Two weeks ago at the HubSpot User Group Event #HUGS11, I saw a great idea in action that I thought could be of interest to readers of this blog....it's IdeaPaint.
I've been using the same whiteboard in my home office for the past 15 years and I was happy with it until the HubSpot event. Now having seen IdeaPaint in action, my whiteboard looks small and dull; flat surfaces in offices I visit loom as a potential surfaces for visual storytelling.
IdeaPaint is a urethane-based paint that comes in a 50 Sq. ft. kit, with roller and requires only one coat. It's the invention of two young Boston entrepreneurs who conceived the idea of creating paint that could cover any smooth surface and turn it into a surface for dry erase markers.
Think of any smooth surface, curved or flat; table top, bench, door; literally anything can become a whiteboard. Use IdeaPaint to help you make your work space work, whether you are in sales, marketing or a student interested in using a whiteboard to capture ideas and write down your thoughts.
IdeaPaint position their paint as more cost effective, easier to apply, longer-lasting and works well with all dry erase markers. In addition it provides:-
1 min read
Whiteboarding with IdeaPaint beats a Whiteboard hands down
Topics: whiteboard selling visual storytelling whiteboarding
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Ten Tips for Effective Whiteboard Sales Engagement
Whiteboarding is emerging as a mainstream enablement tool in B2B technology companies that actually contributes real value during the sales cycle.
Having trained several thousand sales and support people in the Whiteboardselling methodology over the past 18 months, my observations on the most valuable aspects of whiteboarding as an enablement methodology are:-
- Creating clarity in your value proposition and building it into a story that everyone can tell is an excellent initial win. Most companies confess that their messaging is somewhere between 2-3/5 for clarity when we start the process.
- Message Ownership - in 1/2 a day Whiteboardselling training Symposium salespeople either see or do the whiteboard up to 9 times using an active learning method and on the very next day they can give the whiteboard, - they know it.
- Consistency and confidence in telling the story are the knock-on benefits for individuals and this is important in creating differentiation in the mind of the buyer - when the competition are saying the same things you are.
What is under appreciated about whiteboarding is that sales-people will find it very difficult get up and whiteboard on an ad-hoc basis....unless they have already decided what they want to say and practiced what they are going to draw.
A pre-requisite for salespeople to whiteboard effectively is a visual story that centers around what the buyer is trying to achieve, that salespeople can use to engage the buyer in conversation.
A Simple Visual Confection - the Whiteboardselling method
My observations in riding shotgun on many sales-calls as a sales trainer are that salespeople can often get a meeting, but when they are face-face with senior executives, often don't know how to engage in a business discussion and thus revert to where they are more comfortable - discussing their products, and the meeting terminates shortly thereafter.
Ten Tips for Effective Whiteboard Engagement
- A whiteboard session is a conversation aid to help you engage the buyer, - not a presentation....if you feel yourself going into presentation mode, stop, ask a question and get the buyer talking.
- Learn the script and practice the opening, if it is well constructed, it will use a challenging opening and positioning statements to engage the buyer immediately.
- No "marketing-speak" or gobbledybook when you whiteboard. For example, instead of the word "redefine" use "change"; instead of "revolutionary use "different" ...people don't feel like they are being sold when you use plain English.
- The goal of the whiteboarding session is to engage the buyer in conversation and have your capabilities unfold naturally in conversation - not to demonstrate your prowess as an artist or orator.
- Learn the whiteboard story and practice it in private and when you are ready, practice with your peers and your managers until you own it, ask them for feedback to improve technique, (it will take 20 iterations until you own it).
- Get the buyer's issues out in red on the whiteboard and drill down on them, quantify them and figure out together if they are worth solving and how to solve them.
- You don’t have to start the whiteboard at the start, you don't have to strictly adhere to the build sequence and you don’t have to finish the whiteboard. You only need to engage the buyer around one or two issues to get a commitment to advance the sale to next steps.
- Carry a BIC 4 color pen and your own set of whiteboard markers with you, so that you can tell your story on any surface or in case the markers in the meeting room are dry or missing.
- Carry a visual confection (your completed whiteboard story) printed on high quality A-3 paper into the meeting, folded in half in your note book. Use it in the following situations;
- there is no whiteboard or it's full of writing already with "do not erase" written on it,
- your meeting is cut short and you need to get key concepts across in a couple of minutes,
- you are at lunch and there is no writing surface,
- Follow up by sending a meeting summary that embeds the completed whiteboard visual confection in the letter outlining their issues and how your capabilities can solve their problems - and agreed next steps.
Topics: visual confections whiteboard selling whiteboarding
3 min read
New Trade-Show Best Practices - Present from a Visual Confection
Do you attend B2B technology tradeshows? If you do, please answer the following questions to put you in the trade-show mind-set.
- Do you love tradeshows or hate them, or do you see them as a necessary evil?
- How good were the leads you got from your last tradeshow?
