Three Dimensions of Breakthrough Thought Leadership
When I started at Qualtrics last Spring, my remit was to develop and articulate the value proposition of Experience Management for the high-tech industry, and to create thought leadership that would make our brand more relevant to customers in the SaaS, cloud, mobility, security, IoT, and AI sectors. Said more plainly, it was my job to make teams in tech want Qualtrics. It’s basically what I’d been doing for the past 12+ years at Prophet. Find the facts, tell the story, compel the audience, create the demand.
The Ambition
After reviewing much existing content, connecting with our sales teams partners, and getting perspective from the market, I decided on three ambitions for our thought leadership:
Make it more modern, and more befitting a modern SaaS company.
Shift the spotlight from Qualtrics and its products to our customers and our community.
Build upon, and grow, our brand.
Modernity
I felt that our thought leadership could give audiences a more compelling and engaging experience. Tech companies with strong thought leadership - like Hubspot and Adobe - don’t just create relevant, timely content. They build an experience around that content that compels people to engage in it, which helps accelerate them along a journey from “maybe interested” to “marketing qualified.” As I’ve written previously, we’ve exited the era in which staid content in a B2B context was acceptable because it “wasn’t for consumers.” B2B buyers are people too.
And high expectations for content aren’t confined to visual media. Spotify, for example, continues to create distinctive originals that are making audio as innovative and indispensable as it was in FDR’s day. Examples like these set a high bar. I feel that, at Qualtrics, we owe people a content experience worth their time, and that if we don’t provide it, they’ll look to - and engage with - others in our category who will.
Community
My observation was that we’d made Qualtrics the hero in much of our content. There’s a time and place for talking about your product, but at the thought leadership stage, it’s about establishing a frame of reference for your value and your values. It’s about compelling people to see you in the way you want to be seen. And there’s no clearer, faster way to do that than by showcasing the community you’re part of. At Qualtrics, we want to be seen as a champion of breakthrough experiences, and in particular, of those who are bold enough to chase them. I felt that putting a spotlight on ourselves, rather than on the people using our product to build breakthroughs, was a missed opportunity to celebrate people out there doing amazing things.
Our customers and community are such a fabulous pool of people to draw from - I felt it was a hugely untapped well of information, insight, and inspiration: Top executives at companies across tech; leaders in other industries like education, healthcare, and the public sector; entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs; and a wide field of accomplished people who’ve worked hard, worked smart, and made bold moves over the course of their careers to build breakthroughs.
Brand
Related to community is brand. I have a fervent, unshakable belief that every single interaction either heightens or hampers one’s perceptions of a brand. Our thought leadership needs to reinforce that Qualtrics is all about hearing every voice and developing an uncommon sense that enables people and teams to build experience breakthroughs. I felt that, if we could find a way to convey this point of view - using a more modern and community-focused approach - it would be a fantastic way to steward our brand and to build awareness and relevance with audiences in and beyond tech.
The Application
It was helpful that I had experience building modern- and customer-centric thought leadership at Prophet. But it was even more important to channel the part of Qualtrics’ DNA that compels and captivates people and that celebrates our community. So my first ambition was to take a splice of the energy and empathy in, for example, our X4 experience, and apply it to a new style of thought leadership that could help people understand what we believe and who we’re for at Qualtrics.
My second ambition was to put the spotlight on builders - in and outside of tech - who would undoubtedly be regarded by senior influencers and buyers as leaders who’d put a dent in the world. We’d need some representation of companies and teams who use Qualtrics, of course. But in selecting people to celebrate, it was (and still is) most important to be able to answer a single question: “Is this someone whose company we are proud to keep because we are inspired by, and see the impact of, the breakthroughs they’ve been bold enough to chase and build?”
So, modern thought leadership came together with the celebration of breakthrough builders in the form of our company’s first-ever podcast, Breakthrough Builders. Why a podcast? Simple. It’s an incredibly fast-growing medium. The audience we want to reach enjoys podcasts, and listens to a lot of them. All of us got video fatigue during the pandemic - the demands on our eyes became incredibly taxing, but our ears had the appetite to keep listening. And our team could distribute a show on platforms like Apple, Spotify, Google, and the web, eliminating any friction in accessing and subscribing to the content.
