Why Change Selling Blog

Give any 2 year old a set of whiteboard markers and a whiteboard and you have a budding artist and whiteboarding fan. Give a pre-sales engineer the same opportunity in front of a customer and a similar thing happens. There is no fear.

What happens when you give a salesperson the same opportunity?

Typically nothing - unless salespeople have been trained and are practiced in delivering the whiteboard....they will be more comfortable with PowerPoint and will default to this method of presentation...why? - because regardless of how bad the PowerPoint is, they can let the slides do the talking.

This article is not about PowerPoint, but if you would like, here is a link to access some best practices PowerPoint resources.

This article is prompted by a comment made on a blog by David Baga, VP Sales at RocketLawyer.com.

"In my last firm we had to learn a number of whiteboards. But the way they were going about it was totally wrong. We were trained to stand and deliver the whiteboard in a virtual replacement of the Powerpoint. There was no interactivity and when we were done drawing out the whiteboard and reciting the script we asked questions."

I'm keen to set some ground-rules for effective visual storytelling that sellers and marketers can use for better outcomes. As a primer for this conversation, I recommend you view the Visual Storytelling Webinar

Whiteboard Mistakes that Will Hurt You

1. Reproducing a PowerPoint Presentation rote on a whiteboard.

Bad Whiteboard presentations are just as bad as bad PowerPoint presentations. A lot of B2B companies I have worked with over the past 7 years as a consultant are strongly product focused. You know you're in for a PowerPoint product whipping when the first few slides follow this traditional form.
Slide 1. Opening Slide - Welcome
Slide 2. Agenda
Slide 3. About Us
Slide 4. Key Customers
Slide 5. Partners
Slide 6. Awards
Slide 7. Solution/Product Overview
I dont care how sexy the graphics are...so far its all about you. At this point I haven't been engaged, except maybe for the salesperson asking my goals for the presentation....I'm already bored, I could have gotten all of this stuff off the Web and I don't have time to sit through a product rant.

Why then would you want to reproduce this structure in a whiteboard? The purpose of a whiteboard is to engage the buyer in conversation and discover their issues that are relevant, it's not a one-way product pitch.

I also dislike the word pitch as it harks back to the era of carnival touts. If the buyer has issues that your product or service will solve, then these will surface during the whiteboard discussion and you will have the opportunity to introduce how your products could be used to solve the problem in context.

Tip: Start the whiteboard session around your buyer, not you or your products. Use a brief positioning statement to establish your credibility and immediately engage the buyer in conversation.

2. Not having a story

It's OK for a pre-sales engineer to get up and draw out a few concepts on a whiteboard, but many salespeople will be reluctant to get up and whiteboard without a story.

• Whiteboarding is a skill that needs to be practiced....just writing on the whiteboard and speaking at the same time takes practice. Drawing and layout takes practice. Learning the script takes practice
• A whiteboard consists of a visual confection and a narrative and it takes process and intellectual effort to capture the essence of your value proposition and create a story around likely buyer issues.
• We use a variation of the Hero's Journey to explore the buyer's current state, or "what is" and the challenges presented through not taking action. We introduce the future state, "what could be" around how others use our products, with proof-points and a call to action for the buyer to change.
• Whiteboard presenters need to learn the script, know the script, then forget the script, once they have it under their skin.
• Knowing both the story and the whiteboard enables salespeople to focus 100% on the buyer instead of worrying about what to say and what goes where on the whiteboard and in what color.

3. Talking too much - not asking enough questions

Running off at the mouth is a problem for novice whiteboard presenters as well as salespeople in general. We have learned the story and can't wait to tell it.

The way we develop a whiteboard is in a modular fashion with a clump of text and images to relate a concept that we call a module.

RULE 1: Whiteboarding is a totally interactive interchange with the buyer and if you are not asking discovery questions when you transition from one module to another, you are missing a major opportunity...similarly asking the buyer for feedback when you have presented a module will help you qualify interest.

Rule 2: If you become aware that you are doing a lot of talking, ask a question.

