There’s a story that doesn’t get told enough in B2B marketing.
It’s about how around 90% of buyers end up buying from a vendor they already know before doing any research. They’ve already decided before your sales team enters the conversation. Why? Becuase they want to work with experts in the real-world challenges they face every day.
That number should make you pause. Because while 73% of decision makers say an organisation’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its other marketing, only 15% of buyers rate the overall quality of what they’re reading as very good.
Basically, we’ve got near-universal agreement on the importance of thought leadership alongside near-universal failure in execution.
This gap tells you something important: most of the conversation about thought leadership focuses on the wrong things.
We obsess over content creation, executive visibility and distribution channels. Yet we miss the core elements that separate programmes delivering real business impact from those generating nothing but vanity metrics.
This isn’t another article about how to create thought leadership. It’s about the elements no one talks about but everyone needs to understand.
Nearly 65% of a company’s business comes from repeat customers.
Think about that. The customers you already have represent your biggest revenue opportunity. Yet most thought leadership programmes abandon them the moment contracts close.
Yet after you close a deal, your customer doesn’t relax. It isn’t job done.
They face new pressures. They’re introducing unfamiliar processes. They’re now faced with justifying their decision to work with you to stakeholders who weren’t involved in the original purchase. And buying groups now average just under a dozen people, creating ongoing scrutiny that never really ends.
The business case writes itself.
Research-backed, non-promotional content helps prevent against buyer remorse, speeds adoption and gives customers confidence during onboarding and adopting new ways of working. Thought leadership helps customers justify their decision to their peers.
What’s more, it can provide powerful opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling. With effective thought leadership you can continue to highlight new challenges to be solved and new opportunities to be captured. You can highlight the changing nature of business and position yourself as a trusted guide to the future.
A cybersecurity vendor publishing executive perspectives on evolving threat landscapes helps customers evolve their strategy faster. A cloud infrastructure provider using research to highlight regulatory challenges positions additional services as natural next steps. A martech platform equipping customer managers with industry trend reports transforms quarterly reviews from account maintenance into value creation.
The pattern holds across industries. Thought leadership that continues after the sale doesn’t just reduce churn. It creates the conditions for expansion, advocacy and the kind of partnership that withstands budget pressures and competitive threats.
The most effective brands treat thought leadership as a platform, not a campaign. They use it to educate, reassure and enable customers across the entire lifecycle. It helps show consistency between what buyers were promised and what they experience in the real world.
Too few businesses really think about how they’ll distribute their thought leadership effectively.
Companies spend months creating a report. They commission surveys. Hire writers and designers. Get the CEO involved.
And three hundred people read it.
When asked why, all too often they’ll reply with something along the lines of: We published it on our blog, sent an email and posted on LinkedIn (once).
This happens everywhere. So many B2B marketers promote content exactly once – at launch.
Then they move on to creating the next thing.
And yet, with minor updates, the best thought leadership can stay relevant for years not months. (A number of our clients are still using content we created 5 years ago.) But to get this right, distribution must be treated as an ongoing system, not a one-time event.
The companies that figure this out do a few things differently:
Creating great thought leadership matters. But only if people can find it when they’re actually looking for answers.
In the real world, the work isn’t finished when you hit publish. That’s just when distribution starts.
Vanity metrics dominate thought leadership dashboards. It’s understandable, they’re easy to track and make efforts look good. Page views, engagement rates, social shares. Numbers that reveal activity but not influence.
Edelman and LinkedIn found that 42% of thought leadership producers measure effectiveness by looking for increased traffic to their website and social pages. In fact, 19% don’t have any measurement in place to determine effectiveness.
Consider what the data actually tells us. In the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn study, 60% of decision-makers said they’re willing to pay a premium to work with organisations producing high-quality thought leadership. Among those who researched a product or service they hadn’t been considering, 23% began buying from or working with that organisation after consuming their thought leadership.
Yet most measurement systems track activity rather than these commercial outcomes.
Better frameworks focus on influence rather than activity. They monitor share of voice across media and search, revealing whether your brand appears in industry conversations where competitive alternatives get evaluated. Increasingly, they’re measuring share of search as an indicator of impact. They track branded keyword growth as a proxy for mindshare expansion. They measure how often your spokespeople get quoted or referenced by trusted industry sources, indicating authority establishment.
Forward-thinking companies also look to connect content exposure to commercial outcomes. Using attribution models that incorporate employee-generated content and UTM parameters to track how shared content contributes to pipeline. Analysing whether prospects consuming thought leadership assets progress through sales stages faster than those who don’t. Comparing win rates and pricing achievement between accounts exposed to thought leadership versus control groups.
It’s not perfect, what is? It’s also more difficult to execute. It requires different thinking. But if you believe that thought leadership should shape how buyers perceive your brand and bias them towards talking to you, measurement should reflect that reality.
Here’s a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly…
Marketing produces thought leadership to attract attention. Sales needs assets that handle objections, equip conversations and support decision-making at critical buying moments.
In reality, both functions operate separately.
The result is often that the business produces one set of content that is all about blue-sky thinking. They then produce another set that’s all about products and services (with a loose thought leadership wrapper).
The problem is, they don’t connect the two.
So you end up with content that may successfully attract buyers who feel you recognise their pain but which fails to show how you help solve their problems. Or else, you have content that does a good job of selling product but which doesn’t connect that product to the bigger picture (where bigger budgets live).
The problem manifests in predictable ways. Thought leadership pieces lack practical elements buyers require: comparisons (even category-level rather than vendor-to-vendor), ROI or total cost of ownership ranges, risk and security considerations, implementation details. They inform without enabling. There’s no: here’s what you should do next.
It’s noise when customers need signal.
Today, the sheer volume of thought leadership makes it harder for buyers to discern quality from confusion. Compounding this is measurement pressure that drives marketing toward demonstrably impactful activities. This leads businesses to overinvest in bottom-of-the-funnel product content and underinvest in longer-term value-creating thought leadership. Thought leadership that delivers benefits through the full marketing-to-sales lifecycle, not just the initial sale.
Practical integration looks straightforward once you see it.
Add next step sections to thought leadership pieces without transforming them into product pages. Ensure competitive intelligence from research flows into sales tools that handle objections and position alternatives. Create executive-ready summaries sales teams can personalise for specific prospect situations. Hold quarterly sessions where frontline salespeople share which content connects with buyers, which objections remain unaddressed, which proof points resonate. And make thought leadership assets discoverable within sales workflows rather than requiring sellers to remember what marketing published weeks earlier.
It’s not rocket surgery.
Cross-functional collaboration sounds simple until you try it.
Done right, thought leadership requires a combination of marketing strategy, subject matter expertise, sales insight and customer success feedback. Yet, all too often, organisational silos prevent the coordination necessary for coherent execution.
Marketing pursues brand awareness metrics.
Sales chases quarterly quotas.
Customer success focuses on retention rates.
Without shared goals and cross-departmental accountability, thought leadership becomes random acts of marketing rather than strategic narrative development.
The collaboration deficit manifests in three critical ways.
First, getting what you need out of subject matter experts. Internal experts possess deep knowledge but face competing priorities, making consistent content contribution difficult. You need their insights, but you’re competing with everything else demanding their time. And you rarely win.
Second, misaligned KPIs. Different departments are driven by different objectives, creating no incentive for coordinated thought leadership that serves higher-level business objectives. Marketing gets measured on leads. Sales on revenue. Customer success on renewals. As a fundamentally brand-building tactic, thought leadership doesn’t always map cleanly to any single metric (yet affects all of them and more).
Third, weak feedback loops. All too often, insights from sales conversations, customer success and market intelligence simply fail to inform content strategy. The people closest to customer challenges rarely shape the content meant to address those challenges. What a waste.
Breaking down silos demands structural changes. Shared KPIs across departments, aligning marketing, sales and customer success around common goals. These should be customer retention, pipeline velocity or revenue growth rather than departmental metrics. Even better, they should focus on brand equity metrics and mental availability.
You’ll need cross-functional content teams with a mix of skill sets. Teams that self-manage projects with clear business outcome accountability. Add to this a structured SME engagement processes. One that is less like 15 minutes stolen between meetings and more like ongoing collaboration that links their insights to wider business goals (ie, the stuff that really matters).
All this will build trust. And trust is one of the best ways to bust a silo. Organisations that successfully break down silos don’t just improve their thought leadership quality. They fundamentally change how expertise flows through the business.
Nobody talks honestly about ghostwriting in B2B thought leadership. But here’s the reality: senior executives and subject experts rarely have time to produce quality content – not to mention do it with any sort of consistently. They’re running their businesses. Also, just because they are great leaders doesn’t mean they are great writers too.
Ghostwriting agencies now promise executive thought leadership with just 30 minutes of monthly time commitment. That efficiency enables volume. It also introduces risk.
Research on authentic leadership reveals the core tension: authenticity means staying true to values, beliefs and identity. For its part, effectiveness requires adapting to situational needs. In thought leadership, this translates to balancing genuine executive insight (authenticity) against sustainable production (effectiveness).
Skew too far toward efficiency, and content becomes generically professional. It loses the distinctive perspective that creates influence.
Maintain strict authenticity requirements, however, and production becomes unsustainably slow (or, at best, sporadic).
But what about AI? Today, audiences are sharpening their ability to detect AI-generated content. They understand that it lacks the nuance, contextual understanding and personal experience that characterise genuine expertise. And it performs poorly as a result.
Research from the Nuremberg Institute for Marketing Decisions (NIM) found that just 20% of people in the study trust AI.
When customers saw AI-generated marketing content, it scored lower on every one of the 12 measures they assessed, including whether they thought it was eye-catching, interesting, credible, memorable or informative. They were also less likely to take action as a result.
Another study by NP Digital compared the effectiveness of AI-generated articles versus human-written ones. After 5 months, the average AI article generated 52 visitors per month while the average human-written article brought in 283.
It’s why some are now referring to there being a ‘trust penalty’ for using AI in thought leadership.
Here’s what works in the real world.
You’ll need structured sessions where writers can interview senior execs for 60 to 90 minutes. This is their chance to capture the executive’s tone of voice, unearth useful anecdotes, uncover their stories that can go on to inform multiple pieces. This can be brought together in some form of framework that establishes guidelines on tone, individual perspective and the typical ways they express themselves.
You may also choose to tier your thought leadership. Executives may write high-impact pieces (keynotes, annual perspectives, major publications, etc) while delegating tactical content to ghostwriters. This is presuming, of course, that these execs really do have the sufficient writing skills and can take a customer-first perspective. (Easier said than done.)
A good rule of thumb is to split things 30-70. Executives contribute 30% of effort (ideas, review, approval) while ghostwriters handle 70% (deep research, drafting, editing), maintaining authentic voice without requiring an unsustainable time commitment.
This may be controversial, but a good writer should be able to create a piece that is identical to how a senior exec would talk on their very best day.
Most B2B thought leadership relies on assumptions about audience needs rather than real-world research into what target buyers actually prioritise, struggle with and seek to understand.
This inside-out approach produces ‘thought leadership’ that reflects internal perspectives rather than market realities.
Too many organisations skip primary research with target audiences, relying instead on secondary sources and internal team perspectives. They fail to develop proper buyer personas grounded in actual challenges and information-seeking behaviour. Most critically, they don’t establish feedback loops to gain clarity on whether their thought leadership resonates or misses the mark.
The ideal method for building this understanding? Speak to the target audience. Crazy, right?
This may mean conducting short interviews with friendly customers and clients to ask about pain points. Or it could be to explore thought leadership topics that would most interest them. Sadly, time and limited resources push many organisations toward educated guessing rather than systematic discovery. They don’t know what they don’t know.
The consequences are significant.
Thought leadership that focuses on topics the audience doesn’t care about generates minimal engagement. And no, it doesn’t matter if it is beautifully designed. More than this, thought leadership that fails to address real-world challenges will never build the credibility and trust that drive commercial outcomes.
Research-informed thought leadership doesn’t just perform better. It compounds more effectively. When what you publish addresses actual audience needs, readers engage and share with colleagues in ways that signal genuine value. This creates virtuous cycles where measurement data continuously refines strategy. Everyone wins.
What does this kind of insight gathering look like? Think in terms of primary interviews with 10 to 15 friendly customers. The focus is to understand their pain points, information needs and how they make decisions. It is often a good idea to get a third party to do these. In-house people will tend to be blinded by too much knowledge, skewed through the lens of their own experiences.
Add to this some in-depth desk research. Range widely. Explore what’s being said in the media, on LinkedIn, on specialist forums and Reddit communities, in reviews on G2 and the like. Look to identify recurring questions and concerns. Add to this search analysis exploring what phrases target audiences search for online. These will help reveal unspoken questions they’re trying to answer.
It also means tracking content consumption to analyse which topics generate highest engagement and interaction. And implementing continuous feedback mechanisms through surveys, email newsletter replies and direct audience engagement to gather ongoing insight into content relevance and impact. But approach this with caution. This will generally only give you insights into what you’ve already created. There may be whole areas that would be more effective if you widened your horizons.
The reality is, the difference between assumed understanding and researched understanding often determines success.
B2B buyers make decisions in states of heightened risk aversion. Research from Forrester shows that 43% make defensive decisions more than 70% of the time. They’re not evaluating products rationally. They’re protecting their careers. They know they’ll be held accountable for their decisions. And they know how often business purchases fail to live up to the hype.
In reality, this is one of the core reasons you should invest in thought leadership in the first place. Research shows that 49% of executives use thought leadership to reduce the risk of making poor decisions. Risk-averse buyers need credible, confident perspectives to support their decision-making. All too often, however, organisations respond by producing safe, same-old, same-old content that fails to differentiate.
In a nutshell, this is thought leadership without the thought. Generic observations dressed up in a pretty PDF. As such, it completely fails to help a buyer faced with the question of why you and not one of your competitors. This is even more acute if you are not a brand leader. Why should they take a risk when it’s the last thing they want to do?
The perspective deficit stems from multiple sources. Legal and compliance teams prefer content that avoids claims competitors might challenge. Marketing departments fear alienating potential buyers who might disagree with strong positions. Subject matter experts, accustomed to hedging in professional contexts, struggle to articulate clear points of view.
The result is thought leadership that describes what already exists rather than leading people toward what could and should exist.
The data is very clear about what buyers actually want from thought leadership. Research shows that 86% of buyers want content that challenges their assumptions and 63% want guidance for the next three to 12 months.
They want perspective, not consensus.
In fact, risk-averse buyers are the ones who need confident thought leadership most. When decision-makers face internal pressure to justify choices, they rely on external experts who provide defensible frameworks. It’s why the Gartners of the world have been able to charge so much in recent years.
Safe, consensus-oriented content fails this test precisely because it simply can’t deliver the kinds of rationales that buyers need to defend their decisions. Platitudes don’t tend to cut it with the head of finance.
Importantly, this is not about going all out to be contrarian. About everything. All the time. It’s about picking your battles:
Be selective in courting controversy. Define the specific market segment or use case where your perspective applies rather than claiming universal truth.
The distinction matters. Real thought leadership comes from having a distinctive point of view, not from reciting accepted wisdom.
In my experience, brands tend to fall somewhere on a continuum with their thought leadership.
At one end, there are those (often very SEO focused) who treat their thought leadership content as a high-volume venture. They’ve bought into the idea promoted by some martech vendors that they should be a full-on publisher (looking at you HubSpot). So they churn out content at high velocity. Lots of listicles. Lots of hot-takes. Social, social and more social. Content that tries to newsjack current hot topics (even if these have little to do with their business or customers).
The other group goes deep. They produce the occasional 60-page landmark report. Often it’s focused on some sky-high topic such as globalisation or the effect of geopolitics on supply chains or how AI datacentres on the moon are the only viable future. They commission research. Create graphics for data. And publish with all guns blazing fanfare only to go dark for the rest of the year until report time comes around again.
While I lean towards depth over speed, both approaches have merit if you can make them work.
For its part, content velocity offers legitimate advantages. Increased visibility and brand awareness. Better SEO coverage through frequent indexing. Faster feedback about what’s going down well with readers. The ability to capitalise on trending topics.
Yet prioritising velocity also creates risks. Surface-level content that doesn’t address problems deeply. Damage to brand credibility from weak articles. Team burnout from unsustainable production pressure.
Conversely, quality-focused strategies build trust and expertise. They earn backlinks and referrals, drive conversions by solving real problems and deliver stronger SEO returns that persist over time.
But quality-only approaches produce slower output (potentially missing market opportunities). They generally entail higher production costs. And they can lead to a kind of perfectionism that results in endless publishing delays.
The ideal, as with so many things, lies somewhere in between the two extremes. You need high-quality thought leadership content that’s delivered consistently and in a timely fashion, and which is mapped to real business priorities and customer challenges.
Easily said.
In the real world, navigating this tension requires deliberate choices. A way of tiering content that differentiate between cornerstone pieces (quarterly, deeply researched), perspective pieces (monthly, expert POV), and tactical content (weekly, addressing timely questions).
Often, this involves creating one substantial piece quarterly and then breaking it into smaller pieces for blogs, social, PR etc. It also means allowing some wriggle-room to jump on breaking stories if they warrant it (and to be clear, many don’t).
The velocity discussion rarely acknowledges a critical insight: in established category leaders, quality trumps velocity because authority already exists. For challengers and emerging players, velocity matters more. Market presence requires consistent visibility even when individual pieces aren’t definitive.
Ultimately, strategy should match market position.
Too many organisations produce disconnected thought leadership pieces without any overarching continuity. They jump from topic to topic, latching on to whatever seems to be resonating at the time. In doing so, they fail to build coherent storylines that compound credibility over time. And remember, compounding is thought leadership’s superpower.
Instead, each article, webinar or report exists in isolation rather than contributing to a larger framework that helps audiences understand complex market shifts. Put more simply, they never become famous for being the experts in something that matters to customers. And they have to rebuild credibility with every new lurch in direction.
The data confirms that buyers notice. Research shows that 57% say thought leadership content now feels indistinguishable – and with the rapid adoption of AI, this is likely to become exponentially worse. Without strategic narrative differentiation, content disappears into the noise.
“Strategic narrative” is one of those terms that a former client of mine would call “highfalutin”. You only really see it in academic texts and when people like me are trying to show off.
What does it even mean? In a nutshell, your strategic narrative is the story you want to tell that supports your business objectives. How you see the world changing. What version of the future you believe in. And how your audience can play a role in that change.
Strategic narratives serve multiple functions. They provide through-lines that make individual pieces more memorable and easier to reference. They establish consistent perspectives audiences come to recognise and trust. Most critically, they create frameworks buyers can use to organise their own thinking, effectively becoming the “language” used for market conversations. Told you it was highfalutin.
So, for example, when Salesforce came out with a strategic narrative all around the idea of “no software”, it changed how people talked about enterprise apps. It spawned a distinction between on-premise and software as a service (SaaS). It underpinned the benefits of renting applications that were always up to date for a relatively small monthly outlay. This was a distinction that didn’t exist before to any real degree.
Narrative strategy demands consistency. While some elements may flex, a strong core theme helps establish you as a reliable source on specific topics. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that customers will seek your perspective when related issues arise.
Building strategic narrative consistency needs structure. Often, this means creating a framework defining three to five key themes that underpin all your thought leadership content. Each will need a clear positioning that differentiates your business from competitive perspectives. You will then dial elements up or down based on the situation.
In practice, this is often a case of having a core plan for the year (deciding the overarching focus for your messaging) and then splitting activity by quarter where one theme will lead. This will help you avoid “random acts of content” by focusing activity around content clusters that address related aspects. It’ll also help ensure your core messaging remains recognisable whether you are publishing long-form articles, podcast interviews, social content or speaker slots at conferences.
Of course, nothing stands still. You should revisit strategic themes quarterly to assess whether they still reflect market reality and business strategy, adjusting while maintaining recognisable continuity. Though a word of warning: you will get bored of your themes a long time before your customers do.
In reality, narrative consistency doesn’t mean repeating the same message endlessly. Rather, it means each new piece builds on previous content, deepening understanding rather than constantly shifting focus. Over time, this approach creates intellectual property competitors struggle to replicate.
This shouldn’t be a surprise: research shows that 73% of decision-makers say thought leadership is more trustworthy than marketing materials when assessing suppliers. And over half (55%) say that a clear sign of high quality thought leadership is that “it references strong research and data”.
Yet most organisations rely on secondary sources (at best) and fail to invest in proprietary research that differentiates their thought leadership.
The research advantage manifests in three major dimensions:
Fundamentally, hard data is your shortcut to credibility.
To be clear, this isn’t about scraping together 100 friendly sources and asking them a bunch of leading questions. (Looking at you SaaS startups.)
If your audience’s first response to your “research” is Well they would say that wouldn’t they? you have massively failed the smell test. Your credibility will vanish faster than my New Year’s resolutions come February.
This quality threshold matters. A lot.
Buyers distinguish between thought leadership backed by rigorous methodology versus content citing existing third-party research anyone could access. And the stakes are high. The same research cited earlier found:
“But research is so expensive!”
I hear this a lot. Quality research requires budget (survey panels, research partners), time (design, fielding, analysis) and expertise (methodology, statistical literacy). Many organisations think they simply can’t afford it.
Yet even modest research investments, surveying 200 to 300 respondents on focused questions, can generate differentiation that secondary sources can’t match. And, in reality, the costs these days are far lower than they once were. (YMMV of course.)
The standard is clear: thought leadership requires data, research and perspective. And it must be relatively independent from the commercial aspect of the enterprise.
That independence explains why customers trust research-backed thought leadership. It signals that insights emerge from evidence rather than sales motivation.
Most marketing teams treat published content as disposable, moving on to the next piece without considering ongoing value or maintenance requirements.
Yet research shows that most evergreen content remains effective for three to five years with minimal updates. The return on investment compounds when content receives periodic redistribution and strategic refreshment.
This insight changes how you plan thought leadership activity. Rather than viewing thought leadership as ephemeral campaign content, it becomes durable intellectual property requiring active management.
Putting this to use in practice means ensuring you do periodic reviews to maintain relevance. Updating statistics while preserving core insights. Balancing evergreen foundations with timely content that captures immediate attention. Building content repositories that sales and customer success teams can access across customer lifecycle stages.
The shift from disposable to durable content requires different workflows. Editorial calendars that plan for content refresh cycles. Asset management systems that track performance over time. Distribution strategies that treat republication as strategic opportunity rather than failure to create something new.
When you stop treating content as disposable, investment decisions change. Deeper research makes sense if the asset delivers value for years. Higher production costs become defensible when returns compound. Quality takes precedence over velocity because the impact of that asset persists.
The illusion that content has short shelf life drives wasteful overproduction. The reality that quality content delivers long-term value enables more strategic resource allocation.
These overlooked elements share a common thread. They’re structural rather than tactical. They shape outcomes more than execution quality. And they’re nearly invisible in the conventional thought leadership conversation.
The pattern suggests something important about why most programmes fail while a few succeed dramatically.
Success doesn’t come from better content creation. It comes from better content architecture. From systems that connect thought leadership to post-sale value creation. From distribution designed for sustained visibility rather than single pushes. From measurement focused on influence rather than activity. From sales enablement that treats thought leadership as decision support rather than awareness driver.
It comes from breaking down silos so expertise flows where it’s needed. From balancing production efficiency with genuine voice. From research that grounds insight in real audience needs. From willingness to take positions that risk alienating some to resonate deeply with others.
It comes from managing velocity-quality tradeoffs deliberately. From narrative consistency that compounds over time. From original research that creates defensible authority. From legal frameworks that protect businesses while enabling bold thinking. From treating content as a durable asset rather than disposable output.
The organisations getting this right don’t have secret tactics. They have different mental models.
They see thought leadership as strategic infrastructure rather than marketing campaign. As relationship enabler rather than lead generation tool. As long-term investment rather than short-term expense.
They understand that the ~90% of buyers who identify preferred providers before formal shortlists exist aren’t responding to clever marketing. They’re responding to sustained intellectual leadership that shaped how they understand their challenges. To frameworks that organised their thinking. To research that reduced their decision risk.
That’s the architecture everyone misses. The structure beneath the surface that determines whether thought leadership builds lasting influence or simply generates activity metrics.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you start building it, the programmes that seemed impossibly difficult become straightforward.
Not easy. Never easy. But clear.
The question isn’t whether these elements matter. The research settles that. The question is whether you’re willing to address them when the industry conversation focuses elsewhere.
Because while everyone’s optimising content creation, the real opportunities live in the spaces no one’s talking about.
That’s where competitive advantage hides.
In plain sight.
Waiting for someone to notice.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.