Regardless of your role, level or years of experience, I encourage all Presales professionals to invest time in building your own personal brand: the combination of things related to how other people (colleagues, managers, customers) recognise and value you. For example:
- what are you known for?
- what are you the go-to person for?
- why should people listen to you?
Investing time in becoming a Thought Leader and raising your profile not only helps your own career, it helps your company engage with customers, grow pipeline, produce content and generate buzz in the market.
There are multiple ways that you can start to work on making Thought Leadership contributions, which I have grouped into five domains:
- Field of Knowledge
- Social Marketing
- Customer Community
- Public Speaking
- Publication
The expectation here is not that an individual “super-person” does every possible activity in every domain. You can start small in just one area and then build on and expand from those activities over time.
1. Field of Knowledge
The first step in becoming a Thought Leader is getting known as a subject matter expert within your company.
When I meet with different Sales and Presales teams, I am often asked for more knowledge and best practices to be shared by other groups across the region, but far fewer people seem willing or able to spend the time creating or sharing that knowledge. If you want to become a Thought Leader, start by contributing to your company’s internal Field of Knowledge. Examples of how you can do this include:
- Actively participate in Discussion Forums or Chat Groups
- Deliver Internal Presales, Sales or Partner Training
- Write a Case Study or Whitepaper
- Volunteer to be a buddy for a new hire
What I look for in senior promotion candidates are people who have been contributing and sharing their knowledge internally over time. Even if you are not a candidate for promotion, delivering content and sharing your expertise is a great way to stand out relative to your peers and exceed expectations.
2. Social Marketing
Developing an online profile and presence helps build recognition both internally and externally, although to do it effectively requires regular attention and frequent updates.
If you want to build your personal brand in the social media domain, there are a number of activities you can do, including:
- Regular updates and Article/Link sharing: eg. Weibo/Linked In/Twitter
- Write a relevant Blog Post to express a point of view
- Record a YouTube video that demonstrates a Use Case
An easy way to get started online that will help your company is to share news updates via Linked In. It only takes a couple of clicks and helps with building awareness and buzz in the market.
A more advanced entry point to social marketing is to start writing a blog or to contribute articles to your company’s blogs or newsletters. My colleague Yash, for example, has written short articles directly on LinkedIn and has also contributed blog posts that the marketing team have published on our community pages.
3. Customer Community
A Forbes article by John Hall highlighted the link between helping others and building your brand: Be a leader in your industry: Help Others
The “Customer Community” domain of Thought Leadership is about stepping outside of your company, finding the local user- or industry- or interest- groups in your city and joining one. It’s a fantastic way to build your network, increase your own knowledge and represent yourself to a broader community.
Your first goal should be to simply build your professional network, and over time you can become a more active participant and influencer. Ways of building your personal brand in this domain could include helping someone out, sharing knowledge, doing presentations to the community on behalf of your company or even becoming a member of the organizing committee.
4. Public Speaking
The domain of Public Speaking is a high visibility way of getting in front of people and building your personal profile as a Thought Leader. It’s about developing your presentation skills and becoming confident to stand in front of larger and larger audiences, being recognized as a subject matter expert who speaks with authority.
If you want to develop your Public Speaking experience, the easiest starting point is to become a speaker at your company’s marketing events such as local seminars, webinars or customer forums. Getting confident presenting in small-scale events can then extend to speaking at industry events and conferences.
If you are active in a customer community or industry group, that can also be a good forum in which to develop your public speaking skills – either as a representative of your employer, or by speaking on a particular business or technical topic in which you are knowledgeable.
5. Publication
It is relatively easy to write something and self-publish, whether by writing a white paper and sharing it internally (Field of Knowledge) or writing an online blog (Social Marketing). What I want to focus on here are more substantial deliverables that could include:
- Writing an article that is carried by an external magazine (print or digital)
- Writing or contributing to a research paper (eg. through a University or an industry-group)
- Writing or contributing to a book
The topics you choose to write on can vary. Doing this in a way that demonstrates Thought Leadership involves spending time researching your topic, extracting insights, forming your own opinions and then being able to clearly communicate your point of view in writing.
If you are working on a career plan to establish yourself as a Thought Leader, then getting published is a fantastic way to build your profile and personal brand.
Conclusion
My colleague Aella observed that “Personal Brand is who you are without a Presales title”. Each of us has different strengths and skills and becoming a Thought Leader takes time, thinking, communicating and persistence. My goal with this article has been to explore some ideas and share practical examples of actions that you can take to get started.
I recommend picking one or two domains where you will take initial action and then adding more actions and contributions as you build confidence and expertise. Investing your time in becoming a Thought Leader will help you increase your knowledge, build your network and open up new career opportunities. The return on this investment is a Win-Win-Win situation for you, your company and your customers!
What actions are you taking to become a Thought Leader?
Thoughtful Presales 