Your Company’s Thought Leadership Has Eluded Business Development Success. Here’s Why.

In the previous article, we talked about thought leadership and its importance for corporate growth. In this piece we’ll delve a little deeper, and examine the reasons why your company’s thought leadership may have eluded business development success.

Lack of an Idea Culture

Even the best marketing brains cannot create thought leadership on their own. If they try, the result will be promotion instead of thought leadership. There is plenty of good advice available on what to do and not do related to thought leadership marketing. Additionally, your subject matter experts and executives need to provide unwavering support to marketing and become an integral part of idea generation.

No Business Themes

Business themes are clear and concise expressions about issues most relevant to your customers, and are ideally linked to your company’s strategy. As business author Chris Koch examines in his comprehensive paper, business themes help drive revenue and growth.

Your thought leadership should be intimately connected to what your customers need as well as to what your company does. Business themes enable your thought leadership program to create a deeper connection with your target market’s goals and needs. They even give your employees a simple and effective way to better grasp your company’s strategy and goals. Lack of business themes is a common reason why business development success eludes a company’s thought leadership.

Poor Research

Research invariably makes ideas much more credible. People are hungry for statistics and facts. For your thought leadership to translate into business development success, you need to cut through that haze of uninformed opinion. This is only possible when your company leadership conducts and/or encourages proper research as and where necessary.

Lack of Proper Idea Development and Dissemination

It’s quite difficult to achieve business development success without comprehensive and balanced idea development and dissemination. Business leaders and marketers are starting to direct more resources into the development side of the thought leadership supply chain.

Without balancing idea development and dissemination, your business development might be slow. It also makes you more prone to copying others, which according to Forbes Coaches Council is one of the biggest mistakes when building thought leadership.

Absence of an Expertise Center for Thought Leadership

Your thought leadership might miss out on considerable business development if you don’t have a center of expertise. An increasing number of companies now have a central group/center for expertise where they package their thought leadership so to speak. The importance of these centers is evident from the fact that renowned consulting firms such as McKinsey and Bain have had these centers for decades.

Smart companies avoid the above-mentioned pitfalls that keeps them from enjoying significant business development success from their thought leadership strategy.

Fatima Mansoor is a writer at Aepiphanni, a Business Consultancy that provides Management Consulting, Implementation and Managed Services to business leaders and entrepreneurs seeking to improve or expand operations. She specializes in business & entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and health & fitness. Her focus is on creating compelling web content for small and medium businesses form diverse industries. She mostly writes for entrepreneurs and marketing agencies across the US, Australia and UK.

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