Why Change Selling Blog

Are you familiar with the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux or Chauvet Caves in France? If you are not, please click on this link to the  Chauvet Cave Paintings.

I had the privilege of working closely with author Corey Sommers as a consultant for two years until Whiteboard Selling was sold to Corporate Visions in late 2012. This review of the book Whiteboard Selling - Empowering Sales through Visuals, by Corey Sommers and David Jenkins is an insider’s perspective.  

I Wish I Had This Book 2 Years Earlier

I wish I had this book when I started working with WhiteboardSelling in December 2010, as it would have accelerated my learning curve. 

Yesterday Corporate Visions announced the results of its fourth quarter industry survey on visual storytelling, which was taken by more than 300 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople and marketers around the globe.

The findings reveal a lack of visual storytelling techniques among marketing and sales teams, and specifically, that only 13 percent of salespeople use an interactive writing surface such as a whiteboard to support their customer conversations.

To determine what role whiteboard selling techniques play in marketing and sales teams who work in complex B2B selling environments, Corporate Visions presented questions about the use of whiteboards, how they are created, by whom and why they are used. Notable findings from the Q4 survey include: 

Whiteboards are barely used

Respondents noted they use whiteboarding just 13 percent of the time to tell a visual story as part of sales conversations. The other tools mentioned most often were PowerPoint (33 percent), phone (26 percent) and in-person conversations (27 percent), which employ little to no visual components. This means salespeople are losing out on the opportunity to present ideas in a more engaging way, and to differentiate their messages, conversations and presentations to customers and prospects.

Whiteboarding is not an on-purpose effort

Of those who actually report using whiteboards, 51 percent say they create them ad-hoc or borrow them from their peers. Only 24 percent are pre-built and approved as part of a strategic marketing and sales support program. For whiteboarding to be effective, marketing needs to develop the messages and tools alongside the sales team to make sure everyone is delivering a consistent, high-quality message. By pre-building whiteboards, salespeople are given the ability to deliver a simple, repeatable story with confidence and create a differentiated experience in the buying cycle. 

Whiteboards, when used effectively, can be leveraged in various ways – 

Respondents who use whiteboards specified they are essential to the buying cycle in a number of different ways, including:

• 25 percent – presenting/differentiating their solution from the competition
• 17 percent – illustrating the business impact of their solution
• 8 percent – demand generation
• 6 percent – explaining the implementation process

By leveraging the power of visual storytelling, salespeople can help illustrate their ideas in a simple, concrete way that will help them at various key moments in the sales process.

In fact, recent research by Aberdeen Group found that 53 percent of best-in-class companies identified creating more meaningful conversations as a top priority for increasing and sustaining revenue in an uncertain economy.
Furthermore, the firm found conducting an interactive whiteboard conversation (as opposed to a static presentation) leads to a 50 percent higher lead conversion rate, 29 percent shorter time-to-productivity and 15 percent average shorter sales cycle – helping to combat the meaningful conversation problem among businesses.

Aberdeen Group Whiteboarding Survey Dec 2012

"It's clear from the results of this survey that visual storytelling techniques like whiteboarding are alarmingly underutilized by both marketing and sales teams," said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer, Corporate Visions. "87 percent of today's companies are using static techniques, rather than having intimate and visually interactive conversations, which is what whiteboarding allows companies to do. Marketing and sales teams need to work together to create pre-built whiteboards that are going to differentiate themselves in the sales cycle, which in turn, will help them close more deals."

PowerPoint Sales Presentation

Sales and marketing industry experts have been talking about how ineffective Power Point presentations are at building audience engagement and accurately conveying information for years now. Perhaps the most vocal critic is Edward Tufte, author of the widely acclaimed "Presenting Data and Information" books and lecture series.

So why does it seem that we’re being subjected to more bland deliveries than ever?!  PowerPoint’s failings as a medium for sales presentation have already been well-established.  When used in today’s standard fashion, Power Point:

• Inhibits engagement and audience rapport,
• Muddles the transfer of information, and
• Diminishes salesperson effectiveness.

It’s easy to imagine the mechanisms by which PowerPoint inhibits audience engagement – simply think back to the last time you sat through a text-heavy, read-directly-from-the-screen slideshow-style Powerpoint presentation.  Basically, when you put all of your relevant information onto slides that can be easily read in advance by your audience members, you eliminate the incentive for them to follow along and actually engage with the information you’re sharing...in fact why bother showing up...you can send it advance, they can read it without you and they can call you if they need you.

