Thomas Edison understood the limits of invention. He knew the mere introduction of the electric light bulb would not be enough to bring incandescent light to the world.

This point becomes clear when you tour Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory. No longer in New Jersey, the lab is now situated in Dearborn, Michigan in an outdoor history museum known as Greenfield Village.

Step through the lab and you will see an impressive array of patented wonders in the workshop where they were originally tested, refined and developed. However, it’s the front office of the complex that deserves particular attention here. Whereas many inventors have been eclipsed by their rivals or otherwise lost to history, Edison ensured he was not among them. His front office was dedicated to publicizing his inventions and clarifying their importance to the public at large.

Indeed, his remarkable gift for publicity not only drove his extraordinary business success but cast him as the enduring paragon of modern invention.

Over his desk, Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quote: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." Not him. Edison, quite simply, was a thought leader.

What is Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership is the presentation of relevant and compelling insights – enabling one’s intended audience to comprehend key issues, make decisions and embrace change. It concerns all leaders that hope to influence our understanding of past events, present conditions and future possibilities. In the realm of business, this emerging discipline revolves around strengthening one’s market positioning, generating demand and accelerating revenue growth.

But thought leadership must come from thought leaders.

Thought leaders are defined as having a clear, distinctive and specific vision of the future. Their visions may reflect coming advances in business, technology or even social and political arrangements. By articulating these visions, they help us contemplate, confront and prepare for the world to come. They also play a vital role in shaping our perception of that world.

Thomas Edison envisioned a world driven by electricity. Henry Ford’s vision encompassed mass production and the democratization of the automobile. Steve Jobs foresaw the birth of the personal computer and imagined its implications. He has since brought new visions to personal communication and entertainment, changing the landscape of our lives. 

Thought leaders bring a powerful and unexpected new perspective to all of us who hope to make sense of uncertainty and onrushing change. They provide a framework of the future – and they guide us toward it.

While few visions are as breathtakingly large as those of Edison, Ford and Jobs, we continue to seek thought leaders in all spheres of our lives. This is particularly true in today’s business markets. As change accelerates, complexity increases and our own forecasts fail us, we are intuitively drawn to the provocative insights of thought leaders.

Dazed and Confused

Customers in today’s business markets are overwhelmed by choice and change. They must sort through a blinding array of offers and options, risks and opportunities to make high stakes decisions.

In many cases, these decisions can make or break their careers – and severely impact the growth and profitability of their organizations. Consider a company investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a front-office software program or engaging a professional services firm to help redesign its supply chain management strategy. These are not impulse purchases.

They are considered decisions that typically involve numerous decision-makers and decision-influencers over an extended length of time. There are multiple issues to confront along multiple dimensions: strategic; operational; financial; and technical. To build confidence, a thorough and rigorous case must be built to justify change, risk and investment.

Whether the decisions revolve around information technology, professional services, capital equipment, goods and materials, outsourcing relationships, or some other factor, today’s customers are seeking solution providers who can provide relevant and authoritative guidance that builds confidence.  

That's why you want to position your company as a thought leader and trusted authority. By doing so, you earn the confidence to guide your buyers through difficult decisions. You earn the trust to challenge your buyer's status quo and illuminate a new path forward. 

Craig Badings, publisher of a blog on thought leadership strategy and author of the book Brand Stand, has put together a fascinating series of responses to the question:

What will be the single biggest change we will see in thought leadership over the coming year?

He received thoughtful responses from Bob Buday, Erica Klein, David Meerman Scott, Jeff Ernst, Rob Leavitt, Dana van den Heuvel, Matt Church, Fiona Czerniawska, Dale Bryce, Elizabeth Sosnow, and Marte Semb Aaasmundsen. He also got one from me. 

I particularly like the response from Rob Leavitt, who is the Director of Thought Leadership at PTC, a $1 billion software firm focused on Product Lifecycle Management. As he puts it: 

“I think we’ll see another whole wave of thought leadership development and marketing.

“Clearly thought leadership has gained tremendous interest, support, and investment in the last few years, but we’re still very early in a maturity cycle. Many companies are still getting a basic foundation in place in terms of defining issues to address, creating a publication engine, enlisting subject matter experts, and testing the social media waters.

“All this is critical, but much of it is not actual “thought leadership” if by this term we literally mean “leading thoughts.”

