The Ripple Effect
Why flipping the focus of thought leadership generates short term revenue and long term market leadership.
The traditional thought leadership model runs from the outside in; thought leadership builds the brand, broadens awareness, with the goal of this eventually reaching the pipeline. But marketing often has no control over this, or sales misunderstand the role of what’s been created and how to use it. Payoff from investment is often treated as long-term and hard to prove.
But budgets for activity that may or may not pay off in pipeline isn’t getting the sign off it used to. Thought leadership is now judged more often in the business’s own terms, and the pressure shows. ” Andrew Shepherd (Senior Director, EMEA North Marketing, Palo Alto Networks) is blunt about the measure that counts: “The big live-or-die-by metric is marketing contribution to pipeline.” Vanessa Schotes (CMO, Enfuce) puts it more starkly still: “We’re a growth function. We’re not there for pretty pictures.”
At the same time, the relationships and credibility that marketing needs are often fragmented. Only 27% of marketers in our recent Impact Makers survey feel valued by senior leadership, and half describe their relationship with sales as completely siloed or mostly separate.
The Ripple Effect flips this traditional funnel model to solve this mistrust and misalignment. It starts at the core by building the bridge between marketing and sales so the messaging is then built with sales, and for sales.
Because the starting point is commercial, credibility is built internally, and impact is felt quickly in revenue terms. This then ripples outward to generate external credibility and awareness more broadly.
Internal
Not seeing brand and commercial as separate engines to be measured differently but combined, starts marketing on the right footing and drives credibility internally, immediately. Then, by sharing the strategy and not just campaigns with sales – sharing ambitions, messaging and reporting – activation then follows as a natural progression, not forced on sales.
Short-term
Commercial conversations built on relevance, solving genuine problems, contextualising those problems, and offering practical advice backed by industry insight – earns credibility and interest, fast. An engaged sales team, armed with this messaging, builds a pipeline, fast.
Long-term
Being the known and trusted voice in your space shows up in renewals and account expansion, compounds into future revenue and, at the outer edge, becomes market leadership – being the first company thought of in a buying decision.
Why this is what marketers need now
It earns the trust that pays for bolder work. Leadership trust is the precondition for boldness. Impact Makers in our recent research describe an executive “trust advance” that marketers spend on bold bets and repay with results. The Ripple Effect gives marketers early commercial wins to repay that advance, which buys room for the long-term work.
It proves value early. Starting with commercial alignment means the first visible results can be pipeline and revenue, not reach and impressions.
It resolves the short-term v long-term tension. Marketers are caught between demands for quick wins and the need to build for the future. Faith Wheller at TeamViewer describes a chief executive “bought into brand building” who “can see there’s the long and the short of it.” The ripple shows both as the same effect at different distances from the core, not as a trade-off. Brand and commercial working concurrently, not one as a consequence of the other.
It challenges the assumptions around trust. The conventional view treats trust as a brand matter and commercial activity as a threat to it. And commercial content being traditionally seen as trying to trick customers into buying. The combination of brand and commercial at the start allows you to build messaging and campaigns that solve real world problems, build credibility internally and externally, building the brand and delivering sales.
About Grounded
Grounded is a specialist agency that helps marketing make a sales impact. Through marketing led, sales enabled playbooks.
Media Contact: Julieta Hollevoet julieta.hollevoet@thinkgrounded.com