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by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO
Habegger was the CEO of Bitpipe (now TechTarget) which ran the annual White Paper Awards starting from 2001 through 2004.
The last year that contest ran, they got 750 entries.
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Ramminger knows something about white papers, too.
He was executive VP of KnowledgeStorm which began hosting white papers online in 2003. Today he's executive VP of TechTarget, which bought over the company.
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I asked these two executives how software firms can use white papers to generate leads. Here's the advice these two veterans gave.
Click here to see a summary of the 19 tips in this article.
"When a customer says, 'I'm going to do a white paper, what should I focus on?'
we tell them three things," says Ramminger.
"Figure out who you're trying to target, make sure you teachand make the length appropriate.
"We've seen people try to talk to too many people at once.and lose the ability
to get the attention of the person they're really after," says Ramminger.
"The more targeted your white papers are, the better—especially if you can articulate the precise
market segment or job title you're after."
Everyone has a different agenda. Your white paper must speak to your audience's agenda,
or they'll ignore it.
I once overhead a VP of marketing declare, "A white paper is that very rare thing
that can be all things to all people."
He really should know better.
"I can't tell you how many clients we see who say, 'We just want leads,'" says Habegger.
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"But they really want leads in a particular place, which implies a particular audience,
which implies a particular message.
"And that demands the discipline of sitting down and asking, 'Who is my audienceand
what am I actually trying to achieve?'
"That's where a lot of these go off the rails," he notes.
"They've never really thought through who their audience isand what they're trying to achieve.
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"To put it in concrete terms, if you're selling a CRM system, the VP of sales probably has to
raise his hand and say, 'OK, I agree.' But so does the CIO. And the criteria they each use are
completely different. So you need to influence both of them with different messages.
"And the person sitting down to write that document needs to understand that."
No white paper can be all things to all people. The more focused you can make it,
the more effective it will likely be.
Both executives stress that more people read white papers than just IT propeller-heads.
"If you're a VP of manufacturing, you're not going to let some IT person go off and make a
decision about an application to support your manufacturing process without some of your
people involved," says Ramminger.
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He's seen this change over the past 15 years.
"When I was selling for IBM in the early 90s, you didn't always run into a line-of-business person.
But I dare say that the majority of decisions are now driven by people outside IT."
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That means your white paper may well need to cover the business benefits of your offering, as much as
the technology under the hood.
Both executives agree that effective white papers focus on educating their audiences.
"Vendors gain the most influence if they use content to educate their different constituencies,"
says Habegger. "The best white papers come at it from an educational tone focused on learning versus
a preachy approach."
Use your white paper to explain how your offering solves a real business or technical problem.
Don't just declare that you're the best; prove it.
This point is so important, it's worth repeating.
The trick is to explain now, so you have a chance to sell later.
In other words, you've got to prepare the ground before you plant the seed for a future sale.
And a sales pitch masquerading as a white paper will surely fall on barren ground.
"We've seen the most success with people who use white papers to educate and teach, as opposed to
selling," says Ramminger.
"A lot of people lose the reader where they haven't done a good-enough job of teaching the basic
concepts, or illustrating how a concept might resolve the business problems that reader has.
"If you do the right job of educating, people come back to you because you're a source of
intellectual capital. At the right time, they'll allow you to talk about your product."
"We often run into people who want to put too much content into one consumable.
And they are going to lose people," says Ramminger.
"The length of your white paper has to be relevant to the audience."
Flexibility is the key here.
"There is no one single answer, because white papers have multiple purposes and different audiences,"
says Habegger.
He goes back to his example of the VP of sales versus the software architect.
"What the architect is looking for is highly technical, no BS, no marketing, no talk about ROI,
just lots of technical detail that really burrows into the architecture. And those kind of white
papers can go to 50 pages and still work well.
"But something like that is clearly DOA for a VP of sales trying to think about his contact
management problem. For that type of white paper, any more than five pages is probably too long."
Ramminger likes things even shorter.
"I can carve out enough time to go through two or three pages," he says. "And that's either going to make an impression on me, or it's not."
Adding another 5 to 10 pages will do nothing if a reader isn't already engaged from the first few paragraphs.
