Chapter 5

The Science Behind Whiteboard Selling

Grabbing the Pen, Not the Computer

You want your customer to engage with you. Have you ever been in a meeting with a customer who grabs a marker and starts writing on the board? You probably have. How many times have you been in a meeting where the customer grabs your laptop and creates or shows slides? Not very often!

V. S. Ramachandran gave a TED talk on mirror neurons.¹ Mirror neurons are special neurons in the brain that cause us to imitate what we see. If you are writing on a whiteboard, it will be more likely for your customer to grab a pen and start writing, too. And if they do, then you are having much more interaction than if you are presenting a slide deck and your customer is just listening.

Markers are interactive; slides are not. You want to engage your customer in the dialogue. There's something very powerful about graphically depicting solution knowledge without slides to prop you up. When your prospect grabs the pen and says, “We do it this way today,” you and your customer are on the way to creating a shared vision around how your products and solutions can address their specific business requirements in a way your competition can't.

Keeping Attention

Research by Kalina Christoff, Associate Professor at the Brain Research Center, University of British Columbia, shows that everyone's mind wanders more than one-third of the time.² With whiteboarding, your customer will be less likely to have a wandering mind. As Christoff puts it, they become “on task.”

When you are drawing on a whiteboard, you are physically moving. The human brain is programmed to pay attention to movement.³ Every time you draw something on the whiteboard you bring your customer's attention back to the whiteboard, even if the mind has started to wander. PowerPoint is more static—not much is moving. It's easier for your prospects' minds to wander when they are watching a PowerPoint presentation.

In addition to mind wandering, people can have a hard time listening and reading at the same time. According to presentation expert Susan Weinschenk, when people are trying to listen to you present but are also looking at a slide with lots of text or a complicated graphic, they have multiple sensory channels competing.⁴

When you draw on a whiteboard, the drawing enhances what is being said, so the two channels work together. Also, because you can stop drawing, you can control when people are looking (visual channel) and when they are listening (auditory channel).

Bite-Size Chunks

People process information better when it is in bite-sized chunks. The term that psychologists use for this is Progressive Disclosure.⁵

Because you are drawing, you are automatically creating small chunks, as opposed to a PowerPoint where you push one button and an entire confusing slide with lots of text or a complicated graphic can appear all at once.

The Power of Stories

People process information best in story format. Research by Singer, et al.⁶ and in a report in the New York Times⁷ now shows that when people listen to or read stories, their brains are active as though they are acting out the story. For example, if you read a story and someone in the story is running, you will show activity in your motor cortex. It's as though you are running, too.

When you use a whiteboard you will have a tendency to talk in terms of stories, instead of just data. You can't just read the slides. You have to put the information in your own terms. This will make the material more interesting, more story-like, and, in turn, will help your listener process the information more deeply.

¹ V. S. Ramachandran, “The Neurons That Shaped Civilization,” TED Talk, 2010, http://bit.ly/aaiXba.

² Kalina Christoff, “Experience Sampling during fMRI Reveals Default Network and Executive System Contributions to Mind Wandering.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009).

³ Susan Weinschenk, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People (San Francisco: Peachpit, 2012).

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ T. Singer, B. Seymour, J. O'Doherty, H. Kaube, J. D. Dolan, and C. Frith, “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but Not Sensory Component of Pain,” Science 303 (2004):1157–1162.

⁷ “Your Brain on Fiction,” New York Times, March 17, 2012, nyti.ms/J9xjcg.