Whitepaper and Thought Leadership Development Services

As a consultant, your clients must trust and value your expertise as an advisor or implementer. While claims, experience, and service offerings begin to communicate expertise, it is much more powerful to demonstrate expertise. The whitepaper can be a potent tool to this end.

As we think of them, whitepapers are objective examinations of business issues, strategies, and solutions that tell a particular story completely independent of the firm's promotional space. This means that the story and facts remain true and compelling regardless of an accompanied hard sell of consulting services. This gives the piece authority, simultaneously enabling executive clients and consultants to examine business issues in a deep and meaningful way.

Whitepapers and articles often form the basis of a thought leadership driven marketing strategy. As most consultancies strive to get deeper into their clients' decision processes and drive more value into a strategic relationship, the whitepaper is duly purposed as both a critical piece of sales collateral as well as a differentiator in the marketplace.

Challenges with whitepaper and thought leadership development

Whitepaper development is burdensome and challenging for most consulting organizations, even those brimming with smart and idea-rich consultants. For one, whitepapers are often technical and nuanced, putting them beyond the core competency of traditional marketing organizations who are better utilized executing marketing operations and brand decisions. For many consultant contributors, the effort is a "part time" job, often regulated to nights or weekends after billable client work is completed. Lastly, while many consultants shine brilliantly in their expertise and thought process, they may often not have the exact writing skills or time to craft a publishable piece of prose that is well styled, structured, and compelling.

Working with traditional writers or marketing agencies seldom makes this process easier. Because of the complexity of consulting and management themes, writers and marketing agencies find themselves having to learn everything from scratch. Traditional writers typically sprout from a journalism or grammarian type of training, not one in business strategy. Agency copy writers are about style and splash, not necessarily getting into the nuances of complex technology solutions or being adept in industry jargon.

The result can be a frustrating process, where cycles upon cycles of education must be given to the writer and the writing product suffers from being general and uninformed. Worse yet, the extra work required confounds the time and attention shortage the contributing consultant already suffers.

Let us help you: We'll make the process easy and the end product excellent

SAM-Lab understands what it takes to write a quality, compelling whitepaper given the constraints and challenges a modern consultancy and the marketing organization faces. We can help you because:

• We get it: We are field strategy consultants transformed into writers, not grammarians or poets trying to write business or technology strategy
  
  
• We do all (most of) the work: We minimize the amount of time spent for the contributor or SME. We typically work right off of your source presentations or proposals, or conduct painless interviews on your schedule.
  
  
• We thrive in complexity and detail: We fearlessly dive into the hairiest of subjects
  
  
• We quickly move to finished product: We typically move to outline and introduction after the first call, and drafts come quickly and completely.
  
  
• We understand the consulting and business world: We have a deep and potent understanding of business concepts and drivers that enable us to fill in the holes quickly, frame issues as they are relevant to readers, and demonstrate comprehensive and acute business acumen. Plus, we really understand how your sales objectives work in the scheme of thought leadership type tactics.
  
  
• We'll make you look good: We typically wildly augment the impression of expertise our clients are able to portray, often elevating your thought leadership in the eyes of your clients and marketplace.
  
  
• And, we can write: We have the skills to tell a compelling story with intelligent, business-appropriate language and style.
  
  

Read about our past assignments and subject matter expertise to get a sense of the topics and themes we've done well with.

Want to see samples? contact us and we will share some of our work after we've vetted your applicability as a client, feel assured you present no conflict of interest with our existing clients, and we both sign a confidentiality agreement. (Sounds painful, but our client relationships mean everything to us and we are careful to protect them).

Contact: E-mail me directly jtill @ sam-lab . com (remove spaces) or call at (857) 919-2734