WHITE PAPERS SUCK. How Companies Sabotage Their Sales When Marketing Technology to Call Centers (And How You Can Avoid That Fate) by Michael Schein

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1 WHITE PAPERS SUCK How Companies Sabotage Their Sales When Marketing Technology to Call Centers (And How You Can Avoid That Fate) by Michael Schein Michael Schein Phone: ext

2 Why White Papers Suck If you sell technology to call centers, brace yourself for some bad news. Your business is probably dying a long, slow death. Worse, you don t even know it. And what is the name of the virus that s causing your livelihood to rot from the inside? White papers. What is the name of the virus that s causing your livelihood to rot from the inside?... White papers. Dull and obvious - a double whammy. Almost every company I come across in the enterprise telecom, telephony, CRM, workforce management, and quality assurance industries relies on white papers as a main part of their marketing. They re all making a big mistake. At one time, white papers may have worked. Times change. White papers are long. They re dense, boring, and hard to get through. You don t like reading them. Yet you continue to produce them and expect them to generate new business. But, you re saying right about now, My product is complicated. It s not an impulse buy. People need to research my product. White papers let them do that. That might have been true ten years ago when most white papers really were unbiased, academic articles. But now everyone knows that white papers exist solely to sell products. Dull and obvious a double whammy. If your company is associating itself with these overused, ineffective sales pieces, it s only a matter of time before your sales pipeline shrinks into nothingness. Am I telling you to stop producing educational content? Not at all. Especially if you re selling big ticket, high tech products. But just because everyone else is using white papers, doesn t mean you need to too. In fact, that s exactly the reason why you shouldn t. Read on to find out about a much better approach Michael Schein

3 A Brief History of White Papers and How They Went Sour White papers were originally a big hit for enterprise technology companies because call center decision makers perceived that they helped them out-learn and out-innovate their competition. But lately white paper marketing has become a victim of its own success. Eventually just about every enterprise technology company jumped on the white paper bandwagon. The drop in quality from the first white papers to the most recent has been astonishingly steep. And the worst white papers have poisoned the reputation of all the rest. Executives I know run for cover when they catch wind of a white paper launch. They don t want to have to deal with a thinly disguised sales tactic. They don t want to wade through boring, time-wasting technical jargon. It s a fact that executives view white papers negatively. Do you really want your company to be associated with them? Michael Schein

4 How to Stop Turning Prospects Off (and Get Them to Notice You) It s not about you. Make your prospects lives easier. Concentrate on making them more money or saving them more time. That s what far too many white papers miss. Call center executives are under constant pressure to fix problems fast. So when they download an educational document and end up with an obvious pitch for your specific solution, they hate it. Executives want to be able to trust the information they re getting. If you re sending out these sorts of marketing pieces Stop! You re probably not aware of how many sales they re costing you. Jim Ferrato, CIO of call center outsourcing firm Protocol Global Solutions, recently told me what s valuable to him in material sent to him by technology firms. They provide a deeper dive into a problem we re trying to address...so [they re] much more relevancy driven than marketing driven. 1 It s not about you. Make your prospects lives easier. Concentrate on making them more money or saving them more time. That s what far too many white papers miss. Great Marketing Isn t Easy So if white papers are poisonous, what kind of marketing content should you be producing? Educational. Conversational. Continual. Is it easy? No it takes a whole lot of work. Lots of companies create only a few pieces a year. But to build a high quality sales pipeline for technology that ranges from tens of thousands to millions of dollars, that doesn t cut it. Of course, you want some percentage of your readers to eventually mail you a check. But your goal should not be to drive an immediate purchase. Your content should show how a company s unaddressed problems are harming their business. And it should paint you as the expert with the answers. That takes a lot of research, constant writing, and regular publishing Michael Schein

5 How Great Material Can Still Hurt Your Business I was chatting not too long ago with LiveVox CMO John McNamara. John loves his in-house marketing communications team. Yet he s frustrated by how giving even one employee the task of creating effective education-based content holds back the rest of his marketing efforts. If I were able to [free up my in-house content creator], John said, I d probably use [him] to manage some video production... take some of that content and turn it into video demos...take the content on the road in the form of webinars. 2 And that s just the tip of the iceberg. Creating good educational marketing content is resource intensive. The number of projects a company s on-site team can work on at one time is limited. It s hard to regularly produce the full range of content needed to position your company as an industry leader when your creative team s bandwidth is maxed out Michael Schein

6 Expanding Your Marketing Is Expensive Of course you can always hire someone new to help. But bringing someone on in-house every time you think it s a good time to expand your marketing is expensive. And not just in the most obvious ways. Take a look below to see the real cost of hiring a new in-house marketing content creator. The average salary of a marketing content creator is $55,000 per year. 3 Assuming a 2,080 hour work year (40 hours x 52 weeks), this amounts to $26.44/hour Paid Days Off Vacation days: Paid time off for vacations is, on average, 14 days Sick/Personal Days: 3 paid days off for illness or other personal reasons is common Holidays: There are usually around 7 paid holidays in any given year Total Cost of Paid Days Off = 24 days x 8 hours (standard work day) x $26.44 = $5,076 Overhead For an employee earning $55,000/year, a company s combined Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Taxes and Workers Compensation expense would be about $5, In-house marketing content creators also need the following: Computer average $1,000 Phone (with voic and LAN upgrades) average $300 Software/research resources/misc. technical costs average $1,550 Cubicle plus an amortized portion of lease/real estate space average $2,000 Total overhead cost = $10,460 Benefits While some companies are more generous with benefits than others, it is difficult to attract competent employees without contributing at least the bare minimum. A typical scenario: Health insurance contribution: $2, (k) contribution: $1,650 Total benefits cost = $3,650 5 Average total cost of one new in-house copywriter: $55,000 + $5,076 + $10,460 + $3, Michael Schein = $74,186 per year