Tip: When you are whiteboarding you are doing discovery at every step in the process. If you are introducing an important concept or transitioning to a new module, get objective information by asking the following questions, which consultants call the "E's and the I's".
i. How Important is .......to you and your business. How do you do it today?
ii. Assuming the buyer responds that it is important, follow-up with, On a scale of 1-10, 1 being terrible, 10 couldn't be better, how Effective would you say you are at .......?
iii. Rarely will the buyer answer a 9 or 10 to this question, which provides a golden opportunity to ask "What you like to be", "How much is it costing you to live with a 6?", etc.

4. Finding out what the likely outcome of a successful whiteboard will be, prior to starting.

This is so obvious, yet so few sales people ask this question. A buyer's typical response to this question is, "I'll have to discuss it with my boss, team, etc".

Unless you like giving multiple presentations, a good response from the salesperson to this answer is "I know you're really busy and so am I, so does it make sense that we ask your boss/other stakeholders to join our presentation so that we can decide if it makes sense to work together?

5. Not understanding their objectives and checking how much time you have.

Getting the buyers objectives onto the Whiteboard at the outset is a best practice and allows you to figure out what points to emphasize, also to tell the buyer what you are not going to cover.

It also allows you to go back over their objectives at the end of the presentation and place a check mark alongside the ones you achieved and an opportunity to discus what they did not achieve.

Rule: I ask this question at the outset of every call. "you've had some time to think about our meeting today and I wonder if you could share with me any top of mind thoughts and what you would like to achieve from today's session."  follow this up with, "We are scheduled for one hour, are we still OK for this?"

When we know the Whiteboard visual story and the script, we can
start the whiteboard anywhere, focus where the buyer is interested and we don't have to finish it....unlike PowerPoint which follows a sequential structure.

Proof Point: I had a critical 30 minute Whiteboarding demo. session set up with a SVP of a major information services company and in anticipation a problem, I invested my time in advance of the meeting to create a draft whiteboard of the buyers situation and potential story.

It so happened that we couldn't get the video conference working and with 10 minutes left, I created a .pdf of the Paper-Show whiteboard and emailed it to the buyer. He popped open the whiteboard .pdf and I was able to take him through the structure and flow of the story in a couple of minutes....which led to another meeting and we are in discussion on doing business together.

Rule: If you are presenting a whiteboard over the Internet and it's a super important meeting, use a visual confection. A completed Whiteboard is a visual confection and contains a superset of information; it's a  powerful visual and possible to explain it and completely comprehend it in a matter of minutes.

 

Words. Often it's the little things that turn visitors off after arriving at your Website, reading your copy in a brochure or sales letter, or suffering through a bad PowerPoint presentation.

The technology business is rife with words in Website, whitepaper copy and bad PowerPoint presentations, that I call "product-speak".

Write from your Best Customer's Point of View

When people read your copy, visit your Website or sit through your presentation, they are doing so because they have pressing issues or problems that they need to solve. When you write - start from the point of view of your buyer's needs, not your "ground-breaking" product, unless you want to sound just like your competition.

David Meerman Scott calls these words Gobbledygook and he wrote a brilliant E-Book that you can download instantly called The Gobbledygook Manifesto.

You can even run your copy through a content analysis tool called Gobbledygook Grader, to identify text that could be improved.
You might find David's blog "The Four P's of Marketing" that topples one of the pillars of marketing literature worth a read...and a laugh!

If you need help in translating your "product speak" into something that your visitors will want to read, then we can help.

In our work with technology companies in creating website messaging and whiteboard stories, we see the following words or phrases frequently.

My Top 10 "Product-Speak" words.

This article is relevant for B2B technology sales professionals, not just inside sales, as we are all becoming more virtual in our engagement with prospects and customers. 




Findings from the CSO Insights 2011 Telemarketing/Inside Sales Performance Optimization survey set the stage for our conversation. The big Aha in the 2011 survey is that nearly 50% of inside sales are selling independent of field sales.

Inside Sales - No Longer a Junior Partner

The perception of inside sales as the junior partner, being confined to lead-gen, appointment setting and qualifying is changing, as inside sales increasingly handle the complete sales cycle and create trusted adviser relationships with clients. Soon this will become the dominant mode of selling.

