Why becoming an industry thought leader could be a huge mistake

I’m studying a book at the moment, and it prompted me to write this article. This article may save someone hours of work for what will be, a huge mistake.

The book reference will make more sense a bit later.

There is nothing wrong with choosing to elevate yourself from a sea of people and demonstrate your expertise but please, don’t declare yourself as a thought leader on your LinkedIn Bio… it’s not a title!

So why could thought leadership be a mistake?

I’ve had a lot of people come to me and say they want to be thought leaders in their industry. Over the past few years, we’ve helped people establish their influence on the platform, some names you’ll know and some you won’t.

Inevitably when we get into the discussion and I ask… what do you want to achieve from being a thought leader, I usually get a variation on four answers.

Answer 1: I want to get more clients / sales

Answer 2: I want to get recognition

Answer 3: I want to command higher fees

Answer 4: I’m on a mission to change X or Improve Y

Typically, most people fit into those four answers. The majority normally fit into answers 1 and 3 that we work with. They want to get more clients and they want to command a higher fee.

There is no doubt elevating yourself as a thought leader can make it easier to onboard new clients and make more sales. Elevation creates expert status and so it will make it easier to attract clients. Likewise, that same elevation and leadership position should also enable you to command higher fees… a no brainer.

So where is the huge mistake?

As I discuss this with clients, it quickly becomes clear that they have expert knowledge in their field and they have a lot of value to add, but that expert knowledge is also their vulnerability.

How? - They know so much; they forget their focus.

If your goal is to elevate yourself to a thought leader in the eyes of potential clients, that is vastly different to being a thought leader in your industry.

The communication style and the knowledge must be communicated differently for a lay audience versus an audience of other experts.

Industry Thought Leadership is different from market thought leadership – what I refer to as Selling with Influence.

If you pursue industry thought leadership, you are saying you want to elevate yourself in your own industry. If your clients are in the same industry as you – great. But for most, that isn’t the case.

Market Thought Leadership is taking your expertise and knowledge and establishing yourself as a thought leader in the client’s industry and world.

The way you lead in a market is different than the way you lead in an industry. They substance of your communication is different.

Let’s look at Apple for a moment.

They lead the market in smart phones. They changed the industry in 2009 with the iPhone but they changed the industry via the market. The market changed the industry.

Apple’s dominance in that industry (smart phones) is determined by the market. Apple created the demand and the industry followed.

You could say Apple has both market leadership and industry leadership under its belt… but back in 2009, it didn’t have any industry leadership in the world of smartphones…. It gained that via the market leadership.

So, what am I saying?

Most people think that being the foremost or highest profile in XYZ industry and knowing lots of stuff is the key to thought leadership…. It isn’t.

?

If you want clients to hang off your words. If you want clients to be led by your insight. It must be valuable to them.

Now let’s get serious about this…

Would you speak to an industry colleague in the same way as you would speak to a client, would the level of information be the same? In most cases, it wouldn’t.

Let’s look at one area I’m involved with…

Subject Matter: Selling through Content Marketing

Q) Who is my paying audience?

A) Businesses and individuals who want to use content to make more sales and get more clients.

S) My thought leadership piece is about helping people who know less than I do and so I must make things more accessible and easier to implement.

Let’s look at that a different way…

Subject Matter: Selling through Content Marketing

Q) Who is my paying audience?

A) Content Marketers and people in the marketing industry

?S) My thought leadership piece is about show people things at a higher level and in way they haven’t thought about it before.

Let’s look at Neil Patel. Neil is not the foremost thinker in SEO. In fact, I know many in the SEO world who would critique him harshly.

Who is the world’s top SEO person – in the industry?

As I’m not in the SEO world and neither are most of my readers – we have no idea.

But we do know Neil Patel has some great ideas… some which we can use.

See the difference?

So, coming back to the book.

The book I’m studying has a matrix in there of the common ways people fail to communicate. One of the failures for subject matter experts is they overcomplicate. The book talk about the inherent challenge for subject-matter-experts in being able to concisely communicate. Great teachers and guides in life have mastered the skills of communicating complex things in simple ways that makes their knowledge useable and valuable.

If you’re communicating to a clientele, your job is to translate your knowledge into something accessible for them. They don’t know your subject like you do…. Many of them don’t want to know either. They just want to understand how you can help them fix issues they have.?

You know so much, your big challenge might be to break it down for a clientele who doesn't know as much as you!

Whereas…

In an industry, people want to know the substance and will study the substance in detail. They are looking at the future and how things may change or develop.

Getting this wrong will result in a couple of things…

• Gaining more respect in an industry, but still not getting any advantage in selling to clients.?
• Attracting more attention from your competitors and industry colleagues rather than clients.?

Now here is the frustrating part for the people with real expertise…. There are lots of people who have built market thought leadership that know less than you.

Some people who are mere amateurs compared to you have built market-leading positions. They sell better than you, faster than you and for more money than you….

Not because they know more, but because they have monetised themselves and communicated to clients in a way, they ‘get it’

To develop a market-based thought leadership position, you only need to know more than your clients. To develop an industry thought leadership position you have to have something valuable to say to people who have similar levels of expertise.

It is harder to do the latter and it does not pay so well if you are not at the top of the tree.

I hope you get what I am saying because if you miss this, you’ll talk over your clients’ heads and then at some point get p**sed off at competitors making more sales.

?

I met someone who had authored the book on management. All his colleagues said the book was excellent and transformative. The reviews and accolades abounded. I had a bit of a run-in with him because, he wanted to do LinkedIn his way… whitepapers on management and a load of technobabble. I told him, his target audience didn’t need that, they wanted him to guide them into how to build better management.

We argued a lot because he was obsessed with industry leadership and every time we simplified things for his target market - he reverted to industry expert. Sharing content which appealed to people who does the same thing as him. He liked the attention from the industry but would get angry at the lack of enquiries.

I didn’t matter what we said, he knew best.

He wanted clients to love him, but he didn’t want to talk about it at their level. He wanted them to be excited at this Venn diagram that shows management patterns and how they have changed over the last 50 years.

He could not get one client…. Because he was talking and communicating things at his level.

The money is in translating your expertise into something that adds value to clients….

Beware the risks of pursuing the wrong type of thought leadership.