Chapter 7
When to Use Whiteboards in the Sales Process
You may not need all of the whiteboard types we discuss in this book. How many and which ones you need depends on the unique sales situation or sales process you use. While we are clearly strong advocates of using whiteboarding instead of PowerPoint, in some cases slides—and not whiteboards—may play a useful role at various points in the sales process.
We will review each whiteboard type in detail in Chapter 18, but generally speaking you use Qualification and Discovery Whiteboards early in the sales process, and Closing Whiteboards later. But you can use Why Change, Solution, Competitive, and Business Case Whiteboards situationally.
The figure above identifies where in the general flow of the sales process you would typically use each type of whiteboard. The “Dead Zone” is the part of the sales process that, we hope, can be removed altogether. It involves in-depth product evaluations, proofs of concepts, and “bake-offs.” This is a place where PowerPoint can be effective in demonstrating product features and functions, and complex schematics, architectures, or workflows that whiteboards are simply not well tailored to.
Your goal should always be to use whiteboarding as early in the sales process as possible. This positions you as a thought leader and trusted advisor. That, in turn, compresses the sales cycle, removes the extra steps, and keeps the projectors back at the office.
Sales Process Agnostic
Most organizations have a particular sales process. How does the use of these various whiteboards fit into whatever sales process your organization has? We've mentioned before that whiteboarding is agnostic to, and integrates with, any sales process. Here's an example:
According to Wikipedia, there are a couple of generic sales processes that are representative of many packaged methodologies, and that vary from company to company. Below we've indicated where you could use different whiteboard types within a typical sales process. Notice that the mapping is approximate and offers a lot of flexibility in how and when you can leverage the various whiteboard types.
Sales Process Example #1
Sales Process Example #2
You can see that various whiteboard types can be used regardless of sales process, and even in multiple stages. Another example of situational fluency is to determine which whiteboards are effective at different parts of the sales process, depending on the unique sales situation and customer buying cycle.
The Whiteboard Lunch-and-Learn
For those old-school sales professionals, lunch-and-learns are a tried-and-true mechanism to gain exposure to a broad and diverse audience within your target account. You can replace PowerPoint with whiteboarding, and achieve all the benefits we've already discussed, but in front of a larger audience.
We recently worked with a customer that sells, among other things, telepresence and video conferencing solutions. This technology allows people in geographically dispersed locations to interact as if they were in the same conference room. We heard about one case where a salesperson located in San Francisco invited 10 or 12 people from a prospect account based in New York to a virtual lunch-and-learn. The salesperson ordered pizza to show up at the precise time when the attendees in New York were seated around the conference room. Using the telepresence technology, the salesperson stood at the whiteboard in San Francisco and presented the story, which was broadcast in high definition to his customers in New York.
In the following chapters we'll look at each type of whiteboard in depth, providing real-world examples and giving you the chance to create your own versions through guided activities.