Develop It: Nobody Ever Bought Anything Because a Supplier Called Itself a Leading Provider

You have spent three steps getting to something specific. This is the step where most companies take that specific thing and sand it back down into wallpaper.

Packaging Intelligence is the practice of capturing a packaging company's niche expertise and organizing it so the company can find and win more of its best-fit customers.

Go look at the About page of any packaging company, including your own.

Quality. Service. Innovation. Partnership. Decades of experience. State of the art equipment. Committed to exceeding customer expectations.

Now cover the logo and hand it to somebody. Ask him which company it is.

He cannot tell you, because there is nothing in it. Every one of those words is true of every company in the industry, which means none of them carries information. Six hundred suppliers describe themselves in an identical vocabulary, and then everybody wonders why the buyer went to price.

Of course he went to price. Price was the only variable he could see.

Capture gave you raw. Develop turns it into usable.

At the end of Capture you had recordings and transcripts. A veteran talking, unpolished, full of tangents, with the good part buried forty minutes in.

That material is valuable and it is not publishable. Nobody is going to read a transcript.

The job now is to turn it into something a buyer can use in the ten minutes he has, and something a machine can lift and quote when it answers his question.

Those are the two readers, and here is the part people get wrong. They are not in conflict. What a buyer wants and what gets a company cited are the same thing: a clear, specific, honest answer to a real question. Writing for one is writing for the other. Anybody selling you a separate technique for the machines is selling you something you do not need.

Start with the question, not the topic

A topic is a subject. A question is what somebody actually typed.

Topics produce pages titled Our Approach to Barrier Films. Questions produce pages titled Why Your Barrier Film Failed in August and Not in February.

One is a category label. The other is a man's exact problem repeated back to him, and he will read the whole thing because he thinks somebody finally understands what is happening to him.

Every piece you develop should be traceable to a question a real buyer has asked out loud. If you cannot name who asked it, you are writing about a topic, and topic pages are where good captured material goes to die.

There is a practical benefit to this discipline as well. Question pages are easy to plan and easy to stop arguing about. Nobody has an opinion about whether a buyer asked a question. Everybody has an opinion about what the company should say about itself.

The rule that answers the biggest objection

The one thing every owner says when we get here: why would I publish the thing that makes me different.

Publish the what. Never the how.

What fails, what it costs, what to compare, who it is right for, what happened when somebody got it wrong. All of that goes out. Your formulations, your tooling, your process detail, your pricing structure, none of that ever goes out.

A surgeon can tell you exactly which operation fixes your problem, why the alternatives fail, and what happens if you wait. You still cannot perform it. The telling is what makes him the obvious choice. The doing is what he gets paid for.

Your competitor can read every word you publish and still not be able to do what you do, because knowing is not doing. The buyer reads those same words and concludes you are the only one who understands his problem.

That trade is enormously in your favor. The company that stays quiet to protect its secrets protects nothing. It just stays invisible while somebody with less expertise gets the call.

Four things that have to survive the edit

1. The specifics

The year. The temperature. The line speed. The month it always happens.

Editing is mostly the removal of detail, and detail is the entire asset. If the finished piece could describe any company in your category, you edited the value out of it.

Somebody in your building should be able to read it and say, that is our 2014 job.

2. The uncomfortable part

Every genuinely useful piece contains something most people would soften. A failure rate. A material that is oversold. A situation where the honest answer is that you are the wrong supplier.

Leave it in. It is the most persuasive thing on the page, because a supplier who will tell you what he is bad at is a supplier you believe about everything else.

3. His voice, not committee voice

The captured material sounds like a man who has done this for thirty years. Run it through three approvals and it will come out sounding like a company.

Keep the plain sentences. Keep the way he actually explains it, because the way he explains it is why people call him.

4. A straight answer near the top

Say the thing first, then support it.

Buyers skim and machines lift. Both reward a page that answers the question in the opening lines instead of building to it. Nobody has ever been annoyed at being told the answer too quickly.

What good looks like when it is finished

Three tests. All fast, all unforgiving.

Test One: Could a competitor have published this word for word?

If yes, throw it out. It is industry wallpaper.

Test Two: Would your best salesman send it to a live prospect tomorrow?

If he would be embarrassed to, it is brochure copy. If he would use it to save himself an hour of explaining, it is right.

This is the most useful of the three, because it is the only one with a real person attached to it. Go ask him. He will tell you in four seconds and he will not be diplomatic about it.

Test Three: Does it answer the question completely enough that the reader does not need another source?

Half answers built to force a phone call do not get read, do not get cited, and insult the person who came looking for help.

Why this is the step that pays

Buyers do the bulk of their research before they contact anybody, and increasingly that research starts with a full question typed into a tool that answers in a paragraph. What comes back is drawn from whoever published the clearest, most trustworthy explanation of that specific problem.

In most packaging niches, nobody has published anything. Not a competitor, not a distributor, not a trade publication. The space is empty, and the buyer gets a vague, general answer that names nobody, because there was nothing specific for the machine to find.

Develop is the step that fills that space with your name on it.

It is also the step where your reps stop carrying a price sheet into the room and start carrying the clearest explanation in the industry, written by the guy down the hall.

The one thing to do this week

Take one recording from Capture. Find the single most specific thing he said, the one with a year and a customer and a number in it.

Write that one thing up as the answer to the exact question a buyer would have asked. Eight hundred words. Do not smooth it out. Do not add a paragraph about your commitment to quality.

Then read it and ask whether any competitor in your category could have written it. If the answer is no, you just built the first piece of something they cannot buy, cannot hire, and cannot catch up on.

Go deeper on Develop:

Publish the what, never the how.

Why your About page reads exactly like your competitor's?

Question pages versus topic pages.

The uncomfortable part is the most persuasive thing on the page.

Would your best salesman send this to a prospect tomorrow?

CLICK HERE: START WITH YOUR OWN COMPANY

Find what makes you irreplaceable

If you want a straight look at what your company could publish that nobody else could, start with the Packaging Intelligence Audit. A read on where your expertise is trapped and where your best buyers are already looking.

BUTTON: Take the Packaging Intelligence Audit

David Marinac . ABC Packaging Direct . DavidMarinac.com . 216.373.1005 . SpecPkgMarketplace.com

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