At the same time, the physical limitations of a poorly-given PowerPoint presentation diminish rapport and reduce message retention.  Because most PowerPoint slides are read – word-for-word – by their presenters, a connection (which is often founded on eye contact and body language) can’t be formed between audience and presenter.  The result – as you might expect – is a room full of tuned-out attendees, discreetly trying to check their mobile devices instead of listening intently to your pitch.

Overall, though, the biggest hindrance to salesperson effectiveness is a reliance on Powerpoint to tell their story. In many cases, Power Point encourages comfort-zone selling.  After all, there’s no reason to learn and master delivery of your company’s sales message when it’s printed on slides right in front of you!

An illustration of why this matters, imagine two sales people – one who depends upon a PowerPoint presentation to lead client meetings and one who’s embraced his company’s sales message to the point where he’s comfortable expounding upon it in a free-form manner.

Which of these sales people do you think will be better prepared to deliver an effective conversation with a buyer in the face of unforeseen circumstances (for example, a lost USB memory stick or a broken projector)?  Which do you think will be better prepared to ad-lib when needed in order to address unique or unexpected questions and concerns brought up by prospective customers?

The bottom line is that, if you’re relying on Power Point to give your sales presentations, you’re leaving an awful lot of opportunity on the table!
So if you can’t use the corporate world’s most treasured presentation tool, what options exist when it comes to delivering engaging sales presentation without Power Point?  Consider any of the following options:

Whiteboard Selling

As a partner of Whiteboard Selling, I'm a user of the methodology, author of nearly 30 whiteboards and have trained thousands of salespeople to use the whiteboard to tell their story. I still use Powerpoint from time to time, but merely to project an image...I am telling the story, it's my ideas and me that people have come to see and listen to.

The whiteboaring presentation style works because it appeals to both the left and right sides of our brains.  The hand-drawn illustrations delight our visual sense, while spoken words and facts give our analytical sides the data they need to be satisfied.  The result is a message retention rate that’s much higher than audio or visuals alone – not to mention, significantly improved over traditional Power Point presentations.

As an added bonus, whiteboarding creates more effective sales people. What happens when a company adopts whiteboard storytelling as its presentation and buyer engagement medium?  When sales management executives hold their sales team accountable to achieving mastery and then certifies them as competent and confident in delivering the whiteboard story, they elevate the performance of their sales team. When sales representatives know their story  inside and out, - I call it the Zen state... they can engage buyers and influence opinions through delivering relevant information in a seemingly-casual manner.

Message ownership means that salespeople can engage buyers in conversations that are relevant to each client’s needs – anytime, anywhere.

Hands-on Demonstrations

Another effective alternative to PowerPoint is the hands-on demonstration.
Obviously, this style won’t be a possibility for all products or services, but it’s a great option if you are selling, hand-held or portable items or software.  Marketing experts like to say, “Show me – don’t tell me,” and there’s a reason for that.  Giving prospective customers the opportunity to interact with your product in a live environment is one of the most engaging, effective ways to showcase capabilities and guage buyer interest.

Conversations

Conversations where salespeople lead with an informed opinion about the buyer condition are extremely effective. Simply sitting down at the conference room table and telling your future customers, “Let’s talk about your business,” is an easy-to-implement alternative to traditional Power Point slideshows, disarms the buyer and creates wonderful opportunity for rapport and trust to develop.

The benefits of this approach are two-fold.  Not only do people love to talk about themselves (and will be flattered that you care more about their individual needs than about sticking to a standard or custom Powerpoint whipping), leading with an opinion backed by your and your company experience opens up a World of possibility that you may never achieve in presentation mode. 

By taking the time to actually engage your prospective customers – rather than berate them with boring slides and empty talking points – the odds that you’ll be able to build rapport and convey your sales message effectively increase significantly.

Resources

Download the Whiteboard Selling Best Practices Guide

Read how the leading Virtualization company transformed its sales culture with Whiteboard Selling.

Get the New Whiteboard Selling Whitepaper

Planning Kick-off Outcomes

Billions of dollars are spent in the technology business every year to bring sales and support people together for  sales kick-off events to start the new sales year. 
These events are a celebration of the achievements of the prior year and offer a chance to; recognize individual performers, refresh on corporate strategy, a product update, and often a product training session.