- Is the tradeshow on the wane, or is still a viable marketing investment?
- What's your tradeshow strategy as a vendor...are you like HubSpot and shun them, or do you select the best ones and invest in them?
- Do you just talk to the visitor or you do a quick demo and hand out a brochure?
- Do you have a 3-5 slide PowerPoint presentation with just the elements of your story?
- How do you sort out the visitors who just want a stamp so they can enter the draw for the iPad from a potential prospect?
I attended a trade-show recently and used a visual confection to tell my story. (The confection below is an excerpt of the Advanced Marketing Concepts Whiteboard story - a visual confection). 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”
You have 20 seconds to hook the visitor, 3 minutes to engage, tell your story, qualify and get permission to follow-up
Visitors come thick and fast during the breaks and at lunch and drinks sessions. You have a 20 seconds to hook the visitor and between 2-4 minutes to discover their top issues, tell your story, qualify their interest and get permission for follow-up.
Topics: qualification visual confections whiteboard selling
10 min read
B2B Sales and Marketing in Transition - What's working?
This three part blog series started with a guest post on The evolution of marketing and PR, by PR-consultant-turned-inbound-marketer
Topics: inbound marketing sales and marketing alignment whiteboard selling brain science
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Eleven of the Best Things in 2010–Not really a marketing blog
- Best Book: Seth Godin's Linchpin really addresses a bunch of personal issues that prevent people from getting the important stuff done.
- Obama's healthcare reforms: mean affordable healthcare coverage for me and my family and the employees of our business...and millions of other small business owners and employees in the US.
- Moving back to the USA...it was a good time to go to the UK in 2003 and it feels like a good time to be back in the US - an added bonus, we missed the coldest, snowiest winter in Scotland for 60 years.
- Becoming an affiliate of WhiteboardSelling provides a logical output of our Messaging Architecture process and translates it into something the sales team will actually want to use and enables me to implement a lot of the Salescraft technique I have developed as well.
- Our Toyota Prius has to be the smartest car I've ever owned and we are averaging 50+ MPG. A real surprise inside, with more leg and headroom than our old Volvo Waggon and a terrific load deck that will carry most stuff we need to haul.
- Moving in to our Pebble Beach home in just 10 weeks from purchase with a complete renovation has to be some sort of record...thanks to my wife, Robin.
- My new Kevin Burns Putter...this is the first putter I have ever owned that is scientifically fitted exactly for my physiology and putting stroke. It is also the finest quality milled putter available and the custom-fitting-machining process that Kevin Burns invented and his practical stroke improvement tips mean that KBGolf putters are the only truly custom golf clubs that actually improve your game.
- Best Work Engagement: Working on implementing Inbound Marketing at hot Cloud Storage spin-out Scality in Paris.
- Best Wine of the year: 1976 Penfolds Grange Hermitage - a majesterial wine, still improving, incredible colour, nose and massive sweet and intense chocolatey red and black fruit flavors that linger for minutes, this wine still has 20 years in it.
- Best Pub: The Central Bar, St Andrews and ask for a pint of my favorite real ale "Bitter and Twisted" from Harviestoun Brewery.
- Best New Golf Course I played: Loch Lomond, Scotland thanks to my host Rick Gardner and the best parkland layout I've ever played - shot a 79 gross.
Topics: inbound marketing whiteboard selling
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Whiteboard Selling Best Practices Group started on LinkedIn
Whiteboard Selling Best Practices
If you are interested in Whiteboarding, you are invited to join a new LinkedIn group set up to promote and share Whiteboarding best practices, tips and to advance the art of whiteboarding in sales.
Whiteboard Selling Best Practices is an open group created to share and disseminate Whiteboarding tips, ideas and best practices.
WhiteboardSelling alumni and sales, marketing and enablement professionals with an interest in using whiteboarding techniques for in-person and remote whiteboarding are most welcome.
The goal of this group is advance the art of whiteboarding so as to improve engagement, discovery and differentiation through visual storytelling.
Click on the whiteboard to go to the group.
Topics: whiteboard selling visual storytelling whiteboarding
3 min read
PowerPoint Vs. Prezi - Guy Kawasaki and Dan Heath Tell Stories
This post started at the insistence of a colleague who knew of my work with WhiteboardSelling and wanted me to check out Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint.
Topics: effective presentations whiteboard selling powerpoint
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Whiteboard Sales Training vs Traditional Product Training
Readers of this blog collectively will have sat through tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours of product training in their sales and marketing careers.
Topics: cross-sell whiteboard selling product training
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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.
Resources
FAQ's
View a Visual Presentation of the Announcement
Topics: whiteboard selling visual storytelling corporate visions
3 min read
Eliminate Culture Barriers in Sales Training with Visual Storytelling
Recently I had the pleasure of leading a global Whiteboard Selling Enablement Symposium for Siemens in Cologne Germany. Since working as an affiliate of Whiteboard Selling, this is the first training program I have led, which included Chinese native speakers.
