Thought leadership mistakes killing your pitches

There's a particular kind of confidence required to email a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, or Fast Company and say, “I have something worth your readers' time.” Most people who send that email are unfortunately wrong. But it’s not because they aren't smart. Not because they don’t know interesting things. It’s because interesting things alone don't make a great thought leadership piece.

The editors at the publications worth placing in are wading through hundreds of pitches a week from people who are technically qualified to write about all manner of topics. 

People with credentials and strings of letters after their name flood editors’ inboxes. But what makes the people with their finger on the publish trigger actually read these pitches, and most importantly, put them out into the world? Most pitches never make it there. Here's why, and what to do about it.

You're just stating the obvious

There's a difference between having an opinion and having a perspective. Opinions are everywhere. They say everyone has one. And they say it in a particular way, with a particular word, that I won't repeat here. But perspectives on the other hand tend to be rare. And good editors know it the moment they see one.

The temptation, especially for first-time thought leadership writers, is to simply present yourself as an expert or tech founder and expect the world to stand up and listen. But it’s really much more effective to show rather than tell. 

Jake Meth, former opinion editor at Fortune and founder of Opinioned, makes the point that editors don't expect you to be a world-class writer. What they want instead is for you to "supply the deep insights and knowledge that come from knowing your particular issue exceptionally well," he writes on his aptly named Pitches Get Stitches website.

Anyone can make a fist of an article about why workplace culture matters. But the editor who receives a pitch from the person who replaced their entire HR department with a suggestion box, and has the data to show it, is reading something not many others can write.

Before you pitch, ask yourself if anyone could write this. Is it hard-earned wisdom or the kind of thing that falls out of an LLM? If the answer is yes, find another angle.

Stop trying to sell stuff Of course, thought leadership involves promotion. That's not a dirty secret. But it's a tangential result of actually providing insight. The moment a submission starts to read like an advertisement, or worse, your features page, it's over. Sayonara. The irony is that the less you try to sell in a thought leadership article, the more you end up selling. A piece that actually changes how someone thinks about a problem in your industry does more for your reputation than a thousand words of self-congratulation. The reverse is also true. When thought leadership prioritises promotion over insight, it can damage credibility. In fact, a collaborative study by Edelman and LinkedIn found that poorly executed thought leadership caused 45% of decision-makers and 53% of C-suite executives to lose respect for the organisation behind it.

You’re too late

In PR, we know timing as the silent killer of thought leadership pitches. A piece can have a niche angle, a strong voice, and a really solid argument, but still get rejected because it arrived too late. The pieces that actually land tend to hit before a trend properly takes off. Newsjacking, when you strap your voice to a breaking story, can work too. But the window is brutally narrow. 

The best strategy, and the one that also builds great relationships with editors, is leading the conversation, rather than being reactive. What's coming in your space that nobody's taken seriously yet? What pattern have you spotted that will feel obvious in eighteen months but doesn't right now? Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan, Inc., and their equivalents want pieces that are ahead of the room. They want articles their readers will favorite and reference later.

What an editor actually needs in your pitch

The truth is that getting a thought leadership piece into a serious outlet isn't easy. But the above will significantly help your case. What also helps is reading the publication you're pitching to. Really reading it. Understanding the style, the rhythm of how they publish, what they've put out recently, and crucially, what they haven't covered yet but probably should. 

Read the editorial guidelines. Read the submission guidelines. Find your voice and form your perspective. Most pitches get rejected because the writer didn't do any of this. They wrote a piece they wanted to write and fired it at an inbox they hadn't bothered to learn anything about. Don't be that type of thought leadership author. Be the one who shows up having clearly read the room. Editors notice.