Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 6

Old Disciplines, New Behaviors

By changing the approach from slides to whiteboarding, my customers get the vision. The reaction is typically, “I get what you are trying to do.” The content used to be in a bunch of slides. The whiteboard just lets me frame it in a different way, as a cohesive story. The customer is engaged, they aren't messing around with their devices. And they always say, “Let me take a picture of the whiteboard.” I've never had a customer say, “I want to take a picture of that slide.”

—Technology Specialist, large software company

With “power of the pen” as a rallying cry, let's look at a new way of selling, using visuals to do five things.

1. Earn the right to be in front of your customers by confirming their existing situation.

2. Show your customers you know how to listen to them before talking about what you can offer, by using the whiteboard to diagnose and spur interactivity.

3. Demonstrate knowledge ownership and position yourself as a trusted advisor by conveying your products' and solutions' unique and differentiated value proposition on a whiteboard (or any other writing surface) in a confident, compelling, and consistent fashion.

4. Be situationally fluent and take the conversation wherever it needs to go at the moment.

5. Close for next steps to drive the opportunity forward.

Perhaps you're thinking, “This is nothing new—I've been through this a dozen times in various sales trainings and methodologies; listen, diagnose, ask questions, ...