7 Risk is the reason so many marketers, executives, and owners put off new marketing projects. And the more creative it is, the riskier it seems. Creative Content Is Risky If every new marketing program were guaranteed to create profits, each new full time employee might be worth the expense. Unfortunately, there s always a chance a new idea won t work. When you hire an in-house content creator for every fresh marketing concept, your company absorbs the risk. And firing someone every time an idea doesn t go as planned is tough. Financially, emotionally, and sometimes even legally. Risk is the reason so many marketers, executives, and owners put off new marketing projects. And the more creative it is, the riskier it seems. That s true even if they have a hunch that their latest concept could take their company s sales, brand image, and market share into the stratosphere. Just Hiring a Freelance Writer Isn t the Answer Either Bringing on full time employees to handle content marketing expansion has its problems. But hiring freelancers usually fails as well. Freelancers don t expect and aren t entitled to permanent payroll benefits. But modern call centers are complex. There aren t many top-notch writers that have a background in this field. Most would greet terms like CSAT, AHT, PBX, ACD, switches, trunks, or routing with a blank stare. John McNamara from LiveVox touched on this when talking to me about his own past reluctance to hire a freelancer. It s not really dollar cost. It s the opportunity cost of trying to bring somebody else up to speed. And don t forget that your full time (and often highly paid) employees have to spend a lot of their own time teaching unknowledgeable freelancers your business. That can get real expensive Michael Schein

8 The Solution Don t be afraid to show that a human being wrote your piece. It s okay to inject your personality and opinions. Embrace two very important words you and I. So if white paper marketing is busted, how do you create the kind of content that works? Keep It Personal Textbooks and instructional manuals have never managed to hold my interest. Yet people keep writing high-tech marketing materials that sound like PhD dissertations. Many marketers feel that academic language makes a marketing piece sound unbiased. It s a ploy that decision makers figured out long ago. All formal language does now is make readers hit delete. Don t be afraid to show that a human being wrote your piece. It s okay to inject your personality and opinions. Embrace two very important words you and I. Everyone knows that educational marketing pieces are sales material. So ditch the ruse. Instead, write something that won t put people to sleep while you re teaching them something valuable. Your bottom line will thank you for it. Try a Different Name Set yourself apart right on the cover page. Definitely don t call your piece a white paper. Name it something that holds the promise of removing the pain your readers are experiencing as a result of not getting their business problems solved. The best title for your piece depends on the specific market you re targeting and the method you plan to use to distribute it. So make sure you test. Before the full launch, send out the same marketing piece with multiple titles to a few different audiences. Keep track of which one gets the best open rate. That s the title you should use. Draw a Line in the Sand Scan a few of the white papers clogging your inbox. I bet very few of them take firm positions. Writing without a strong opinion is dangerously close to having nothing to say. Milquetoast gets overlooked. And deleted Michael Schein

9 Take a stand on an issue or trend that affects the industry! You might turn some people off. That s okay. You re not trying to appeal to everybody. In fact, you re trying to draw a line in the sand. People who disagree with your position won t call you. Great! You want to identify decision makers who are open to unique ideas. Those are the prospects that will respect your gutsiness and ultimately buy your products. Take Advantage of High Authority Sites Now I m going to tell you something I bet you don t hear every day. You re lucky you re selling to call centers. The call center industry has some of the best trade websites around. They re full of valuable content and have great reputations. This is a gift to content marketers. Call center executives responsible for IT decisions trust the advice they read on these sites. They visit them regularly. Find out which websites your prospects rely on. Make sure your material shows up there. If your pieces provide new perspectives on common problems in a compelling way, visitors will forward them to their colleagues. Before you know it, your message and product will go viral. Help + Strategy = Marketing Success Swamped internal marketing teams have a hard time regularly producing fresh, industry-specific educational content. Strategically hiring an independent content creator can help. But how can you do this without wasting time and money? Hire an independent content creator on an as-needed basis rather than full time. This lets your marketing department more efficiently manage its budget and avoid paying for expensive overhead costs. It also frees your in-house teams to concentrate on new, creative projects designed to expand your pipeline. But what does the right independent content creator really look like? When you hire a freelance copywriter who doesn t know what buttons to push to get call centers to buy technology, you lose the benefits of outsourcing. It takes a lot of work getting a generalist up to speed. It s better to find someone who is call center industry insider as well as a creative content marketer. Because when you re selling a product that s as complicated or expensive as yours, you can t afford to have marketing material that sucks Michael Schein

10 About Michael Schein Michael Schein is a marketing communications firm that specializes in creative content for the telecom, telephony, CRM, BPO, call center, and customer management industries. As Vice President of Solution Development at a leading call center outsourcing company, Michael Schein gained deep insight into the problems, concerns, and thought processes of decision makers in all aspects of teleservices and telecommunications. He now brings this knowledge to his own practice. Mr. Schein is also a MacMillan published author. Clients of Michael Schein receive the benefit of a highly effective marketer, writer, and seasoned call center industry insider in one. You can reach us at ext. 801 or via at info@scheincommunications.com. Or check us out online at 1 Ferrato, Jim. Personal Interview. 25 January McNamara, John. Personal Interview. 26 January Copywriter Salary. Retrieved from Indeed: 4 Berlin, R. (2011). What Are Payroll Taxes? Retrieved from 5 Hadzima, J. (2005) Retrieved from Boston Business Journal: much-does-an-employee-cost.html Michael Schein

11 Michael Schein Phone: ext Michael Schein Michael Schein