“Many of us are producing useful, non-promotional, educational content, but examples of more innovative and ground-breaking thinking is more rare, and requires far more investment, discipline, and experience.

“As more of us get past the foundation stage, I expect a great deal more innovative work in the next few years.”

Look for more responses in subsequent posts in Craig's compelling blog.  

Mia: Don't you hate that?
Vincent: Hate what?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bull****? In order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don't know. That's a good question.

Not that I'd recommend Pulp Fiction to everyone.

But this exchange between Uma Thurman and John Travolta came to mind recently when I was reflecting on the outcome of a sales call.  

It occured to me, in a post-call review with one of my colleagues, that the conversation might have been better if my own temptation to fill silences had been resisted. 

Yes, it can be a little awkward to let silence own the moment. But you should get used to it. I know I am.

We tend to think -- and it may be a cultural issue -- that silence is an indication that something has gone awry. We feel pressure to say something -- anything, perhaps -- to end it.

But we should savor it instead.

Silence may indicate that an idea is being contemplated and considered. It's a sign that your prospect is working through questions or suggestions that have been introduced into the conversation.

Don't interrupt -- or interfere with this process. You'll only be exhibiting a lack of self confidence. 

And here's a data point to consider. In recent research on top sales people, author and consultant Steve W. Martin found that a lack of gregariousness was a common trait.

As he puts it:

Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers...The results indicate that overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance. 

That last word -- dominance -- might trip you up. It sounds rather aggressive, doesn't it? What he means is that sales people need to establish a position as a trusted authority. They require their customers to respect and follow their recommendations if they are to meet their sales goals. 

But they can't achieve this objective if they are submissive, overly friendly -- or unwilling to savor the silence.

They must project self-confidence in order to earn the confidence of their prospects.  

Are you struggling to accelerate sales cycles and meet your sales objectives? Maybe it's because your people aren't reaching enough senior decision makers.  

You may even be pressing your people to sell higher. You may be frustrated by their tendancy to spend most of their time with people who don't have much influence on the decison. You may be imploring them to storm the executive suite. But can they? Do they have the credibility to get a meeting with the top person? 

After all, senior-level decision makers may be unwilling to meet with people who are perceived as lower status than themselves. They may tend to push those meetings down to lower levels. To grant a meeting, they generally need to know the person they are meeting with is truly an expert -- an authority in some sense on matters relevant to them.  

This is the new logic of high impact selling: The larger the deal size, the more senior the decison maker. The more senior the decision maker, the more they expect the person conducting the initial meeting to be a thought leader (in some respect) and to understand their specific situation (in some depth). They want to meet with someone they see as a peer. That person must have the requisite business acumen; the confidence to converse on an executive level. 

If your salespeople are not likely to be seen as peers by key decision-makers, it may be necessary to selectively draw on others in your company -- individuals that are perceived as authorities in the field. 

With this in mind, companies engaged in a high impact sale should consider developing a thought leadership platform -- a solid base on which key experts can stand and be elevated. Your appointed experts should be encouraged to publish, present, and develop a following. You'll then want to sequence them into the sales process at the opportune moment -- perhaps the initial meeting with the buyer's key decision maker. This is how you can get much-needed deal velocity. 

Your thought leaders may be limited in number, but their time can be actively leveraged. How? By enabling them to conduct meetings through web and videoconferencing. Evidence suggests that buyers are increasingly comfortable with such media. In fact, such media can enable your thought leaders to present ideas, graphics and visual concepts that may be far more difficult to convey in person. 

While these high-level meetings may or may not happen in person, the point is that the executive decision maker is most likely to meet with someone who is perceived as having equal (or superior) status. They are far less enthusiastic about meeting someone with lower perceived status. 

Now, here's the interesting thing: status can be borrowed. 

Think of your sales people as members of a diplomatic corps. Their role may be to set up virtual or face-to-face "summits" where the most senior people can meet and discuss key principles for an agreement. Then, the deal can be handed back to your sales team and the decision-maker's buying team to work out the details. If the senior decision maker agrees, in principle, that the ideas presented have merit, then the opportunity will have gained considerable momentum.  

Thought leaders, in other words, don't have to be deal closers. But it may be increasingly important to involve them as deal openers -- trusted authorities that can enable your organization to obtain and conduct key meetings with key decision makers at an early stage. If you can reach these senior people early in a business relationship, you can challenge the status quo, articulate a new direction, establish trust and confidence, and accelerate the deal cycle. 

