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Managing Thought Leadership for an Organization | Matthijs Van den Broek
Creating thought leadership using your entire organization
An interview with Matthijs Van den Broek about managing and generating thought leadership using the resources of every employee in your organization.
Today’s guest is Matthijs Van den Broek, head of thought leadership and the energy industry at WUA!, a digital research consultancy in Amsterdam that focused on digital experience benchmarking and the customer journey.
Matthijs discusses how his work at WUA! moves thought leadership from the role of a small team to the duty for every employee at the organization. We discuss the methods they’ve used to form guidelines for involvement and the hurdles they face getting people involved. Matthijs shares how they used their thought leadership in 2016 to write The Digital Excellent Challenge. In addition, Matthijs explains what success looks like. Also, he reveals how they are connecting their thought leadership to sales and marketing to fill the sales pipeline while building trust with their clients.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- How thought leadership can be created by an entire organization.
- What the biggest obstacles are that prevent people from getting involved in creating thought leadership
- Why connecting your thought leadership with your marketing team can prevent your assets from sitting idle.
Managing thought leadership within an organization takes plenty of strategy and creativity. If you want to create a deeper impact with your organizational thought leadership, reach out to Thought Leadership Leverage. We can help you devise a strategy and develop many resources for use within your organization.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello and welcome. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we focus on one of my passions organizational thought leadership. That is, the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organization. My guest today is Matthijs Van den Broek. He is head of thought Leadership and the Energy Industry at War, a digital research consultancy in Amsterdam. Matthew, welcome.
Matthijs Van den Broek Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. So I said in the introduction that you’re the head of thought leadership at War. What is war and how are you using thought leadership?
Matthijs Van den Broek Woo is a digital research agency based in Amsterdam, founded in 2008 already. So we’re 12 years old this year. We focus on digital experience benchmarking, and that means that we track and research customer journeys and benchmark them all over the world and globe. So we’ve only have a focus on digital. And we used it for leadership to spread the word about customer experience, benchmarking our research models, our for both sales journeys and service journeys.
Bill Sherman So you’re using thought leadership to fill the sales pipeline?
Matthijs Van den Broek Yeah, we have it in a combination. Well, for leadership and our is it was in the last couple of years was really a marketing effort. And we are now making the handshake between marketing and sales to keep them more combined as a more commercial organization. But yeah, in the end all the board leadership efforts, be it a blog post, be it a podcast like we do, be it a white paper on the consumer behavioral psychology. It all narrows down to lead generation and generating new business.
Bill Sherman Now he’s thought leadership in the marketing department or where does it sit in the organization?
Matthijs Van den Broek Well, right now we’re more or less having more in the in the heart and veins of the whole organization. And that’s a bit vague, maybe, but I’ll try and explain it. Please do. Yes, we have more. We have a lot of researchers who have a lot of deep knowledge about customer experience, about the do’s and don’ts. And we want to have that knowledge more expanded abroad to a different media and also to our clients, be it in white papers or in blog posts or in email newsletters. And that’s why the Fournier ship is I am more than the director or I’m more a facilitator, becoming more a facilitator than the CMO or the head of the head of the marketing department. So we’re we have decided that marketing should be anywhere in the organization. That’s why. Because we have fallen leadership as a strategy. It becomes more and more a normal thing to do, a part of the job of anyone working at more.
Bill Sherman So that’s interesting. So instead of tapping 3 or 5 people and saying you’re responsible for thought leadership, you’re talking about thought leadership across the organization and that it’s partly everybody’s responsibility. Is that what I’m hearing?
Matthijs Van den Broek Yeah, exactly. And that is also something that is probably more a long-term effort. And also, keep your eye. Yeah, it’s going to be a long run for anyone within the organization to adapt to more like a marketing perspective on their business. Because normally if you’re a digital researcher or if you’re your sales guy, you don’t have it in your in your job description. So it should be anywhere. It should be slowly but steadily. It should become part of your job. And you also should be. And that’s what I think you also should be. Again, you get your I you say that if you have a talk with your boss, then you should also consider your thought leadership efforts.
Bill Sherman Right. Right. So in terms of your performance and your objectives for the year, they should be tied to thought leadership to some degree and your boss should be supporting and managing to that is what sounds.
