Whiteboard Selling E-Book

Corey Sommers

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 212

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Create compelling whiteboard presentations to engage your customers and win their business Whiteboard Selling offers a step-by-step approach to transforming your message and selling style by using powerful visual stories that inspire and engage customers and prospects. Free your sales force from relying on slides and other static sales tools during the sales process. Whiteboard Selling offers practical guidance and skills to enable marketing and sales teams to quickly adopt visual story telling practices that apply to today's fast-moving, competitive selling environment. * Explains how to take a sales message inventory * Illustrates how to design your visual stories * Empowers your sales force to tell the story and extend the reach of visual storytelling Through the power of technology and effective storytelling, you and your team can create and deliver effective presentations that engage your customers, hold their attention, and win their business. Whiteboard Selling shows you how.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

Is Selling with Visuals a New Idea?

How This Book Is Different

Is It the Whiteboard That Matters?

How You Should Use This Book

Part 1: The End of the Age of Slides

Chapter 1: The Role of Presentation Slides in Today's Sales Culture

How Did We Get Here?

From Foils to Slides

Have We Moved Forward or Backward?

How Slides Harm the Sales Process

Overwhelming with Slide Candy

Longer Sales Cycles

Slides Get Around

The Premeeting Slide Shuffle

Hey, Where's Your Projector?

In the Hot Seat

Chapter 2: The Role of Slides in Today's Sales Training

The Battle of the Slide Bulge

The Slide Agenda from Hell

It's the Norm

The Typical Annual Kickoff

Where Did That Slide Come From?

Slide-Fry Your Brain Online

Chapter 3: Self-Assessment: Are You Slide-Addicted?

Scoring

Part 2: The Visual Selling Opportunity

Chapter 4: The Power of the Pen

“I Don't Need a Sword—I Already Whiteboard”

“I Don't Need Slides or a Whiteboard”

Be Different!—And Lighten Your Load at the Same Time

Chapter 5: The Science Behind Whiteboard Selling

Grabbing the Pen, Not the Computer

Keeping Attention

Bite-Size Chunks

The Power of Stories

Chapter 6: Old Disciplines, New Behaviors

Earn the Right and You'll Earn the Business

Prove You're Listening. “Shhhhh—These Whiteboards Have Ears!”

Be the Subject Matter Expert! You'll Never Write Something on the Whiteboard That's Not in Your Head

Be Flexible—Go with the Flow

Close for Next Steps. Only Then Put the Cap on the Pen

Part 3: What Exactly Is a Whiteboard for Sales?

Chapter 7: When to Use Whiteboards in the Sales Process

Sales Process Agnostic

The Whiteboard Lunch-and-Learn

Chapter 8: The Major Whiteboard Types

The Whiteboard Army Knife

Qualification and Discovery Whiteboards

Why Change Whiteboards

Solution Whiteboards

Competitive Whiteboards

Business Case Whiteboards

Closing Whiteboards

Chapter 9: Whiteboard Case Study

Company Name: Cool Road Trucking

Cool Road's Unique Capabilities

Foody's Fresh Food's Current Situation and Challenges

Chapter 10: Whiteboard Structure, Flow, Content, and Interaction Points

Types of Interaction Points

Whiteboard Architecture Examples

Chapter 11: Qualification and Discovery Whiteboards

The Four-Quadrant Time and Knowledge Qualification and Discovery Whiteboard

The Don't Waste My Time Qualification and Discovery Whiteboard

The Are We a Fit? Qualification and Discovery Whiteboard

Chapter 12: Why Change Whiteboards

It's a Messaging Problem

Wake Up the Old Brain

The Wall Why Change Whiteboard

Chapter 13: Solution Whiteboards

Solution Whiteboard Examples

The Level Set Wheel

The Buying Criteria Solution Whiteboard

The Mountain Solution Whiteboard

The Day-in-the-Life Solution Whiteboard

Chapter 14: Competitive Whiteboards

Bash or Be Bashed

Competitive Whiteboard Examples

Chapter 15: Business Case Whiteboards

Chapter 16: Closing Whiteboards

Part 4: Building a Whiteboard for Sales

Chapter 17: Are You Ready to Whiteboard? Not So Fast!

