And Why It’s Not about Your Wonderful Qualities as a Human Being

I don’t mean to suggest that your customers don’t care about your fundamental decency, professionalism, and your devotion to your local community. However, each of those qualities is necessary, but not sufficient for someone to do business with you. Ultimately, your personal brand reflects your unique ability to help your ideal customers succeed.

A few weeks ago I had a phone conversation with a former colleague who had invested a significant amount of money with a company whose assignment was to shape his personal brand. To show off the results of the exercise, he pointed me to his brand-new website which highlighted his passion for financial planning and his devotion to his local Midwest community. Since I’ve known him for years, I know that this accurately reflects the kind of guy he is. But if I had been a customer going to his website in search of solutions, my initial reaction would’ve almost certainly have been, “So what?”

Remember visitors to your blog or to your website are looking for answers to problems. They are not looking to evaluate you as a person until they are darned sure that you and your organization can provide solutions to the problems that drove them to your website in the first place.

Therefore, your personal brand should focus on your unique capability of solving the problems of those future customers that you have defined as your perfect target market. A meaningful personal brand would seem almost impossible unless it reflects your ability to deliver uniquely powerful solutions for your customers.

If you visit the website of ThatWhitePaperGuy, you won’t read any verbiage about what a great guy he is or how passionate he is about white papers. Instead, he gets right to the point by asking rhetorical questions that qualify the visitor and then demonstrates that he understands their needs and can solve their problems by creating effective white papers. Here’s the core of his homepage message:

Put the power of white papers to work for your firm!

Special reports… executive briefings… product backgrounders… 

Whatever you call them, these fact-based documents generate leads and build mindshare… if they’re done right.

If you’re a B2B marketing manager looking for a white paper writer, you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve worked on 120+ white papers for companies like Google, Rackspace and Oracle… plus many smaller firms with big ideas.

So when you’re ready to talk about your next white paper, call me at +1 (705) 842-2428 Eastern, or e-mailGordon@ThatWhitePaperGuy.com

Only after we have convinced ourselves that he can solve our problems relating to white papers will we care whether he’s the kind of person we want to work with. His personal brand is all about being a white paper expert and has nothing to do with being a passionate, community-oriented professional.

Prospective customers don’t care about us. They care about how we can help them.

Perhaps, the word ‘personal’ gets us into trouble when we attach it to the word ‘ brand.’  ‘Personal’ simply means that the brand relates to you as an individual. But the all important ‘brand’ component means it’s all about what you can do to solve your customers’ problems.

When you make it obvious to your customers how you can help them, you will grow your revenues.

Some of the smartest people I know run very small companies in the business-to-business market.  They are dedicated to helping their customers succeed.  In one-on-one discussions with customers and prospects, they make it clear how they can help.  That’s terrific.  And it generates sales.  But it’s just a start.

I am convinced that white papers–and their first cousins, e-books– can extend that in-person knowledge sharing and trust building to the entire world.  A great example is a compelling white paper from The Result Source, called, Cold-Calling 2.0: The Next Generation of Prospecting.

The Result Source, is a small company based in Toronto, Canada that works closely with businesses who need to generate leads which will translate directly into revenue.  Its owner, Marguerite McLeod-Fleming, is a veteran of IBM and other large sophisticated organizations.  She is able to apply her understanding of the importance of process to lead generation for small organizations.

What Cold-Calling 2.0 does so well is to explode the myth that cold calling doesn’t work anymore while demonstrating a repeatable process that will generate sales cost effectively.

Her white paper begins with a compelling Executive Summary:

Let’s face it. Cold-Calling has gotten a bad rap.

If you still think of cold-calling as an ineffective waste of time, phone spam or money down the drain, then this paper is for you. In fact, many “experts” have said that cold-calling is dead. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of cold-calling are GREATLY exaggerated.

You will learn in this paper why, despite the lingering myth that cold-calling is dead, it still works. And we will show you here why it is still one of the most effective ways of generating new business. We will prove it with examples of companies that have successfully implemented
cold-calling — known as teleprospecting — and yielded incredible results.

We will discuss the difference between cold-calling in the past, and how companies are using cold-calling today as a strategic form of prospecting to open new markets and to generate exponential sales results.

Marguerite then proceeds to make the case for a new generation of cold calling.  Although I am generalizing from my own experience, her white paper stood out among a half-dozen potential vendors of telemarketing services that I was evaluating for a client.  Not only did the white paper give me a high level of confidence in her organization’s capabilities, but it taught me a lot about how companies need manage the entire process of lead generation.

