Introduction

Are you a sales professional looking for a new and creative way to engage your enterprise prospects?

Or a marketer determined that sales will use the right messages to attract economic buyers into your sales funnel with a unique and fresh approach?

Or a sales leader, focused on sales transformation, larger transactions, and shorter time-to-close?

If so, then this book is for you.

What if you could sell with nothing more than a pen and a drawing surface? When sales professionals lose the PowerPoint and use the pen, they are more confident, and they are much more likely to compel buyers to act. This book shows you how to make this transformation for yourself or your entire sales and marketing organizations.

We should make it clear up front that although this book is titled Whiteboard Selling, this by no means implies we are inventing whiteboarding for sales. Seasoned sales professionals and other customer-facing personnel have been whiteboarding for decades. All we have done is put a heavy dose of structure and process behind building powerful visual stories and discussion frameworks, and then enabling sellers to present them in a way that captivates and motivates buyers.

Is Selling with Visuals a New Idea?

Yes and no. There are literally thousands of books on the power of visual communications, visual thinking, and presentation skills—and not just books, but reams of academic papers, studies, and surveys. Indeed, it is well established that visual thinking, learning, and communication styles and approaches have clear advantages when conducting business. Ours is an increasingly visual culture; we consume media and information through an ever-growing variety of visual channels.

Likewise, there are many books and other publications that detail different sales methodologies and processes. Ask any experienced sales executive and they will recall at least two or three different packaged sales approaches they have been trained on, each with its own twist on convincing corporate buyers to part with their valuable budgets.

How many books have been written on how to build and deliver better PowerPoint presentations? Presenting a set of slides to a customer is not selling with visuals. Selling is a dynamic exercise. Selling should encourage interaction with, and participation from, the buyer. If the buyer is passively observing a set of slides, then you are not using true visual selling.

How This Book Is Different

So how is this book any different from those mentioned earlier?

It is entirely focused on the power of hands-on visual selling techniques to enable your sales force to sell bigger deals faster. And not just large sales forces—even a small business owner or a few salespeople working at a start-up can use these techniques. If you are going to learn to use visual thinking and communication when you sell, then you have to learn a unique viewpoint and a set of best practices, all of which are contained in this book.

The visual selling techniques and approaches in this book are appropriate to any sales methodology. Enabling sales through visuals can be part of any approach to selling and any sales enablement program. The use of powerful visuals at the point of sale—that moment of truth, so to speak, when a seller is communicating the unique value proposition of their product or service—is just one part (perhaps one of the most important parts) of any larger sales model or sales transformation initiative.

This book contains hands-on, step-by-step guidance on how to design powerful visuals to support your sales process. It is explicitly designed to be a complete and exhaustive companion to any sales and marketing organization's efforts to bring visual selling techniques to its go-to-market strategies. This book is as heavy on practice as it is on theory.

The book is valuable to both sellers and marketers alike. It provides this practical guidance in a way that both sales professionals and marketers can use to become more effective. While the term “bridging the sales and marketing divide” is often overused, in this case it really fits. This book will help get marketing's message out to sales in a usable and powerful fashion.

And finally, this book is based on proven best practices and results demonstrated over half a decade of rigorous application in professional sales environments. More than 50,000 sales professionals in more than 20 countries and belonging to more than 75 sales organizations have benefited from these approaches to dramatically change the way they communicate with customers and prospects.

Is It the Whiteboard That Matters?

Some would argue that drawing on a whiteboard—“whiteboarding”—is not the point and it is really visual thinking and idea creation that matters. This is partly true. But in Whiteboard Selling—Empowering Sales Through Visuals, we specifically explore the use of the whiteboard (or any drawing surface for that matter) as a disciplined, repeatable, and process-driven mechanism that enables high-dollar sales of complex products and services targeted at educated buyers.

Using a pen to draw ideas is only useful if it drives a compelling event such as the purchase of a million-dollar software suite, medical device, financial service offering, or consulting service (among many other types of products and services). When you use a drawing surface to sell solutions, you have to understand the sales process and field training/enablement. You have to assess each individual salesperson's proficiency using visual thinking to move a sales opportunity to the next level. Sketching stick figures, smiley faces, and other “cave art” won't increase sales in a meaningful way without understanding the sales context in which they are drawn.

By the end of this book, you'll learn how to train and enable your entire distribution channel with powerful tools and techniques to make the power of the pen a groundbreaking differentiator in how you bring your products and services to market.

How You Should Use This Book

Part 1—The End of the Age of Slides

We've been helping businesses, large, medium, and small, to ditch their slide projectors since 2007. As time goes by, we have to convince our customers and prospects less and less that whiteboard selling has clear advantages over slides for important sales interactions. In the first section of this book, you will learn why slides should play very little role in high-dollar sales interactions and sales training, as demonstrated by real-life stories from the field.

Part 2—The Visual Selling Opportunity

Once you understand that salespeople and sales trainers can actually completely free themselves from the evil clutches of slides and projectors, Part 2 will teach you about the specific opportunities and benefits of leveraging visual selling techniques and the science behind why this is so effective. We'll also highlight some results that may impress.

Part 3—What Exactly Is a Whiteboard for Sales?

In this section we showcase a number of different whiteboard types using a case study to demonstrate whiteboard structure, content, and flow. Part 3 also includes a variety of exercises and activities to flex your whiteboarding muscles.

Part 4—Building a Whiteboard for Sales

Whether you are an individual contributor or the head of a marketing or sales team, you'll need to marshal some key resources—both people and content—before embarking on whiteboard design. Then, we'll show you how to follow some basic and proven whiteboard creation best practices.

Part 5—Enabling the Field

You've designed some powerful whiteboard stories. So what's next? This section covers sales enablement options, how to test-drive your whiteboard prior to field rollout, and then how to measure the success of your whiteboard-selling training initiatives.

Part 6—You Have a Whiteboard, So How Do You Present It and What Do You Leave Behind?

This section covers some basic whiteboard presentation best practices, and how to use the whiteboard as a powerful tool for documenting and communicating the next steps in the sales process.