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Thought leadership for revenue growth differs from supporting cost reduction propositions. You need two non-obvious skills, which sales teams might struggle to guide you.

What is new: To make your thought leadership for revenue growth work, you need exceptional problem formulation and naming skills.

Why it matters: Thought leadership for revenue growth needs to resonate with new audience groups beyond your classic targets.

Reach beyond well-known audiences: What makes your revenue growth propositions different

1. Messages buying teams and decision makers 🛒 understand well.
2. Messages your customers’ sales and marketing ⚙️ capture well
3. Messages resonating with your customers’ business buyers 💵
4. Messages making sense to your customers’ government buyers 🤓
5. Messages exciting the final user 👤 of your offerings.

Business storytelling: Big problem, Desired business outcomes, Big solution, and Visualization.

Government storytelling: Top of citizens’ minds, Benefits to society, Solutions, Visualizations anyone can get.

Business language: shareholder value, growth, customer experience, revenues, efficiency, cost, total cost of ownership, return on investment, customer acquisition, time to market, competitiveness

Government language: Society values, economic growth, job creation, quality of life, time to impact, potential to scale, equal access, investment, economic parity, trade flows, sustainability.

🔦 Well-articulated problem formulations: Problem formulations, from hypothesis through validation, are central to all forms of customer-led innovation. Innovations enabling your customers to grow their revenues require more profound problem formulations.

You must break down the overall problem statement to address the underlying problems for users, business/government buyers, and your customers’ and sellers’ problems.

📝 Descriptive names: This scenario exposes you to a chain of stakeholders. One of the success factors for growth is ensuring all stakeholders have a shared view of the opportunity. Your job is to reduce the risk of “whispering games” between stakeholders that fragment the fundamentals of an opportunity

Easy-to-understand descriptive names have immense value. A solid recipe aims for two-word names, one connecting to what all in society get and one to what is new/innovative.

Examples of names to target with high potential to create mindshare and momentum are

• A hybrid vehicle is a vehicle with both combustion and electrical engines.
• Smartphone as a mobile phone, but made smart with mobile apps
• Digital transformation is any transformation a digital solution component and business model enables.

❌ What to avoid: Avoid long multi-word combinations, complex abbreviations, and industry jargon.

Three words are too long, making it complicated for stakeholder groups to remember all four. The primary role of the names is to create an association, and there is no need to provide an accurate explanation in the name.

Multi-word names quickly become abbreviations. Even two-word names, where both words are long, tend to be abbreviated. Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Wireless Fidelity are examples of descriptive names where the acronyms AI, AR, and Wi-Fi dominate daily use.

Industry jargon does not translate well across industries. Test your naming candidates towards all five stakeholder groups above and aim to secure a good match with all five.

📀 Consult your software teams: Your software teams might be good liaisons. For what you want to promote, consider returning to the overall customer delight statements they created before kicking off the design sprints.

Great software teams excel at formulating the customer problems that their code addresses. A job well done here is a gold mine for thought leaders who articulate problem statements.

Vague problem statements from your software teams, or statements centered around trends and technology inflections, are worth investigating. In the worst case, they can result from poor customer understanding, and in the best case, they need better problem articulations and descriptive opportunity names.

™️ Naming major opportunities is a branding job. It is a big job where you, for your strategic opportunities, will put in efforts comparable to defining a company brand. Aspire to pick names for your largest opportunities with the potential to stay relevant a decade out.

Consider the opportunity to trademark a great name, as it balances maximizing market size and building preference for your company—market opportunities involving a broader ecosystem benefit from being used by all contributors, including your competitors.

Offering names is different as it can involve your company name with an explicit interest in making you stand out. A good base strategy is to name ample opportunities in a way that blends in and names offerings that stand out.

The 1/2/3 rule of thumb: As a rule of thumb for naming opportunities, the following

• One word for something new, e.g., Internet, Drone, Cloud
• Two words when disrupting a market, e.g., Electric Vehicle, Mirrorless Camera, Mobile Broadband
• No more than three letters for acronyms, e.g., AI, VR, API, and IoT.

Additional reading suggestions

• Think Bigger – How to Innovate [BOOK] – by Sheena Iyengar
• Digital transformation roadmap [BOOK] – by David L. Rogers
• Brand naming [BOOK] – by Rob Meyerson
• Crafting a value proposition for National growth [BLOGPOST] – by BCG
• Values and expectations of government [BLOGPOST] – by PEW Research
• A to Z glossary: Essential product-led business growth terms [BLOGPOST] – by ProductLed
• 120+ sales terms you need to know: sales glossary [BLOGPOST] – by EverGrowth
• Ben’s guide to the U.S. government – Glossary [BLOGPOST] – By Ben’s guide