Imagine you’re a salesperson, and you’ve convinced a C-level exec to pay attention to your solution’s business benefits. Now that person is calling in the techies for due diligence on your claims—and you know your sale depends on your credibility. Further, you know you don’t have the technical chops to go toe-to-toe with these engineers, but you also know you’ll need their buy-in and endorsement to close.
Enter the technical white paper.
Technical white papers are often cited by business people as one of the most credible sources of vendor information. They are consistently ranked within the top five media types for evaluating technology purchases, and there is strong evidence they may be potential customers’ most popular form of B2B collateral
But they need to be done right. In order to make a technical white paper effective, you need to do five things:
1. Be truly educational.
The best white papers do a real service for readers by educating them about the newest technologies. Readers of technical white papers are looking to learn and be informed by unbiased information from subject matter experts. Engineers appreciate products being explained in technical terms without vague claims or exaggeration—what they sneer at as “marketing fluff.”
2. Make your case clearly—and back up claims with multiple sources.
All too often, technical white papers can end up being a series of disconnected technical snippets. To make your case, stake out specific claims about your solution—for example, that it’s more powerful than previous versions. Then back up each claim with convincing proof points. For a performance claim, the proof can be as simple as a processor speed or number of processing cores. Other types of proof points might include benchmarks or test results that you or your customers have discovered.
Then use third-party information to further back up your claims. The more third-party information you can reference, the more credible your white paper will be. And don’t forget the footnotes. Some readers will judge your credibility by the number of references in your paper.
3. Lose the hyperbole.
The solution offers breakthrough performance and unprecedented cost efficiency.
That may be true, but technical readers’ eyes will immediately glaze over when they see adjectives like “breakthrough” and “unprecedented.” Worse, they may feel they’ve been misled into reading what amounts to an advertisement. Such material actually has a negative impact because it erodes your credibility. It’s much better to make your case about high performance and cost efficiency by presenting the factual evidence and trusting readers to reach the right conclusions.
4. Set the right academic tone.
Understand the difference in tone between a marketing white paper and a technical white paper. A marketing paper typically addresses the reader directly: Make the most of your resources with the xyz solution. A technical white paper uses the third person: Organizations can make the most of their resources with the xyz solution.
Using the third person communicates impartiality and sets a tone of calm, scholarly consideration. The reader feels free to evaluate your information without pressure—it’s as if the salesperson has left the room. A technical paper also employs the active voice whenever possible: “Next, the administrator uploads the software,” not “the software is uploaded.” Using the active voice will help maintain the technical reader’s interest.
5. Use all the space you need.
While too much technical detail can kill your deal at the C-level, providing too little technical information is a huge mistake once the handoff to IT occurs. If you need more information (charts, diagrams, sidebars, or text) to fully explain something complicated, by all means include it. There are no set rules for what is an acceptable length for a technical white paper.
But do be careful about focusing on meaningful differentiators. For example, if your solution is all about raw performance, you probably don’t need those extra three pages explaining the subtle nuances of configuration options.
So let’s review. Technical white papers should always:
1) Be educational.
2) Make the case clearly, with strong proof.
3) Avoid hyperbole.
4) Use an academic, impartial tone (and making sure the paper is well written goes without saying, right?).
5) Be complete, but remain focused. (Reminds me of the famous John Wooden quote, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”)
TDA has followed these guidelines for more than two decades, and they’ve helped us earn our reputation for producing effective technical white papers. We continue to see these papers provide tremendous support during the sales cycle because they help prospects understand how and why complex products deliver their promised value. When prospects understand how things work, they become more comfortable with new concepts, and comfort is prerequisite for purchase.