Apart from a good time and hangover to remember, salespeople typically leave the kick-off event with little more than they came with. Despite best intentions of organizers, this is sadly the case and sales and marketing leadership need to take a more qualitative approach to planning kick-off outcomes. 

Why Bother with a Kick-off?

This is a good question and one that event planners and sales leaders are finding increasingly difficult to answer. Cisco has saved a small fortune since they scrapped their nation-wide kick-offs, which are now held virtually in regional offices. A day of speeches and death by executive PowerPoint presentations over a videoconference to remember - I'm told (not).

Given the huge investment in time and money to stage a kick-off and the risks involved, salespeople should take something home of value that they can use as soon as they return to work, other than the memory of a good time.

Don't Bother with Traditional Product Training 

Product training on a newly announced product, a recently acquired companies product, or a refresher on existing product is often a driver for bringing sales team's together for an event and part of the business case to fund kick-off events. 

The trouble with traditional product training, despite best efforts of the product
management/marketing team is that salespeople will not begin to sell the new product in the volumes the company would like until at least 12 months after introduction - on average.

To get true product ramp time, we need to add the time it takes for the core group to get comfortable selling the new product (6 months), to the time it takes for the sales cycle, from lead to close and let's use 6 months as an average cycle time in our example. 

Let's assume that the sales team has an inbound lead conversion system that works and a supply of sales-ready leads are available from the day they are trained in selling the new product. Using a  traditional product marketing route it will take about a year to get the core group to sell-though... so at the next kick-off, the product management team will finally start seeing the results they sought in the prior years kick-off. 


I looked for a study on ramp-times for B2B software products after introduction and the closest thing I could find was this chart from CSO Insights 2012 Sales Performance Optimization survey of more than 1500 B2B companies. 

Visual Storytelling & Role-playing 

Question: What if you could cut 90-120 days from the new product ramp time? - what would that do for your revenue and profit?
Question: What if you could embed a process into new hire training and use it at your next kick-off to get everyone trained and capable of selling the product, the day after training?

In these enablement sessions, salespeople engage in intense 1:1 role-playing sessions using visual storytelling and a visual confection that is fully scripted and peppered with best practices discovery questions, common objections and counters to those objections.

At the end of the session, salespeople will have seen or presented the visual story up to 9 times and they know the story and can engage customers the next day. We have received numerous emails with feedback from successful salespeople who have used the visual confection in the weeks following the training to identify and close multi-million dollar deals.

Sales Management and Coaching Follow-up

As with any behavior change initiative, disciplined practice, coaching and feedback from sales managers in the weeks and first few months after a visual storytelling event are key to getting ROI and cutting the ramp time for sell-through of new products.

Without coaching and regular practice/use of the visual confection and script, salespeople may revert to their comfort-zone and to leaning on PowerPoint to tell their story. We recommend creating an expectation in the sales team that the Visual storytelling approach is here to stay and not an option and they will be required to pass a certification role-play in front of their managers.

What is Sales Enablement?

To my surprise, the Wikipedia definition of Sales Enablement has been removed and after a few queries I uncovered this definition from Forrester, which aligns with my take on the subject.

"Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system". 
One of the many objectives of the sales enablement team is equipping client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with customer stakeholders. Note this does not say a presentation, but there may be a point in a customer's problem solving cycle where a presentation is appropriate, but it is usually well into the buying cycle.

Why Whiteboarding? 

1. Compelling Conversations

With the buyer firmly in charge of the buy-sell relationship, when salespeople are  given an opportunity to meet a buyer they had better be well prepared for a conversation with the prospect about their business, have a working knowledge their industry, their competitors and be armed with an understanding of their likely issues. 

According to extensive research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board, published in  The Challenger Sale, 53% of the contribution to customer loyalty comes from the sales experience itself and the interaction with the sales and support team...not brand, not price and not features.
These are table stakes in the new go-to-market equation.
A conversation with a buyer around their issues using the back of a napkin or whiteboard to convey key points and concepts is far more compelling than a product presentation-driven approach.

