You spent a lot of time and effort to create a new whitepaper. Assuming the goal of a whitepaper is to build thought leadership and help drive sales velocity, would you put a big fence in front of it and force people to provide a bunch of information that isn’t needed at this stage? How many people would just skip it and move along?
If the goal of a whitepaper is to build thought leadership shouldn’t you make it easy for people to read it and share it?
Running the whitepaper gauntlet
I know why you put a registration form in front of your whitepaper. You think that visitors will place so much value on what you published they will gladly hand over their contact information. And you will assume those are leads.
Now that’s funny.
I also know what happens next. Those “leads” you hand over to your sales team are ripped to shreds as being worthless.
Ditch the registration form
Do yourself a favor and remove the registration form. Let as many people as possible download and read it. If it’s good they’ll pass it along to other people. Hopefully that will prompt some of them to contact your company to learn about how you can solve their problem. If you’re not giving away state secrets there’s little risk. And if you’re worried your competitors will get it, fear not. They’ll get it using the same means you would if you wanted a copy of a competitor’s whitepaper.
Learn from a bad example
I’m going to call out TradePub.com because they are doing exactly what you shouldn’t be doing. It’s obvious that this document is probably not a whitepaper. It’s marketing collateral printed on white paper. Enjoy…
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