WHITEBOARD STORYTELLING - YOUR SECRET WEAPON IN FACE-FACE SELLING

In-person selling is back after a COVID-enforced hiatus.

As salespeople, customer success and pre-sales engineers return to face-to-face meetings with prospects and customers, it presents an opportunity for your business. How can you equip your direct and channel teams to thrive in these in-person conversations while fostering growth and learning?

While many sales professionals are accustomed to using slides during virtual discovery calls, I strongly recommend refraining from using them during virtual or in-person meetings.

Adapting to face-to-face discovery sessions and subsequent in-person calls requires situational awareness and practical communication skills. It's a chance to differentiate and engage buyers in what they care about: - their struggling moments, the internal and external complications of behaviour change and their desired outcomes.

How can we prepare newcomers and channel partners who may have never made in-person calls to develop these essential skills, and how can we refresh the skills of experienced sellers?

• In-person discovery meetings require situational fluency and conversational competency.
• In-person interactions demand heightened levels of communication proficiency and emotional intelligence to gauge the mood and dynamics of the meeting as it progresses.
• Buyers do not want your PowerPoint presentation in a first in-person meeting; they prefer a conversation, and the odds of getting a second meeting diminish with PowerPoint use during discovery.
• Leveraging the whiteboard in the room can be a powerful way to differentiate and showcase competence and confidence.
• Combined with stories, salespeople can use the whiteboard and simple hand-drawn images to reframe conversations, strategically position vs competitors, guide discussions, and capture crucial information for future reference. 

I remember making an initial call at Ericsson in Texas many years ago. We walked into the meeting room, and the only thing on the table was an LCD projector. Its fan was whirring, it was hot, and it was awaiting our PC connection (and an expectation of the customary company pitch and feature-benefit dump). We turned it off, to the relief and surprise of our audience, and had a productive opening meeting.

Buyers now cringe when a salesperson plugs in an LCD projector, as the expectations from hundreds of prior boring product and company presentations hit a negative anchor in their brains.

To learn more about channel acceleration using whiteboard storytelling, watch the Centrify-CDW channel enablement case study. 

Discovery Meeting Goals

A well-executed discovery meeting serves the needs of the buyer and the seller:

1. The salesperson should open the meeting and elicit the prospect's end-in-mind (for agreeing to meet with you), after which you share your end-in-mind and your intent for the meeting.
2. Ideally, the seller will elicit the questions the buyer has on their mind—as that is why they are there—to have their questions answered.
3. The salesperson will then run the meeting to ensure the buyer has their questions answered while asking questions they need answered to determine whether they should meet again for an in-depth discussion.
4. Once the meeting agenda is set and the time available agreed upon, the salesperson should share their insight into the buyer's industry, trends likely to impact the buyer, and a hypothesis about the buyer's struggling moments and possible outcomes with a different approach.
5. The salesperson should use the whiteboard in the room to capture the buyer's current state challenges and the desired outcomes from a new approach and to convey big ideas using hand-drawn pictures and stories
6. The salesperson should introduce high-level capabilities of their approach (don't get into product detail) and understand the impact of the change on the buyer.
7. A successful meeting should conclude with an agreement to meet for a more in-depth conversation or an agreement that there is not a fit and part gracefully. Both companies have benefited from the meeting.

Using WHITEBOARD Storytelling to Accelerate situational fluency

Whiteboards are familiar; they have been around for over 40 years and are in every meeting room.

One objective for using the whiteboard is teaching salespeople to spontaneously use it to confidently convey aspects of your "why-change" story and the discovery conversation you want them to have with customers. 

A much more critical and underappreciated outcome of using whiteboards and storytelling is the acceleration in learning and competency that comes from combining all senses in immersive learning.

When I run a whiteboard storytelling workshop, salespeople read, see, say, do, listen to partners, and practice the whiteboard story using multiple visual storytelling techniques up to ten times in the space of an hour or two.

To illustrate how well this enablement method works, a newly hired Pitney Bowes product manager who participated in a whiteboard storytelling workshop I ran in Melbourne in the early 2010s gave their GIS Whiteboard story "gold standard" presentation to lead off the workshop session the very next day in Sydney. Our executive sponsors were well pleased with the training outcome and their investment in whiteboard storytelling to accelerate new hire sales ramp

Effective whiteboard storytelling incorporates a natural and structured approach to presenting ideas through visual storytelling that helps overcome common sales performance problems often sighted in sales performance surveys;

• Salespeople lack basic presentation and communication skills
• They are unable to differentiate from competitors
• They are unable to articulate how they create value
• They don't tell stories about how in-kind companies have succeeded in overcoming similar challenges
• Their meetings end without clear agreement on achieving outcomes
• They fail to gain commitment from the buyer to confirm in writing the agreed next steps

Whiteboard storytelling methodology 

• A messaging workshop for developing a compelling message on a whiteboard, either from existing material or where this does not exist, to help create it. If you want to see what a well-constructed whiteboard story looks like you can freely download the Centrify Platform Whiteboard (circa 2016).
• A whiteboard storytelling workshop, where virtual or in-person customer-facing teams learn to tell the visual story through repetitive role-playing.
• A certification process to ensure salespeople have practised and internalised the story, where individuals roleplay a discovery call using the whiteboard and are critiqued by their managers, either in person or virtually several weeks after the workshop.