In fact, today's recommended sweet spot for white papers aimed at business readers is 6 to 8 pages; for technical readers, this can be longer at 6 to 12 or even more pages.
Click on the graphic to see a full-sized version. The page range shown in green is recommended; yellow is questionable; and red is NOT recommended.
Here's an intriguing rule of thumb: Make each white paper as short and specific
as your budget allows. That way, each one is as focused as possible.
So, if you have four key points to make and can afford to publish a white paper on each one, do it.
If you can only do one paper, you're got to cover all four points in the same document.
More on budgeting later.
"People don't go looking for products, they go looking for topics," says Habegger.
"The most likely thing a potential reader will see is a title and a short description.
So effective titles are essential."
He cites a recent white paper called "What Hackers Know That You Don't," from wireless LAN security
supplier AirDefense. Habegger says its downloads are "off the charts"—partly because it's good,
and partly because it's got such a great title.
"That title is as perfect as you're ever going to get: It's catchy, it's pithyand
it contains a benefit statement right inside it," says Habegger.
So why doesn't everyone come up with catchy titles?
As Emerson observed, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Some vendors may want every document in their library to line up in a neat pattern.
But Habegger warns against this.
"If you're putting together a collateral kitand you have Product A, Product Band Product C,
there's a temptation to say everything for Product A should be called 'Product A: The White Paper,'
'Product A: Our Technology Capability,' and so on.
"Well, that works fine in the collateral kit," he says, "but it's the kiss of death online."
Why is that?
"We find that any white paper with a product name in the title does anywhere from
50 percent to an order of magnitude worse than if the title contains an educational
or benefit statement."
Ramminger agrees. So leave the product name out of your white paper titleand watch your downloads improve.
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Certain information is clearly useful for each phase of the buying cycle.
The proper type of white papers can help move a prospect smoothly along that process.
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"In the early phases, white papers make a tremendous amount of sense,"
says Ramminger. "They can be very useful for educating a prospect about a set of concepts
they might not understand at that point."
In the first phase, which Ramminger calls "vision," a prospect is simply imagining how to solve a business problem.
At that point, a high-level white paper focused on business benefits can help them visualize
the possibilities of using your offering.
In the second phase, "planning," a prospect is trying to map a set of functional requirements to your product.
That's when a more detailed, technical white paper can help them understand how your solution
would work in their environment.
"By the time a prospect gets to the evaluation phase—looking at who can meet their functional
requirements—white papers are not as critical," says Ramminger.
In the evaluation phase, he says, case studies become supremely useful.
"If a prospect is interested in your case study, it says they believe your system can support
their functional requirements. Until then, they're probably not interested in your case study."
Ramminger says case studies are ideal for showing off your success.
They can get a prospect thinking, "You know, this company looks kind of like we do,
and they're using this product..." And then, you're getting close to the short list.
We've talked about when and how to deploy white papers. But who should write them in the first place?
A product manager? A support whiz? A software architect? An in-house technical writer? An outside journalist?
The best answer here: It depends.
"I think it's very case-specific," says Ramminger. "I've seen great papers written by internal
people, especially someone who is very knowledgeable about the industry or the offering.
"But I feel it's better to have someone outside the company as the final writer.
Someone who has done a lot of writing for periodicals can probably create a more consumable
document than a product manager."
Habegger takes a similar view, more or less.
"I find that the absolute best white papers are
written by company insiders," he says. "But not everybody has an insider who can actually do the
authoring. The thing is to find somebody who can write decent prose in a timely manner."
Wherever you can find it, make sure to line up strong writing talent.
More than one white paper has died on the vine for lack of careful and consistent review.
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To keep the process going, you'll need two or three well-chosen reviewers.
"People start out with great intentions, but it's a lot of work to get one of these things produced,"
says Habegger.
"So they sometimes give up after the first draft.
"Or it drags on for a long timeand they wind up blessing the first very rough draft."
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Who should be driving your white paper publishing?
"I think it's a cross-functional task," says Ramminger. He suggests putting together a small team
of both marketing and product people.
"The product people can help tone down—maybe that's the wrong term—help 'manage'
the level of marketing information that comes across, to help focus not on shilling the company,
but on educating the audience."
Habegger goes even further.
"To be quite candid, in many cases the marketing department is the last
organization you want having editorial control over a white paper," he says.
