or the “new thing they could be doing”, but they never give that customer a reason to stop the thing they’re already doing.

So implicit in any good insight is a simple message: “Hey!  You’re doing it wrong!”.

To be clear, that message has to be conveyed politely, diplomatically, professionally, empathetically…these are certainly important nuances to doing this well.  But at the end of the day, we’ve got to be able to look our customers in the eye and say “what you’re doing right now, is wrong.”  Something that makes the customer want to change their behavior.

And that path to behavior change, should lead back to you and only you (not to you and your competition).

At its best, true commercial insight – insight that leads to a commercial result for us, the supplier – reaches beyond what is just traditional thought leadership.

SEC Members, to learn more about this type of sales messaging, see our newest research on Deconstructed World-Class Commercial Insights, which includes sample teaching pitches from select member organizations. Also be sure to register for our upcoming July 24th webinar on Creating Cutting-Edge Sales Messages.