Matthijs Van den Broek Like what I’m hearing. Yeah. And also the sub bosses. So the guy who was responsible for data the girl was responsible for, for our research department, our CEO was responsible for the sales, they should all be adhered to. Getting the message out of why that is an important thing to do. So yeah, and that’s and it’s my job to, to facilitate to and also to guide them in what, what is possible to do. So that’s exactly what tactical. Yeah.
Bill Sherman Yeah. That’s exactly where I want to go because yeah, it could be risky and almost a disaster if you were to give the announcement and say, Hey, everybody do thought leadership and go and not give them some direction. So talk to me about the strategy setting and how you’re communicating that strategy to the team so they know what to create and what pieces you need so you don’t get duplicated effort or wasted effort, right?
Matthijs Van den Broek Yeah. Well, what we do is we have a we have a certain we don’t have to have it like put in concrete, but we have, we have a website that is in a, in a, in a certain grid with a certain look or feel and a certain stories on it. And what we try to do is have people adapt to what we already have. So what I am now doing is I build up a editorial team of three people and they’re really good, really skilled writers. They all have. It’s not a coincidence. I think they all have a background in journalism and.
Bill Sherman That’s very common.
Matthijs Van den Broek Yeah, and we formed a small multidisciplinary team. One is a researcher, one is a data specialist. I’m there to guide them. And we talk about what stories could we possibly bring? What are you up to? What are the white papers that you want to produce in the coming weeks or months? And that is one way I’m trying to get the Ford leadership message out to people who thought, well, that’s a marketing effort. That’s for the marketing guys. I’m not I’m not involved here. But I do think it can be improved and it should be better. So everybody with a will kind of who was on the sideline saying that marketing should improve on its quality, they are now into the game and they can play with me. So it does really play the game with me. So that’s really nice.
Bill Sherman So yeah, go ahead, finish, please.
Matthijs Van den Broek Now it’s also more of a bit of a strategy change that we made in the, in the last, well, last year I guess. Yeah.
Bill Sherman And with the announcement of that strategy changed and saying, okay, thought leadership and the thought leadership function isn’t just a team in marketing, but it’s everybody’s responsibility. How was that message rolled out and what was the response to it? I mean, how did you make that change?
Matthijs Van den Broek We were still let me let me really be clear that we’re still at the middle of the storm.
Bill Sherman Okay?
Matthijs Van den Broek Okay. So we’re really into the change and all the circumstances of Covid 19 really don’t help me with getting the message across. But what we did was we had a questionnaire among all the people asking them really simple questions about what they could do, how they think that that they their responsibility is regarding. Marketing communications offered leadership efforts. And we had a really great intern North Year doing that research and we presented that to. In the last couple of months to everybody in the team. So this is where we stand now. This is what you think you should do and are now working on giving them the possibilities and the guidelines and also the enthusiastic push in their back since. To do it. And that’s I think the research by our research companies are really logical to do it to do those kinds of research. But it was really helping me also to understand a bit more about what is what is the idea that lies in the company, what is the main objective not to do it? What are the reasons that people are not as enthusiastic as me about all the all the great stuff they can do on social media or on LinkedIn or on blog posts or on the stage of a marketing, a big marketing events.
Bill Sherman So given that you have the opportunity to basically to pull your whole, you know, organization, you know, I’m curious, what objections did they give about thought leadership, right? And what were the hurdles that you had to overcome in terms of saying, you know, that they were saying, no, no, no, Where are they?
Matthijs Van den Broek The biggest one, I guess is time. Okay. I have to work a lot of. I heard that from the research department. The biggest one is time. I’m under a lot of pressure to deliver a nine plus experience to our customers and they deserve it. And I want to put all my time and effort, energy and everything I have into that report or into that dashboard or into the consultancy. I’m trying to give. And all that is all things different to that. Next to that is, is getting me out of focus and is costing me free time. It’s costing me my, my, my, my, my spare time in my and my private life. And that’s one of the biggest ones. The second one is I don’t know what to do. And I thought that was really interesting. And to me, it was a an a really an eye opener. And also I had to do some introspection myself because I didn’t understand how could you not know what to do? Because it’s a it’s a one of a hell of a playground there anything it’s.
Bill Sherman Well, and that could almost be the part that’s intimidating, right? It’s like, what should I do? You know? Yeah, I can try to figure out what to do on LinkedIn or Twitter, but what are the right things? And those worlds are ones that change pretty rapidly. And, you know, if you’re if you’re not following it day after day, it can be more of a challenge.
