B2BFYI #1: Why your thought leadership isn't leading anyone

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B2BFYI is written by industry veterans Chris Bennett (Strategy), Geoff Bretherick (Creative) and Philip Bennison (Tech), and published bi-weekly. You can sign up here to get issues straight to your inbox.

So last week I came across a piece of thought leadership on LinkedIn. And it sucked. I won’t name and shame here (that’s just rude) but it got me thinking about how rarely I come across thought leadership that feels like it’s, well...leading anything.

Don’t get me wrong, the hook of the article was fantastic—it’s what got me to click on it in the first place. But the rest of the article? Oh, boy. Strap in. It’s time for a productive rant.

The purpose of this article was to cover a recent piece of hot news in this firm’s industry. The problem? It simply outlined what the news was. I could easily go and read the same basic overview in a hundred other places online. I don’t even work directly in this industry and could still have summarised it myself.

In essence, they didn’t add anything to the conversation. Why bother simply presenting someone else’s news if you aren’t going to add in your own take?

You’re a professional service business, not a news aggregator. There’s loads of industry news sites for every sector, niche and vertical you can think of. You don’t need to do their job.

By the time I got through the full article (and the only thing powering me through was the thought of writing this piece about it), it was clear that it was an excellent example of ‘thought followership’.

Should prospects want to work with your business because you follow what everyone else does and says? No chance.

But hey, it’s quick and easy to just summarise news that everyone has probably already read by the time they see it from you. You can summarise anything in about 3 seconds with AI.

So what should they have done instead? It’s deceptively simple: just lead. Take a clear opinion and write about that.

Example news:
UK Legal Firm Jane Doe Associates Announces Expansion Into US Market

Example thought leadership:
Why expanding into the US gives UK firms more work and less focus

Pick an angle, then expand on it with your own take. But make sure it’s genuine—don’t write about an angle you don’t firmly stand behind, or one that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Let’s dive into some more ways to make your content more thought leadership and less thought followership.

Thought Leadership content is a critical component of any modern professional services marketing strategy. While it’s been a thing for quite some time, many are still stuck in the old way—a tired rehashing of other people’s insights.

I’m going to show you how to do it better and more efficiently.

What actually is thought leadership? A service page sells what you do. A blog post informs on how you do it. True thought leadership provokes. It aims to change why a client does something at all. It's the only content that should have a strong, original opinion. Emphasis on original.

What's the real business case for it? Or: how on Earth to convince others to contribute. Don’t talk about ‘leads’. It's about making the five most important sales conversations your partners or execs have next month 50% easier. It’s about creating hand-raising opportunities for your prospects so sales can zone-in. It builds trust before the first meeting, so they aren't just seen as a vendor but as an expert. Thought leadership makes the business more money.

How do I prove the ROI for an 18-month sales cycle? Stop trying to draw a straight line from article > client. Instead, measure influence. Track sales enablement (e.g. ‘partners used this in 12 pitches’ or ‘a bisdev rep references this in 13 emails’) and account penetration (e.g. ‘five C-suite contacts at target firm read this’). Make sure your sales folks are making clear notes on each account in your CRM about how they use thought leadership content in their efforts.

How do I find topics that are genuinely insightful? Quit trying to figure this out yourself. You have three sources: AI, internal and clients. Ask an AI to summarise info on the web, such as the prompt: “Give me a thorough list of questions clients ask about X”. Go to your fee-earners and ask this one question: "What's a 'smart but wrong' assumption your clients always make?". Go ask your best clients (the ones you have a strong relationship with) what their biggest challenges are. The info you find across these three sources informs your next great thought leadership piece.

Should our content be broad or super-niche? Always super-niche. Nobody wants to waste their time on a broad article on ‘leadership’. A niche article on ‘the 3 leadership challenges for first-time law firm practice heads’ will be read, saved, and forwarded by your exact target audience.

How do we develop a unique "voice"? Quit trying to invent a "brand voice." Your firm's voice is the actual voice of your most interesting partner or exec. Interview them, record the conversation, and transcribe their exact words. Your unique voice is hidden in their rants and analogies. Save the formal brand voice for press releases and funeral announcements. People have interesting opinions, not corporations.

What's the end goal? (Brand, leads, or sales support?) The primary goal is sales enablement. The content's job is to arm your sales-facing folks with a reason to get in touch and something to leave behind that isn't a sales brochure. Brand awareness and lead gen are valuable by-products of doing that well. It’s combination of building authority and giving relevent prospects the opportunity to raise their hands and become warm leads.

