Chapter 19

Forming a Working Team

Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.

—Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert

A working team for a whiteboard design initiative is different in purpose and makeup than a working team for other marketing and sales messaging projects.

Whiteboarding initiatives stir the passions of salespeople as a new and novel presentation mechanism, therefore they usually generate working teams whose members are from groups all over the company, not the least of which is sales. Sales is driving (and in some cases paying for) the whiteboard initiatives. This often results in sales executives who are willing to commit the time and resources of key members of their teams to participate and ensure that the whiteboard meets the needs of the field.

Even when whiteboarding projects are sponsored through marketing, sales is extremely interested and wants to participate. This is why whiteboarding projects are so effective in bridging the marketing and sales divide—whiteboarding finally brings together all the great work that marketing has done. It results in sales and marketing messaging delivered in a format and delivery model that appeals to salespeople. Salespeople want better ways to engage with their customers and prospects, and that is the result of a whiteboard initiative.

The net-net is that whiteboarding projects tend to have very high visibility across the organization, and there is usually very little difficulty in recruiting members.

The Working Team's Core Responsibilities

Here's what the working team does:

The time commitment for a working team member is approximately eight hours spread over a four- to five-week period, depending on the time frame of the project. This is very important to clarify when recruiting a working team member. You want to underscore the low-touch nature of the role. You don't want to distract your sales resources, whose chief responsibility is quota achievement and revenue generation.

Who Should Be on the Working Team?

So who exactly should be part of whiteboard project working teams?

We've seen a broad range of makeup and personalities in working teams. Much of it depends on the size of the organization. Smaller, earlier-stage clients have C-level executives and company founders as part of the working team. But even with customers that have sales forces in the many thousands, it is not uncommon to see VP-level marketing and sales executives as part of working teams.

Another driver of working team membership is a whiteboard's objectives and topics, discussed in Chapter 18. Once you have that nailed, selecting working team candidates is a fairly straightforward process. For higher-level, corporate stories, senior executives—who have a stake in the game when it comes to getting the story right—want to get involved. Senior titles are not usually involved with lower-level, more solution- or product-specific whiteboards or competitive whiteboards. There are sometimes exceptions, based on corporate culture. We worked with one very large Fortune 500 organization to design several whiteboards in parallel, and the working teams were packed with VP-level key players who had a fervent interest in the outcome of the project. What's more, the CEO of the company requested regular updates from the teams as the projects progressed.

So how big should a working team be? No fewer than five and no larger than eight members. With too few members there are not enough viewpoints and not enough representation of key constituencies. And when the working team gets into the double digits, you get the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome going.

Working teams normally include individuals drawn from (but not limited to) the following profiles:

This last group includes “key players,” who in many cases don't fit neatly into the other four groups. It is critical that these important influencers are sought out and at least invited to participate on the working team.

Product managers are marked as optional only because they (hopefully!) trust their marketing counterparts to represent their needs.

To summarize: If you are ever in doubt as to who should be on the working team for a whiteboard design project, just make sure that any message owners—key players who are instrumental in shaping the key corporate, solution, and even product messaging for your organization—are invited to participate.

Who Shouldn't Be on the Working Team?

The answer to this question is simple. If you invite someone, and they respond they are too busy to contribute the 8 to 10 hours over four to five weeks, then they shouldn't be on the team. The last thing you want is to have people sign up to participate and then not show up to key review meetings.

There is also a wider circle of people, such as field personnel and executives, whose input and approval you will need, but who are not essential working team members. In later sections we'll address ways you can get their input and sign off on the project.

So you have your Working Team formed, now what? You're about to embark on probably the most important part of the predesign process: selecting the ingredients that you are going to bake your whiteboard cake with.