6 Lead Generation Strategies Using White Papers

It’s clear that white papers are a great way to open doors and make the sales process easier. At this point, you’re probably excited about using white papers. Once you have a quality white paper written, it`s time to use it to generate leads. Use these proven lead generation strategies to attract interest from qualified prospects.

Build an email list with your white paper.
Email marketing remains one of the most reliable ways to make sales. There`s just one problem: how do you get relevant prospects to sign up for your email list? There’s a simple solution: offer a free digital copy of your white paper to each person who signs up.

You can then reach out to each person who signs up for the white paper. Pro Tip: Experiment with different services such as the Hello Bar or SumoMe’s Scroll Box to increase the number of email signups on your website.

Introducing a new product to past customers.
How often have you heard the advice – which is absolutely true! – that selling to past customers than gain new ones? Yet many companies fail to make the most of this opportunity. Here’s how white papers help. Let’s say that you’re launching a new product and you think a few past customers would be interested.

How do you start the conversation? Offering a white paper to your past customers is a great move. Psychologically, you’re showing them that you can bring insight and knowledge to the table in addition to your products. This approach is especially helpful if the new product (e.g. a complex marketing application) requires significant background to understand.

Present a Seminar.
Delivering a presentation in front of a live audience remains an excellent way to build a business. How do you come up with what to say? Easy: adapt your white paper into a presentation!

How do you generate leads? On the last few minutes of the presentation – during the Q&A time – tell audience members how they can receive a white paper that summarizes the key points of the presentation. Pro Tip: Not sure where to present about your industry? Review the Association of Association Executives (http://associationexecutives.org/) website. There’s a conference and association for practically every industry category you can think of!

Present a Webinar.
Sometimes you can’t afford the time and effort required to present at a conference. Or maybe you just missed the deadline to submit your conference application.

Don’t’ worry – there’s another approach. You can give a web seminar (i.e. “webinar”) using tools like GoToWebinar. (https://www.gotomeeting.com/webinar/features) to your prospects based on the white paper’s content. For the best results, offer your white paper as a free download at the end of the webinar for those who email you to request it..

Following Up On Networking.
How do people make complex decisions when it comes to making major purchases? According to consulting expert Alan Weiss, referrals from a peer (e.g. one manager to another manager) are the top way to land high value business opportunities. Let’s say that you’re already proficient at networking and meeting new prospects.

How do you stay in touch without coming across as annoying? Add a step to your follow up process where you offer your white paper to prospects. Then, a week or two later, you can get in touch again to discuss the white paper’s findings. For this method to work effectively, it’s vital that you have a detailed white paper that speaks to the pressing needs of your market.

Enhance your Trade show Marketing.
Trade shows offer an interesting sales opportunity. On the one hand, you have the rare chance to meet with hundreds of potential buyers in one location! That’s hours of travel time and hassle saved. On the flip side, you may be seated right next to all of your competitors! That makes standing out from the crowd more difficult.

There’s a way through the noise by using white papers. Think about the tradeshow from your buyer’s point of view – they came here to stay informed about trends and share their insights with colleagues.

Listening to one more sales pitch doesn’t help them look good in front of their boss who paid to send them on the trip. What’s better? Coming back with a white paper – your white paper! – that provides valuable information about the industry.

What you need to know about lead Generation

Lead generation doesn’t matter for every business. Before you invest in lead generation, read on to find out if it is right for your company.

If you’re selling candy at the local convenience store, then you can aim for an immediate sale. Likewise if you sell other low price products like a $2 pen, your customers are ready to make a purchase right when they walk into your store.

If your business sells complex and high price products, it doesn’t make sense to ask for a sale right away. Instead, lead generation is the better way to go.

Let’s quickly define the term lead generation:

Lead generation is a method of “warming up” potential clients to your business and moving them on the path to eventually buying.

Contrast lead generation to retail sales at a store in your city. For most stores, you probably walk in and buy a magazine or chocolate bar and continue with your day. There’s not much of a “warm up” process in that case.

If you sell to businesses or offer high price services, lead generation becomes much more important. Why? Only a few prospects you encounter are ready to make a purchase right away.

What about all the other prospects that have a “passing interest” in your business? Perhaps they visit your website today on a quiet Friday afternoon, read about some of your products and then disappear. That “drive by” visitors could translate into a sale in a matter of weeks or months if you had a lead generation process in place.

Avoid these common Lead Generation mistakes.

No Lead Generation
If you have high prices products to sell, you can’t expect that many customers will be ready to make a purchase when they first meet you. Without lead generation, only “I need it right now!” prospects will convert to sales.

For everybody else? You’ll just have to pray that they remember you when they eventually decide to make a purchase.

No Lead Nurture Process
Let’s say that you are starting to generate leads. That’s an improvement. It’s not enough. Here’s a common scenario: a prospect receives a white paper from you as a gift for joining your email newsletter list.

What happens next? All too often, it’s radio silence… Until you decide to offer a sale or some other promotion. The missing step is a “nurture process” – a series of messages that build a connection between you and the prospect. Example: Prospect receives a white paper explaining the latest challenges in iPhone cyber-security problems.

The nurture process in this case could be a series of five pre-written emails that provide additional examples of cyber-security failures and explain how difficult these challenges are to solve.

The final message in the sequence would incite the prospect to your monthly cyber-security webinar (or to a sales call). By nurturing the lead over time with valuable communications, the lead will become more open to buying from you.

No Lead Generation Experimentation
In business, it’s easy to get stuck using the same method over and over again. If the method is generating sales, there’s some wisdom to using the tried and true. However, the marketplace doesn’t stand still.

