Cultivating High-Profile Relationships in a Digital World | Clemence Sop | 571

Today I want to explore the concept of the thought leadership pipeline. Whether you're practicing thought leadership on your own or on behalf of an organization, there's a long supply chain between your raw ideas and data and your target audience's informed actions. And any small break in that chain will prevent impact. It could be you broadcast your ideas to the wrong groups, or it could be you don't fully explain your ideas to your sales team. It's possible you may even make cross connections that don't make sense to your target audience. Today I speak with Clémence Sopp. She's the head of marketing innovation at Intersystems. Clémence trained in supply chain engineering but she's wound up in marketing innovation and thought leadership. In today's episode, we talk about targeting audiences, utilizing clusters of buyers to shorten the thought leadership pipeline, and data-driven thought leadership. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Clémence.

Well, thank you for having me.

So I'm excited to have a conversation around the hypothesis testing and thought leadership and really bringing an organization together to create impact, right? And you've had an interesting career in thought leadership. I want to jump first to one of your early roles and then we'll come back to what you're doing Now, so you told me early on that you were involved in yacht sales. Tell me a little bit about that and the process of selling high-ticket items.

Oh, the luxury industry is very complex, right? So you have to do your homework and make sure that when you're reaching out to a potential buyer that he's ready to buy because it's a lot of effort we call it cultivation strategies. When you're cultivating a high profile individual, you have to invest a lot. So you have to make sure that as you're doing that, you're doing the right thing so you can land the deal. We always go for almost 90, 80% conversion rates. Otherwise you're wasting a lot of money and resources, right? So how do you apply digital knowledge or digital I call it social listening or digital information in this kind of high-profile engagement. There is huge power and potential in digital networking, right? So when you're scraping through the net and you're finding information about specific individuals, it helps you to engage at the right time, at the right place for them, and improve this conversion rate. Let me tell you a story of how we did this particular example. So this wasn't even recent because I always, you know, I wear many hats at the same time, right? The pandemic hit. I already left the company, but they reached out to me again because of my algorithm knowledge and because I studied all of this B2B platform. So they reached out to me again during the pandemic and said, we want to break into a new market. We need your help to understand how we can break into a new market and we're targeting a new target audience and it's new to us. Luxe. So what did we do? We went on LinkedIn platform. I like to start with LinkedIn because LinkedIn is always very tangible and it's a people-to-people platform. We always have to define a spokesperson. I tell, I, what, what I've learned over the years is that you can build trust very fast from a person, from as a person than as a brand, really, if you want to break into a new market. Building that trust at the personal level always brings, gives results faster. So we had a spokesperson and so we identified the key target audience on LinkedIn, CEOs of scale-up startups, big companies who could be potential buyers of this product. Then we had our thought leader talk about the product that where we were selling. And then in this case, we hired, you know, a renowned celebrity to be the brand ambassador also on LinkedIn. And we created a community on LinkedIn. We created a private group. And so these folks, the thought leader and the ambassador, were inviting our target audiences to this group. And in the group, we were nurturing them. I know, and then we started inviting other people as the recommendation. Would you invite 4 or 5 more people as with the same similar profile of yours to join the group. That's how we— I call it like social networking plus social selling, right? Because we started the conversations online and then took it offline. So that's an example.

That's a great example. And I want to go back to something that you said early in your response because I want to underline it for our listeners. You said, hey, we needed a 90% conversion rate, otherwise the effort for marketing and sales didn't make sense, right? And so with a high-ticket luxury good, you have a small population target audience, right? And yeah, and so with that, you can spend the time to get to know them well. It's a relationship selling piece, but instead of broadcasting or even narrowcasting to an industry, you're really doing point casting. You're targeting individuals where in many cases you're researching them by name, by profile, and saying, what is important to this person? What do they value? How are they going to respond? That's a very high-touch approach to thought leadership.

Yeah, it's high-touch, although we combine it with a multiple-touch approach, right? Because you have a pool, we We had a pool of people that we were targeting. So we went meticulously one after the other, but there is what we call like lookalike audiences where it's a, I think the communication on all social platforms is always twofold. Once you position yourself as a trusted advisor and you put your content out there, the algorithm works in ways to put your content in front of people who would value it. And if you're answering their questions, guess what? You put yourself on their radar and they were not even part of your target audience. So you're also multiplying your efforts by doing that. That is what I wanted to highlight.

