About this white paper
The purpose of this white paper is to give you a strategic understanding of how a ZATZ Custom Magazine could help you improve your bottom line and "sharpen the saw," a concept the Stephen Covey used to describe doing those tasks that were critical for long-term success.
In this white paper, we talk about how a ZATZ Custom Magazine could help you sell into the enterprise if you’re currently selling to consumers. This is just an example. You could easily use your own ZATZ Custom Magazine to enter any new market area, and to help you educate and inspire your prospects, turning them into customers for life.
|
The marketing arsenal
Without a doubt, the two most important weapons in a sales person's arsenal are his product and his own sales skills. Continuing the military analogy, the role of marketing then (as compared to sales), is threefold:
- To determine strategically what new ground is to be taken (what markets to go after),
- To locate and identify targets of opportunity (in other words, create sales leads), and
- To create new tactical weapons (marketing tools like brochures, ads, and so forth).
Once a commitment is made to attack a new market, your front-line troops must be given the best possible weapons. In real warfare, troops fighting in arctic terrain need to be equipped far differently than those fighting a jungle battle. The same is true in business. The tools that are most effective when selling to consumers may not be the most effective when selling to the enterprise. You may need new and different weapons.
 When you're selling to consumers, traditional advertising can work wonders. But when you're selling into the enterprise (or moving into any new market area), you're no longer selling to one individual. Instead, a single large sale often depends on convincing an entire management team (including a regiment of influencers not directly reachable by your sales team) that your solution is viable, cost-effective, and beneficial.
Advertising, trade shows, and word-of-mouth can get you leads. Brochures and flyers can outline features and benefits. A sales team can pitch, handle objections, and make deals. But when it comes to outfitting an entire enterprise your solutions, only the customer can decide when the time is right. And we can help the customer make the right decision.
Helping inspire prospects
That's where your own ZATZ Custom Magazine becomes your secret weapon.
Our job, when we create a custom magazine, is to inspire your prospects; to show them, using examples they can viscerally identify with, exactly how your solutions can help their business, solve their problems, save them money, and make them shine.
"Our job is to inspire your prospects, to show them what’s possible, and to build credibility."
|
You see, we can show your prospects what's possible. We work with real, live customers who've had success with your products and services and those customers then tell their stories. In effect, we're helping your existing customers inspire your future customers.
And that leads us to our next job: build credibility.
When one of your prospects reads your ZATZ Custom Magazine, they can see solutions in use, in action, and benefiting real people. For example, in PalmPower's Enterprise Edition, we wanted to know if Palm handhelds could be used to help solve old-fashioned data collection problems. In our December issue, we told the story of Stimson Lane Vineyards, where Palm devices paid for themselves within ten weeks.
Stories like this in your ZATZ Custom Magazine make it much easier for your prospects to get a real, hands-on, understanding of the benefits of your products and services. These articles go a long way to drive influencers to recommend your solutions and decision makers to approve their purchase.
The ZATZ Custom Magazine editorial process
In each issue of your custom magazine, we'll present four or more articles that showcase your solutions, explain what you need explained, help inspire your prospects, and help make your aftermarket suppliers more successful and effective.
Each month, as part of our editorial process, our editors talk with your business development managers (if they want to make themselves available) to be sure we're covering topics that will help you meet your business challenges.
Each issue, we'll feature an aspect of your strategy, providing in-depth coverage geared toward helping you make a strong business case to prospects. Some of the major market segments we've examined in our magazines include sales force automation, mobile office solutions, field service, legal, and medical.
Usually, there are three or four articles devoted to the market segment featured in a given issue. What's incredibly valuable is that those articles are always available to anyone who can get to the Web. For example, if you're trying to sell a sales force automation solution, there might be four articles immediately available online in our November issue. Trying to sell to a huge law firm? Visit our February issue and you'll be able to go to town (and to court). Got a hospital you're trying to convince? Our March issue is just what the doctor ordered.
The business value of your ZATZ Custom Magazine
Let's look at the business value of a ZATZ Custom Magazine. To return to our military analogy, funding a simple Web site might be likened to throwing a few bucks at a local militia, hoping that it might stir things up a bit. Whereas, funding your own ZATZ Custom Magazine is much more like contracting with a hard-core defense contractor to develop a strategic weapons system that can be deployed with pinpoint accuracy (but without the politics and at a very affordable cost).
So, while the uninitiated might easily confuse a ZATZ Custom Magazine with a regular magazine or Web site, it's a very different beast. In reality, what ZATZ Custom Magazines are designed to do from the very beginning is to provide extremely targeted, very tight on message, high-powered, credibility marketing to decision makers and influencers who need detailed, specific, and tangible ideas and solutions to help convince them to make the right decision and put your solutions into practice on a large scale.
We're using powerful marketing expertise, integrated with real journalism, to provide an intensely powerful teaching engine specifically targeted to your desired market segments.
We’ll have a great time creating this powerful weapon for to your team and you’ll be amazed at how powerful a ZATZ Custom Magazine can be!
|
|