Years ago, FAX marketing produced results until the authorities clamped down on that practice. Regulations and competitors are making different moves every day. That’s why you need to include experimentation in your lead generation.

For example, consider using A/B testing on your website to generate leads – test headline A (“Get A Free White Paper On…”) vs headline B (“CIOs – Read This Whitepaper to keep your iPhones secure…”).

Use the 80/20 rule for experimentation – 80% of the time, focus on proven strategies. For the remaining 20% of your time, experiment with different lead generation techniques. Resource: For an in-depth explanation of A/B Testing and how it can be used to increase sales, check out Nick Disabato’s book “The A/B Testing Manual.”

Build A Lead Generation Strategy.

Lead generation is a tested way to increase sales but only if you do it strategically. To create a lead generation strategy, you need to understand a few key facts about your business:

Customer Lifetime Value
Over a two year period, how much revenue does an average customer generate for your business? For example, if a typical customer makes three $10,000 purchases over that period, then they are worth $10,000. Resource: For additional guidance on understanding this importance metric, read How To Calculate Lifetime Value.

Cost Per Lead
How much money (or staff time which can be translated to money) is required to generate a qualified prospect? If it takes a week of full time sales effort to generate a lead for your consulting business, then your cost per lead may be well over $1,000.

Document Typical Sales Objections
Nearly every sales conversation involves objections. Your prospects express a doubt or concern about the product and it is your responsibility to address that. For example if you sell accounting software, a typical customer objection may be that the software may not meet the customer’s cyber-security requirements.

Document Your Sales Process
Using three recent sales as a reference, write a one page summary of the steps you go through with each sale. How many phone calls does it generally take? In the case of B2B sales, also take note of how many different people you have to meet during the sales process.

Questions to ask.

What lead generation processes does my business have in place?
At one end of the spectrum, you have a basic process like handing out a business card at a conference and “hoping” the prospect calls you. At the other end of the spectrum, you have content marketing assets like white papers and a fine-tuned nurture process.

Do I have a reliable process to communicate with prospects?
A reliable process means that you know approximately how long it takes to guide a lead from walking in the door to making a purchase. Remember that larger purchases typically take more time to build trust. In the airplane business, the sales process typically takes over a year from beginning to end.

If your sales staff are currently manually nurturing leads (e.g. calling them once a month), it is still important to have a systematic process in place. Ask your sales staff to track their engagement with prospects and report to you on a monthly basis on the success of their activities.

How can I earn permission to stay in touch with prospects over time?
Permission to stay in touch is important. Otherwise, your prospects may mark your messages as SPAM.

The best way to earn permission to stay in touch with prospects is to use a double opt-in email marketing system. Email marketing providers like ConvertKit, Aweber and MailChimp make this easy.

How to Generate Leads with White Papers

What’s the difference between selling $900,000 business software and a $0.99 iPhone App? One requires getting the attention of an executive in a company…

While the other requires a few taps of your fingers. If you’re in the business of selling complex, high price products and services – aircraft, enterprise technology, consulting to name a few – traditional, consumer oriented sales strategies will not work.

Ever wondered why? Let’s take you inside the buying process at a multi-billion dollar company. This example is based on a real bank that spends over $9 billion per year on suppliers and vendors of all kinds including multi-million dollar purchases with professional services firms and technology companies. This is how you generate leads with white papers.

Inside The Corporate Buying Process.
As a sales representation visiting Big Bank Inc, what’s the first thing you try? You might try looking up a prospect on LinkedIn and sending them a cold email (or call).

Unless you’re unusually well informed, you’ll probably get nowhere. Even worse, you might be told something like “Visit the procurement website: that’s where all our major purchases are done.”

You take the feedback in stride and check out the procurement website. Before you know it, you’re knee deep in “RFPs” (requests for proposals) that have endless requirements.

Big Bank Inc has eight people work on each procurement decision – a purchasing specialist, a technical subject matter expert, the end business user and more. With this kind of committee style buying process, you can expect to wait weeks or months to close a deal.

Why do companies –your potential buyers – have these complicated procedures? Why wouldn’t they just let you in to present your product?

It all comes down to one word: risk. In the corporate world, everyone is SCARED of killing their career by buying a million dollar software system only to have it fail. A procurement failure like that could set back your buyer`s career by years. Fortunately, you can soothe their fears by using white papers in your sales process.

The White Paper Solution.
How do white papers open new doors for complex sales? Let’s quickly define our terms. “A white paper is a persuasive document that usually describes problems and how to solve them.

The white paper is a crossbreed of a magazine article and a brochure. It takes the objective and educational approach of an article and weaves in persuasive corporate messages.” (from “Writing White Papers” by Michael A. Stelzner)

According to Stelzner’s research, over 80% of executives report that white papers are extremely helpful or helpful. Even more important – over half of executives state that white papers influence their buying decisions. White papers are highly popular and most heavily used in the technology sector.

However, they can be used in other areas where buyers are making complex or large budget decisions. In contrast to a presentation or visit from a sales representative, most prospects view white papers as non-threatening. If you’re tired of getting told no when you ask for an appointment, consider offering a white paper to your prospects instead.

2 Reasons To Market Your Business with White Papers.
Before you commission a white paper for your business, consider the following.

1) White Papers put Technical Stakeholders At Ease: Without a robust white paper, your sales effort may be defeated by the fear, uncertainty and doubt of a technical stakeholder.

2) White papers go where your sales team can’t: Getting your foot in the door at a large company is difficult. Assistants are told to keep away sales people like you. How do you get through the gate keepers? You need an insider to help you. When your white paper is read by one person inside a company, it may be shared to others. That peer recommendation opens new doors that would be difficult to open any other way. For this process to work, your white paper has to deliver highly valuable industry information and a subtle sales message.