Chapter 11: Your Investment

I know that there is a lot of nonsense spoken in the marketing world, but thought leadership has some very concrete business benefits. Karen Fletcher103

The previous chapter outlined the many benefits that can be gained from producing compelling thought leadership material for the purposes of growing your business. But what is involved in producing these highly effective marketing assets? How much do you need to invest personally or as an organisation?

The costs and rewards associated with thought leadership are hard to pin down. Investing in thought leadership might be best compared to the time and money spent building a brand: difficult to calculate because of the loose connection between the activity and the gains. However, just like branding, it is enormously valuable and essential to success in any field where good ideas matter.

Your time

The most significant cost involved in thought leadership is time, specifically the time involved for you to research and write material, and to distribute and promote it.

Nancy Duarte spent more than two years on her book Slide:ology. ‘The book took an enormous amount of time,’ she says. ‘I had to spend every night and weekend working on the book for over two years. But it wasn’t just my time; my team played a role in editing, art directing and designing it. We didn’t track all the hours but it was more than 2 000 hours.’

Duarte adds that it took enormous dedication to see the project all the way to the end. ‘It takes tenacity to write a book. Many people have brilliant book ideas in their heads but they stay in their head without ever making it to paper because the sheer amount of work it is to make it reality. Much personal sacrifice and rabid-like commitment goes into making a book real.’

Kevin Bloch, the chief technology officer at Cisco, who we also met in chapter 3, reports having worked seven days a week and through his holidays — up to 100 hours in a week — when he wrote his series of guides to telecommunications technologies. The extreme hours came from combining his normal and full-time ‘day job’ with writing.

In his present role, Bloch often spends days preparing for important presentations to customers. He estimates spending five hours to prepare a seven-minute presentation for a group of business partners, and more than two days to prepare a 40-minute keynote speech. ‘And that’s on top of the stuff I’ve already got,’ he exclaims. ‘So it’s not like I start from scratch. It’s an enormous amount of work.’

However, the rewards can be substantial. ‘I never charge for my time,’ says Bloch. ‘My focus is really not about the sale, so to speak, it’s more about what’s possible if you team up with Cisco.

‘I had a situation with a previous company who was chasing a $450 million sale but wanted to charge up front for my consulting time. We wasted precious time trying to work out how to charge for a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of consulting. My view was: just give it to them free if that’s what you need to do to get on with the job — so that you can get your $450 million that much quicker!

‘That’s pretty much Cisco’s attitude. It’s “go as quickly as possible without any encumbrances”. As soon as we can get engaged, the probability that a customer is going to want to engage more deeply with us is extremely high. Once we’ve gotten in front of them and had the opportunity to talk to their senior management, the chance of follow-up is almost 10 out of 10.’

There are ways to reduce the amount of time required to produce compelling thought leadership material. You can outsource elements of the research or writing task to colleagues, staff or external suppliers. You can keep the overall size of your projects to an achievable scale, and you can develop systems to help you accelerate the production process.

Andrew Lumsden, the lawyer introduced in chapter 7, for instance, continually collects interesting material, then cuts and pastes it into Word documents, alongside related material. This means he can write opinion articles quickly when opportunities arise because he’s gathered material in a disciplined way and already has content in a workable format. It also means he often finds the editing process more time consuming than writing his first draft.

‘Usually it doesn’t take too long to write a column,’ says Lumsden. ‘It’s the polishing that’s the hard bit. Op ed-style pieces are fairly tricky in that it’s 800 words and you’ve got to try to make a point quickly and in a way that’s interesting and topical.’

Types of time

Producing thought leadership requires two types of time: research time and production (including writing) time. It’s important to distinguish between them because it is often the research time that makes the production of thought leadership material so expensive, especially if you run labs like an IT, pharmaceutical or manufacturing company, or pay a third-party to conduct a survey.

Breaking down your budget will help you consider where you can add most value. If you’re a great researcher but a slow writer, you might do the research and outsource the writing. Alternatively, you might outsource the research to a specialist who can conduct interviews or other time-consuming tasks, but retain the analysis and writing processes for yourself.

Budget models

I asked a friend who is the marketing director of a large law firm if she could send me an example budget for a major piece of thought leadership that her firm had produced. She quickly sent back a list of production costs such as printing and design expenses, but I realised it was missing the biggest element — the time spent by the firm’s lawyers producing the document. So I pestered her for more.

‘It’s just kind of expected as something they’ll do on top of their other work,’ she confessed. ‘But we’ll work it out for you.’ Here’s what she sent. The piece of thought leadership was a 50-page overview of the Australian legal system containing about 25 000 words of copy. It offered reference material as well as advice for clients.

Cost breakdown for a 25 000-word report

As the table shows, the production costs (printing, design and proofreading) and even the 180 hours spent by the firm’s business development team to coordinate the project and ensure the quality of the document are a sideshow. The big ticket item — at over 70 per cent of the cost — is the professionals’ time, which has been valued at the hourly rate the lawyers could have been charging clients if they weren’t writing.

You can see what happens within large organisations. Instead of asking the firm’s management for more than $60 000, the marketing team asks for just over $8 000 to cover the external costs, then handles the process management internally and asks 15 lawyers from across the firm for about five hours of their time each. I’d probably do the same thing, but there are downsides to this approach.

Any business should have a clear idea of what it spends on marketing activities, and what strain it is placing on its people, so it can calculate whether it is getting a good return on that investment. In this case, the law firm should be able to see how the report will generate sales leads, reinforce existing client relationships and deliver other benefits such as improving the expertise of its team.

The importance of reinvesting in expertise is captured by David Maister in his book Managing the Professional Service Firm. Maister speaks about the need for professionals to continually top up their intellectual balance sheets to stay at the forefront of their fields. He says he sometimes looks in the mirror and asks himself: ‘OK, David … What do you know now, or what can you do now, that you didn’t know or couldn’t do one year ago? In what way are you a better professional today than you were one year ago?’104

Not just for the big guys

You can deliver great thought leadership material without dedicating full-time staff or spending millions of dollars. In fact, the beauty of thought leadership is that there is no barrier to entry and, if you’re an expert in your field, you may already have plenty of material at your fingertips. Thought leadership is one of the most effective ways for individuals or smaller companies with brains and passion to become noticed and build credibility. How else can a small newcomer stand out against the marketing might of global industry leaders?

You might even be able to persuade your audience to help fund the production of your thought leadership material. Anthony Hobley, introduced in chapter 3, arranged for a group of his clients to sponsor him and a small team to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in late 2009. Taking part in the event enabled Hobley to gain valuable insights into climate change policy, increase his knowledge and contacts, and publish insightful reports privately for the clients and publicly via a blog. Each of the clients that sponsored Hobley’s team paid just enough to cover the team’s costs. In return, they gained an inside understanding of the event and invested in the education of their legal advisers.

Summary

Researching and writing thought leadership material requires a substantial investment. While there are production and logistical costs to consider such as design, printing and travel expenses, the biggest factor is your time. Being realistic about the effort and resources required will improve your ability to produce compelling material, give you a precise view of gains and help ensure that being a thought leader is enjoyable and fulfilling. As you consider your investment, keep in mind that the process of creating thought leadership is essential to maintaining and extending your expertise.