Building evergreen lead gen by treating templates as tools, not billboards.
Nava had a b2b sales motion and we were a lean start-up. We were already seeing lead gen success with both our in person and virtual events, but as anyone who runs those knows, it's laborious to keep things running. You can batch but at certain level you need to recreate the wheel each time.
We sold mainly to HR so I set out to create something that 1) gave HR immediate value, and 2) tied back to Nava's offering (benefits).
We started with an RFP template. RFPs are routine when a company goes to market for a new benefits broker, but the formatting is wildly inconsistent. If we built a clean, usable template, we'd help HR teams with real work AND quietly shape the RFPs landing in our own inbox. The same project served both sides of the table.
My stipulations for this RFP template were as follows:
1. Make it actually useable. Downloading a PDF you cannot edit is a horrible experience. So we made this a google doc that you could copy and make your own in two clicks.
2. Make it unbranded. I HATE downloading something in someone else's branding. We made the template unbranded so the person who downloaded it didn't have to do the extra work of removing our branding.
Both rules broke marketing convention, but were also key to the value being provided.
After we got initial feedback and metrics that this was working for us we continued to iterate on other useable templates for HR including an employee benefits survey template (which I built alongside the talented Melissa Blackerby!!) and an open enrollment planning guide.
All continued to pass the test of being unbranded and editable.
I wish i was writing this earlier so I had stats on MQLs > pipeline > closed won, but largely at the time these worked for us from both an evergreen lead gen but also larger trust building with our prospects.