Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 13

Solution Whiteboards

Several things make whiteboard selling successful; the approach simplifies complex solutions. The format fosters dynamic group interaction between seller and buyer. PowerPoint is not used. I want you to know this—we use whiteboard selling techniques daily to convey our messages, fill our pipelines, and close business.

—Sales Rep, South Florida

Since 2007—and as of this writing—we have worked with our customers to design and deploy approximately 500 Solution Whiteboards. In some cases, single customers have engaged us to build more than 50 different whiteboards, corresponding to specific products, solutions, or even corporate-level whiteboards that showcase the breadth of solutions that an organization brings to market.

Solution Whiteboards differ from the whiteboards we have showcased so far in a very important way—they talk about the “why you” and “what is it” as opposed to the “why change” and the “why now.” They also can follow a Qualification and Discovery Whiteboard designed to discover and learn more about a prospect's challenges and determine whether the opportunity is worthy of further pursuit.

Many Solution Whiteboards are architected to get into a deeper level of detail about the specific components of your solutions and services and the unique value they deliver. From a content perspective, Solution Whiteboards are driven by the information typically contained in traditional sales collateral (slide presentations, datasheets, whitepapers, ...