Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 2

The Role of Slides in Today's Sales Training

I felt like I was in a war zone. The slides were bombs and the presenters were firing in every direction, but nobody was getting hit. It was just a bunch of loud bangs.

—Business Development Manager, Eastern Region, large networking firm

The Battle of the Slide Bulge

Have you been to one of these sessions? It's typical product training. All the salespeople are in a room for a full day. Eight hours later they walk out, bleary-eyed and shell-shocked after a long line of presenters has bombarded them with slide presentation after presentation on the latest and greatest products and features. Somewhere in the barrage of slides there should be something that connects those features and functions to value for the customer but, sad to say, this is not the standard.

Slides have negative impacts that reach far beyond the sales meetings with buyers that we described in Chapter 1. Unfortunately, slides are also the cornerstone of how marketing and sales enablement teams equip salespeople with critical knowledge. Salespeople learn the skills they need to do their jobs effectively through slides. And slides are the way the organization communicates to salespeople about the latest and greatest products and solutions. The key phrase here is “communicates to them” instead of “communicates with them.”

Studies show that people retain less than ...