Again, another post by Brian has me thinking. Today, he links to Michael Stelzner who has a video about how he generated 60,000 qualified leads through free education. He did this against the advice of his business partners and decided to give away his trade secrets in a whitepaper in the hopes of establishing himself as a thought leader.

We do similar things here. We run a Web Seminar Series that is free and we book expert speakers on a variety of business topics. We even run seminars on how to conduct a successful webinar even though we have a events team that does just that - runs successful webinars.

As you can tell, I am in full agreement with Michael and his methods. Establishing yourself as a thought leader helps shorten the sales cycle and cuts down on truly cold leads. In a B2B world, most people want to hire someone that can do the job more efficiently and with better results. The majority of B2B purchasers, do not want to reverse engineer a solution. They simply want to choose the best solution for their business and let the experts take care of the rest.

It is not a surprise to me that Michael was so successful. However, what interests me the most is where Michael promoted this whitepaper to receive such an overwhelming response. Unfortunately, he does not share that secret with us. Was it paid advertising? Was it organic search? PPC? Forums? Blogs? I would be very interested in knowing.

Technorati Tags: whitepapers, Michael Stelzner, lead generation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under Marketing, lead generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Digg »