How to Turn a Good White Paper into a GREAT Lead Generation asset

Posted by Jeff Ogden on September 20, 2011

B2B Lead Generation: Is a White Paper just great content or a great lead generation tool. What’s the difference?

In this post, we explain how to turn that great new white paper you just published into a superb lead generation tool — using the best-practice approach of one of our favorite companies, Kinaxis.

Do you want a trickle of leads or a flood? What are current best practices on white paper marketing?

Our white paper experience

We’ve penned 3 great white papers to date - all are free at Find New Customers.

Lead generation - How to Find New Customers (Marketo)
B2B sales - Definitive Guide to Making Quota (self) and
Email marketing - Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email Marketing (Genius.com)

- so we know lots about this topic.

To illustrate, let’s look at an example of how to turn a nice white paper into a great lead generation program:

We craft a great white paper, like our highly acclaimed white paper on B2b lead generation How to Find New Customers, sponsored by Marketo. Then what do you do with it?

How to Find New Customers

You post it. You tweet about it. You blog about it. What happens?

A handful of leads trickle in and you get some decent leads.

Is there a better way? There sure is.

In fact, the company that was awarded the BtoB Marketing Idea of the Year award from Find New Customers uses this best practices approach.

Let’s look at the Kinaxis best practices approach. Use your keywords and everything points to the landing page:

Write and post the white paper to a landing page, then do these five additional things:

Record and post a video interview of the author (YouTube)
Record and post an audio summary with the author (iTunes)
Commission a transcript of the video interview (blog articles)
Build a slide presentations with audio from the author (SlideShare)
Produce multiple small bite-sized summaries, like our new cheat sheet 7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing (Content marketing)

Post that content everywhere - such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Docstoc, Slideshare, etc. — each with a Call to Action for the landing page. (Like an offer.)

Use this approach with your next white paper and watch that trickle turn into a fast flowing stream of leads.

Do you have other tips on how to market a white paper? We love your comments (and respond to every one) and appreciate those who share.

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Jeff Ogden (@fearlesscomp) is President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers. Find New Customers helps companies dramatically improve revenue results by transforming how they attract, engage and win new customers. Contact Find New Customers by calling (516) 495-9350 or sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com.

Why Sales needs Content Marketing and Marketing Automation

Posted by Jeff Ogden on September 20, 2011

B2B Demand Generation | The Benefit to Sales

If you’re in BtoB Sales, you may be thinking that this great content stuff and demand generation talk belongs in marketing. After all, you need to close deals! “This mumbo-jumbo’s not for me. I need to be out there talking to prospective customers.”

I think the problem is us. We’ve been talking about the marketing point of view for a long time. Now let’s talk about your world in Sales.

Let’s examine a Sales scenario to illustrate the power of content marketing and marketing automation software. The point we want to make clear is this:

The primary beneficiary of content marketing and marketing automation is Sales.

Sales Scenario 1: Without content marketing and marketing automation

Sally Smith, a Sales rep for us, calls target customer and leaves a message. Sally waits a few days and leaves another voice-mail message. Sally sends an email. After a few weeks, after more voice-mails and e-mails - with no response, Sally gives up.

Sales Scenario 2: With content marketing and marketing automation

Sally calls prospect and leaves a message. Prospect visits website and checks out the company. Though he did not fill out a form, Sally knows who it is and edits the anonymous visitor record with the contact name and company.

Seeing what the prospect did, Sally calls again and leaves a personalized message. Prospect visits again and downloads a white paper - completing a form. (And since she edited the record, both visits are captured. The prospect is automatically added into lead nurturing - and valuable information is shared over time. Because we’ve implemented lead scoring we’re able us to see exactly when they are sales-ready - ready to talk to Sales.

45 days later, Sally is notified that she has a new lead. She calls the prospect and the prospect answers. “Sally, great to hear from you. I’ve been getting so much great information from your company and I’m convinced you can help me. I look forward to meeting you.”

I hope you can now see how content marketing and marketing automation actually benefits Sales.

If you’re in B2B Sales and you feel you’re not getting the quality leads you really need, please share this post with your Vice President of Sales.

What do you think? We love comments and those who share. And we’re proud to be syndicated by many services like CustomerCollective, B2C, and many others.

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Jeff Ogden (@fearlesscomp) is the President of the B2B lead generation consultancy Find New Customers. Find New Customers helps companies dramatically improve revenue results by transforming the way they attract, engage and win new customers. Contact Find New Customers by calling (516) 495-9350 or sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com.

“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.

3 Reasons Qlikview is killing Microstrategy

Posted by Jeff Ogden on September 20, 2011

B2B Demand Generation | Why an upstart is killing the incumbent

I recently met with Microstrategy and their marketing leadership expressed concerns about a new competitor, Qlikview. I thought it might be helpful if I analyzed the justification for their concerns.

Microstrategy is a big, established player in business intelligence, but lately a company called Qlikview has been growing much, much faster. Why is this happening?

I believe there are 3 reasons why this is happening:

Qlikview has no internal challenges.
Microstrategy has an in-house developed CRM, (no compatibility with other applications), no marketing automation and no content marketing. Building B2B demand generation from scratch is tough. Qlikview had none of those obstacles.
Qlikview has savvy, aggressive marketing leadership.Microstrategy does not. While they have new marketing leadership, not much seems to be happening there.Qlikview won the Marketo Revenue Performance Excellence Award for Global Revenue Performance Excellence. They are also expanding globally very quickly.(Here is the definition of Most Successful Global RPM Execution):Honors an organization with successful Marketo implementations across multiple countries or regions, as well as unprecedented results within those deployments, including increased revenue, marketing ROI, global alignment and overall business impact.)
Qlikview is a modern marketing firm
They are big into B2B demand generation, including social, content marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, etc. Microstrategy is doing none of those to any degree that I can see.

What do you think? Why do you think savvy young companies damage established players so much? We love comments and those who share.

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“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.