Developing Thought Leadership Value | Sue Yasav

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Using thought leadership to develop value propositions.

An interview with Sue Yasav about developing value propositions for emerging brands.

Our guest today is Sue Yasav, CEO and Founder at Marquette Marketing LLC.  Previously, she was the Vice President of Thought Leadership and Content Strategy at Synchrony Financial.

Sue discusses her early work at GE Capital building value proposition for credit card brands and the processes she developed that she would later apply to many other topics.  She discusses moving to Synchrony and having to build value for a brand that wasn’t instantly recognizable.

In addition to building processes, Sue developed content and new talent to speak about the brand.  Through this development, customers would understand company values. They would recognize who they were speaking to, and why a customer would want to be involved with the brand.

Next, we discuss what successful thought leadership means to Sue. Then, we talk about how to measure it and how to identify when something isn’t working and adjust the course.

Finally, we wrap up with Sue giving some critical advice for anyone seeking to move into a thought leadership role at some point in their career.

This is a great episode for anyone seeking to better understand and build value in their brand.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Thought Leaders need to understand what a brand stands for. The need to know how to portray those ideals in order to successfully build brand value.
• The manner in which content is ingested has changed. Thought leaders need to do the proper research to connect with their audience where they are, not where you want them to be.
• The measurement of successful thought leadership is often gauged by being asked for to speak in the media, be part of a panel, or being quoted.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. What does it take to launch a thought leadership function within an organization? To help us explore that question. I’ve asked Sue Yasav to join us today. Sue served for eight years as the VP of Thought, Leadership and Content Strategy at Synchrony Financial. Synchrony Financial was a spinoff of GE Capital. And today we’ll talk about the challenges of launching a thought leadership strategy. While the company is also reintroducing itself to the customers under a new brand. I’m eager to also talk to Sue about how she recruited talent from across the organization who will become Voices for Thought leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Sue.

Sue Yasav Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Bill Sherman So you come to thought leadership from a bit of an interesting route value prop. Tell me a little bit about the world of value prop and how that led you into the world of thought leadership.

Sue Yasav Well, interestingly enough, they’re both unusual job titles, right? You don’t see a lot of job postings for VP of value prop or VP of thought leadership out there. So, yes, I was the VP of value prop at GE Capital, and I worked with retail partners to develop their value proposition for their credit card brands. And so I went from retailer to retailer doing that. And as a result, I came up with this process and I wrote a white paper on the process and an infographic, and it went over pretty well. And that evolved into, well, how do you go from value proposition to setting yourself up as a thought leader? So it really happens from thinking about a process and thinking about, okay, how do we get better at writing down what we do and making it more of a repeatable process? So that’s how it evolved from writing one white paper to another to kind of making that as a launch, going from one process to another, launching value proposition as a discipline.

Bill Sherman Okay. So and as you mentioned, you started this work at GE Capital with store branded financing and credit cards. Right? Right. Right. Yeah. So for them, it was a new product or service that they could offer their customers to help them make purchases. Right. But you had to explain the value prop of why would you want to have a store branded card rather than Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover, etc.? Right. So you were having to do an education role in value prop, in my understanding that correctly?

Sue Yasav Well, actually, it was the whole process of how do you develop a value prop for a business, right? So it could be repeatable to any business. So first you start off with understanding your customer, doing some consumer research, and then reaching out to the stakeholders of your business and figuring out what do you really want to stand for, what is your brand and how do you portray those brand ideals? In this case, it was in your credit card value proposition, but really you could do that for any brand. You could say, What do we want to stand for? What do our consumers want and what do we want to give as benefits of being part of our organization or buying from us or hiring? So yeah, we found that after we did it, it was quite a repeatable process.

Bill Sherman And that becomes an interesting point. Like you said, your entry into the world of thought leadership was I wrote a white paper. Right. And as I’ve said before, many times, for many of us in thought leadership, the practice, it’s either a second or a third act in a career. We didn’t plan to land here. But then we realized there is a system, there is a process of how do you take ideas to scale? And it became appealing. Now, did you have a thought leadership title at GE Capital when you were there? Or did the VP thought leadership come when you with Synchrony.