Otherwise, your sales people are constantly pushing a boulder uphill, trying to gain executive access that is reluctantly (if ever) granted. They will have no ability to initiate a new deal  -- much less close one.    

The new logic of high impact selling dictates you must get access to senior decision-makers -- early in a deal cycle -- if you wish to identify latent demand and create new business. The question is: Who has the status to get and lead these critical meetings?

Want to win more deals? Maybe it’s time to invest in new marketing and sales messages. 

Smart messaging should position your sales people as trusted authorities in the eyes of their prospects. Messaging assets -- whether they are oriented to demand generation or sales enablement -- should be designed to vividly identify problems, clarify consequences, and articulate business value. They should set the stage for and enable sales people to guide buyers through a complex and demanding decision. They should facilitate a credible and compelling business conversation.  

But messaging often falls short. 

Too often, companies create messages that are inward-looking or introspective in nature. In their white papers or sales presentations, they talk about themselves, their products, their features and functions. Sellers often aren’t locking on to the fact that their buyers really want to hear about themselves and others like them. They want to know, first off, that the seller really understands the problems and challenges that they face.             

So, marketing and sales messages should vividly reflect the pain and problems the prospective buyer is presently experiencing  -- or will experience in the absence of an appropriate solution. That’s how you engage them. Otherwise, they won't see you as a trusted authority. They won’t be provoked or enticed to meet with you in the first place.

But, when they do, it’s critical to continue being provocative. Sales conversations must generate unexpected insights if they are to build credibility with executive decision makers –- and drive an opportunity to the next stage. 

In their powerful new book Conversations that Win the Complex Sale, Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer argue that “you must be willing to challenge your customers’ current situation if you are going to get them to something different... if you don’t do it someone else will.” 

The authors (who I’ve had the good fortune to work with) argue there are several actions you must take to propel customer conversations forward: 

• You must be willing to push your prospect out of her comfort zone.
• You need to help your prospect to see her competitive challenges in a new light.
• You have to highlight specific painful situations and make them unmistakably urgent. 
• You need the guts to create constructive tension and use it to your advantage. 

As this suggests, you’ll have to challenge or provoke your prospects in order to drive change and win more deals. But your people will need to be prepared. They’ll need messages -- and associated assets or tools -- that help them engage in conversations that are truly compelling.  

Sales people tend to be inveterate optimists. They prefer to paint visions of a bright, shining, speculative future -- where everyone's happy and the results are just fabulous. 

Unfortunately, this kind of approach never really gets the buyer in the gut. It tends to get lost in all the rest of the syrupy, feel good noise they hear every day -- market-blather that fails to speak to their deepest concerns and problems.   

Still other sales people overwhelm prospects with a blizzard of techno-talk. They fail to speak in a language that is real and accessible to the many, disparate players (technical, operational, executive) that must participate in a high-value, highly complex decision. 

From a positioning, messaging and communication perspective, the challenge ahead lies in engaging your prospective (and existing) clients on the level of "clear and present" problems. 

The heart surgeon doesn't try to tell an unexamined patient how great everything will be after a heart operation. First, he or she asks a lot of unsettling questions regarding the patient's symptoms and then, conducts a thorough examination. Only after that process is complete (and the state of the condition is confirmed), does the surgeon start discussing the operation itself. Only then is a prognosis truly discussed. 

So it goes with successful approaches to the high impact sale. At the outset of a business relationship, it may feel awkward to raise unsettling, no-nonsense questions that get at the "symptoms" of a possible problem. It sounds so "negative," after all.

And it is. But this is the open secret of engaging and credible selling. By addressing the negative symptoms that a customer is experiencing at the moment, you build the credibility to advance the conversation and determine if the symptoms have problematic causes and undesirable consequences. It is the credible identification of these consequences that will drive the decision to change. 

When it first went to market more than a decade ago, SalesForce.com asked its prospects if they were tired of dealing with software (at least, in its conventional manifestation). Were they fearful of long, drawn out implementation efforts? Were they concerned about paying out big money upfront for an uncertain outcome? 

Turns out, these "negative" symptoms of the prospect's present condition often could be addressed with a service-based solution (where the software itself was hidden from view). Marc Benioff sure got that right. 

Counterintuitive though it may seem, sales people initially must address their prospective clients in the unpleasant present (not the positive and speculative future) if they intend to establish an honest and compelling dialogue. But you don't need to (and shouldn't) manipulate with "fear, uncertainty and doubt," as some sales gurus suggest. The pain and problems that your solution can address either exist or they don't. And you won't know unless (and until) you ask. 