Matthijs Van den Broek Yeah, I think it is. And it may be. It’s also very logical because where we’re coming from, there was the marketing department with marketing specialists doing marketing stuff and sometimes using our research or data in a marketing way. And, and now it’s getting more, yeah, more consolidated that it’s more one voice and more one team effort. And I really like that that approach. But I think it’s. It may not be the easiest. Yeah.
Bill Sherman It it’s definitely a challenge to build that from a competency instead of just a handful of people out to the whole organization.
Matthijs Van den Broek And also in terms of I’m curious what you think because also in terms of budgets, you know, if you don’t if you’re not the Bridget Holder in the in the Dutch, we have the saying that if you if you pay you you’re the boss. So where and most of the fault leadership departments, if any, don’t always control the budgets I guess.
Bill Sherman Correct. And I think one of the things that we sometimes struggle with in terms of organizations is explaining how it connects to revenue and sales and customer satisfaction. And so that’s an additional hurdle. If I do this, does it help me reach any of the goals that I care about, whether it’s creating a great customer experience, winning new business? And that’s one of the questions of how do you connect thought leadership to things that people across the organization carry too?
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Bill Sherman One of the questions I want to ask you on that is I can imagine there’s an announcement like, okay, thought leadership now is no longer Matthew’s responsibility. It’s all our responsibility. I can imagine someone on the team raising their hand and saying, that’s great in all what’s not leadership. So how do you answer that question to them? And how did you answer to your colleagues?
Matthijs Van den Broek Wow. Well, I always say that that for leadership is a tactic or a strategy to get your message across, to get your message across at a targeted audience, and not only across, but also in the hearts and minds, so that the message of your company or the vision or the mission really resonates so that the event eventually will Well, well, we’ll trust you as an adviser to get to create business with each other and that they won’t choose a competitor, but they choose you because you’re the expert on your topic. And I think. Well and what we’re really since the start because we’ve generated and validated our research models ourselves. We’re into a really great position to claim for leadership in the customer experience benchmarking space. So, so what I’m, I’m trying to, to, to tell to, to my, to my colleagues why it’s important and what and what it should be.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think you brought out a couple of key points there in terms of communicating a vision, deepening trust and being the people that are on your client speed dial. When they have a problem, they don’t know where to start, they don’t know how to solve it, but they know you’re good at this and they can say, Hey, what do you think? Right? That invites the conversation. So it and I know you said you’ve been in the journey of getting more people to create thought leadership. Do you have a story or a success or a moment that you want to talk about for leadership at all that stands out that you feel went well in terms of doing thought leadership for the organization?
Matthijs Van den Broek Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think the most beautiful what I’m really proud of is well, in our in our Benchmark is a book. It’s the Digital Excellence Challenge. We published it in 2016. And what we what we did was we interviewed our the winners of our benchmarking studies. So that could be the head of digital of a big insurer or energy company or a telecom agency. And we asked them we asked 25 of them a standardized question list of about digital KPIs they use, about their challenges, about why it’s important to have a winner of mentality, to definitely to win. And we created a book around that with really nice pictures and the whole all the interviews and the full interviews. Full Q&A interviews. And we printed it in a almost 3000 edition and we delivered that book in. I think we shipped 1400 of the copies of them in at the end of the season. And for a seasonal gift at the end of 2016. And that was really wow, that was really awesome to have the faith also within the company because print is well, it’s expensive.
Bill Sherman It’s definitely a commitment.
Matthijs Van den Broek It’s a really a commitment. And also there was a real, real a lot of trust. And I and also the reactions on the book were really good because everybody wants to be in a book, of course. And that’s why. But also it gave a really nice overview of the of the digital landscape about what people in digital marketing or in e-commerce which challenges they are facing and also about their future plans for the next year. So it was a that was really nice. And what we also did is we gave it away as a for free as a as a download after you filled out our religion form. So it generated also thousand plus marketing qualified leads. So yeah, I’m really proud of that of that project. And it was really intense to after working in the digital space for almost a decade to have a print deadline again. So I think I must have been really, really, really stressed. But it also gave a really nice vibe. So that was great. Yeah.
Bill Sherman Well, and you’re talking about multiple modalities there, right? So you’ve been living in the digital world, but there’s still that magic of, you know, you open a box or you get a package with a book in it, especially if you’re in it and you’re referenced in it. It’s a much more tangible experience than, Hey, we published your interview on a website, right? And so I liked that. And then you did you talked about multimodal campaigns where you gave it away to clients, uses a free get a copy of the book if you sign up. You know, and one of the things that I think you talked about is you said you generated a thousand leads. So let me ask you this question. How are you measuring success now? What are you doing to measure success and results for thought leadership?
