A white paper does two things.
They are:
1. Educate the reader on your product
2. Push the buyer along the sales cycle
The first one is self-explanatory.
A white paper provides information to your customer about your product or your service. It does it in an informational way. It answers most questions your customer has about your product. It discusses the key advantages of your service.
The second reason to use a white paper is not so obvious.
It’s to push your customer further down the sales cycle
Almost all writers get the first one.
Yet if you don’t get the second one, your white paper will likely fall flat with influencing sales.
The white paper MUST push your customer along the sales cycle.
Or to say it another way. After reading your white paper, the buyer must be closer to buying your product.
In the grand scheme of making a sale, it’s this purpose of a white paper that’s more important.
We’ll talk about it in this post.
If you’re a marketing manager using white papers in your mix, a business owner using white papers to attract customers, or you’re a white paper writer with a marketing mind, then the topic you’ll read about today will give you a new perspective on what to write about.
It will open your mind up to an entire new level of thinking.
It will discuss how to use your white paper to propel the customer closer to the sale.
I’ll start with the strategic view.
Then drill down into some practical ways you can apply it to your own unique business.
At the end, there’s one surprising result we’ll discuss.
You can use it to make your white papers much simpler to develop.
It’s all about the decision about what content to include.
This one little thing could change the way you approach your white paper writing. It will make your planning process go much, much faster.
But let’s not jump ahead just yet.
First, let’s discuss this simple truth about buyers.
The decision making process is complex.
And there’s a lot of information out there discussing the topic.
If I’ve read one book on decision making, I’ve read a hundred.
They’re everywhere.
On Amazon, there are thousands of books – maybe tens of thousands – on decision making.
To save some time, we’ll skip over the individual opinions of the writers.
However, they all have some some things in common.
There’s a general process with 5 – 10 steps.
Each step represents a concrete and “actionable’ step in the decision making process.
You complete one step and move to the next one.
The steps all move forward and, at the end, you have your final decision.
That’s how most of the decision making systems work.
Those books are okay.
Here’s what’s useful for us.
It’s helpful to think of your buyer as passing through system of stages. It’s like a process.
The buyer moves from one stage to the next one until they buy from you.
But there’s a problem with this process-centric approach.
It’s this.
There’s a ton of emotion that goes into a decision.
And to truly understand the buying decision, you need to study psychology, not of process.
The other thing the decision experts get wrong is this. Most people DON’T follow this logical, concrete stepwise manner in making a decision.
At least not in the rigorous way outlined in the books.
A person DOES go through a process when they make a decision. But it’s not the formal one the decision authors rattle on about in their books.
As a white paper writer and a marketer, it’s too complicated to consider all these variables when you’re planning a white paper.
So for simplicity, let’s break it down into a series of stages.
If you’ve studied sales, you’ll recognize this tactic. There are methods using sales stages.
I’m not going to reference a particular technique here. Instead I’m borrow and pull inspiration from them all.
The stages of buying
A buyer goes through stages when they’re interested in your product.
Consider each stage as a single step in the decision making process we mentioned above.
We’ll start with 3 stages.
Each step /stage represents the readiness of the buyer to give you money.
Each stage leads to the next one.
And the names of our 3 stages are: Cold, warm, and hot.
The buyer goes from one stage to the next.
A cold lead reads the white paper. They discover all the great benefits of your product, then take interest in your product. But they’re not yet ready to buy.
They buyer has moved from someone knowing nothing about your service to someone with awareness.
In other words, a cold lead becomes a warm lead.
You can see how knowing these stages gives you enormous power.
Here’s why.
It allows you to target your customer without getting bogged down into the individual details.
It allows you to plan your marketing initiatives and gives you guidance on what to include in your white paper.
I’ll discuss how this relates to the WHAT to include in your white paper in just a bit.
For now, let me give you a brief overview of the 3 types of leads.
This will give you a framework to adapt to your own organization and team.
The 3 types of sales process:
1. Cold lead – Never heard of you ; no idea about your product
2. Warm lead – Interested ; have heard of you
3. Hot – Ready to buy
Cold Lead / Lead Generation – These guys have never heard of you. Furthermore, they may have never heard of your product. This is the majority of the people out there. Contrary to what you may believe, it’s likely most people don’t know you. Even if you’re on the Forbes 100 list most will not have heard of you. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Warm Lead – They have heard of you or your product. They have an interest in your service but likely don’t know all the details or benefits of the product. They aren’t quite ready to buy. For a warm lead, there are many questions to be answered. Price. Quality. Term of service. Performance details. Licensing. How you compare to the competition. There’s a lot of possibilities here. Here’s the main takeaway – They’re heard of you and have an interest.
