The Thought Leadership Approach to Sales
With guest speaker Craig Badings
For years marketing has been about creating your value proposition, then incorporating those key messages into your advertising and marketing collateral. Glossy brochures, press releases, adverts, cold calls and web pages…
The problem is our clients are tired of being sold to in this way; it’s turning them off.
Thought leadership on the other hand is: “Evidence-based views and opinions that deliver insights and knowledge to the customer or prospect about the specific issues and challenges they face today and into the future”. A great definition from Craig Badings our guest speaker at this First Wednesday workshop.
Five years ago thought leadership didn’t even rank as a focus for B2B marketers. Today across numerous B2B surveys, thought leadership is ranked one or two as the area of most significance for marketers.
Craig will be speaking on:
- How thought leadership can create a compelling value proposition
- How to use thought leadership in marketing and sales and ultimately shorten your sales cycle
- How to develop and present evidence-based insights to your clients
- How you can take thought leadership to the market – tactics for growing your audience
We will be workshopping your businesses following Craig’s talk, and develop live examples of how you can shorten your sales lead time using his techniques.
You can see Craig’s posts about thought leadership and how it’s transforming business here: http://www.thoughtleadershipstrategy.net
About our guest speaker, Craig Badings
Craig Badings has spent the past 22 years consulting to small and large brands about their public relations challenges, and is also the author of ‘Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership’.While thought leadership is his passion, by day he is a director at Sydney-based corporate and financial PR consultancy, Cannings Corporate Communications, a member of the ASX-listed, STW Group Ltd, Australia’s largest communications services group.
His view is that anyone can be a thought leader as long as they put in the time, they have new insights, points of view to share and they are able to package and communicate it effectively to their target audience.
We’ll have some great boutique wines as always and some gourmet nibbles, hope to see you there!
First Wednesday First Timers: if it’s your first time to First Wednesday, you can bring a colleague free of charge. Just send an email to ericf@leadcreation.com.au with the details of who you’d like to bring so we can set up a name tag