Chapter 17

Are You Ready to Whiteboard? Not So Fast!

A pressing challenge for a large enterprise is getting sales, marketing, training, and other content developers on the same page when designing effective sales tools used at the point of sale. In my experience running marketing teams at large enterprises and in start-ups, collaborating to build visual stories—aka whiteboards—is a rallying cry to bring x-functional teams together to gain consensus on messaging and how it should be communicated. Whiteboard selling is not just an outstanding way to communicate value to customers and prospects—it helps organizations come together to provide tools that salespeople actually use, thus ensuring the message gets out in a consistent fashion.

—Brian Bell, Chief Marketing Officer, Zuora

After all the whiteboard examples we've shared and the activities we hope you've completed, you may say to yourself, “I've got some great whiteboard templates built out, now I'm going to go out and start whiteboarding with my customers.” Feel free to try out some ideas, but if you're serious about creating sales culture change, there's a long road ahead before rolling out whiteboards to your sales force.

Depending on your role, here are some guidelines on next steps.

Individual Sales Contributors

First, make sure you have completed some of the activities in the previous section in order to create customized examples of some of the whiteboard templates. Model the examples with a specific customer or prospect in mind, perhaps an account you are trying to penetrate or close a deal with right now. In later sections we'll discuss some best practices for how to learn to present a completed whiteboard for sales. Feel free to jump ahead if you are anxious to try out your whiteboard ideas. But before you engage with prospects directly using these new sales tools, be sure to test them out with your colleagues or existing customers to get their feedback and input.

A note of caution: If you find your whiteboards are effective and you decide to document and distribute them in scanned drawings or photos, you must realize you are at risk of running afoul of marketing teams and executives who have not put their stamp of approval on the core messaging contained in your pitch. The market trends, typical challenges, value propositions, competitive information, case studies, and other whiteboard ingredients may not reflect corporate-sanctioned doctrine. Just as home-grown PowerPoint presentations may raise the ire of the message owners, a “skunkworks” whiteboard—if widely distributed—can result in “blowback.”

Marketing Managers and Executives

If your objective is to create highly effective whiteboarding tools to arm your sales force on a large scale, your work has just begun. In this book you've seen several highly effective templates and story designs, but a whiteboard design effort usually results in a one-of-a-kind piece of art that uniquely meets the needs of the sales channel. You want to free your salespeople from the evil clutches (and crutches) of PowerPoint. But your success will depend on a high degree of collaboration, working with a x-functional team. You may need to free up resources that are currently tasked with everyday marketing functions in order to make your unique whiteboards come to life.

Sales Enablement Teams

You sit at the crosshairs of sales, marketing, training, products, HR, and many other groups within modern-day companies. We've seen whiteboarding initiatives be the most strategic endeavors an enablement group undertakes. We've seen whiteboards create tremendous value across the organization and bridge the gap between marketing and sales. As with your marketing counterparts, however, you'll need to put together a x-functional team to get buy-in from all the key players.

Sales Leaders and Executives

When it comes to sales transformation, a whiteboarding initiative is just one piece of the puzzle. Your key role to make this successful comes down to one word: leadership. Every successful whiteboarding initiative we've witnessed relies on sales executives to lead and drive the project. You have to ensure complete participation by all groups and create a sense of accountability that drives all the way down to each field person's responsibility to learn and master the story. If you are going to truly enable your sales team to whiteboard your story effectively, you have to certify that each and every seller can articulate the story in a high-pressure, simulated sales call. This process will be a topic of a later chapter.

Leadership to make a whiteboarding initiative successful also means you have to allocate a good chunk of time at upcoming sales kickoffs and other meetings to run hands-on whiteboard training. You want to be sure your entire field organization can master the story and go out the very next day and engage with customers and prospects. We've worked with sales organizations large and small that build their entire sales kickoff or other sales event around whiteboard learning and training. They have a strategic view of using whiteboards to enable their sales teams to be more effective.

Preparing for Your Whiteboarding Initiative

We don't use the word “initiative” lightly. Rolling out whiteboarding is not just a “one and done” proposition. We've seen organizations that deploy one whiteboard and soon find themselves in the midst of a full-blown program to roll out whiteboard stories for all of their major solution sets and new product launches. If you want to ensure that the stories are repeatable and adopted, then you have to plan and get broad participation. This is a truly programmatic initiative. And even if you've got our whiteboard creation best practices under your belt, short-circuiting the step-by-step design process can result in a final deliverable that misses the mark.

There are three key steps required to lay the groundwork for the whiteboard design process:

We have devoted Chapters 18, 19, and 20 to each of these critical steps to ensure that you properly lay the groundwork before you even begin to design your whiteboard.