Thought leadership

What is thought leadership?

Thought leadership is content that shares a point of view only you can give, because it comes from your own experience, your own data or opinions you've earned the right to hold. The test is simple: could a smart writer with Google produce the same piece in an afternoon? If yes, it isn't thought leadership.

Let's say you sell inventory software to restaurant groups. A blog post called "7 ways to cut food waste" is fine, and a thousand other sites have the same one. Now picture your founder writing about the patterns she saw while helping 40 kitchens set up the product, like which kitchens count stock daily and why their food costs drift less. Nobody else can write that post.

Thought leadership is the Narrative part of my Knowledge-Narrative content strategy. Knowledge content answers what buyers already search for. Narrative content gives them a new way to look at their problem, usually before they start searching at all.

Why thought leadership matters for B2B SaaS

B2B buyers are experts in their own field, and they spot recycled advice fast. They also have to defend a vendor choice to their boss and their team. Trusting the people behind a product makes that choice easier to defend.

The 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveyed nearly 3,500 decision-makers, and 73% of them said a company's thought leadership is a more trustworthy way to judge its capabilities than its marketing materials. That means your founder's honest post can do more for trust than a polished product page.

Here's why I think it's worth the effort for post-PMF SaaS teams:

• It gets you onto the shortlist early: Buyers form their favorites long before they book a demo. Someone who has followed your CTO's posts for six months already knows how your team thinks.
• It reaches people who never search: Few buyers type "new way to think about food costs" into Google. Thought leadership finds them in their feed, their inbox and the podcasts they already follow.
• AI tools need something new to cite: When every vendor publishes the same guide, AI answers have no reason to name you. Original data and clear opinions give them something worth quoting.
• Sales gets something to share: A strong post or essay is easy for a rep to forward to a buyer who's on the fence.

How to create thought leadership

Good thought leadership starts with what your team knows and believes. Here's my process:

• Interview the people who do the work: Record 30-minute calls with founders, product leads, sales and support. Ask what objections they hear, what customers get wrong and what they'd change about the industry.
• Write down what you believe: Pick two or three stances your team would defend in public, like "most onboarding problems start in week two". Every piece should back up one of them.
• Use your own numbers: Product usage data, customer survey results and patterns from support tickets are things no competitor can copy. Even a small sample is fine when you say how big it is.
• Pick one face and one channel first: Start with the founder on LinkedIn, posting on a fixed schedule. Add a newsletter or a podcast once the habit sticks.
• Get help with the writing: If the founder has the ideas and no time, a ghostwriter can turn a weekly call into posts in their voice. The ideas still have to be theirs.

Thought leadership examples

Thought leadership works at two levels: a person and a company. Here are a few I point people to:

• Joe Colantonio and Test Guild: I used to work in automation testing, and everyone in that niche knows Joe. He hosts the Test Guild Automation podcast, and testers follow him because he talks to practitioners about real problems week after week.
• Basecamp's founders: Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote books like Rework and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work about how they run their company. Plenty of people knew Basecamp's views on work before they ever tried the product.
• Gong Labs: Gong publishes research drawn from the sales calls its product records, on topics like how much reps talk versus listen on a call. It's data no blogger can get, so sales leaders share it.

We've worked with B2B software brands like Katalon, Arrowsterr and Omniscient, and the Narrative side shows up in almost every plan we write. Our LinkedIn thought leadership service runs on the same idea: you talk, we write.

How to measure thought leadership

Thought leadership is hard to attribute, and that's okay. Measure it with its own scoreboard, or it will always look weaker than paid search. Here's what I track:

• Replies and comments from your ICP: Count comments from people at target accounts, and read them. Ten replies from heads of finance beat 1,000 likes from other marketers.
• Profile visits and followers: LinkedIn's analytics show who viewed the author's profile and how the follower count grows. Steady growth from the right job titles is a good early sign.
• Branded search: Watch searches for your brand and your founder's name in Google Search Console. When thought leadership works, more people look you up by name.
• What buyers say: Add a free text "How did you hear about us?" field to your demo form. Answers like "I follow your CEO" are wins your analytics will miss, since much of this travels through dark social.
• Influenced deals: Ask reps to note in the CRM when a buyer mentions a post or podcast. After two quarters, compare those deals with the rest.

Common thought leadership mistakes

• Recycling what everyone says: A post that repeats the industry's favorite advice adds nothing. If you can't add a story, a number or a stance, skip the post.
• Being contrarian for attention: Going against the crowd only works when you know the topic deeply. A bold claim you can't defend hurts trust for months.
• Outsourcing the ideas: A freelancer with no background in your field can't invent expertise. Bring the writer real interviews, real data and real opinions.
• Posting when there's time: Trust comes from showing up often enough that people remember you. Pick a schedule you can keep for a year and stick to it.
• Never giving it reach: A great post seen by 300 followers can't do much. Share it with sales, cut it into a newsletter or put budget behind it with Thought Leader Ads.

Here's an honest question to start with. What does your team believe about your industry that your competitors would disagree with?