In Part 2 of this three-part series, we’ll look at whitepapers, explaining the benefits these bring to your sales team.
Let’s Take a Look at Whitepapers
A whitepaper is one of the next required follow-up documents to a case study from the sales process perspective, and could be one of the first sources of technical information from a system design perspective.
The whitepaper is far less of a colorful, image-filled two-page case study document that a sales team might use to explain a concept at a high level, often toward the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Rather, this is a technical document, often tens of pages in length that can explain in detail how a technology works and how it can be used to address a problem. It is a source of information that is critical for technical sales teams and bridges the information gap in many cases for system design teams, specifiers, and engineers.
Let’s take our example from Part 1 of this series where a business owner was trying to determine as early as possible when a vehicle pulled up to the front entrance gate. The case study explained the concept of using a gate solution at the entrance to a facility to solve the challenge, however, it didn’t really explain in technical terms how the gate system works and integrates to other systems like video analytics or access control to create an overall solution.
Once armed with a whitepaper related to the solution from a manufacturer, the system integrator’s design team can dig deeper into the information and explore the technical aspects of the equipment and software required to deploy the solution.
Likewise, the business owner’s internal technical stakeholders, like facilities and IT, can use the information outlined in a whitepaper written by a systems integrator to verify that the solution is the right fit for their operational processes and technology infrastructure.
From an online education perspective, a whitepaper can be used by a marketing team as part of a blog or ongoing campaign. For example, the blog post can act as a challenge-to-solution teaser. At the end of the blog may be links to a few different additional resources including the complete case study as well as a link to the related technical whitepaper. This allows a team to look to one topic-focused blog page to get the relevant additional information they need to make a good decision and move the idea or project to the next step.
Need Professional Assistance?
Hire Vector Firm to identify, research, and write your next technical whitepaper. Our team will apply all the key aspects of the project presented in the case study to write the technical whitepaper that propels the project to the next stage in a manner that resonates with your technical target prospects.