Sue Yasav Came with Synchrony? I actually wrote my on the job description.

Bill Sherman Okay. So let’s talk about the transition from GE Capital to Synchrony and that transformation.

Sue Yasav Yeah. You know, when I was with Synchrony, I’m not it with synchrony anymore, but when I was with Synchrony, GE Capital was kind of launching us as our own brand, right? Yes.

Bill Sherman So you were a spinoff, essentially, right?

Sue Yasav Yeah. Yeah. We had a synchrony, had a deep experience in the field, but it was a brand new name. So it was really launching thought leadership for a brand that had been around for a while but was unknown in the marketplace. So that is required of few challenges. What did we stand for? So that again, talking about repeatable process, we said, okay, so how do we do this? How do we decide what we want to stand for as a stand alone brand? After we got, you know, we left the GE Capital kind of family. So we said, okay, there are a couple of ways of doing that. First, what do we want to stand for? What are the pillars, strategic pillars that we want to stand for? And then what was.

Bill Sherman What were those?

Sue Yasav Back then it was loyalty, analytics and deep customer relationships. So those were the three pillars. I mean, there was a lot of strategy, but that’s what we wanted to write.

Bill Sherman Right.

Sue Yasav Out there in the marketplace, right? And then we said, okay, so how what do our customers want to hear about? You know, what do our clients, our retail clients, what is important to them? So that, of course, built in to the thought leadership framework. And then how are we going to do this? Is it white papers? Is it infographics? Are there events that we want to sponsor or there are corporate, you know, who should go out and represent the company and what should they say when they represent us? So all of that was built into a framework of the evolving thought leadership discipline.

Bill Sherman And this was in the early 20 tens when you were standing this up. Am I remembering correctly?

Sue Yasav It was. It was let’s see, I want to say 2008, maybe a little before 2010. Yeah.

Bill Sherman Yeah. And you mentioned that you got to write your own job description. Did you choose Thought Leadership as a title at that point?

Sue Yasav I did not. You know, we had been we had been going back and forth about it a little bit because a lot of what I wrote about was based on consumer research, consumer insights, because that’s what we really wanted to connect with. So we went to Market Insights Leader and it evolved into thought leadership. But then what did it mean? So I have to write, okay, this is what I want thought leadership to meaning in this organization and yeah, and it became the job.

Bill Sherman Well and that’s one of the fascinating things, right, is because many organizations are standing them up. And if you have someone on the executive team who’s sponsoring it and then someone who’s in the role and founding it, their background and personality really helped shape what thought leadership means within that organization from what I’ve seen. Right. So. What were some of the things, if I may, that you put in that job description? What were the things that you wanted to accomplish that were on your portfolio?

Sue Yasav So one of the most important things was really the ability to communicate effectively. So in addition to having these insights, having the strategic framework, really you have to like communicating. So the ability to write, the ability to visualize information and insights and take reams of data and call it out and make it impactful and important to your clients, not necessarily to you. Right. I didn’t really write about the payments industry all that much. I wrote about what our clients were interested in, which was retail. So you have to have an ability to really research what it is that your customers want and give it to them in a format that is appropriate for how they’re consuming data. So when we first launched, it was more about the written word. You know, people had a tolerance for longer white papers, you know, 8 or 9 pages and everything. And then it evolved to infographics. And they went from there to videos to podcasts. So you have to kind of almost create the vehicle that your customer is most interested in absorbing.

Bill Sherman So you mentioned some something as well in terms of speaking at conferences and you talked about the pillars. Let’s talk for a moment about recruiting people to speak and or to be voices on each of those pillars. Right. And how did you look across the organization and find people who would be that voice?

Sue Yasav That’s such a good question, Bill. You know, ultimately, they’re super smart people. I mean, we have the chief technology officer that very luckily knew how to write. So he wrote a couple of blog posts. And, you know, I was very supportive of that. I wrote a white paper with him, which was great. But, you know, you have other people in the organization in IP that you may say you’re super smart and we want you to be one of the thought leaders and they’re not. Great writers or communicators or something. So at times I had to be the ghostwriter, you know, chief of analytics, head of analytics. So I would be the ghostwriter. And our CMO at the time simply didn’t have the time to write a white paper again. So I would step in and be the communication arm after absorbing what they wanted to communicate.