Individual Sales Contributors

Marketing Managers and Executives

Sales Enablement Teams

Sales Leaders and Executives

Preparing for Your Whiteboarding Initiative

Chapter 18: Choosing the Right Topic for Your Whiteboard

Selecting a Whiteboard Topic

Chapter 19: Forming a Working Team

The Working Team's Core Responsibilities

Who Should Be on the Working Team?

Who Shouldn't Be on the Working Team?

Chapter 20: Taking a Message Inventory

Content Requirements

Chapter 21: The Working Team Template

Whiteboard Name

Target Complete Date

Whiteboard Audience

Delivered by Roles

High-Level Market Trends and Themes

Company/Solution Capabilities

Company/Solution Capabilities Must be “Binary”

Competitive Focus and Silver Bullets

Key References and Case Studies

Third-Party Recognition

Chapter 22: Formalizing Your Whiteboard Design

Basic Whiteboard Design Guidelines

Chapter 23: Packaging Your Whiteboard

Creating Professional Visuals

Adding Key Questions to Ask

Adding Objection Reframes

Packaging Your Whiteboard into Sales Tools

Recording Whiteboard Videos

Part 5: Enabling the Field

Chapter 24: Whiteboard Test Drive

Chapter 25: Field Enablement Options

The Whiteboard Symposium Approach

Large-Scale Whiteboard Symposium Case Study

The Regional Symposium Approach

Remote Symposiums

Online Learning Paths

E-Learning Modules

New Hire Training

Chapter 26: Measuring Success

Post-Training Web Surveys

CRM Integration

Certification

Controlled Studies

Part 6: You Have a Whiteboard, So How Do You Present It and What Do You Leave Behind?

Chapter 27: Whiteboard Presentation Best Practices

Rinse and Repeat

Come Prepared

Watch Your Stance

The Lose-Your-Foot Rule

Engage

Avoid Dead Air

Slow Down!

Manage Your Time!

Go Virtual!

Dialing for Whiteboards

Whiteboards for Lunch

Conclusion

A Path Forward

About Corporate Visions, Inc.

Index

Cover image: C. Wallace.

Cover design: C. Wallace.

Copyright © 2013 by Corey Sommers and David Jenkins. All rights reserved.

Illustrations by Truscribe.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with the respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Sommers, Corey.

Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales through Visuals/Corey Sommers and David Jenkins.

ISBN: 978-1-118-37976-9 (pbk); ISBN: 978-1-118-61227-9 (ebk); ISBN: 978-1-118-46157-0 (ebk); ISBN: 978-1-118-46155-6 (ebk)

1.Selling–Audio-visual aids. I. Jenkins, David. II. Title.

HF5438.25

658.85028′4–dc23

2013000324

Foreword

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

—Walt Disney

Knowledge is power. Prior to the early 1990s, salespeople had it—buyers didn't. Today the tables have turned and buyers can now get information about your products and services whenever they need it, thanks to the Internet.

Allow me to expand on this. A commonly held belief among many executive leadership teams is that the keys to a good sales force are: (1) to make sure they have deep product knowledge and (2) that they can deliver a compelling pitch about their products and services. Operating on those beliefs, sales organizations developed deeply ingrained cultures where product training was mandated, centrally prepared and tightly controlled sales decks were developed, and specific step-by-step sales processes were implemented. There was a great deal of focus on the delivery of the sales pitch, and a bevy of feature- and function-rich materials provided as leave-behinds. These methods were effective during most of the twentieth century because salespeople were the most common source of information for buyers. It just made sense to create a business process at the heart of which was control of the information flow to buyers through sellers.

Unfortunately, the preferences of buyers (particularly executive ones) have changed. Due in large part to the Internet, the pendulum has shifted and buyers are often more informed about the products and services than the salespeople. Salespeople who don't add value only add cost to the value exchange. In order to squeeze out costs, professional procurement organizations are increasingly active in more buying negotiations. Since the tables have turned, and these buyers now have more information than their sales counterparts, they are winning. This development is the single biggest driver behind the margin erosion felt by most B2B businesses.

In response, many sales leaders are directing their teams to bypass procurement functions and sell higher in those organizations. The higher the level of executive targeted, the less interested they are in learning about products and services and the more interested they are in the role sellers play in helping them meet objectives or solve problems. Understandably, then, a new form of communication is required but few sales forces have figured out the right formula to elevate who they sell to or how to cross-sell their products. Forrester Research has been studying the perceptions executives have about sellers in our annual buyers insight study. Less than 20 percent of these executives find that the common salesperson adds value, and 68 percent believe salespeople are only wired to launch into some prepared pitch about their products or services. Clearly, something needs to change.

