I spent Yesterday with the Duarte organization in Mountain View, CA. in a one day Resonate story development workshop.
This was an excellent workshop that helped me identify the core elements of my story. I came away from it with the basis for a story that will resonate with a much broader audience and that I expect will improve my engagement and the outcome of meetings.
4 min read
Ten Presentation Rules for Sales People to Improve Engagement
Topics: resonate powerpoint visual storytelling
2 min read
Selling your Solution to Early Adopters - Visual Stotytelling Video
This Selling Early Adopters video was created following a joint Webinar with Dominic Rowsell, co-author of
Why Killer Products Don't Sell. The original sound-track was unusable, so I captured the elements of that Webinar and added more meat into the following two-part, narrated whiteboard video.
The following Flash videos are a 2 part series and run about 7 minutes.
This video introduces the four buying cultures and how they map onto the Technology Adoption Life-cycle. Will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals selling B2B technology solutions or professional services based engagements.
This series offers insight into buyer behavior and the process of getting your challenging idea/solution through the buying process.
Buying Behavior is dependent on Risk Tolerance
Early adopters of new technology are prepared to accept more risk when buying technology than the majority of buyers. Despite the success of SaaS as a concept and the wholesale adoption of cloud based applications, the vast majority of SaaS software fails to achieve commercial success because the innovation never makes it across the chasm from the early adopters into the early majority mainstream market. The consequent massive uptake of the SaaS innovation has eluded all but a small percentage of aspiring entrepreneurs.The following Flash videos are a 2 part series and run about 7 minutes.
Part 1. The Four Buying Cultures and the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle.
This video introduces the four buying cultures and how they map onto the Technology Adoption Life-cycle. Will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals selling B2B technology solutions or professional services based engagements.
Insight Selling is Value Created Selling
This series offers insight into buyer behavior and the process of getting your challenging idea/solution through the buying process.
Topics: killer products selling to early adopters visual storytelling
5 min read
Creating Visual Storytelling Images to Empower Sales Communication
The purpose of sales communication is to have the buyer interact with both the sender and the material, to engage around the core issues, transform thinking and activate the buyer to create change.
If your sales letters and proposals look visually boring and are chock-full of features and benefits, and “product-speak” that’s all about you, then it's time to stop sending them and re-assess what you are trying to achieve.
Do the images you use on your Website, in your sales letter, proposals and sales conversations create clarity or confusion and cause the buyer to turn off as they try to unpack the meaning of all the chart junk, drop shadows, text boxes and block arrows?
A picture is worth a thousand words - and it truly is when it comes to communicating your ideas on your Website, in-person, over the Internet and in a sales letters and proposals.
Why?
More than 50% of the brain is dedicated to processing information in the visual field. The brain processes images differently than it processes words. Simple images are stored as complete objects, no reconstruction or thought process is required to recognize them or understand their meaning.
Collections of images tell stories in context and pre-date written language, with man’s earliest visual images painted on cave walls at Chauvet Cave in the South of France, some 45,000 years ago. These images give an inkling of the sophistication of the human brain and the power of images alone, to tell a story.
Introducing Visual Confections
According to Edward Tufte, Visual Confections are “structures that consist of a multiplicity of image events that illustrate an argument, organize information, show and enforce visual comparisons; they should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional…with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the viewer.”
When I create a whiteboard story, I am effectively creating a visual confection, consisting of hand drawn images, words and numbers that tell a story, that is ideally meaningful without any explanation.
A day in the life of a Visual Confection used in sales
The exquisite beauty of visual confections is their scalability and adaptability for a multitude of sales and marketing purposes.
Topics: visual confection trade-show tufte visual storytelling
3 min read
Visual Storytelling, PowerPoint and Memory
Visual Storytelling is the future of presenting
Users of PowerPoint like it because it's easy to create and modify presentations and that's the good news. The bad news is when you are on the other side of the presentation - in the audience as a salesperson at a kick-off, or as a prospective customer in a sales or marketing presentation or in a business setting.
Topics: whiteboard enablement whiteboardselling visual storytelling
2 min read
Whiteboard Selling acquired by Corporate Visions - Visual Storytelling goes mainstream
Whiteboard Selling is now a part of Corporate Visions.
Effective Friday 31st August 2102, Corporate Visions now owns Whiteboard Selling. Whiteboard Selling co-founders, Corey Sommers and David Jenkins and their affiliate partners have developed over 500 whiteboards over the past 5 years for more than 50 companies. The whiteboard stories are used to help salespeople own their value creation message and to engage buyers in conversation, without using PowerPoint slides.YOUR VISUAL STORYTELLING JUST GOT BETTER
The strength in the Whiteboard Selling approach is in capturing a companies value proposition in a visual story. Whiteboard Selling creates a visual story and synchronized script that salespeople can quickly learn to tell in a 1/2 day workshop, so that they are more confident in front of customers and their conversations are more consistent across the company. A well constructed Whiteboard story will enable salespeople to engage buyers around their issues to answer that question and that makes the conversation compelling for the buyer.
Visual StoryTelling hits a Tipping Point in Sales
This acquisition signals a tipping point in the adoption of visual storytelling in sales and a recognition that the old ways of selling, led by questioning technique that looked for pain, coupled with PowerPoint presentations that laid out the solution to the buyers problem are over.The integration of Corporate Visions messaging process and the Whiteboard Selling visual tools is an ideal fit in a new acquisition for Corporate Visions.
Take a look at Selling Power's Top 10 list of sales training companies in 2011 and drill down on their approaches. About half are rooted in traditional question-based consultative selling which I contend is obsolete, of the other half, some are getting started in storytelling, but very few have the clarity of Corporate Visions, with their focus on messaging and conversations to equip salespeople to disrupt the status-quo, who now have the visual tools to effectively engage buyers.
The Majority of Salespeople are Spectators in the Buying Process
Anyone in selling today will admit that the selling process has given over to the facilitation of a buying process. This means that most B2B salespeople are unwilling spectators in a buying process which has disintermediated all but the salespeople who are able to connect with buyers, engage in conversation around their issues and develop trust and influence as consultants first and salespeople second.But what specifically are the 13% of successful producers in the Sales Benchmark Index report doing that is different from the core group? Research shows that these salespeople have highly evolved interpersonal communication skills and emotional intelligence and are using stories to engage buyers… either because they are story-telling naturals or because they have learned and mastered the techniques.
This is the essence of the Corporate Visions approach and combining visual storytelling tools from Whiteboard Selling gives customers of both companies a complete methodology to help improve the performance of the core group. Naturally nothing happens without disciplined practice, coaching and feedback from sales management teams, and that is also part of the methodology.