Matthijs Van den Broek Well, we had all the digital marketing KPIs you could you could have in place, and we tracked them every month in the last couple of years. So it was about leads, it was about traffic, it was about the conversion rate on our on our website. It was about time on site. It was cost per lead, even cost per channel. So we did also a lot of paid advertising. We experimented with LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads and Facebook ads and retargeting, and it all comes down to a traffic conversion and leads, right? And there was the there was the well, there was the kind of the marketing department phase we had. But as we started this this podcast, we. Talked about, also about Legion and about that every effort should be in in any way contributes to the bottom line of the company. So we also had the marketing qualified leads to sales qualified lead ratio in place. And those are all of course, I think they’re not really thought leadership KPIs or digital marketing KPIs, but we use them to have a sense about what we are doing and if we’re moving at what’s the right direction Also to set goals. Because I think and we, we had a really bumpy road in that, but it was really nice to set a target, work on it with a team and then reach your target. Just in quantitative idea of we generated 400 marketing qualified leads in May 2019. So that’s a that’s a really nice idea to work. That gives a lot of a lot of energy and a lot of and a good fight. But it’s always interesting if you do if you’re doing the right things when you’re working in a B2B environment, if the if the marketing qualified leads all suck and the sales department doesn’t get any business out of it, then you’re did you do the right thing? Did you track the right track, the right KPIs? So that was really a learning curve also there. But yeah.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. So and you talked about something in terms of the connection between thought leadership and sales, right? So it doesn’t matter that you create a great piece, whether it’s digital or physical, that you want to get it in the hands of the people that are client facing or you want it to be found through marketing channels. So talk about in-house, the connection that you have with your peers on the marketing side, as well as how you’re connecting with sales and sales leadership to make sure that the ideas just don’t sit on the shelf at will.
Matthijs Van den Broek I’m not sure I understand that question correctly.
Bill Sherman So let me try this again. So in terms of you’ve got the thought leadership, you’ve got a great piece. You either need to get it into the hands of your sales team so they can share with the client. Yeah. How are you working with your sales team?
Matthijs Van den Broek Okay. Yeah. What we did is what we normally did is we generated a beautiful white paper or the book or, or any of the studies we publish. We publish them to a large, large group of potential clients, but also our clients are also in there and to their industry specific mailing lists. And we send them out, we ship them and people who are interested, they download a preview results of a study, or they leave their contact details behind for to get more info, or they ask for a demo on a certain customer experience, a dashboard we have in place. And then the connection with sales steps in, they get we have all the pilots connected to Pipedrive and they get they get the lead directly into their to their pipelines. So that is how we did it in the past and how it’s still it still works at this moment. Yeah. And that is a so we use the MQ l lead gen also for kind of the measuring of interest for prospects and hope and also existing clients. So we get a lot of downloads from existing clients in the past and then a sales rep would say, yeah, it’s already a client. Yes. But it’s also a share giving you an idea of that your client is still interested in, in the stuff we have for them. And it’s also a contact point that you can use in your future communication with your client. So it’s not the really tight between Michael and then that’s cool. So we also use it as a as a kind of interest measure, measuring of interest, get.
Bill Sherman A measurement of interest, but also then equipping your sales team and saying, hey, there’s interest, here’s something to have in your next touchpoint conversation with them. Check in and see what they’re trying to solve, what they care about. Right. And dig deeper, right? Because you can have a client, but it’s more important when you know what the client’s interested in.
Matthijs Van den Broek Definitely. Definitely. So it works. It worked both ways. And we like the book is a great example of a piece of content that we produce and that our sales reps could use as a present, literally as a present to future clients, but also to the to the existing clients as a moment of gratitude for working with us. That’s how we literally use it. Yeah, they deserve it also. Yeah.
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s a nice place, I think to wrap up on that thought, leadership can also be a gift that you give to people and an expression of gratitude because there’s a human connection of ideas and that you can share those ideas and express warmth and caring in a way that’s more than just filling the pipeline. Those two can exist in parallel, which makes it a very powerful tool. Matthew, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today.
Matthijs Van den Broek Thank you for having me. 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.
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