ACTIVATING DIRECT AND CHANNEL SALESPEOPLE WITH WHITEBOARD STORYTELLING

Are you a revenue leader in a B2B SaaS company charged with recruiting, activating a channel, and achieving significant sell-through in 2024?

If so, your challenges are significant—entering new markets, economic uncertainty, and recruiting and activating your channel partners quickly.  This article explores a lesser-known but proven approach to channel activation that can provide a foundation for channel success and improve the performance of your existing sales team.

The Situation

You are the newly appointed revenue leader in a PE-backed scale-up with aggressive revenue goals and little time.

• Recruiting and activating reseller channels is essential to access new markets and one of your MBOs.
• Initial conversations with potential partners indicate interest, but nothing formal exists.
• Ideal partners already serve customers in target geos selling overlapping products that create a potential for conflict.

Complication

You realise that scaling in the "post-SaaS Bubble" environment will be challenging, with a flagging global economy causing revenue slowdowns, layoffs, cutbacks, and spending freezes.

• Economic uncertainty is affecting IT spending in your ideal customers.
• IT leaders are consolidating vendors and rationalising partner relationships to cut costs and simplify their lives.
• Top-of-funnel prospect acquisition is a universal challenge.
• Finding, attracting and retaining good channel development professionals will be an issue, but not today's.
• Activating the channel will be critical, but most initiatives take too long and fail to produce meaningful revenue.

Turning point

You realise that a compelling channel message, a high-impact initial training session and ongoing enablement are key to partner activation.

• You work with your SMEs and top reps to create a compelling product presentation, competitive SWOT and compensation model.
• You take it out to a target VAR sales group… but their sales team seems disinterested, and you can tell they want to leave before the hour ends; they grab a slice of pizza and a beer, head back to their desk, and there is little engagement post-training.

• Despite all your team's planning and good work, you are embarrassed at stumbling at the first hurdle.
• STOP!
• There is a better way to enable and activate channel salespeople in the initial hour they will grant you.  Let’s examine the probable causes of the poor reception.

Problem 1.

The problem with your pitch is likely that it’s all about you and your product.

• Your ideal future customers are using cumbersome legacy approaches to do what your product will automate with a far-reaching impact on the organisation.
• Your initial prospective customer conversation should be a “Why change?” conversation, not a “Why me?” product pitch.

Problem 2.

The second problem is that the reseller team you are trying to activate already has dozens of products in their portfolio, and yours looks like a “me-too” product with a long sales cycle.

Problem 3

The third problem with your approach is that the reseller's salespeople are disengaged; yours is just another boring vendor pitch and pizza-fest, and they must sit through 2-3 a month, robbing them of valuable selling time.

Resolution

A new way – well, not so new

• What if you could succinctly capture why your ideal prospective customers should consider changing their approach that grabs your buyer’s attention?
• And what if you could empower and motivate the channel sales team to tell your story the day after leaving the one-hour training session you are allocated?
• And what if, during the process, you elevated the channel team's skill level and helped them improve their technique in engaging buyers on every sales call?

The answer is that you can, and there is magic (encapsulated expertise) in creating the story and enabling the channel team to tell it.

Create a compelling whiteboard story

Whiteboard storytelling is a method proven over 30 years for creating a customer engagement deliverable for activating direct and channel salespeople that can be used to:

• Build rapport and establish the credibility of the salesperson at the outset.
• Create a reframing or positioning device to highlight your unique capabilities vs the field of competitors (it’s not a feature comparison table) to help prospective customers understand the limitations of their current approach and the opportunities ahead. (This example from the Centrify Platform Whiteboard circa 2016)

• Tell a compelling narrative on the "consequences-of-not-changing"... in this example, a well-known cybersecurity hack story from mid-2010s.
• Tell a “who-we’ve-helped” customer story ("Hero’s Journey") that resonates with the buyer.

• Position your solution as an obvious choice to achieve better outcomes.
• Help prepare salespeople for typical buyer objections and impart techniques for helping the buyer to resolve them.
• Encapsulate discovery questions in ways that seem conversational instead of interrogatory.

If you are an early-stage company leader, you might need help to create the positioning matrix, the "consequences of not changing" story and the "who-we’ve-helped" story as they are the crux of the "why change" message and then to weave it all together into a compelling story that can be told in 10-minutes.

It’s important to understand that the whiteboard storytelling technique is designed to get your story into the salesperson’s head and make it stick, whether they use it in front of customers or not. Once you have created and vetted the story with existing customers, it’s time to hit the road literally or virtually and train your partners in a whiteboard storytelling workshop.

Multiple versions of the whiteboard story

From experience, we know that some salespeople will quickly revert to their comfort zone and use PowerPoint product presentations vs. conversation and imagery to tell the story; therefore, embedding whiteboard elements into a more traditional PowerPoint deck is recommended.

A visual confection in PowerPoint that builds the visual story so the salesperson can provide the narrative is a valuable derivative of the whiteboard story.

Summary

In Part 1 of our exploration into channel activation, we've introduced the potential of a whiteboard and script to capture your story and tell it in a compelling story to fuel rapid growth.

By embracing the art of whiteboard storytelling, you're activating your channel partners effectively with a compelling narrative that resonates with your customers.

Additionally, you're redefining how your company engages with its audience and elevating the conversational skills of your direct and channel sales teams.

Part 2. Running a Whiteboard Storytelling workshop will guide you through the practical implementation of this transformative strategy, from immersive workshops to reinforcement and adaption.