Bill Sherman So some of it then helping them on a writing side. But then also for speaking, were you identifying not only where to speak, but who should be speaking and were you doing sort of that conference matchmaking, if you will, in terms of which podiums did we want to be on and what was the message when we were there?

Sue Yasav Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, back when we could go to conference. Right.

Bill Sherman 2020 being the exception.

Sue Yasav Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the beginning, when we launched Synchrony as a brand, we were kind of not really peaking at any events or anything. So we decided that there would be maybe 4 or 5 events that we really thought were important for us to be at. And yes, then we I worked with the communications team to figure out who should be speaking, what they should say, and developing the content for what they were talking about. Right. So we had we were a very big sponsor and women in retail conference for many years. And so that we were the primary sponsor and I would be responsible for setting up the content for the executive that would present at that conference.

Bill Sherman You really had an interesting challenge. Not only were you setting up a thought leadership shop, but you were also setting it up with a company that didn’t have that name or reputation or recognition. What were some of the challenges that you encountered in sort of this two levels of sort of finding the place not only within the organization but also for the organization?

Sue Yasav Yeah. You know, that’s again, a really good question. You know, because initially we just wanted our name out there. So we were in airports and big signs. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the new National Retail Conference in January. It’s just huge. Investor A ton of money on just big signs. Let’s just get ourselves out there and get our name out there. Name recognition, right? Synchrony. Synchrony. And then afterwards it evolved from there and it became a little more pronounced. Okay, now what do we want to stand for and who should stand for it? Right. From those original three pillars that we had. Now, those three pillars are something else which is completely valid. Right? But it evolved from just get your name out there and get some name recognition.

Bill Sherman Help them recognize logo. Right?

Sue Yasav Right. Exactly right. Like synchrony. And I would have to say, and we do credit cards. So now people almost know what I what I you know the company but back then they didn’t. So and then it becomes a little more strategic afterwards.

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Bill Sherman Yes, they were about that on terms of the strategy, right. So some organizations with thought leadership go after a broadcasting strategy. Some go after a narrow casting strategy that says we know that most people aren’t going to pay attention to us, but we know our folks that we’re trying to reach. What sort of strategy did you craft?

Sue Yasav I think it was a little bit of both. So you can’t you can’t say, you know, that we well, in the sense that we still wanted our name out there. Even this year, last year, 2020. We wanted our name out there, but it became a little bit more strategic. What is important to our company Culture and diversity inclusion came up, especially in 2020. What kind of we got there? Right? But especially in 2020, you know, the leadership was very committed to that. And then also the other strategic goals we wanted. To really be known as a technology company and various other things that are more specific to the retail industry and then the other industries that the company wanted to get into at the time. And like I said, I don’t speak for Synchrony anymore, but back then that was almost the evolution from broad to very specific.

Bill Sherman And I think you hit on something that I’ve seen as the evolution from the long form, sort of desire to sit down and consume content to give it to me in 60 or 90s show me an incorrect graphic, a short form video. People are looking much more for a poll version of thought leadership and the long form push doesn’t stick as well.

Sue Yasav It does. It’s how people consume information nowadays. And not only that, I mean, think about podcasts, right? So popular. We not only want to consume information quickly, we want it to do it while we’re doing something else. Exactly. While we’re getting dressed in the morning. While we’re driving.

Bill Sherman While we’re working out.

Sue Yasav Really hit me quickly. It’s hit me quickly while I’m doing something else.

Bill Sherman And so you have to have a degree of punchiness to the message. You know, you have to know who you’re talking to. And like you said before, what are the problems that they care about rather than the topics you want to talk about? Because it’s easy to fall into a monologuing sort of thing where you’re talking, but maybe nobody’s listening.

Sue Yasav Yeah. And again, we go back to when you and I had discussed this before, Bill, almost what the definition of content versus thought leadership.

Bill Sherman That’s a that’s a great distinction.