How do I get expertise from busy partners/execs? You don't ask them to write. You book a 30-minute internal interview. You come prepared with a handful of smart questions (3-4 is enough), record the call, get it transcribed, and then you (or a writer) shape their words into an article. You can even use AI to do this for speed, and then give it a quick check and edit. The results aren’t half-bad these days, and only getting better.

💡 TIP: For marketing leaders, schedule a call with your CEO/Director and ask for their support in your content-gathering efforts. If your colleagues know that the boss approves— and can be seen to do so—then you’re much less likely to encounter resistance. I’ve had my best success when asking the CEO (very politely) to send a company-wide email supporting this work.

Is it inauthentic to ghostwrite? No. Think of it as ghostshaping. You are not inventing their ideas. You are translating their brilliant (but messy) spoken expertise into a clear, structured article. It's their ideas, your structure. See it as a collaboration.

How do I get experts to want to participate? Show them what’s in it for them. Less “this helps our marketing” and more "this will build your personal brand, get you invited to speak, and warm up your prospects.”

💡 TIP: When a particularly difficult person has finally bowed under my onslaught of my emails and agreed to support content, get them a little thank you. Pack of doughnuts, a coffee voucher, anything. They’ll be a 100x more likely to help again. Relationships, folks. That’s what it’s all about.

How do I create bold content with a strict sign-off team? This can be compliance, legal, regulatory, or just a micromanaging senior leader. All frustrating. Involve them early, but frame it correctly. Ask them to fact-check the info, not approve the opinion. Strong thought leadership is an opinion based on facts. Compliance owns the facts, your execs own the opinions.

Can I just use ChatGPT? Treat AI as a wicked smart intern, but not an exec. It's great for creating a first-draft summary or five social post variations. It's terrible for creating the core, original, client-facing insight. Your expert's brain is the part you can't automate, sadly (for now, I guess). Use AI for sensible short-cuts to gain in efficiency, not quick paths to value.

Whitepaper vs. LinkedIn posts? Both. The whitepaper is your big, core asset. The LinkedIn posts, blogs, and emails are the smaller bits you break off to promote it. Create the core once, then atomise it for 3-6 months.

How to make it look good with a boring brand? Stop trying to change your logo or colours if you haven’t had any approvals or intention signals from whoever needs to sign major change off (likely the leadership team). Focus on what you can control: pull-quotes, data visualisations (charts, graphs), and a strong, bold title. A single, powerful statistic in a large font is more engaging than any stock photo.

💡 TIP: You can actually make your stock photo selection much better. Choose images which look more professional, like they were taken by a pro photographer. You could colour balance them all to have a similar visual treatment, and even include shades of your brand colours. A brand with a strong blue as the primary colour would benefit from stock photography having its hue adjusted slightly toward stronger blues and cyans, for example. Get creative. If in doubt, hire a good designer.

Is LinkedIn the only place that matters? It's 80% of the game, sure. But the most important channel is your exec’s personal email. An article forwarded by an exec directly to three key prospects is worth more than 100 random organic likes.

Why does our content get no engagement? Because it's a statement, not an opening. The content is probably safe, generic, and has no clear opinion (see my opening rant). The best posts don't just share an idea, they ask a provocative question, challenge a best practice, or state a strong opinion. Aim to be a contrarian. You can still be a professional, and disciplined contrarian. Afterall, your company probably likes to say that you “do things differently” anyway, right? So prove it.

How do I get execs to actually share it? Make it super simple. Send them one email with: 1) the direct link, and 2) two pre-written copy+paste sharing options. Option A is a simple summary. Option B is a more personal, opinionated take.

💡 TIP: The best way to get folks to share the company marketing content is for the CEO to be seen doing it. You can also get this into people’s job descriptions and role requirements so that it’s monitored and reviewed. This is a bit of a nuclear option, though!

How to "atomise" a whitepaper? Don't just publish it and forget. Mine it for 3 months. A 10 page paper = 3x blog posts, 1x webinar, 15x social media posts (one for each stat, key quote, or framework), and 1x internal sales-team cheat sheet. The sky is the limit. Get creative.

Should we pay to promote it on LinkedIn? Yes, but strategically. Don't boost it to a wide audience. Use a small budget to guarantee it's seen by a hyper-specific list of 500 people that match your ICP and target regions. It's effectively just digital account-based marketing (ABM). If in doubt, use LinkedIn’s minimum budget per day for a month and see what happens.

