The Best White Papers
It’s always useful to have “leave-behinds” when you call on a prospective customer. They can be paper, or electronic, or samples of your technology.
This blog is about a good way to produce white papers that have some impact.
One way to produce these is to sit in your office and write them. Doing this may give you some decent sales material, but there’s a good chance that they’ll go into a file or a waste basket.
How can you overcome the tendency on the part of your prospects to ignore your materials? I have a specific suggestion.
Start With Customer Discovery
I’m assuming that you’ve done or are doing customer discovery. That is, overcoming your desire to talk about your technology and instead learning customer needs without pitching your solution before you understand their problems.
One of the useful things you can do when you are doing customer discovery is to ask what trade journals your prospective customers read and pay attention to. If you’ve done a reasonable number of interviews—and you need to—you’ll find patterns.
Reach Out to Trade Journals
The next step is to learn about those journals. Make a list of their editors and get in touch with them, either by reaching out or by meeting them at trade shows.
These journals are always looking for unusual content that will keep their subscribers interested. Will they be looking for articles about the details of your technology? Probably not. But if you can talk knowledgeably about an industry-wide problem and mention your solution, there’s a good chance they’ll publish it.
Then you can use reprints as white papers and leave-behinds, and these will have much more credibility than something that you’ve written and not published. You’ll also have the benefit of professional editing, which the journal did before printing your article.
Don’t Expect Leads to Come to You
By the way, don’t expect much to come of your article other than its use as a white paper. It’s fun to think that readers will reach out to you and demand your solution. And no doubt sometime in the history of trade publications, that has happened. But it’s vanishingly rare.
I was once in a venerable Boston used bookstore, run by a man who was a local legend. He had his radio on and tuned to a local news station and was pleased that they were airing a short interview with him.
We both listened to it and he said to me, “I’ll bet you five dollars that someone calls me about that interview within five minutes.” I said, “Let’s make it a dollar,” and he agreed. Five minutes went by with no calls and he handed me my dollar.
I’ve had peer-reviewed articles in journals, editorials, opinion pieces, and the like.
Response? Zip.
Cited in other articles? Yes.
But outreach from potential customers? No.
The Takeaway
If you set your expectations properly, you can create a set of white papers that carry the credibility of having been published in journals your prospects actually subscribe to, and sometimes read.
And if they saw your name in print and now see you in person, it gives your visit a bit more weight. That small signal of authority can help you be taken more seriously.