By Ed Gandia
“Too many software companies write white papers for the wrong reasons,” the marketing director of a $200 million software company recently told me at a dinner meeting.
“It’s not that white papers don’t work,” he added. “They do. It’s just that a great number of white papers are not used properly, so they fail to produce the expected results.”
He’s right. White papers can be extremely effective tools in a complex sale. But many of them aren’t leveraged they way they should be. Some companies don’t even have the types of white papers they need, when they need them.
Specifically, I’ve noticed that many software vendors lack solid top-of-funnel white papers. I refer to them as “top-of-funnel” because they’re designed to produce activity at the top of the sales funnel. In other words, their goal is to generate inquiries.
These are the pieces that make potential prospects aware of business problems they didn’t know they had. Or they frame an existing problem differently. Or maybe they further define a problem that the market has already identified but most businesses haven’t acted on.
Considering how important and powerful these types of white papers can be, some marketers fail to pay enough attention to them. Instead, they choose to focus their resources on white papers that are intended for the later stages of their buying cycles-technical backgrounders, product briefings, competitive reviews and so on.
These other types of papers are important. But why not focus as much energy on crafting one or two powerful top-of-funnel pieces?
Probably because most of us assume that prospects already know what their problems are. Makes sense. If they work in that environment all day long, wouldn’t they already fully understand their problems?
Not really, according to Jeff Thull, author of the best-selling book The Prime Solution (Kaplan Business).
In The Prime Solution, Thull argues that business-to-business solutions are now in “Era Three” of an evolutionary change that began in the 1950s. The present era, “Era Four,” which emerged in the mid-1990s, is marked by greatly increased speed of change, information overload and complex problems that have expanded beyond the buyer’s easy comprehension.
According to Thull, complex developments have made it increasingly difficult for buyers to fully understand their own situations, needs and problems. They may know what their goals are. They may realize that they have a problem. But they have difficulty trying to determine which components are most important and how existing systems and business processes are getting in their way.
A few of my clients have found this to be true. For instance, through a comprehensive industry survey, a software company I work with recently found that its target market (durable goods manufacturers) understood most of the problems related to their aftermarket service business.
Yet the nature of the responses made it clear that most companies in this space hadn’t connected some critical dots. They hadn’t noticed some troubling patterns in their aftermarket service business. As a result, they hadn’t taken steps that could have a dramatic impact on the their company’s overall financial performance.
Using the survey data, the software company quickly went to work writing a paper that pointed out these problems, how they’re connected, why they’re important and how they can be addressed.
It’s best not to assume that your potential prospects understand every aspect of their problems, the problems’ causes and the potential solutions. Survey your target market. Talk to potential prospects. Get a better sense of how they perceive their business problems and how they believe they can solve them.
Then, draft a focused white paper that can help them further understand the full nature of the problem and the different ways it can be tackled.
About the Author: A successful, 11-year B2B sales veteran, Ed Gandia is a freelance copywriter specializing in software and technology white papers, case studies, web copy and direct marketing.