In fact, this white paper follows the golden rule of content marketing: Provide a ton of compelling content that is so valuable that your prospects might normally expect to pay for it.  If your company was large enough or if you have enough discipline, you could probably do what this white paper describes.  But, most of us realize that we must count on skilled professionals to achieve the results that are described in Cold-Calling 2.0

The Result Source whitepaper demonstrates that the company is chock full of the kind of big ideas that will bring immediate and obvious benefit to its customers.  It sure looks like Marguerite invested a significant amount of money in producing this information product.  But, from my perspective, that investment really delivers content marketing value that will, in turn, deliver a measurable ROI.

Be sure to check out Cold-Calling 2.0.  It will provide an excellent model for white papers that you may want to produce.  And, it may also convince you that a new generation of cold calling, in general, and The Result Source, in particular, may offer solutions to your lead generation challenges.

A guest post from White paper expert Gordon Graham

If you are selling a technical or otherwise complex product, white papers can be one of your single most successful content marketing tools.  But that’s only if you strip out the hype. So pay careful attention to what Gordon has to say below.

Why you must seek out and destroy hype

by Gordon Graham, That White Paper Guy

While every company is unique, a lot of white papers share the same problems. How can I put this delicately?

Many white papers suffer from an over-abundance of wishful thinking, unattributed factoids, vacuous logic, and good old-fashioned hype.

And there’s no place where hype is less welcome than in your next white paper.

Hype just doesn’t work for skeptical IT managers, cynical journalists, or cautious analysts. Hype is especially inappropriate in a white paper, where readers are looking for precise technical background and real-world business benefits. If you give them hype, you can likely kiss your good name goodbye.

That’s why I believe one of the top priorities for any white paper writer must be to seek out and destroy hype.

But what is hype, and how do we recognize it?

Hype is short for “hyperbole.” From the ancient Greek, this literally means “excess” and “to throw over.” Think “over the top” and you’re on the right track.

• Hype appears in many guises:
  overblown claims
• extravagant exaggerations
• over-excited tone
• excessive punctuation, à la Tom Wolfe!!!

As one of my colleagues says, “Nothing screams hype like an exclamation mark!”

Here are some examples that should have your own personal “hype detector” sounding a red alert:

▶ “Our best-selling network analyzer…”

from a company that only sells two different network analyzers.

▶ “A vast majority of IT managers prefer commercial software over Open Source.”

But where is the actual statistic, the survey methodology, and the name of the study’s sponsor? Could this research possibly be sponsored by some company that perceives Open Source as a major competitive threat?

▶ “Now shipping! Our most comprehensive update ever! Complete with 99 new and improved features!”

But does that number include the long-advertised features that for the first work properly because you finally got around to fixing the bugs?

If hype is so unpersuasive, why is it so common?

I believe that most hype springs from two sources: inexperience and arrogance.

Inexperience is perhaps excusable in a new writer doing his or her first-ever white paper. An unseasoned writer will most likely ask what an engineer or manager thinks and simply drop whatever they say into their document.

With no objective outsider to challenge any basic assumptions, a white paper can get caught in an endless loop of self-referential logic. This is where a seasoned editor can question these assumptions and find evidence to support them.

Arrogance is tougher to root out.

Many technology companies are driven by what the founders feel is a genuine technical breakthrough. They may spend years proselytizing for their technology. They naturally attract a team of people that parrot this belief.

For instance, Steve Jobs is notorious for his “Reality Distortion Field”: his total disregard for practical limitations or market forces as he pursues his latest inspiration.

In the extreme, this can develop into a form of “groupthink” where everyone assumes their technology is superior, with no need for any proof. This becomes an article of faith and a badge of loyalty.

But simply stating that something is so does not make it so… particularly for someone outside your company.

Making this point to your management or client may be painful. But you owe it to them (and to yourself) to challenge any articles of faith and groupthink, and be sure they don’t find their way into your white paper.

What’s the alternative to hype?

I believe that an effective white paper presents useful information in a persuasive context based on:

• concrete evidence
• inarguable facts
• impeccable figures
• comments from recognized experts
• stories from actual customers

Your goal should be to think like a lawyer and write like a journalist. Gather all the evidence you need to make your case, then write so clearly that no one can misunderstand what you’re saying.

If you do that, no hype will survive for long in your white paper.

To learn much more about writing effective white papers go to Gordon’s site, ThatWhitePaperGuy.com

]]> http://contentmarketingtoday.com/2008/09/26/whitepapers-hype-is-the-enemy-of-successful-content-marketing/feed/ 0