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Thought leadership without succinct facts is like an omelet without eggs. If you want better data for your thought leadership content, here are five sources to explore. 

What is new: Thought leaders can explore four distinct data point options for their next thought leadership initiative. 

Why it matters: Succinct data points elevate all forms of thought leadership and are the ingredient that defines the quality of your initiative. 

What makes it challenging: Finding high-quality data points and how to combine them into insights is an art. The quality comes from the data points’ relevance and the sources’ reliability. Insights often come from combining multiple data points; their relationship can be obvious or non-trivial. 

🔎 What to look for: The most critical data points serve one of several purposes: 

• Quantifying the size of the market or market segments. 
• Framing a business opportunity by putting numbers on specific challenges 
• Indicate end-customer willingness to pay for new revenue growth initiatives 
• Understand potential cost savings for cost-out initiatives 
• Finding a rough order of magnitude for price points for novel offerings

🔓 Open data sources: Openly published data in research reports that are easy to reference. High source credibility and ease in obtaining publishing rights compensate for the less revolutionary nature of these data points. 

You can find these data points by scanning recurring and one-off research reports. You can consider sources representing industry-specific facts and more generic market statistics. 

The nature of these data points makes them more relevant for framing and sizing business opportunities rather than associated solutions. Expect them to play their most prominent role early in a new initiative. 

🤹‍♀️ Own primary research: Primary research in areas where you enjoy high credibility is of great importance. You use your expertise to frame research initiatives around important industry questions before anyone else addresses the area. 

Costs grow with how many markets you cover in your research project. The cost of doing this type of field research lands on your company, which limits the applicability to a few significant initiatives per year, even for large corporations. 

In areas lacking market credibility, you can join forces with a trusted third party to conduct the primary research. The results can then be published under their name or be co-published. 

🔦 Collaboration projects: Projects conducted with light-house customers or partners for a new opportunity, are invaluable in quantifying the values unlocked with your solutions. Since you use actual project data, you replace hypothetical improvements with validated ones. 

These data types are more sensitive and require customer/partner buy-in before publication. Your interest in sharing with potential other customers can conflict with light-house customers’ interest in converting first-mover advantages to competitive differentiation. 

Expect quantification of improvements to be easier for non-monetary terms, such as lead-time and relative business improvements, than full-fledged business cases.

🚪 Closed sources: Closed sources are the fourth source to consider. In this category, you find facts that are and will remain in the restricted access domain and reports you don’t have or can’t get publishing rights to. This reality takes these facts off the table for use in publicly available reports without anonymizing the data, as often done by business consultancy firms. 

Be clear about the limitations of having closed sources upfront in your project when cost or distribution rights make these facts out of reach. You want to avoid ending up with a solid story that is too dependent on closed sources. 

➕ Your additions: With a portfolio of facts from one or several of the above types, you have a solid fact base to build from for your thought leadership initiative. The next step is to group your facts and extract insights on what an individual or a combination of facts means for your opportunity. 

Numbers can tell stories by themselves when the context is intuitive, but it is better to assume that you must explain the meaning of each number and ideally support it with a metaphor. Explaining the context and the sense of a fact is essential in thought leadership. Focus on the two to three sentences you would use when presenting a number verbally. 

Bottom line: With solid facts, thought leadership can stay balanced. Expect to invest time and budget into finding solid facts across the four categories above for any thought leadership initiative you will conduct. An essential part of the job is to create a structure for tracking facts across different thought leadership initiatives and for re-using and continuous updates.