And, perhaps selfishly, I was exceptionally motivated to do it. The thing I miss most about being with people (not “with” in air quotes; really with them) is Real Talk. Conversations with new clients over a dinner about what really motivates them. One-on-ones over a coffee with a colleague about their challenges or their goals. Getting into a room with a team to solve a problem and build on one another’s ideas with authentic energy, clear body language, fun spontaneity, and inspired collaboration. Taking the time to deeply understand other leaders, and to help them find a way to tell their story in a way that educates and inspires people.
Add to that the fact that I’d become enthralled by real-talk shows like Armchair Expert with Dax Sheppard and smart-talk shows like Making Sense with Sam Harris (and of course hockey talk with Spittin’ Chiclets) and we had the business case, the brand, and the motivation to go pull this off.
I’ll write separately about my lessons learned from creating and executive-producing a podcast. It’s been an incredibly rewarding part of my first year at Qualtrics, and it deserves its own page. Here, though, I’d like to share a few of the conversations from Seasons One and Two of Breakthrough Builders that I still reflect on nearly every day as a leader, teammate, and family member.
Robert Chatwani, CMO of Atlassian. Robert talks about how his experiences with friends, family, and teams led him to discover his purpose, and about how he was willing to say “no” at a particular point in his career because there was a stronger “yes” calling to him. He also talks about the future of Marketing and how the role of the CMO will change over the next 5-10 years.
Geetha Murali, CEO of Room to Read. Geetha discusses the importance of building skills and nurturing relationships in the quest to build a global nonprofit and educate 40 million children. She also talks about how her mother’s grit and determination inspired her to understand and rise to the specific challenges of being a leader, a woman of color, a parent, and a colleague and mentor.
Kim Malek, CEO and Co-Founder of Salt & Straw. Kim shares her journey of quitting a successful corporate career to open the now-famous artisanal ice cream shop designed around community. She also talks about how funny she thinks it is when people say that she’s “made it” - her perspective is that she’s on a journey that keeps offering more and more opportunity to change the world and make life better for her customers, her employees, and her communities.
Kellie McElhaney, Professor, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Kellie shares her view on the economic, social, and emotional impacts of having the courage to make real change - in life and in business. She recounts specific funny and serious stories of the moments she made brave pivots in her life that turned out to lead her down an incredibly rewarding - even if incredibly difficult - path.
Gurdeep Pall, CVP of AI at Microsoft. Gurdeep is an inveterate creator and builder who played instrumental roles in the invention of VPN, TCP/IP, and digital communications technologies. In our conversation, listeners hear about how Gurdeep brought together a lifelong love for learning, a disciplined technical expertise, and a deep interpersonal empathy to invent practical technologies and to reimagine and help advance our world in the process.
My colleague James Wadsworth has channeled his incredible writing skills to create another “way in” to Breakthrough Builders - a series of posts on the Qualtrics blog. Each entry tells the story of a guest in a way that emphasizes a particular part of the story without repeating the narrative flow that’s in the recorded conversation. This helped confirm for me that there is no end to the ways in which we can use content like this to engage people on their terms - and it has significantly improved accessibility to the show for audience members who are hard of hearing.
I’m happy to report that, as of this writing, Breakthrough Builders has a 100% 5-star rating on Apple Podcasts (ratings are not yet available on other sites). We’ve also gotten some really positive feedback on the relevance, distinction, and compelling nature of the show. We’re still in the brand-building phase of this franchise, and as Tim Ferriss reminds me, it takes time. But we’re already starting to think beyond the podcast and the blog to broaden the Breakthrough Builders platform in new, creative ways across more channels. And, as it becomes safer to be together, we’ll start introducing new in-person formats to the conversations that will help generate even more compelling content experiences.
One final note. It is incredibly important to me, and to our team at Qualtrics, to use this platform to represent a range of voices. To showcase a diversity of backgrounds, colors, genders, countries of origin, and most important, lived experiences. As with any effort in this direction, Breakthrough Builders is still a work in process. But I am proud to have included in Season One 50% women, 50% people of color, 25% people who grew up (and/or still live) outside the US, and 100% people who saw an opportunity to create a breakthrough experience - and were bold enough to chase them.
A deep and sincere thanks go to Ali Rohani, Nate Crenshaw, Todd Bagnull, James Wadsworth, Gregory Hedon, Baron Santiago, Vansuka Chindavijak, Chelsea Hunersen, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen for their support of the show and of me personally.
Please tune into the show if you haven’t already. We’re just getting started. Looking forward to having you!