Absolutely, right? Is, and this goes into something from an earlier career of yours and your study. So you've mentioned algorithm a couple times. Where did you think you were going to initially spend your career? And then how did that transition? Because you enter this with a very detailed mindset.

Yeah, but it's very funny, you know, growing up, every— almost everybody in my family is an engineer. So we have nerd, ironic systems engineers, build, you know, into the engineering of building planes. So we grew up around— we have some nerds around me. So at some point I went to school and studied supply chain engineering because I come from Cameroon. And, uh, I— when I arrived in Europe, I always I was always fascinated to understand, and I really wanted to understand how to transport goods from one place to the other. Because in my mind, I was thinking if I was able to understand that, then we will get more access to food. I could work in an industry to have more food or basic necessities, right? So I went into supply chain engineering and I studied that in Paris and then at the, in Germany. And when I was doing my master's, you know, I just pursued engineering still, but you know, when you are looking for the next job, I'm always somebody, I'm very ambitious. I always want to know what is the next step for me. And I really enjoyed engineering, but I came across this Forbes article that was talking about the jobs of the future, right? It was so interesting. He talked about systems engineer. He talked about big data. You know, and then it talked about social media, you know, going to school. I don't want to sound pretentious at all as a nerd or as a tech. We used, I used to regard those studying communications, you know, we used, I remember we were at the cafeteria and then they're walking with all girls kind of courses and they were used to think that's so easy, you know, that's how I used to regard it. So I read the article and it talked about social media. It was when Facebook and Hi5 and MySpace were still evolving, but it talked about it from the data At that point, he said that this is going to become such a huge data warehouse and the engineering behind that, we would call it the platforms are collecting intelligence and collecting data that are going to determine human behaviors and patterns in the future. And that all companies and the whole entire world is going to depend on it. Fast forward, here we are. So I was looking at it from that point and my mentor said, don't you want to look at that a little bit deeper because it might sound easy, but think about what your competitive advantage might be. Well, reading more and digging deeper, I understood that there is obviously a business model behind it. They're selling the data, ads, and everything like that. This platform has millions of millions of users. So at the beginning, I said—

Yeah, I think LinkedIn is 800 million.

Yeah, 1 billion. It's crazy. Twitter, you name it, right? And so companies are advertising it. So I said, okay, why don't I study the patterns on all of these algorithms, how they work from the front end. Then I know what to do and I can advise companies on how to spend their money or how to meet the right buyers at the right time to make these strategic decisions. So that's what I started doing. And I said, I started studying right at the beginning. And that's what brought me to marketing. Yeah.

Which is a different road, certainly, but you've, you've explained in many ways how sort of the data mindset, the underlying approach and seeking for algorithms and understanding how do I scale, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Really becomes essential here.

Yeah, I'm happy I made that decision. And because today, even with AI and all of the new technologies available, I've always been about also with my team, we build our own intelligence report, we build our own automation platforms to scale whatever we want to achieve. Like, so that's where my engineering background is kind of helping. And when I'm reading more, I'm seeing that marketing would start hiring data scientists, you know, to understand all the pricing to help them. So I'm happy about this article.

Well, and it's been a significant change. It used to be that the CIO controlled the majority of the tech budget, right?

Yeah.

Now it's the CMO and the marketing funding that can control so much of the tech spend. And if you do not understand the technology and you don't come with the data mindset, you run into difficulties. I want to flash forward to today for you, talk a little bit about your current role, and I want to go into the story of Belgium and how you approach the world in Belgium to address a thought leadership need and start a conversation. So what, let's start beginning. What do you do today?