So, why is communicating with executives so different? For starters, the scope of their responsibilities is much broader than their subordinates', so the issues they want to tackle are more holistic in nature. In order to get their arms around all of the moving parts, executives like to visualize the system in order to make sure they have visibility into all of the cause-and-effect relationships they need to address in order to be successful. In addition, these people have risen through the ranks to become leaders in their organizations because they have proven they can produce results. Thus, they are much more inclined to discuss an example about how other customers have worked with your firm to solve problems or meet goals, and they really want to hear about common pitfalls and how other people like them have worked around them. The scope of these conversations and their dynamic nature are not a fit with a traditional product-centric, prepared pitch-driven communication style. It requires a fundamentally different approach.

This is why this book is so important. While the concept of using a whiteboard to communicate complex ideas is not a new one, creating an overall architecture and process for developing the content and equipping salespeople with the skills to create one is. What Corey Sommers and David Jenkins do in this book is to first establish the basic attributes of how a whiteboard discussion framework should be constructed to effectively empower sellers with a safety net to stay relevant to an executive audience, and then show the steps for how to convert prose-based messages into a visual format. Finally, Corey and David provide the common requirements and whiteboarding best practices to properly train salespeople to be effective in client situations. When successfully executed, this new medium of communication allows for much faster ramp-up times of salespeople to deliver a complex message, while at the same time reducing the noise inherent in traditional presentation approaches.

—Scott Santucci Research Director and Principal Analyst Sales Enablement at Forrester Research

Introduction

Are you a sales professional looking for a new and creative way to engage your enterprise prospects?

Or a marketer determined that sales will use the right messages to attract economic buyers into your sales funnel with a unique and fresh approach?

Or a sales leader, focused on sales transformation, larger transactions, and shorter time-to-close?

If so, then this book is for you.

What if you could sell with nothing more than a pen and a drawing surface? When sales professionals lose the PowerPoint and use the pen, they are more confident, and they are much more likely to compel buyers to act. This book shows you how to make this transformation for yourself or your entire sales and marketing organizations.

We should make it clear up front that although this book is titled Whiteboard Selling, this by no means implies we are inventing whiteboarding for sales. Seasoned sales professionals and other customer-facing personnel have been whiteboarding for decades. All we have done is put a heavy dose of structure and process behind building powerful visual stories and discussion frameworks, and then enabling sellers to present them in a way that captivates and motivates buyers.

Is Selling with Visuals a New Idea?

Yes and no. There are literally thousands of books on the power of visual communications, visual thinking, and presentation skills—and not just books, but reams of academic papers, studies, and surveys. Indeed, it is well established that visual thinking, learning, and communication styles and approaches have clear advantages when conducting business. Ours is an increasingly visual culture; we consume media and information through an ever-growing variety of visual channels.

Likewise, there are many books and other publications that detail different sales methodologies and processes. Ask any experienced sales executive and they will recall at least two or three different packaged sales approaches they have been trained on, each with its own twist on convincing corporate buyers to part with their valuable budgets.

How many books have been written on how to build and deliver better PowerPoint presentations? Presenting a set of slides to a customer is not selling with visuals. Selling is a dynamic exercise. Selling should encourage interaction with, and participation from, the buyer. If the buyer is passively observing a set of slides, then you are not using true visual selling.

How This Book Is Different

So how is this book any different from those mentioned earlier?

It is entirely focused on the power of hands-on visual selling techniques to enable your sales force to sell bigger deals faster. And not just large sales forces—even a small business owner or a few salespeople working at a start-up can use these techniques. If you are going to learn to use visual thinking and communication when you sell, then you have to learn a unique viewpoint and a set of best practices, all of which are contained in this book.

The visual selling techniques and approaches in this book are appropriate to any sales methodology. Enabling sales through visuals can be part of any approach to selling and any sales enablement program. The use of powerful visuals at the point of sale—that moment of truth, so to speak, when a seller is communicating the unique value proposition of their product or service—is just one part (perhaps one of the most important parts) of any larger sales model or sales transformation initiative.