Inside Sales Effectiveness Focus in 2011

Inside Sales Priorities

Once again the top priorities for sales leaders in the CSO Insights survey are to align sales and marketing and to increase lead generation.

These two objectives are inextricably linked, only in my view, sales leaders have them in the wrong order and I propose the following priorities.

1. Sales and Marketing Alignment

1. As a first step, we need to align sales and marketing messaging around product usage and value creation; features and benefits selling is dead and most marketing teams have work to do to translate features and benefits ("product-speak") into something the sales team can actually use to engage prospects.
2. Aligning sales and marketing also means agreeing on the definition of what makes a sales-ready-lead. Innovative companies like HubSpot have established service level agreements between marketing and sales and both groups are tightly aligned in their objectives.

2. Enhancing Lead Generation

Once you’ve established a value proposition that is built on product usage and value creation, you have something that both sales and marketing can use. Creating content that prospects value attracts interested visitors to your Website; engages and converts them into leads using an Inbound Marketing process.
David Baga  
I spoke to David Baga, VP Sales at hot SFO-based RocketLawyer last week about his challenges in running a rapidly growing inside sales team. (RocketLawyer is a fast growing startup designed to make legal services easy and affordable for individuals and SMBs)

"The #1 challenge is connect rate....getting the prospect on the phone is becoming increasingly difficult. Cold calling is virtually impossible in today’s environment and would be a crude waste of time and money compared to an inbound marketing engine.”

 

Inbound Lead Generation Requires a Technology Foundation

Baga continued, “We need interested prospects to raise their hand and Inbound Marketing platforms like Marketo and HubSpot make this possible and the performance predictable.

Our lead generation is dependent on an integrated technology fabric consisting of:-
•    Inbound Marketing Automation platform (Marketo)
•    CRM systems (Salesforce.com)
•    Cloud-based call center technology with predictive dialers, ACD (auto-dialers), IVR (Interactive voice response) (Five 9’s)
Putting this stuff together and delivering the right content at the right time is hard to do; we’ve been at it 9 months now and are just beginning to realize the benefits of our efforts”

3. Revising Sales Team Structure.

There is a perception in sales that inside sales earning potential is limited. This is no longer the case and it is possible to achieve income parity with outside sales reps in many inside sales positions.

“We have chosen to centralize our sales team so that we can provide them with technology, education, collaborative support and sales management needed for high productivity. The productivity gains alone make it advantageous over individuals working out of a home office”, added Baga

Salesforce.com, like RocketLawyer and HubSpot have created very successful, centralized inside sales teams. Salesforce.com has created various roles and specializations for their inside sales team to provide a career path for advancement and to lower customer acquisition cost.

A typical Inbound Sales team structure is;
•    Lead Development – work inbound leads, responsible for lead qualification, pass lead on.
•    Small Business Representatives - quota carrying, responsible for a territory
•    Account Executives - responsible for major accounts; travel from time-time to meet customers

4. Revising Sales Process

BANT - Discovery and Qualification, the Achilles heel of selling.

If salespeople spent less time talking about their products and more time listening to the buyer's answers of their insightful questions, they would improve their diagnosis of the client condition.

Without a strong qualification process like BANT, underpinned by skilled diagnosis and discovery, pipeline reviews and forecasting are a magical and mystical event.

Using a whiteboard to Create Buyer Vision

On the minus side, inside selling means salespeople must work harder to develop rapport because the visual dimension is missing in the communication feedback loop.

The good news is that there are new tools that can really help in creating a dialogue and engaging the buyer around their issues. My WhiteboardSelling customers are spread across the World and 95% of my sales calls are virtual. I prefer to sell this way now.

Using the Paper-Show digital whiteboard and GotoMeeting or Webex videoconferencing service enables me to engage buyers in a whiteboard discovery session and present our approach to the prospect’s sales and marketing challenges using a whiteboard and to gain excellent feedback at every transition in the process.

I follow up the meeting with a qualification confirmation letter with the whiteboard from our session embedded as a .jpeg in the letter. This has a huge impact on forecasting accuracy as the qualification confirmation process eliminates non-buyers at the outset and makes it much easier for your mentor or internal champion to build and position your case against competing projects.

5. Facilitating a Buying Process.


Shift in Power in the Buy-Sell Equation.