Sue Yasav Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. So it’s peer to peer. I talk to you as an equal and we have a conversation about what it is we’re trying to achieve or what you are trying to achieve as my stakeholder or as my client or customer. Right. And that is more a higher level peer to peer. Where should we go? Where are we now? Kind of conversation. Content is more as you know, you know, you useful stuff out there. You say it’s more top down, if you will, if you want to say, you know, this is what I want to tell you and this is how I want you to hear it.

Bill Sherman It’s much more of a push. It’s often much more transactional. And I think one of the things that I pull out from the definition that you used for thought leadership is there’s a respect and maybe even a humility in the person who’s doing the work as a thought leadership practitioner. If you’re coming as a know it all, stepping in to solve their problems, people will roll their eyes and not pay attention.

Sue Yasav Yeah, Yeah. It’s not so much a teacher, it’s more a professional business person. One professional to another. And maybe you have a different perspective. Maybe there’s something else that you’ve found out, like a market insight, and you talk to them about it. So that is more thought leadership.

Bill Sherman Let’s connect the dots a little bit. As you worked as a practitioner and thought leadership. Did you draw on any skills that you had built from your days working in value prop? And if so, what were they and how did they help you?

Sue Yasav Yeah, I had about a 15, 20 year experience or background in marketing prior to leadership. So strategic marketing, direct marketing. But in communications I was even in Lean Six Sigma functions. So all of that built into eventually what would be thought leadership, because you you’re presenting and you’re trying to assess a process and building a framework out of nothing. And that’s really what leadership is, right? So all when I’m facilitating lean workshops and now it’s agile, right? Right. Right. And then going out to clients and launching their value propositions. It all makes you look at a framework and says almost assess what does this really mean? So is this repeatable? What can we communicate about that?

Bill Sherman And you talk about process and we’ve talked we’ve mentioned it a couple times, and I think about you mentioned Six Sigma and GE being one of the initial homes of Six Sigma, Six Sigma to Lean to Agile. That’s an interesting sort of throughline as well. When you think about the processes of thought leadership. Let’s talk about process for a moment as not thought leadership is the one off activity that you write your grand white paper and bring come down from the mountain to deliver to the world. Right? But how do you set up a repeatable process that’s relevant to today’s piece? What are your thoughts on that?

Sue Yasav Yeah, actually, we touched on some of it and I think that it is a process and it’s not to your point, you know, let’s put this out. I’m sure a lot of we’ll get a lot of hits and a lot of likes. It’s first a site deciding or actually doing a lot of internal work, saying, again, the pillars, what do we want to stand for? So that’s an overall overarching framework, right? And then from there, what are our clients? What is important to our clients and our customers? And then from there, how are they consuming data? What were they? How do they want to hear what we have to say? And then what are the communication goals of that organization? Because not every strategy is going to go down to communicating out to the world. Right. And then how do we want to say what Well, before even how do we want to say what do we want to say? What are the topics we want to talk about? And who should talk about these topics? And then after all of that, you say, okay, now what? What is the content that supports all of that? So there’s definitely a framework and it’s not really as complicated and a podcast. Right, right. It’s hard to say visually.

Bill Sherman This would be the infographic type, right?

Sue Yasav Yeah, Right, exactly.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think this also leads to a question that a lot of the leadership practitioners struggle with How do we define success for what we do? What does success look like? And how do we measure it? And then the flip side of that, if we have something that’s not working, how do we identify that it’s not working? Right? And so if I go back to Six Sigma and Demark, for example, if you’re going to define and measure, you have to understand your process and you also have to understand what’s an error. A lot of times content is put out there. They’re without criteria for success.

Sue Yasav Right. Right. I agree. And it’s not easy. And this is been a challenge and I’ve heard this on your podcasts in the past. It’s quite a challenge because it usually points to a longer sales. Absolutely. And it is very impactful if it’s done the right way. And I think I saw longitude put out something like 70% of CEOs say thought leadership of a company makes them really consider that company in an RFP process. So it is impactful. The problem with measurement is, of course, it’s easy to measure content. It’s more difficult to measure thought leadership. But you have things like you are being asked for your opinion in media. You are quoted by media for what you say and your experts are seen as the subject matter experts in that area. Again, shares and likes are important, but they’re not the only thing. If you’re asked to speak, if you are put on panel. And so all of these may be more, I don’t know, qualitative measurements rather than quantitative. But again, all of them are indicators of you are being thought well.