This book contains hands-on, step-by-step guidance on how to design powerful visuals to support your sales process. It is explicitly designed to be a complete and exhaustive companion to any sales and marketing organization's efforts to bring visual selling techniques to its go-to-market strategies. This book is as heavy on practice as it is on theory.

The book is valuable to both sellers and marketers alike. It provides this practical guidance in a way that both sales professionals and marketers can use to become more effective. While the term “bridging the sales and marketing divide” is often overused, in this case it really fits. This book will help get marketing's message out to sales in a usable and powerful fashion.

And finally, this book is based on proven best practices and results demonstrated over half a decade of rigorous application in professional sales environments. More than 50,000 sales professionals in more than 20 countries and belonging to more than 75 sales organizations have benefited from these approaches to dramatically change the way they communicate with customers and prospects.

Is It the Whiteboard That Matters?

Some would argue that drawing on a whiteboard—“whiteboarding”—is not the point and it is really visual thinking and idea creation that matters. This is partly true. But in Whiteboard Selling—Empowering Sales Through Visuals, we specifically explore the use of the whiteboard (or any drawing surface for that matter) as a disciplined, repeatable, and process-driven mechanism that enables high-dollar sales of complex products and services targeted at educated buyers.

Using a pen to draw ideas is only useful if it drives a compelling event such as the purchase of a million-dollar software suite, medical device, financial service offering, or consulting service (among many other types of products and services). When you use a drawing surface to sell solutions, you have to understand the sales process and field training/enablement. You have to assess each individual salesperson's proficiency using visual thinking to move a sales opportunity to the next level. Sketching stick figures, smiley faces, and other “cave art” won't increase sales in a meaningful way without understanding the sales context in which they are drawn.

By the end of this book, you'll learn how to train and enable your entire distribution channel with powerful tools and techniques to make the power of the pen a groundbreaking differentiator in how you bring your products and services to market.

How You Should Use This Book

Part 1—The End of the Age of Slides

We've been helping businesses, large, medium, and small, to ditch their slide projectors since 2007. As time goes by, we have to convince our customers and prospects less and less that whiteboard selling has clear advantages over slides for important sales interactions. In the first section of this book, you will learn why slides should play very little role in high-dollar sales interactions and sales training, as demonstrated by real-life stories from the field.

Part 2—The Visual Selling Opportunity

Once you understand that salespeople and sales trainers can actually completely free themselves from the evil clutches of slides and projectors, Part 2 will teach you about the specific opportunities and benefits of leveraging visual selling techniques and the science behind why this is so effective. We'll also highlight some results that may impress.

Part 3—What Exactly Is a Whiteboard for Sales?

In this section we showcase a number of different whiteboard types using a case study to demonstrate whiteboard structure, content, and flow. Part 3 also includes a variety of exercises and activities to flex your whiteboarding muscles.

Part 4—Building a Whiteboard for Sales

Whether you are an individual contributor or the head of a marketing or sales team, you'll need to marshal some key resources—both people and content—before embarking on whiteboard design. Then, we'll show you how to follow some basic and proven whiteboard creation best practices.

Part 5—Enabling the Field

You've designed some powerful whiteboard stories. So what's next? This section covers sales enablement options, how to test-drive your whiteboard prior to field rollout, and then how to measure the success of your whiteboard-selling training initiatives.

Part 6—You Have a Whiteboard, So How Do You Present It and What Do You Leave Behind?

This section covers some basic whiteboard presentation best practices, and how to use the whiteboard as a powerful tool for documenting and communicating the next steps in the sales process.

Part 1

The End of the Age of Slides

Chapter 1

The Role of Presentation Slides in Today's Sales Culture

The best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and thereby contaminate its decision making.

—Robert Gaskins, co-creator of PowerPoint

The term “death by PowerPoint” is so prevalent that it is now firmly entrenched in corporate culture. In fact, as of this writing, if you Google this term and look at the Google Images search results, you will see 50,000 images (many of them great comic relief) related to the term. The phrase was actually first coined by Angela Garber in 2001.1 It was a good article. But like thousands of other articles and books on how to continue to use PowerPoint while avoiding its pitfalls, Garber's piece was just that—suggestions on how to put lipstick on a pig. We ask, “Why not just fry up some bacon?”

