Lead generation and thought leadership

- So you've spent a lot of your time on the lead generation perspective, and I think a lot of people think thought leadership, and they want to associate it with lead gen. So I want to hand this question to you to begin with of where do you thought leadership, and lead gen intersect? Because I think we're going to spend a good amount of time talking about that today. - Yeah, yeah. So I think, let's see the way I like to think about this is that thought leadership can be used as a form of lead generation, but isn't and I think shouldn't be only measured based off of that. I think that true thought leadership has to come from like a philosophical kind of belief in wanting to help people, and sharing your expertise possibly without getting anything in return always, right? But, but knowing that it's for like, the greater good of your potential clients. Maybe even not your potential clients, your market, your industry, whatever that might be. But I do think that when done strategically, you can tie thought leadership into your lead generation strategy, and be effective at it. - So and we're going to go deeper into this. I think one of the things that we should first balance on this is the concept that, well, if you're doing thought leadership in your organization, somebody's going to ask you, "Is it working, and how do you know?" Right? And so if you want revenue in terms of resources. If you want people to help you, et cetera, you got to know that it's working. So legion is one of those things that gets teed up often of the, "Look, we got this lead from the white paper." Or, "We got that from this activity we did." And I agree with you, it can be a pitfall, right? On that. So how do you balance that altruistic sort of giving versus, "Hey, we're in a business. We've got to measure things. - Yeah. How do you balance it? I think you've got to have the right people that are on the leadership level have to be bought in at the true kind of meaning, and understanding, and value of thought leadership, and have to truly understand that it's not all trackable. That is just the truth. And then I think you also need to just determine, agree upon and regularly evaluate what are the metrics that you want to track and that you can track. You know there's plenty of things that are, you know, done from a data standpoint. You can see how many people have listened to your podcast. You can see how many impressions you've gotten on a LinkedIn post or how much engagement. I mean, of course there's lots of metrics you can use that I think are valuable to see your reach and to see how things are being kind of, is it making traction and is it resonating? I think that's something you can definitely do. But when you really get to tracking for lead gen, like did we get a lead? And then did we get a lead that turned into a customer? I think that there you have to be, you have to be creative, and you have to be diligent in how you gather that information. And so the truth is, for a lot of us, I mean for internally even at our company, we invest a lot in thought leadership across our three divisions. We have podcasts. We speak regularly at events. I mean, we're doing all the things. And we also just have an old school spreadsheet where when we hear anyone mention they listen to something or they were from this, we put it in there. And we try to be really good about that. And that, that is actually one of the best ways to do it, because it's not always going to be directly through a form like a white paper per se. - Right. And so let's sing the praises of the simple spreadsheet. - Yep. - Here for a moment. Because in many cases, when an organization starts deploying thought leadership, the spreadsheet is your friend, just start collecting anecdotes and that's, while anecdotes aren't hard data, they can at least signal patterns, right? And so I like to think of it from a crawl, walk, run perspective of, if you don't start with the spreadsheet, you never have anything more sophisticated for data collection, and you have to be willing to accept that early on, the data's going to be fuzzy, and it's not going to be what you want.