Gated or ungated? Don't gate it (or any other high-funnel content). Your goal is influence and trust, not MQLs. Execs would rather 100 key prospects read the article than have 5 junior "leads" in a spreadsheet. Gating it kills all social sharing and expert credibility. Plus it annoys people. Don’t annoy people.

What metrics actually matter to our CEO? Only three: 1) Key Account Penetration: "Are the right people at the right firms reading this?" 2) Sales Enablement: "How is our sales team using this?" 3) Competitive Positioning: "Are we being invited to better pitches?" and “Are the handraisers a closer match to our ICP?” Erase the concept of likes and website views from your mind. Total waste of your time and energy. Tells you nothing about how it moved the needle on revenue.

How to attribute an 18-month, relationship-based sale? You don't. You track influence and touchpoints. Ask the new client in the kick-off call: "What content did you see from us that was helpful?" Or simply ask your execs: "Did this content help you start or advance a conversation?" Their "yes" is your ROI. If revenue is going UP, then who cares about the vanity metrics like shares or web visits?

How do I build a simple dashboard? Avoid vanity metrics. Your dashboard should have only 4 items: 1) Key Account Engagement (a list of target firms who viewed it), 2) Sales Team Feedback (qualitative quotes from execs and bisdev folks), 3) Top Referring Channel (e.g. LinkedIn), and 4) A single hero metric (e.g. webinar attendees).

How do we know if we're doing well? You'll know it's working when your internal audience responds. When an exec emails you "Great article, sending this to [prospect name]" or a fee-earner says "I saw that post, can I get involved next time?" That's the first sign. The second is when a prospect says, "I've been following your work” or something similar.

💡 TIP: Promote the best performing thought leadership content on LinkedIn as Thought Leader ads. Let the campaign run, then scrape (carefully) the handraisers (likers, commenters, sharers, exec profile visitors, company profile visitors) and stick them in a spreadsheet. Run these folks through a lead finding tool like Apollo or ZoomInfo, validate their emails, then you can A) enter them into an outbound email campaign and B) add them back into LinkedIn as a prospect list to retarget with case studies through LinkedIn ads. Need help doing this? Send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll walk you through the setup ⚡

If you work in the environment sector, then you’ve probably heard of ERM. For everyone else, ERM—Environmental Resources Management—is a titan of the environmental consultancy world.

Raking in a respectable $1.4billion in global revenue in 2024 (£95m UK consulting revenue), and holding around a 4.3% share of the UK environmental consulting market, they’ve been a top organisation in the sector for decades.

Now, onto the main course. I’m going to break down their entire thought leadership strategy for you. Take a peek inside what works for one of the best in the professional services space.

This is certainly a massive advantage that larger firms can leverage, and will likely be off the radar for any small to medium-sized business. But there is something to be learned here. Even if you can’t hire someone to specifically champion thought leadership, you can emulate this by having the leadership team nominate someone (or several) to take a lead. This should be someone who ISN’T on the marketing team. Ideally, it’s one of the senior leaders, but could also be a senior consultant. Having that non-marketing, internal champion can be a massive difference maker to overall buy-in to your thought leadership program.

They publish across four primary content types:

Having a range of content gives you scope to reach people in different ways. A podcast is great to have on in the background during a lunchbreak. A blog can be saved and read later. Webinars require more attention from a user, so tend to give a better handraising signal for a lead. Reports allow a much deeper technical dive into a niche subject.

They all work together to tell a cohesive story of expertise and authority opinion.

ERM promote their content mostly on their own website and on their LinkedIn company page. They also consistently run ads to most of their content (check out all their ads here). They ensure their thought leadership content is where their prospects and clients are, and then make sure its seen all the time.

They have hundreds of ads covering a full range of content types.

ERM underwent a major rebrand in 2023 and as part of this process developed professional, consistent visuals to use across each channel, format and customer touchpoint. This brings you several advantages:

For subscribers only - links directly to these assets are available below the subscription break.

This month we have the following resources for you:

Grab the Google Sheets checklist here. To make a copy, simply go to File > Make a copy. To open with Excel, go to File > Download > Microsoft Excel .xlsx

Feel free to adapt it to your own needs or share with your team.

The longer, friendly email

SUBJECT: Quick question about our rebrand (and your expertise!)

Hi [name of exec you want buy-in from]

I'm reaching out with an exciting (and very overdue) update. We're officially beginning a project to refresh our brand.

