Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 26

Measuring Success

All the clients were very impressed. In some of the opportunities they took pictures or asked me not to clean the white board. It was impressive. They loved it, and plan to use it themselves as the basis for telling their own story “up the ladder” to the committee that approves their funding. The whiteboard got the customer to start identifying areas of opportunity. It expanded their understanding of what was possible.

—Enterprise Seller Symposium Participant

One of the most often-asked questions we get when proposing Whiteboard Selling to prospects as a way to increase knowledge ownership, improve confidence, sell higher, and close more/bigger deals, is, “So, show me the ROI.” We submit that it is no easy task for any sales methodology or other training approach to take credit for quantitative sales metric improvements. While it is possible in rare cases to confidently correlate a single set of skills or a new way of selling with sales improvements, we believe making blanket statements is in most cases deceptive selling. We frequently observe methodology and training vendors claiming that they “increased sales by x” or “improved deal close rates by y.”

There are so many other factors that can contribute to fluctuations in sales growth and other sales patterns—seasonality, addition of new products, management changes, reduced competitive pressures, and so forth. For example, one of our largest clients, a leading provider of storage and data management ...