Uh, today, uh, I'm in marketing innovation. What we do is actually find new ways to resolve the existing marketing challenges that we have in a marketing department and leveraging social platforms is a big part of it. So during the pandemic, just give you a little bit of story. In the pandemic, we, uh, we introduced what we call now behavioral selling, which was then social selling, adding to systems. Basically my definition of it is finding the right people, identifying your buying committee, and then building clusters within the company so you can divide and conquer. On social, peer speak to peer. If you have only one group of people reaching out to multiple different personas, you're just burning efforts right there. There is really a very big advantage, especially when you want to validate a hypothesis, to have salespeople go and find out from the other company. It's all about validating a hypothesis so that when you are engaging, you're engaging with insights, right? And then you can land the deal. So that's what we, that's the concept that we built and developed that into Systonas. And that got me to the project that I had in Belgium. So I was called by the Belgian country manager, Jan Vekemans. And in Belgium, they had a couple of issues, right? We are in the systems. We are not very well known. So brand awareness in Belgium is not strong. It's not very strong for the company. The healthcare system is not, it's not what it should be, right? Because they have 3 different languages and 3 different regions and hospital systems do not to hospital systems. Patients still have to carry files from one, from one hospital to another, and you get information gets lost like that. So that was, so when we, that was my understanding of the problem at hand. Then hospitals as well, and hospital groups do not speak to one another. They might have a, and they already have an existing, they already have existing system. So there was really no need to purchase a new product even though they have a pain. Right.

Uh-huh.

Worst is they don't have a, they don't have the budget because the government has to release the budget to give it to them so that they can purchase this intelligent platforms that would speak to one another, the electronic, electronic healthcare record. That's the, that's, that's the, so that's the problem. Then we need to break into the, we need to get into that market.

Well, and there was a problem even on the citizen side as well, where they had to create their own workaround of how do you manage your records when the hospital might not have that. Tell the story of the yellow lunchbox, because I found that—

how we get to that. So, so, and one thing that is really just to tell you how, how it is there, how it was, that the elderly population have something they call a yellow box in their fridge with with a few information about, you know, their allergies. And it's literally a yellow lunchbox in their fridge so that if they get an emergency, any doctor coming to attend to them would open the fridge and find some information. I mean, that kind of felt like we are in the third world country. But no, so those are the problems. And then when I immediately, you know, when we looked at all of the problems, one thing came to my thought, leadership. And community building as the way to get into the market and, and then achieve our goal. So what we did is that we identify— I thought about community building, so we identify the people who are feeling the pain the most. The person feeling the pain the most really to me was the patient. If you don't have access to your data, how would you even know if you want to get a second opinion? It's just going to be very difficult. The patient is the problem. The doctor is facing the problem. Well, the engineer is also facing the problem because it's difficult, right? He had to find information. So, but starting a community, we thought about coming at it from an emotional standpoint. The founding father, so we created a community called One Patient One Record. So the founding father of the One Patient One Record was our very own employee. So he had an emotional story. So we started on the LinkedIn platform. By creating, officializing the hashtag, creating a newsletter, and he shared his story. I was sick. I had cancer. I had to take a second opinion. I had no access to my data. And that's how we started about it. So then he was talking about the problem and talking about the solution. Look, there's not talking about— he didn't talk about the systems. He talked about the problem, the pain. Then suddenly other people joined the movement, right? So we had doctors join and We had the Me Too effect because we were on lots of platforms on Facebook and, and, and then, um, on Twitter and people were like, yeah, me too, me too. So we were collecting the stories and tagging the government, tagging the ministers and saying what happened as we were excavating, because this founding father was from InterSystems. He was building trust and talking about the problem, but he was talking about potential solutions and how other countries are doing it. And we were connecting him and establishing networks with all CIOs of the hospitals. We have 52 hospitals. They were all became part of his radar because if you understand the algorithm, you have to, if you, if somebody is not part of your first degree or second degree connection, it's difficult for them to see your content. So we did our homework and brought all of them to our ecosystem. So they were engaging. He was having this. So we brought Moxie in the principle of peers speaking to peers. Our engineers were talking to the engineers of the hospital, this, and then we introduced hackathons within it. So now we even partnered with, uh, with another company to electronify the yellow box, to have an electronic version of the yellow box. The outcome of this is that we were able to establish trust with a thought leader at a personal level because he was addressing pain points and providing solutions. He got into conversations and booked meetings, then people, then he was the one introducing into systems, you know. So if you don't even have brand recognition, imagine the power of thought leadership because you're having, you're prompting engagement and people will trust you. That's what, that's the story of Belgium.

And what I love about that is it worked on several levels. One, You found the right advocate, someone for whom it was personal on multiple levels, right? It wouldn't have been authentic if you just tapped someone randomly within the organization. But if you say, this is my story as a cancer patient, and this was the challenge, people tune in and you create the space for a conversation. Where other people who have had similar experiences can start coming in and you start creating a movement. But really, ultimately, you were looking to reach the hospitals and create visibility at a government level on this issue. And the way to do that was to create that movement so that they couldn't set that aside and say, this is lower priority. This is what— instead, this is what the people are saying they want.

Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what we did.

And I love it from a thought leadership design perspective, because if you had said, how do we get the attention of government for this issue, it would have had a very different approach and probably not worked as well. Because you didn't have the movement underneath.

And even the credibility, because imagine if we came, if we started, you know, talking about this issue as Intersystems, as a brand, as a company, right? Right. We had no credibility. It's like we had to do a lot more. I'm not saying that we were not credible, so we had to do a lot more work to get there. We had some learnings, and this also applies, if that leads me back to the point you mentioned about being authentic. Authentic, right? We started with this authentic face and it suddenly blew up. So, so many people, I'm telling you, we had, so we, we had a landing page where we were capturing some of those stories.

I can only imagine how many stories were coming in, some of them probably heart-wrenching, right?

Exactly. And so we called, we reached out to a few of them and said, wait, this is not just a one-person movement. Let's meet and let us record some of, let's have a video version of your stories. We had mind-blowing stories. The first recording session, you know, we did the very mistake that also Mark Ricci always do. We added the Intersystems brand on it.

Right.

That was a big mistake because we were held accountable by the audience. Is this another marketing campaign or are you guys serious about it? Right. Then we had to change everything again. If you look at One Patient, One Record online, you would not even associate— now you would associate it to Intersystems through the thought leader, right? But then we had to take everything down. So you are— we— people trust people. So you have to be authentic. And when you start putting yourself out there, people will hold you accountable for what you say.

But One Patient, One Record started as the tagline, sort of the platform of the movement, rather than a tagline tied to the organization.

Yeah, exactly. That was it.

I, I love how that came together. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL. L, and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So then I want to talk about getting attention in a noisy world. We've talked about algorithm, but you and I had a great conversation about sort of mental frames, filters, and the spam filter, and how we have to overcome that for any idea. That's in Thought Leadership. So what do you mean when you're talking about mental frame filters and spam filters? And then we'll get into how do we move beyond them.

Yeah, you know, I like to always have statistics when I talk about things, you know. Gartner, LinkedIn, they came up with a lot of research. People already consumed a lot of information online before the pandemic, after the, during the pandemic increase, and we haven't gone to like a world where people will just read paper. This consumption of knowledge has really increased. The buyer's journey is over 80% now online. Our buyers are active listeners. We are not the only ones who know that. All the brands, everybody knows it. Therefore, what do they do? We all fall back on digital platforms to bombard there is just a saturation of knowledge or content online. Now with ChatGPT, I mean, you can recognize the ChatGPT voice now. It's just—

At least for now. We'll know in a couple years if we can't tell the difference, but for now, yeah, you can spot it.

Yeah, I get the feeling in this ever-evolving landscape.

Right, right.

You know, you can spot that. So Every 7 seconds, a feed is reactivated, is renewed with new content, right? On Twitter, it varies from platforms to platforms. On Instagram, the same thing. Every time you refresh, you have a whole new different content. So, and in a B2B field, all our SDRs have fallen on digital platforms to prospect. There's an aggressive prospecting that is happening now online. Which to me has led people to build what I call the mental spam filter. You know, if you accept a LinkedIn connection request, 90% of the time it feels like you've accepted, you invited someone to your living room. The first message, the second message, the third message. So people have built that mental spam filter and they are conscious about what knowledge is relevant to me. So they need to filter through. There is a lot, but they filter through. And if it's, if it's not relevant to them, why can they keep, they keep, they keep reading. So that for me is the foundation behind that.

So I agree, we're all far more skeptical at invite requests, what shows up in our feed, but how do we establish relevance if that's what everyone is hungry for, recognizing we can't be relevant to everyone. How do you be relevant to a few or maybe even some?

Yeah, my advice is you cannot just start a thought leadership campaign or publishing content for the sake of publishing. I always say, what is your niche? You need to have a niche. You need to have a target audience. Why should people care about what you are what you're sharing, of what value is that to them. So once you've identified all of that, guess what? If your experience on all the WeChat platforms keeps diminishing, you're not going to go back. So the algorithms are designed to give you as a user the best experience. It learns the part, it learns from what you like as an individual, what you engage with, and that's how your feed is designed, what you save. What you would like to see. And so if somebody's sharing content that is relevant to you and the algorithm is showing you that and you like it, you will keep showing that to you. I also see it sharing content and being relevant with a niche, the target audience, the purpose, and the reason why they should care about your content.