2. Message Clarity 

Having worked on more than 50 messaging alignment projects, most clients prior to commencing a project will rate their messaging clarity somewhere between 4-6/10, where 1 its is completely unintelligible and 10 is crystal clear.
When polled after completing a project, they rate their clarity between 8-10/10. Sales and marketing messaging alignment is a typical high priority item in the sales enablement agenda. Whiteboard story development when done effectively will create a clear value proposition that is relevant to the target audience.

3. Message Ownership - Consistency

Lack of message ownership is one of the biggest  barriers in Selling complex B2B products and services. Typical symptoms of a problem with message ownership are;

• lack of confidence in engaging business buyers,
• long ramp times for new hires and longer than expected lead times for new product introduction,
• reliance on PowerPoint to tell the story, 
• calling at the level of the user or technical buyer instead of the business buyer...(at least they will understand the product),
• a reliance on pre-sales on sales calls (because the conversation dives into features instead of focusing on the business problem), that contributes to higher cost of sale and longer sales cycle

Once the whiteboard story is created, it can be learned quickly through immersion in active role-playing sessions and in half a day, an entire enterprise sales team can be trained to know a whiteboard and can make sales calls using a whiteboard the very next day.
Practice makes perfect and in the weeks after the role-playing sessions it is important for sales managers to have the sales team continue to practice doing the whiteboard.

4. Leveraging the Whiteboard story for marketing purposes 

A well constructed whiteboard story is easily repurposed to offset its development cost. If the story that drives the whiteboard is well constructed and truly aligned around capabilities that create value in solving the buyers problem, then it can be used for marketing and on the job training.

Video-scribing is an exciting new of way repurposing existing whiteboards as it captures attention and engages while the story unfolds. These hand-scribed videos can be posted on the company Website and viewed by customers for marketing purposes and salespeople for training purposes on smartphones and tablets.
Find out more about converting your whiteboard story into a hand-scribed video

5. Behavior Change - Coaching and Certification

The goal of sales enablement is more than just creating communications and engagement tools, it's to produce a positive behavior change across the whole sales team that drives improved sales results.

Too often enablement and sales training investments fail to produce the desired results.

The key to behavior change is getting people out of their comfort zone in the first place and then using practice, spaced repetition and coaching and feedback from managers and peers until the new behavior becomes comfortable and is ingrained in the individual and the sales culture.

To maximize the value of an investment in the development of a whiteboard story requires an ongoing commitment to behavior change. Certification in 60-90 or 120 days after any training event is an excellent way of forward tensioning the behavior change and getting sales reps to 
practice and learn the story.

Certification when used in the induction process at a sales training boot-camp can drastically shorten ramp time of sales reps as they are able to engage buyers in their story from the first call.

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:-

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 visual confection is a powerful tool for communicating a lot of information in a short space of time.

Visual confections are excellent sales aids for inside sales and field sales professionals selling complex products and services. A completed Whiteboard is a visual confection in itself.

I'm a Mac user and had been toying with the idea of buying a tablet PC so that I could more easily create visual confections in PowerPoint. Up till now all of my whiteboards have been created using either objects from WhiteboardSelling's pre-populated style gallery or created on my Mac using an external touch pad.

An example visual confection below is the Message Strength vs. Clarity graphic below. It contains words and hand drawn images to quickly convey an idea around the effectiveness of your Website message in attracting visitors in the first place and then its clarity in conveying meaning. If you missed the original message strength article you can click on the image to read it.

Message Strength vs. Clarity, an example visual confection

What Price or Value was your last Sales Call?

Would your prospect have paid you for the value they received from meeting with you or one of your sales executives on your last call with them? 

This is a vexing question and it's one of many vexing questions that have been on my mind since I read the "Challenger Sale".  It's a question that should be keeping B2B sales enablement professionals, sales managers and sales professionals up at night.

This question is vital in a World where buyers can find everything they need to know about your products and services without having to speak to you.

On your last call, did you bring the gift of knowledge and insight? Did you educate the buyer on an industry issue or sub-optimal condition that you are aware of because of your domain expertise, view of the market, knowledge of their company and your unique understanding of how your capabilities can create value?

Alternatively, would the buyer have invoiced you for 40 minutes of their time that they felt you robbed from them on your last sales call because you occupied their time, but failed to bring any value?

I will introduce a couple of related concepts to begin to address the value of the sales call question.

Challenger Selling is not new to Top Tier Consultants

The Challenger Sales type has been identified as the most effective in selling complex B2B products and services. When we examine the