Chapter 20

Taking a Message Inventory

You've chosen a whiteboard topic and formed your working team. You have your menu, your team of chefs, now all you need is the ingredients to prepare your masterpiece. You can't just run down to the corner grocer. You need prime ingredients from a gourmet food shop.

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The majority of the organizations we work with have existing, effective messaging. Designing a whiteboard is not often an exercise of growing your own soybeans—it's more like the process to turn those soybeans into soy sauce, or make gasoline out of crude oil. [We shouldn't mix metaphors like this…stick to food metaphors…olive oil out of olives…wine out of grapes.]

However, there are cases where messaging is in flux rather than locked down. There are situations where an organization is going through a re-branding or re-messaging. Because the working team is x-functional in nature (including sales, marketing, training, etc.), the whiteboard design process is actually an opportunity to clarify and enhance certain aspects of that organization's messaging. There can be unanticipated benefits when the working team comes together. People begin to agree on common ground. What comes out of the process is consensus around important company themes, solution value messaging, and competitive positioning.

Content Requirements

Let's look at a situation where the raw materials are in place—the messaging is stable and mature—you just need to pick the ingredients off the shelf after you find out which aisle they're on. The type of content required will correspond with the scope of the whiteboard and the corresponding messaging. If it is a higher-level Why Change Whiteboard, you'll need a very broad set of materials that cover all of your organization's solutions and services. A more specific Solution Whiteboard that focuses on a specific solution or category of offerings (by industry, use case, etc.) will require a much narrower set of content.

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Let's take a closer look at six sources of messaging you'll want to assemble with the help of the working team.

1. Core solution sales and marketing presentations (PPT or PDF). These are the official sales presentations, executive briefing decks, and other fully-sanctioned customer-facing materials that have been blessed by the powers that be. It is extremely important that the final whiteboard story—while not having to perfectly align with these materials—should reflect and embrace their core themes and message pillars. One of the arts of whiteboard design is how to take one of these 25, 30, or even 50-plus slide presentations, and reduce it to its essence on a “single pane” image that a salesperson can deliver in 10 minutes or less.
2. Product/solution messaging contained in Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. This can include any “message maps” that were put together before the sales and marketing presentations.
3. “Sales play” or playbook documents. Whether tied to a specific sales methodology or homegrown, sales playbooks or “sales motion” tools may be valuable sources of messaging and other content for the whiteboard, including key questions to ask the customer during an interactive dialogue.
4. “Battle cards” and “cheat sheets.” These sales tools are perfect ingredients for whiteboarding because they provide sales with bite-sized talking points, silver bullets, and probing questions. Some organizations build these tools in a parallel effort to the whiteboard design because the same design principles are in play—easily digested and easily communicated “knowledge nuggets” that resonate with customers and spark a two-way information exchange.
5. Competitive documents (presentations, Word docs, PDFs). Anything with the word “competitive” in it will prove extremely useful in the design process as most if not all whiteboards should have at least some competitive element to them.
6. Existing whiteboard concepts. Some of the most important whiteboard ingredients are home-cooked visual stories used by salespeople and other customer-facing personnel. Put your feelers out early to identify these storyboards. They are often used with great success but without much fanfare or exposure to others in the organization. If you make an effort to bring these whiteboarding examples and those who designed them into the process, you will create important project ambassadors and champions.

This is only a narrow subset of the possible content sources for the key whiteboard ingredients. Depending on the topic and scope of the whiteboard, you will need to rely on your working team to guide you and provide you with additional information sources.

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