Whiteboard Selling - Training 3200 People to Sell Differently using a Whiteboard

The global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure enables over 3,000 front-line field personnel to effectively tell their story in a confident, consistent, and compelling fashion.

Challenge

Our customer accelerates an organization’s transition to cloud computing, while whiteboard case studypreserving existing IT investments and enabling more efficient, agile service delivery without compromising control.

With more than 250,000 customers and 25,000 partners, our client helps organizations of all sizes lower costs, preserve freedom of choice and energize business through IT while saving energy—financial, human and the Earth’s.

Our customer experienced explosive growth over the last few years, including major additions to their field organization on a global basis.

In the midst of this hiring, and as part of this broad-reaching cloud initiative, they needed a way to enable and train their global field organization in the new company positioning, messaging, and value proposition, so they could more effectively sell solutions to C-Level buyers, and differentiate from the competition by not relying on the same old slide presentations.

Our customer planned to hold its World-Wide Sales Kickoff in Las Vegas in February 2011, and was looking for creative new approaches to engage field personnel in hands-on exercises instead of more slide presentations on the latest and greatest features and functions.

Solution

Our customer’s Sales Enablement and Sales Leadership teams evaluated a variety of different options for their kickoff, and eventually chose WhiteboardSelling as the cornerstone of the sales training component of their event.
When surveyed, participants identified a number of factors that contributed to their overwhelming satisfaction with the enablement sessions:

  • The sessions were interactive, with participants able to ask questions, add things to the whiteboard, and share their opinions while learning from others
  • The training was 100% hands-on, facilitating “active learning”
  • The activities encouraged team members to come out of their comfort zone to learn new skills and present in ways they did not think possible

Well in advance of the event, WhiteboardSelling worked hand-in-hand with our whiteboard selling customer on the design and development of the high level Corporate Story Whiteboard, along with six solution-specific whiteboards that provided “drill down” discussions branching off of the main whiteboard (over 1,200 technical sellers were also trained on these six whiteboards at the kickoff).

WhiteboardSelling applied various best practice approaches, tools, and technology to facilitate the whiteboard development process, which involved multiple constituents from many different groups, including sales, marketing, products, services, and enablement, among others.

This process was supported by the WhiteboardSelling WorkbenchTM technology platform, which made possible the rich collaboration by multiple constituents and stakeholders to ensure that the whiteboard message was broadly accepted and consistent with our customer’s brand.

The Workbench is now used in an ongoing fashion to maintain existing whiteboard assets, and to design new ones. The Workbench supports the translation of existing whiteboard assets in up to 50 different languages, a feature that our customer plans to leverage heavily.

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