Chapter 22
Formalizing Your Whiteboard Design
The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to “tidy up” the mess, as opposed to understanding it's a “day one” issue and part of everything.
—Tom Peters
Tom Peters' insight is instructive as it informs the design focus of many of the whiteboard structures we have featured in this book. The “day one issue,” as Peters put it, is the design element that corresponds to current market trends and themes, as well as to the customer's challenges and business issues, and not your solution or services. This design point is what enables the discussion to be situationally driven by the customer.
You've put in place the resources (content and people) required to be successful with a whiteboard project. Now you are in a position to formalize your whiteboard design. If you've completed the exercises and activities in earlier chapters, it will be a fairly easy exercise to combine that work with some basic design best practices.
Basic Whiteboard Design Guidelines
First, there are a number of important guidelines and principles that we suggest be adhered to when designing a whiteboard story for sales. Here are eight of these guidelines as they apply to a Solution Whiteboard:
1. Whiteboards are single-pane visual narratives. What this means is that, unlike a traditional storyboard, a whiteboard for sales—at least from our perspective—does not occupy separate “canvases.” It should be a cohesive visual that tells a singular story within a defined space—either on an actual whiteboard, on a flipchart, on a small section of butcher paper at a restaurant over lunch with your customer, or on any other drawing surface.
2. Likewise, whiteboards do not have components that are erased when the whiteboard is delivered, for similar reasons to number one above. After the whiteboard is delivered to your customer or prospect (who, you hope, writes “save” or “do not erase” next to it) and you leave, anyone else who walks into that office or conference room should be able to take a look at the visual and get a pretty clear sense of the story you are trying to tell. Erasing elements as you go along would be akin to literally tearing chapters out of a book.
3. Typically, a whiteboard is broken up into between 6 and 12 steps, each step equating to a chapter in a book. Each step should address a specific part of the storyline. For example, “Market Trends and Themes” would typically have its own step, as would “Next Steps and Actions.”
4. An effective Solution Whiteboard should contain no more than 75 words on the visual.
5. Whiteboards should contain more than just words, so we suggest a bit of “eye candy” in the way of simple drawings or iconography. The whiteboard templates in Section 3 provide good examples, and a well-designed whiteboard should contain as few as 5 but no more than 10 to 12 visual elements (not including lines, circles, and other basic shapes).
6. Each whiteboard step should have no more than 400 words of scripting, and should take between 1 and 1.5 minutes to present, uninterrupted.
7. Each whiteboard step should have at least one question to ask and one Objection Reframe. (See Chapter 23 for more details.)
8. Effective whiteboards can be drawn in just one color (black or blue are usually recommended), but the use of multiple colors can be effective. For example, the whiteboard examples in this book more often than not use black to frame the discussion and describe solutions, and red to depict customer challenges and competitive weaknesses. A four-color scheme can also be effective:
(a) Black to frame the discussion.
(b) Red for business challenges or competitive limitations.
(c) Green for your solutions.
(d) Blue for references, anecdotes, and third-party validation.
The advantage of four colors is that someone observing the whiteboard for the first time after it has been drawn can get a pretty good sense of the narrative just based on the colors used.
One additional note on colors: As your whiteboard flows from step to step, make sure that your design does not require frequent color changes within each step. This would make it more difficult for sellers to present the whiteboard and would definitely complicate the whiteboard training process.
ACTIVITY
Select two or three of the whiteboards you designed in the last section and, using a blank sheet of paper, redraw the whiteboard, keeping in mind the design guidelines outlined above, and use the appropriate colors. Remember those Bic four-color ballpoint pens you used back in high school? Well, guess what, Bic still makes them, so go down to your nearby office supply store and pick up a few, since they work great for whiteboard prototyping.
