The Missing Link Between Thought Leadership, Visibility and Revenue

For decades, professional services firms have operated on a simple formula: thought leadership plus relationships equals growth. Hire smart people (PhDs, top-tier MBAs, deep domain experts), extract their insights into publishable content, and trust that strong client relationships will follow.

For twenty years, this was the playbook. It's no longer enough.

Early in my career, I led US marketing and business development for a global HR consulting firm. We had brilliant consultants. Thought leadership came naturally. My job was figuring out how to extract and package it. Some of our people became genuinely famous in their fields: published authors, keynote speakers, quoted in the press. They had visibility most professionals would envy.

But even that didn't guarantee their success.

Relationships were harder. Our consultants did a decent job when given a chance with clients, but they got sidetracked when busy. We never figured out how to institutionalize relationship building. We just assumed our rainmakers had some innate gift the rest of the team lacked. Meanwhile, some of our most visible thought leaders struggled to convert their profiles into consistent pipelines.

Then I read The Activator Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024) by Matt Dixon, Ted McKenna, and their colleagues at DCM Insights, based on the Rainmaker Genome Project, a study of over 3,000 professional services partners. And lightbulbs went off.

Our rainmakers weren't magic. They were doing specific, replicable things. We just never thought to study them. And our visible-but-struggling thought leaders? They were missing a critical piece.

The Market Has Changed. Has Your Approach?

The formula that worked twenty years ago no longer works because the way clients buy professional services has fundamentally shifted.

Consider the data from DCM Insights: when C-level buyers were asked whether they'd automatically rehire a firm that delivered good work, 76% said yes five years ago. Today? Only 53%. And just 37% expect that loyalty to hold five years from now.

What happened? Several forces collided at once.

First, procurement arrived. Purchasing in "soft-spend" categories like professional services, once a black box shielded from corporate procurement, is now formalized. Incumbent firms must compete for business they once received automatically. Alternative fee structures like fixed fees, capped fees, and performance-based models have become standard as procurement extracts more value for money.

Second, buying committees exploded. Twenty years ago, an executive search partner sold to the CEO or CHRO. Today, that same partner sells to HR business partners, the HR operations leader, the head of recruiting, lower-level HR staff, and countless business partners influencing the decision. The average buying committee has grown from 5.4 stakeholders to 11, and sometimes as high as 20. COVID accelerated this: when client meetings went virtual, the cost of adding another stakeholder to the call dropped to zero.

Third, new competitors emerged. Boutique and niche players previously outside the consideration set now compete for work that top-tier firms assumed was theirs. And they're not just taking transactional work. They're winning higher-end engagements too.

The result? As one Big Four partner described it: "We've been the go-to provider for this client for years. I've never really had to sell to them. So I was in shock when I heard they'd gone with another firm. When I called to ask if we'd done something wrong, they said, 'No! You guys are great! We love working with you!' It was deeply troubling to think we'd done everything right and still lost."

Doing great work is no longer enough. Being visible isn't enough. Even strong relationships aren't enough, not when the decision now involves eleven people, half of whom you've never met.

The Expert's Trap

Let's be clear: thought leadership alone doesn't make you visible. Visibility requires real work. Speaking at 15-20 events per year. Publishing regularly. Serving on panels and boards.

As one Expert in the research admitted, "I don't think the events themselves drive business opportunities, but they increase my brand profile. I'm a recognizable name whether they attended the event or not."

That's the first stage. But here's where the trap springs shut: visibility doesn't convert to business on its own.

I saw this firsthand. We had consultants who wrote books. Who spoke at major conferences. Who were quoted in Harvard Business Review. They had name recognition that junior partners would have killed for. And yet some of them couldn't build a sustainable book of business. They'd get occasional inbound calls, but not enough. They'd win some competitive pursuits, but lose more. They were famous and frustrated.

The Activator research gave me the language to understand what I witnessed. They identified a profile called "the Expert": professionals who invest disproportionate time burnishing their visibility. They've done the work to get recognized. And then they wait. As one firm CEO put it bluntly, "They like to aggressively wait for the phone to ring."

The Expert's assumption is that visibility creates inbound demand. Sometimes it does. But by the time a prospect calls, they've already defined their needs, often with input from a competitor. They're already talking to three other firms. The Expert has entered a race that started without them.

And in today's consensus-driven buying committees, that's fatal. Research shows that with every additional stakeholder, the likelihood of getting a decision drops. Buying committees can agree there's a problem. They struggle to agree on how to solve it, or which provider to hire. Pitches die in committee, not because the Expert wasn't qualified, but because no one shaped the conversation before it started.

The research found that non-Activators send thought leadership "out into the universe, hoping for a response." They've surrendered control of the next step. The result? RFP fire drills, commoditized pursuits decided on price, and partners who only hit their numbers through credit on colleagues' deals.

Your clients see through it. As one said in the research: "I find most requests to check in to be nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to troll for more work. The professionals who do that don't actually care about me or my organization, they just care about my discretionary budget."

What Activators Actually Do

The top performers, called Activators, do something different. They don't stop at visibility.

They activate it.

Nearly 60% of Activators regularly alert clients to regulatory changes, market shifts, and emerging risks before the client knows to ask. Only 34% of non-Activators do this. Activators manage 20% larger networks with twice the engagement activity. They never reach out empty-handed. As one explained: "I never reach out to a client unless I have something valuable to offer."

The difference shows up in how they use thought leadership. The research found that Activators don't spam clients with generic content, and they don't let it sit unused. Instead, they contextualize it. One Activator said his most impactful outreaches start with the phrase "I thought of you because..." That phrase signals thoughtfulness, foresight, and an understanding of the client's unique situation. As he put it: "My clients are bombarded with generic thought leadership. It's a real value-add to synthesize this content for them and contextualize it for their role, company, or industry."

Activators don't wait for the phone to ring. They shape how clients understand their needs before competitors enter the picture. They build relationships across multiple levels of the client organization, not just with the decision-maker, but with the influencers who now crowd every buying committee. And they bring colleagues into client relationships instead of hoarding them.

Looking back at my consulting days, our rainmakers did exactly this. But it never occurred to us that we could teach these behaviors to other consultants. We treated it as personality, not practice. And our famous-but-frustrated thought leaders? They had the visibility. They just never learned to activate it.

That was the mistake.

The Real Formula

Here's what I wish I'd understood twenty years ago:

Thought leadership is raw material. It takes work to produce, but producing it doesn't make you visible.

Visibility is earned. It requires consistent effort: speaking, publishing, showing up. But being visible doesn't generate business.

Activation is what converts. It's the systematic, disciplined work of reaching out with ideas that matter to specific people at specific moments. It's not a gift. It's a set of behaviors that can be trained, measured, and institutionalized.

If I'd known this twenty years ago, I would have spent less time polishing white papers and more time building systems that turned every consultant into a relationship builder. And I would have helped our visible thought leaders understand that fame without activation is just frustration.

The question for firm leaders: Are you investing in all three stages? Or are you stuck believing that visibility alone will fill the pipeline?