I know how swamped everyone is, especially on the [their department/practice] side, so I'm being very intentional about whose time I ask for.

That's why I'm writing to you. As my team are digging into this, I keep thinking about [your experience with client X/your deep knowledge of Y/the way you articulate our value]. Your perspective on how we actually deliver for clients is exactly what we need to make sure this rebrand isn't just a marketing exercise but something that truly represents us.

We're holding a few focused 45-minute brand voice workshops with a small, hand-picked group of people from across the business. This isn't a massive, ongoing commitment. It's a one-time session to get your input.

Would you be open to joining one? We have a slot on [date suggestion 1] and [date suggestion 2].

If neither of those works but you're open to it, just let me know and I can work around you.

Really hope you can make it. This project won't be nearly as strong without your voice.

Cheers!
[Your Name]

P.S. There’s no substitute for going over and speaking to someone, but not everyone works in the same office or even time zone these days!

The no-nonsense, informal email

SUBJECT: Can I pick your brain for 30 mins? (rebrand project)

Hi [colleague's name],

I'm leading the charge on our new rebrand project, and I'm trying to cut through the normal "death by committee" process.

I'm pulling together a very small group of people who I know will give sharp, honest feedback. You're at the top of that list (lucky you!). Your work in [their professional area] is exactly the kind of expertise we need to anchor this brand in reality.

Would you be willing to give me 30 minutes of your time next week for a one-on-one call? I just want to run our core ideas past you and get your gut reaction.

No prep needed on your end. Let me know what day and time suits.

Cheers,
[your name]

Use with Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude.

These prompts help you find unique, relevant topics in the spaces your competitors are missing.

1. The "contrarian take" prompt

What is a common best practice or piece of conventional wisdom in [your niche, e.g. 'environmental consulting ESG reporting'] that is actually outdated, inefficient, or wrong? Explain why and suggest a better alternative approach.

2. The "topic intersection" prompt

Generate 10 potential thought leadership topics at the intersection of [emerging trend, e.g. 'generative AI'] and [your firm's niche, e.g. 'mid-market supply chain management']. For each, identify the primary target audience (e.g. CFO, Head of Ops).

3. The "empty space" analysis

Analyse the top 5 search results for the term [key industry topic, e.g. ’digital transformation in manufacturing']. Summarize the main arguments and identify a critical empty space or unaddressed question that a professional services firm could build an original opinion around.

These prompts help you move past generic pain points to uncover what your target clients really think.

4. The "smart but wrong" assumption prompt (from the article!)

My target audience is [target role, e.g. 'CEO at a tech firm']. What are 5 smart but wrong assumptions they likely make about [your topic, e.g. 'data privacy compliance']?

5. The "Search Intent" Prompt

Generate a list of the 10 most common how-to, why, or what-if questions that a [target role, e.g. Head of Procurement] would be searching for before they know they need a consultant for [your service, e.g. 'supplier risk management'].

These prompts help you get the real insights from your firm's busy partners and experts.

6. The "provocative interview question" prompt

I'm interviewing an internal [expert role, e.g. partner in our M&A practice] for a thought leadership piece. I need to get their unique, unscripted opinions, not generic advice. Give me 7 provocative, open-ended questions that will get them to share rants, stories, and strong opinions.

7. The "expert voice" translation (shaping)

I have a rough transcript from an interview with my expert: [paste a 200-word sample of the transcript]. My expert's personality is [describe them, e.g. direct, witty, and loves sports analogies]. Rewrite the key insights from this transcript into a 150-word summary that captures their authentic voice, not formal corporate jargon.

These prompts help you quickly process large amounts of information and get to the good stuff.

8. The "rapid report summary" prompt

I've uploaded a 40 page industry report on [topic]. Analyse it and extract the 5 most counter-intuitive findings and 5 most compelling stats that would be most surprising to a [target role, e.g. CFO].

Tip: You can ask Perplexity to find these reports for you, then summarise them to understand if they are worth using.

Note: This requires an AI model with file upload capabilities.

9. The "red team" argument tester

I want to build a thought leadership piece around this core argument: [state your provocative opinion, e.g. most corporate DE&I programs fail because they focus on training instead of systemic process change.] Act as a skeptical [target role, e.g. Head of HR] and 'red team' this argument. What are the 3 strongest counter-arguments I must address for my piece to be credible?

10. The atomization prompt

Based on this core argument: [your core argument], generate a 6-month content plan. Include:

The more context you provide, the better the output. Always try to include: