David A. Fields Consulting Group When developing thought leadership and IP you intend to share in articles, speeches, webinars, etc. there’s a temptation to make yourself and your consulting firm look smart.
That’s upside down and misses the mark.
Rather than trying to make yourself look smart, focus on pun density making your prospects look smart.
Each month or quarter, ask what tidbit* your consulting firm could distribute* that would help your prospects look smarter in their own eyes and the eyes of their peers and bosses.
Makes sense… but how do you actually accomplish this goal?
By offering SAGE advice.
The SAGE Framework for Thought Leadership
Simple
The best thought leadership can be grasped quickly and remembered easily.
Overly complicated reasoning and abstruse approaches may puff your ego, but they won’t pad your wallet.
Actionable
Ensure your thought leadership can be applied immediately—at least in part.
If implementing your well-seasoned advice depends on your consulting firm’s experience and expertise, it will be set aside then forgotten.
However, quick application embeds your thinking, proves its usefulness, and promotes its spread in your prospect’s organization.
That traction increases the likelihood your consulting firm will be called upon for tailored implementation or a sampler platter of your best thinking.
Givable
For your prospect to look smart, they must, by definition, share your idea with others.
Therefore, frame your ideas in a way that is easily repeatable.
Metaphors, acronyms, frameworks, simple visuals all make your thought leadership more givable.
Social proof such as peer use* or expert validation* also enhances givability.
When your prospect shares your thought leadership, attributing your ideas to your firm also provides social proof.
Elevating
Elevation is all about raising your prospect’s esteem by making them look or feel smarter in their own eyes and that of their peers.
One element of creating elevating thought leadership is ensuring what you’re sharing is relevant to their organization and, ideally, is tied to a pain a budget-holder is experiencing.
My suggestion: adopt SAGE as a quick checklist to review before your consulting firm releases each new piece of thought leadership.
Do you share information that makes your prospects look smarter?
Text and images are © 2026 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
I like this advice David and will certainly use this checklist. Do you have any good examples of this to point us to?
Fair question, Stacye. In my biased opinion, this article serves as an example. It’s Simple (a 4-part framework), Actionable (you create a checklist), Givable (you could easily tell other people you use the SAGE framework to hone your thought leadership) and Elevating (it relates directly to a salient issue for you).
What I’ve seen with frameworks like this is that people who adopt it tell others. In this example, SAGE allows the adopter to look smart because when others ask why the adopter’s IP is spreading, they confidently talk about SAGE. In fact, adopters may talk about the framework even before they see results themselves.
Let me know if that helps as an example, Stacye. I can point to plenty of others too–you see them all the time on the posts that get reshared on LinkedIn.
Thanks for asking!
Thanks David…makes sense!
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Great insight ! Would you have some examples please ?
Thanks for asking, Aya. Stacye asked the same question just a few minutes before you–check my answer to her for the example (which is this article).
We sponsor in-person educational seminars (three so far this year) for CEOs and business owners where we and non-competing fractional executives each put a customer on stage in a panel discussion to talk about how they used fractional exec consultants to solve real business challenges. The panelists do not talk about us as individual consultants. They each tell their unique story of their epic journey (good and bad) using fractional execs. Our target is to do seven more in the next two quarters. Four are confirmed in Portland (OR not ME), Canton (at NFL Hall of Fame), Erie (PA) and Omaha. The first three events had over 50 attendees, and nearly all paid a nominal fee ($25 to cover coffee and bagels) to attend.
Thanks for sharing your practice, Ken. Elevating your clients by putting them on stage can be a great relationship-builder. If one of those on-stage clients shares your IP in a format that the audience gloms onto, then you know you have SAGE thought leadership.
Also, congrats on putting the events together–you’re succeeding with a technique that is more work than it looks like from the outside. Well done, Ken!
I’m pitching a Long Island seminar next week! Stay tuned. If you bring chocolates, I’ll comp you a ticket!
Effective use of chocolate for marketing, Ken! (I’ll be up in Canada next week. Let me know how the event goes.)
Ahhhh, no event next week. The pitch is next week. We plan 12 weeks out, minimum. So the Long Island event will likely be late Oct / early November.
Perfect, Ken. That should coincide with my Mallorca vacation. ????