So we know that slides are the predominant way organizations communicate internally and between buyers and sellers. But there is now data that shows there are significant, quantifiable costs associated with their use. Right around the twentieth anniversary of PowerPoint, a study cited in the Wall Street Journal conservatively estimated $252 million in lost productivity per day due to bad slide presentations.2 The calculation is based on Microsoft's 2001 estimate of 30,000,000 slide presentations in existence. That's in 2001, during PowerPoint's infancy or, at best, its adolescence. How many hundreds of millions of presentations could be out there now? Today's daily PowerPoint productivity drain could be measured in the tens of billions of dollars!

How Did We Get Here?

Something momentous happened in the mid-1980s. Yes, it was the advent of the personal business computer, which was first manufactured by IBM. But more important than that, slide presentation software was invented. Word processing, spreadsheet, and slide presentation software promised businesses of the 1980s an immense increase in productivity. They have no doubt reshaped corporate communications. Whether they increase productivity and effectiveness of high-dollar salespeople in the twenty-first century is debatable.

From Foils to Slides

Before slide presentation software existed, the notion of using a foil to communicate a singular idea within a larger presentation was not new. During the two decades prior to the 1980s, we first had the overhead projector with transparencies and then the slide projector, both of which were ubiquitous in college classrooms, government agencies, and corporate meeting rooms. The “pop” of an overhead's worn-out light bulb and the audible “thwack, thwack, thwack” of the stuck projector slide are to some people fond (and to others not so fond) sounds of a bygone era.

When electronic slides arrived—which are, strictly speaking, computer-generated images that include text, graphics, and charts in one program—they were a powerful change in communication. Now the presenter could seamlessly move forward or backward between slides, insert multimedia elements, and integrate with other software programs. The widespread addiction to slideware quickly took hold.

Have We Moved Forward or Backward?

This era of electronic slides created a new communication superpower: PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint quickly became the dominant player in the computer-generated slide market, displacing Harvard Graphics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Harvard Graphics never gained much traction when the market shifted to Microsoft Windows from DOS, where it had owned almost 70 percent of the market. PowerPoint, with its form and flash, quickly became the software of choice for corporate use, education, and increasingly, in the home.

Since then, PowerPoint has been widely (or should we say “wildly”) adopted as the way to execute a sales presentation in the corporate office or meeting room. While bad sales presentations have been around almost as long as the sales profession, PowerPoint amplifies bad habits by eliminating the need to think on your feet, study your message, and prepare it diligently. “They tried adding elements from multimedia shows (such as sound effects, attention-grabbing transitions between slides, moving text, and bullet points that flew to their places from somewhere off screen),” says Gaskins. “Much of this was novel and interesting the first few times, but virtually none of the extraneous entertainment had any purpose or benefit in the kinds of meetings where overheads had been used.”3 Not only do these flashy features serve little purpose, they are so overused and badly used that sales presentations become a distraction and even an obstacle to the core purpose of any meeting.

This massive and lightning-fast adoption of the electronic slide has been a step backwards in how sellers communicate the business value of their products and solutions to corporate decision makers. In fact, it can be argued that the move from overhead projector and transparencies to a slide projector was itself regressive. What was gained in form, factor, and flashy visuals was lost in the free form of hand drawing with a grease pen that is actually more like whiteboarding than any technology-based mechanism.

How Slides Harm the Sales Process

While we agree there is a role for slides inside an organization, they become a disaster for big sales opportunities. Having a salesperson plug in a projector and go through an hour-long slide presentation during a first sales meeting doesn't inspire a buyer's confidence. In fact, it could actually damage the salesperson's ability to properly interact with the client and communicate the business value of a product or solution. Using a slideshow ultimately jeopardizes a sales professional's credibility.

Overwhelming with Slide Candy

With PowerPoint's ever-increasing feature set for animations and other flying eye candy, slide presentations of all types more and more resemble TV commercials. Watching a car commercial is one thing. Feeling sold to in the context of the sale of a product or service that can make or break somebody's job is another.

Many of these problems were echoed by those surveyed by PowerPoint expert David Paradi in 2011.4 Of 603 respondents, the following reasons were given for why slide presentations are not well received:

The speaker read the slides to us

73.8%

Full sentences instead of bullet points

51.6%

The text was so small I couldn't read it

48.1%

Slides hard to see because of color choice

34.0%

Overly complex diagrams or charts

26.0%

Longer Sales Cycles

Is it possible that the use of PowerPoint can elongate sales cycles? Unequivocally, yes! When people are annoyed or distracted from your core message, they won't decide to buy.