Hot lead – They’re ready to buy. You’re ready to negotiate terms. You’re ready to discuss pricing. You’re ready to discuss licensing issues and you’re ready to discuss delivery and scope. In some businesses, they may have their choice narrowed down to one or two vendors and you’re one of them.
The buyer moves from cold to warm to hot. At the last stage, they are giving you money.
Before moving on, let me make a quick side note to deal with this question.
How fast does this occur?
If you’re advanced, you’ll notice that I’ve left out the time lines. The reason for this is simple.
The time lines vary between industry and niche, product and price. It depends as much on the marketplace for your product as it does for the type of customer you’re going after.
And it also depends on whether you’re in a consumer market or a B2B market.
The B2B market has longer lead times.
For example, many large, multinational corporations may take years to reach a final decision. Government decision almost always years.
I personally worked with one sales guy who was doing a deal with the global corporation Texas Instruments. That deal took 18 months to close. And that was just from the time I got involved. Who knows how long it took in total.
On the consumer side, the lead times are much shorter.
For example, a person looking for a new exercise plan may go from cold to warm to hot in less than a week. It might even be as short as an hour.
If you’d like to see a hyper-example, watch a 30-minute infomercial.
That entire program takes you from cold to hot in 30 minutes with commercials.
Love them or hate them, it’s perhaps the most miraculous feat of writing that exists in commercial form today. Perhaps the only equivalent as far as emotional content is the screenwriter. If you enjoy that stuff, study the direct response marketers, who do the same thing, but with print letters and direct mail.
Because there’s so much variation in the time lines, I left them out of this post.
What’s important here is the stages.
We can adjust the states with the appropriate time lines depending on your product and industry.
Here’s what’s amazing.
Regardless of the time lines, every buyer goes through these stages.
Some go fast, some go slow. But they all go through these stages. Most marketers know this intuitively, but few actually think about it.
Consider your own experiences.
You’ve gone through these stages yourself.
Think about something you recently purchased.
There was a time in your past when you had no clue that thing existed.
It may have been 3 weeks ago, or it may have been 3 years ago.
At first, you likely didn’t care about the product, didn’t know about it. And your life operated just fine without that knowledge.
And then, one day, you heard about this product from a friend. Then maybe you heard about it again on Facebook. Then you saw an ad.
Now at this point, you still don’t care about the product, but you KNOW about it. You’re now a warm lead.
Maybe you finally decided you’d heard good things and you wanted to try it.
Maybe you’re shopping and put it in your bag.
Maybe you were a bit tipsy and ordering stuff online from Amazon.
Whatever. At that point you made the purchase.
You were a hot lead.
So, you see, you’ve been though these stages too, even if you didn’t place a label on them.
Moving on. let’s tackle the big question
How to use this with a white paper?
Well, the answer is very simple.
By using these stages, you can determine WHAT content goes into your white paper.
If you’re looking for new leads, your content will focus on the benefits of your product. It will focus on info about your success cases. It will show social proof and give the reader an overview of working with you.
If your reader doesn’t know anything about you (i.e. a cold lead), your job is to get them excited about your service. You explain how to solve their problem. You highlight your strengths and overcome their skepticism.
AND… you’re not trying to close the deal, you’re just trying to get them to the next stage.
The same is true for the Warm lead.
You get them to move to the next stage. You give them more information about your product to get them closer to buying.
And of course, in the HOT stage, you give them all the details they need to give you money. At this stage, you’ll have established phone contact with the buyer, so a white paper may have limited use here.
Now, next.
Let me explain how these 3 stages are guides for your white paper content.
First, it lets you know what to write about.
The most common complaint from managers is they don’t know what to write about.
Most include anything and everything about their product, their company, and whatever else they can think of.
By using these stages, you only have to include enough information to get them to the next stage. You don’t have to close the deal with the first white paper.
This is HUGE.
I’m going to say it again.
By using these stages, your white paper has to only push them to the NEXT stage.
It doesn’t have to complete a deal or include your entire company history. The only job is to push them to the next stage.
Which leads to the second big thing – Using these stages allows you to figure out what to NOT write about.
This is counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
When it comes to the service you provide, you are likely an expert. In fact, if you’re been with your company or product for over a year, then you’re in the top 10% of product knowledge.
If you’ve been doing it longer than 2 years, you’re in the top 1%.
You have expertise that most don’t.
A buyer who is just coming into your front door knows nothing about your service. Jumping into lengthy conversations and long, drawn-out expositions will scare them off.
Save that stuff for later. After they’ve had some time to educate themselves on your service.
You DON’T have right about everything. Only the items that are relevant for whatever stage they are in.
And that gives you a massive shortcut on developing content for your white paper.
Knowing the buyer stage tells you what to write about.
It also allows you to determine which things to leave out so your paper isn’t 45 pages long.
And those two pieces of information can save you a lot of time, save you a lot of heartache, and make your white paper stronger and help you make sales.