Chapter 25
Field Enablement Options
The Whiteboard Selling approach provides a sales training and enablement model unlike any I've witnessed. Most sales training approaches are heavy on process and light on how to actually communicate solution value to customers and prospects at the point of sale. Whiteboard Selling, on the other hand, is entirely focused on how to engage in confident and compelling C-level communications with interactive, visual presentations. This visual storytelling approach to sales enablement is ideal to ensure that enterprise sales personnel are elite executive presenters—ready and able to make corporate messaging relevant and well-differentiated from the competition.
—Christopher Thomas, VP Sales, CA Technologies
Once a whiteboard pilot is completed and feedback incorporated, you are now in a position to confidently launch whiteboard training to the field. Developing a whiteboard is a great first step, but stopping there really misses the whole point of the endeavor, which is equipping sales with a set of tools, skills, and ultimately that critical element of knowledge ownership to raise their game when engaging with customers and prospects with confidence. The question is, when can you start seeing ROI from the whiteboard design phase? The answer is whiteboarding enablement.
Whiteboard enablement and training for the field comes in many flavors, but the ultimate goal is twofold. The first is to enable sales to have mastery of the whiteboard content, structure, flow, key questions to ask, and objections and how to reframe them. The second objective is to provide basic whiteboarding skills and best practices, as discussed in Part 6. Content mastery together with whiteboarding skills results in a seller's ability to confidently present a visual story to a customer or prospect and have an interactive information exchange.
There are six enablement options that can be put in place to get sales teams ramped up on how to use the whiteboards:
The Whiteboard Symposium Approach
In earlier sections we referenced studies that consistently show training participants retain about 70 to 90 percent of material when learning in a hands-on, visual fashion—in other words, with pen in hand. The Whiteboard Symposium enablement option is not just about whiteboard memorization—it is designed to be a role-play-based learning mechanism to transfer solution knowledge quickly and effectively to field personnel who may not possess the situational fluency and deep domain expertise of tenured and proven sales resources. As of this writing, we have put over 50,000 globally-distributed sellers through the symposium approach, in groups as few as a dozen to as many as several thousand at a time. These events—which can be half-day, full-day, or even multiday activities—are ideal for sales kickoffs and other large-scale sales gatherings that are typically loaded with slide presentation trainings about the latest and greatest product features and functions.
The symposium events are based on what we call the Unit of Six: six participants per table, working together as a team and leveraging a role-play-based, repetitive, simulated sales call approach to present the whiteboard to one another using a flipchart and markers. The role-play sessions are preceded by a “why-whiteboard” keynote and a gold-standard presentation of the whiteboard presentation delivered by a sales leader or other subject matter expert. The beauty of the Unit of Six is that it can scale from two tables up to several hundred tables or more (space permitting!). The events are capped off by a competition of top performers in front of the entire group.
Large-Scale Whiteboard Symposium Case Study
One of our largest customers—a leading virtualization software vendor—enabled over 3,000 front-line field personnel in a single sales kickoff event, taking over the entire conference center of a large Las Vegas hotel and casino. Our customer saw explosive growth over the past few years, including major additions to their global field organization. In the midst of this hiring—and as part of their own broad-reaching sales transformation initiative—they needed a way to enable and train their global field organization on 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 slides.
Their requirement for the kickoff was to leverage a more creative approach to engage field personnel in hands-on exercises instead of more slide presentations on the latest and greatest features and functions. The event was a major success, with the majority of the participants leaving with the ability to present the whiteboard the very next day.
When surveyed, participants identified three factors that contributed to their overwhelming satisfaction with the enablement sessions:
The whiteboard enablement was such a success at the kickoff that our customer immediately began enabling its partners with the material, and localizing the content into seven different languages.
The Regional Symposium Approach
Unfortunately, although whiteboard symposiums make a big splash at large-scale sales kickoffs that need that something special to motivate the troops and foster team building, these types of meetings usually only happen once a year. What's more, many companies are moving away from these events due to cost cutting measures. Another of our customers—an even larger organization—chose a similar symposium model, the difference being that the training teams traveled to each sales region and ran half-day events for groups of 100 to 150. The regional GMs used the balance of the day for account reviews, sales planning, and other activities. These events are just as successful, and also benefit from a more intimate setting and team-specific focus.
Remote Symposiums
Imagine 50 different locations spread across the globe, with groups of as few as four and as many as several dozen, participating in a remote symposium experience that follows the same team-based model as an in-person event. We conducted one such event for more than 700 participants in a single five-hour session. A “home-base” location is run by the symposium facilitator, remotely guiding the group through the activity and exercises. Inexpensive, high-definition webcams are used in each location, joined together in a web meeting environment that enables the host to switch focus between locations to collaborate, share whiteboard examples, and even run competitions. In certain respects, remote symposiums have advantages over large scale and regional events: they significantly reduce costs, and actually allow for a more personalized experience because of the moderator's ability to zoom in on a specific location's team and share whiteboard examples. An additional consideration for a remote symposium is the requirement for a local facilitator at each location.
Online Learning Paths
Organized symposiums—whether in person or remote—are excellent opportunities for teams to come together, share knowledge, and learn from each other. You also have the built-in advantage of monitoring the learning experience to ensure uptake of the whiteboard content. But in some cases, team-based training is just not an option. Or, some organizations want to complement in-person events with online learning as prework, or as an event follow-up requirement. This is where the concept of an Online Learning Path can be very effective. Online Learning Paths are not a new concept, as they leverage industry-standard LMSs (Learning Management Systems) to serve up content to individual sellers or other field resources. For learning a whiteboard, they can be very effective, and they follow a prescribed ordering of these six activities:
Online Learning Paths usually track registration and provide reporting on completion status, requiring some level of setup and monitoring. But with this comes the benefit of ensuring total participation in either a stand-alone training delivery model or as pre/post work in conjunction with a symposium event.
Online Learning Paths for whiteboard training and enablement are also a great option for partner enablement and certification. Several of our customers used the Online Learning Path approach to ensure partners achieved the necessary level of solution knowledge, and whiteboard mastery was one of the required tracks to achieve Platinum status (which came with certain benefits, such as increased margin, etc.).
E-Learning Modules
A simplified version of an Online Learning Path is simply an E-Learning module that might include a video of the whiteboard and some accompanying slides. These types of modules may or may not require registration and tracking.
New Hire Training
Many of our customers build whiteboard symposiums and even online training into their standard new-hire curriculums. One such customer does not allow a new hire seller to “touch” a customer until they are certified on three different Solution Whiteboards.