The Challenger Sale and Whiteboarding

Visual Storytelling a powerful enabler for The Challenger Sale approach.

Big Pictures Help Buyers Appreciate the Difference

The visual storytelling creation process using an adaption of The Challenger Sale message structure, captures the seller's unique capabilities from the buyer's perspective in a visual confection and a story that can be used to educate buyers and help them appreciate the unique value in using their products/services.

The completed visual confection can be used in sales training  to enable salespeople to quickly internalize and remember the message through immersion in active learning role-playing. This helps accelerate ramp times for new product introductions and post-merger sell-through, as well as getting new hires ramped faster.

Adapting the story based on the interest of the buyer

No two meetings with customers are the same and no two sales conversations are the same. Salespeople who have internalized the visual story and "own the message" can adapt their story based on the audience...we don't need 5 different messages for the 5 buying influences in the sale. Proof points will change, value emphasis will change based on the buyer, but the core ideas and value creation message will remain constant. 

Influencing the buying process

A completed visual confection is a meaningful record of your discussion. Whether it was captured on a sheet of paper, a napkin, or in your note-book, it is a powerful selling aid that can be used to influence control over key players in the organization. 

A visual confection captures on one page the trends and challenges buyers are likely to identify with, highlighting the status quo or "as-is" in black, their issues in red, your solution  or "as-it-could-be" in green and agreed next steps in blue.

The next best practice step is capturing it digitally and embedding it in a meeting summary letter to follow up the sales call. This is one of the single most powerful tools in getting your ideas shared and exerting influence at the executive level and vital for surviving the internal funding battle in the positioning phase of the buying process.