And to build on that, you've touched on this several times, but I want to call it out. Is that level of passion and authenticity. You've got to care about the content that you're talking about almost to the point where there's this sparkle in your eye, that joy of engaging in it. You can't fake that, right?

No, you cannot fake it.

And so whether you talk about your champion in Belgium who became the person who elevated the conversation, they had to come at this willing to say, let me share my story because there has to be a better way, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. So let's come— let's talk about it from a B2B standpoint, right? Like this, how leadership engaging from here with people online. This digital platform, so it's a people platform. People talk to people. Think about it. When you want to buy something, let's say on Amazon, but this is my experience, so I can only speak for myself. Intuitively, I go and look at the, the, the reviews before I make a decision. So I read the reviews. What is that? It's credibility. Are you reading a review from a brand? No, you're reading a review from people who are telling you about their experiences. Thought leader establishes that trust, right? When he's talking about authentically what his experience is, you know, what the trends, that what the trends on the market, recommendations. So he's relevant and he's saying this from a personal point of view. That's how you can build trust with people online.

So I want to shift a question for a moment and I want to turn We've been talking about brands.

Yeah.

I want to turn the question to you. Where is your passion for thought leadership? So if you had a voice, what would you advocate? Right.

That's a very personal question. Yeah. If I had a voice, I would advocate, which is what I already do. I would advocate for providing opportunities to girls at the margin.

Say more, please.

I come from a very poor community, right? And I would like to know that, you know, I won the birth lottery. I heard one of my colleagues say that one day. I thought it was a beautiful thing, you know, because when I look at my peers from my village, right, who did not have access to education, there is a clear and distinct difference between me, myself, and a peer of mine who didn't have access to education. Here am I here in America paying taxes, right? Paying taxes, earning money, and then I have a brain. My peer is married, probably more, with a lot of children, and it's probably the second or third wife to, to a man in a village, right? The difference is opportunity, exposure to knowledge. I believe that, you know, the cure to poverty is not money. It's exposing people to knowledge. So that's what I'm a strong advocate at, providing opportunities so that I got this opportunity as a child when I was 8 years old to get access to education so that we can find and identify that potential and provide it because we never know, maybe we can find the next Einstein, right? By investing. And giving access to education to girls, boys at the margins.

Absolutely on that. And it's an opportunity to elevate people and help them find a way to reach whatever destination they want and challenge themselves to grow. But yeah, it's the tension on opportunity, right? If you don't have the opportunity, there's a lot of wasted intellect.

A lot, a lot of wasted intellect indeed.

So I want to ask you this question as we begin to wrap up. You've been practicing thought leadership in high-end luxury. You've practiced thought leadership from a data science perspective for an organization. What advice would you give yourself based on what you know now in thought leadership that you wish you knew earlier?

I would say that I was late, late, late to, late. It took time for me to understand the value of thought leadership and it all came through learning and testing. So I wish that I was open to this earlier and that's one I read, like be more open. And the other advice will be for anybody going into thought leadership, identify your niche and please leverage the principle of peers speaking to peers online because you're just wasting. So I think you're wasting a lot of time when you try to reach out to so many people at the same time. People with the same, with the same affinities have speak the same language and you have the, you can get engagement sooner than later. That would be my advice.

That's fantastic. I want to close with a final question. Whose work in thought leadership, whether it's a book on your nightstand or someone that you respect and admire, should more people be aware of and know about?

Oh, wow. That is a fantastic question. Whose work? Dr. Denis Mukwege, my absolute hero. He's a Nobel Prize winner and he's a physician who is based in Congo and we call him the women fixer. So he studied in Belgium as a physician and dedicated his life to go to Goma where he's receiving women who have been abused by the war victims. And, you know, give them medical care. I think he's a, he's an epitome of just lifting others up, instilling, you know, promoting them to gain self-confidence and has done a lot of great work in, um, mental healthcare and trauma, trauma healthcare. So I think that we need, the world need, more people need to know about the work that he does because he's just fantastic.

Wonderful. And for those listening, we'll leave the notes to find him in the show notes. So go ahead and take a look and you can learn about that individual.

Thank you for joining us today, Clemens.

Thank you very much.

Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, Check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas. Or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.