Bill Sherman And if we tie it back to your pillars, for example, there’s more typically more speaking opportunities than you could fill or want to fill. Right. And so the first order, are we being asked to speak? Second order. Are we being asked to speak on the topics we want to speak about to audiences, then that we want to get in front.

Sue Yasav Of our relative? Right?

Bill Sherman Exactly right. Rather than. Yeah, we spoke Check the box and we did it. Have you reached your audience that you’re trying to reach? And that’s something that you can track on a monthly or quarterly or annual basis and say, okay, we were trying to reach these folks. How did.

Sue Yasav We reach? Do they know who we are?

Bill Sherman And do they know what we’re talking about? And did they hear our message? And if so, did they act on it? Right. Right. And so it depends. In some cases, you may have a target audience where it’s a small group of people and you can measure almost on a name by name basis. Did they act right for leadership at the B2B level? Works that way sometimes. But in cases like you were talking about for retail, right, with Synchrony, there were, you know, tens of thousands of retailers that you were trying to reach with message, I assume, right?

Sue Yasav Right. And they could go anywhere for content. But you have the National Retail Association, National Retail Federation, the NRA’s you have a whole bunch of retail newsletters and websites tracking the field. So, yeah, you kind of need to bust through all that and make yourself noticed.

Bill Sherman So as we move towards the end of the conversation, Sue, I want to ask you this question. Many people who are now heads of thought leadership for their organization have only been in the role for the last two years or less. What advice would you give someone, having been in the role at Synchrony for as long as you had? What advice would you give someone starting out in this role?

Sue Yasav I would say have a real good thought about what your client or customer wants to know about. So the closer you connect with their strategic goals and what they want to know about what their challenges are, how they consume information, and how you can become relevant, not only relevant, but indispensable to that conversation. That is really the key to success. And then, of course, it’s communicate. And don’t be afraid of making bold statements. So I have this five point presentation that I give on really how individuals can also be thought leaders. And one of them is use data. Another one is make a bold statement. Be futuristic. Don’t be afraid of that. Not everybody is going to agree with you. And that’s okay. Just show that you’re thinking about things. You know.

Bill Sherman Often when you put out a perspective out there and people disagree. It’ll either help you sharpen your own idea or get an insight into something, because usually if you get critical feedback, it’s not that they’re uninterested. It’s that they see the world differently.

Sue Yasav Right. And that’s why that might be good. Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead. Support your position. And that might give you an opportunity to say, well, I do have a good position or I may have to rethink this one. Yeah.

Bill Sherman I didn’t think about that context or here’s the data I have. Does that not line up with your experience? Right. Right. Yeah.

Sue Yasav Right. But even the fact that you are looking at what’s happening in your field and really trying to be bold and futuristic and really thinking about it, it does set you up as eventually making it to leadership.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. Because you’re repeating what everybody else is talking about. Then you’re only amplifying the current conversation.

Sue Yasav Right. You’re a curator, not a thought leader.

Bill Sherman Well, and there is a role for curation in thought leadership of elevating ideas. So and I would guess this is true whether a GE Capital or synchrony, that there were ideas within the organization that you spotted and said that’s a good one. I know I have an audience. And so you helped someone who had the idea get in front of the right audience.

Sue Yasav Exactly right. Right. Exactly right. Yep.

Bill Sherman So, Sue, I want to thank you for joining us in the conversation today. You’ve mentioned that you are no longer with Synchrony. You’ve set aside your head of thought leadership there. What’s next for you?

Sue Yasav Well, I have my own company now. It’s called market marketing. And it’s twofold. It is helping businesses develop their value propositions through this process that I just discussed. So it could be a lot of different businesses. I have a passion for women owned businesses. I also help leaders become thought leaders, so I help businesses and people in the industry who may have great brands but have not really attained the thought leadership that they would like to attain out there. So I work with brands. I’m doing them.

Bill Sherman Wonderful. Thank you very much for joining us today, Sue. I really appreciate you being here.

Sue Yasav Thank you so much. It was my pleasure.

Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.