What's impeding your growth and undermining your success?

Well, there's one detrimental factor I'm seeing quite a bit these days. I'm wondering if it's a challenge that you face.

What I'm seeing are companies failing to position themselves as thought leaders on the issues that matter most to their potential clients.  As a result, they are unable to get the attention or earn the confidence of executive decision makers. They may even be relegated to people who lack the authority, influence or ambition to champion a new approach. 

This is a huge missed opportunity. Thought leadership marketing, as our clients well know, provides an opportunity to win big in today's highly contested markets. And one more thing: the investment necessary to engage in such efforts is minor relative to the possible payoffs.

It's even a chance for the Davids to level the playing field with some of the Goliaths. We should know. We've worked with Goliaths such as Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Cisco. We've helped these companies articulate a thought leading position on key issues.

What's interesting is how little it would take for aspiring firms to look just as authoritative and formidable as these giant firms on particular business issues. Indeed, focus and intensity represent a key advantage in this regard. They enable smaller firms to zero in on what's most salient, build credibility with senior decision makers, and set themselves apart from much larger players.  

The challenge revolves around articulating a compelling or provocative message. You win by presenting a distinct point of view on a key issue and establishing yourself as a trusted authority.  You'll cut through the clutter and capture attention -- even as your rivals go to market with  powerless presentations, weak white papers, and tedious talking points. 

 Let them.  

This is your chance to win. This is a chance to engage your prospective clients at an earlier stage of the decision process and even initiate a new decision. You then can guide them through the decision, helping them address the key issues that otherwise might have led to no decision at all.  

By thinking in terms of conversation design, you'll equip and empower your sales people to engage in business conversations that uncover and amplify value. And by reaching more executive decision makers at an earlier point you will produce more deals -- and more profitable deals.  

So ask yourself: Is your message compelling? Provocative? Differentiated? Are you a thought leader on the issues that are most relevant to your buyers? And, if not, why not?      

What's your executive outreach strategy?

Too many companies are excessively reliant on passive mechanisms to generate new leads, appointments, opportunities, and deals. They are leaving money on the table. Lots and lots of it.

They are:

• Relying on Inbound Marketing: Right now, there's an extraordinary amount of attention focused on "inbound marketing" approaches to generate leads. What this typically means is that you are using email, search engines, or social media to reach your prospects. You put messages and offers out there in the ether and then wait to see who responds. This is great as far as it goes. But it will take more to consistently engage the executive decision makers you want to reach -- assuming you know who they are.  

• Relying on Referrals: It's great to get referrals. It means your customers and partners have confidence in you. But you aren't necessarily getting the business you sought out. You may not get the clients that are most appropriate for your strategy. In fact, you may have to adapt quite a bit to address the needs of referred buyers. Their challenges may not be fully aligned with your company's core strengths.   

• Relying on RFPs: When you respond to an RFP, you are immediately thrust into a dog-eat-dog, race to the bottom situation. You are battling it out in an arena where the criteria for the deal have been set by someone other than you. You are not the trusted advisor, you are just another participant.

If you are engaged in a high dollar, high impact sale and decisions around your solution are made at an executive level, you may want to put some thought into expanding your client development repertoire.  

You can begin by formulating your business development strategy around targeted executive outreach. In other words, you'll want to identify and profile  potential buyers –- seeking out the ones who resemble your most profitable and promising existing clients.

This is an "account-driven" approach. You will reach out to specific decision makers with messages and value propositions that are specifically designed for them.

To do so, you'll need provocative messages and value-rich, sales enablement tools. If you challenge your prospect's current thinking and offer a new perspective on their situation, you can earn trust and set the stage for a profitable deal.

Through conversation design, you can ensure your business development people are engaged in executive conversations that help buyers buy, identify pain, and recognize business value.  

This may involve some research – some analysis. But the payoffs on this upfront work can be considerable, particularly if you are pursuing large deal sizes.

Deal margins will increase even as the length of your deal cycles decreases. Most importantly, you'll win more deals because you'll be having credible and compelling conversations with the key decision makers.

So don't simply rely on passive marketing. By actively focusing on executive outreach and positioning your people for the executive conversation, you can produce more deals, more profitably.

You can win the clients you want to win.