"What they will do is naturally try to make it parrot the marketing messages they developed.
But if they go in and start dropping marketing-speak into your white paper,
that's the kiss of death."
This touches on another key strategy:
Get rid of the marketing jargon and buzzwords.
It just doesn't work in white papers.
Both executives have years of field research to back up that view.
"The worst performers are essentially extended brochure-ware with exclamation points all over the
page," says Habegger.
"You don't have to read very far to figure out if a white paper is well-written,
if it has a nuanced point of view, or if it's essentially blaring exclamation points:
'Our product is great!!' 'Trust us!!' And the IT audience has no patience for that."
"We find the less marketing-speak, the better," agrees Ramminger.
"I'm not judging this from what I'd like to see personally. We have proof over time that better
leads are created by content that's more to the point than by content that has a lot of
marketing-ese in it."
Software firms can spend a little or a lot to commission a white paper.
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"The cheapest way to produce a white paper is to do the writing and graphics in-house,"
says Habegger.
"It's not only the cheapest way, but the best when your paper is aimed at a
highly technical audience."
Naturally, the cost goes up if you hire a freelance writer.
"The next step up is a 'non-brand name' freelance technical writer or journalist.
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Depending on the expertise of the person and the length of the document, that can be anywhere
from a few thousand up to maybe $10,000."
Another source from TechTarget confirms that small- to medium-sized software firms can expect
to pay $3,000 to $5,000 for a white paper from an outside writer.
"Then you get to what I call 'brand-name' third parties, Aberdeen and people like that,
who do white papers for hire," says Habegger. "For them, the sky's the limit.
"I don't have their pricing sheets in front of me, but their entry cost
certainly starts in the teens and goes up from there."
"How much?" is usually followed by "How long?"
Again, it depends. How long do you have?
"You know, I've seen clients literally drag them out for yearsand I've seen stuff done overnight
in anticipation of some campaign," says Habegger.
"I would say a 'non-rush' time frame is probably two to three months, allowing for back and forth,
editsand final production."
This rings true with my experience.
And a "real-world" deadline that can't slip—for example,
tying your white paper release to a particular trade show—gives everyone a compelling deadline.
Let's say you've carefully followed this advice, created a bang-up white paper, syndicated it through TechTargetand generated a fistful of leads.
Now you can just hand those leads to the sales force to close, right?
Not so fast.
Tossing leads to sales prematurely is "one of the cardinal sins," Ramminger says.
"The worst thing that can happen is for the marketing department to hand a bunch of leads to a
sales team.
"If someone downloaded a white paper and are still trying to
understand what CRM is, they aren't ready to talk to a salesman.
"So if a salesman calls, it makes the prospect mad. And then the salesman says,
'The leads from these white papers are no good! These people don't want to talk to me!'
"That person probably still needs to be nurtured, not sold. It's important to work with that
prospect to make sure they're ready to move on from being a researcher or a prospector to
being a buyer."
So how do you nurture someone who isn't ready to buy?
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"One of the techniques we use with complex products is 'waterfall white papers,' " says Ramminger, "meaning different levels of information.
"So there's a white paper with the general
concepts, there's one with the next level of detailand so on."
Naturally, this cascading approach works best when each white paper is focused and specific.
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Using white papers strategically means evolving from old-fashioned "interruption marketing" to today's so-called "permission marketing."
Interruption marketing means making cold calls, banging on doorsand phoning people
while they're eating dinner, all in the vague hope that somebody out there must be interested
in what you're selling.
Permission marketing, on the other hand, means engaging a prospect in a kind of dialog-on-demand,
building their trust by sending them helpful information when they request itand drawing them
into your sales funnel at the pace they want to come.
"The biggest thing is to establish that a person is willing to accept content from you,
and then to send them content regularly," says Ramminger.
"And always give them the opportunity
to raise their hand and say, 'Could somebody call me about this?'"
That's when you call in the sales forceand not before.
Until then, white papers can help build your credibility without hypeand explain your
technology without selling.
This approach calls for great patience and restraint.
But using white papers this way can pay off
in a steady crop of great leads that blossom into happy customers in the proper season.
Copyright © Computing Technology Industry Association, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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