The relationship with buyer has shifted from managing the sales process to facilitating a buying process…prospects buy when they are ready to buy.

“We spend a lot of time and effort with our middle funnel process generating relevant information that maps to buying needs/process once the visitor has converted into a lead by completing a form.   
  
With the buyer in control, lead nurturing is essential to manage and establish a trusted relationship and stay top of mind until the buyer is ready and to measure online behavior and interaction. Leads are scored based on activity and routed to sales at the right time.” said Baga.

Take Aways:

1. Sales and Marketing alignment is step 1 on the journey to improved sales performance for Inside sales.
2. Inbound Marketing underpinned by a tightly integrated technology fabric is no longer an option – it's essential to Inside Sales Success.
3. Lead nurturing is the way to stay top of mind and build a relationship with prospective customers until they are ready to buy.
4. Skilled whiteboarding can restore the communication imbalance in a virtual environment.
5. You don’t have to sweat closing deals if you have done your job in discovery and qualification.

 

Selling with Pictures and Emotion

What makes a great sales presentation and what's the difference between a good presenter and poor presenter?
Lets get crystal clear about the purpose of a sales presentation.

Here's my new definitiion, "the purpose of a sales presentation is to have the audience interact with both the presenter and the material to engage, transform and activate the audience to create change."

The best presenters successfully weave a story around the buyer's current condition... "what-is"; they engage emotions and lead the buyer to understand "what-could-be" as a result of using your products/services and conclude with a call to action or logical next steps.

Great presenters make the buyer the center of the story. Great presentations are delivered in a true dialogue with the audience....images and props serve as visual aids - where appropriate.  It's not about Powerpoint slideshow technique or bullets.

Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone announcement is continually referenced as an exemplar presentation. Steve uses emotion, humor and props as well as dramatic music.... his images are simple and powerful and add clarity and weight to the point he is making. His timing is perfect and he knows the material and this comes from rehearsing the presentation more than 20 times.

The Hero's Journey Story Structure

In the development phase of a whiteboard story or visual storytelling structure we loosely follow the Hero's Journey structure to create contrast between "what is" and "what could be" and engages the buyer in conversation around the challenges of the "now".

The Hero's Journey from Nancy Duarte's Resonate

Early adopters of new technology are prepared to accept more risk when buying technology than the majority of buyers.

A few things that might be of interest.

It's the official start to Barbecue season here in California with the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Much has happened over the past 8 months since arriving in the US; including buying and renovating a house and settling in Pebble Beach and working as an affiliate with WhiteboardSelling.

Do you attend B2B technology tradeshows? If you do, please answer the following questions to put you in the trade-show mind-set.

• Do you love tradeshows or hate them, or do you see them as a necessary evil?
• How good were the leads you got from your last tradeshow?
• Is the tradeshow on the wane, or is still a viable marketing investment?
• What's your tradeshow strategy as a vendor...are you like HubSpot and shun them, or do you select the best ones and invest in them?
• Do you just talk to the visitor or you do a quick demo and hand out a brochure?
• Do you have a 3-5 slide PowerPoint presentation with just the elements of your story?
• How do you sort out the visitors who just want a stamp so they can enter the draw for the iPad from a potential prospect?

I attended a trade-show recently and used a visual confection to tell my story. (The confection below is an excerpt of the Advanced Marketing Concepts Whiteboard story - a visual confection).  According to Edward Tufte, Visual Confections are “ structures that consist of a multiplicity of image events that illustrate an argument, organize information, show and enforce visual comparisons; they should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional…with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the viewer”

You have 20 seconds to hook the visitor, 3 minutes to engage, tell your story, qualify and get permission to follow-up

Visitors come thick and fast during the breaks and at lunch and drinks sessions. You have a 20 seconds to hook the visitor and between 2-4 minutes to discover their top issues, tell your story, qualify their interest and get permission for follow-up.

Plenty of conversations at a recent marketing event lead me to believe that there is a major problem in the way companies approach product training.

Getting Sell-through

I asked 10 people in B2B product marketing or product management the same question "How long after new product training does it take for you to get meaningful sell through of the new product?"

Sell-through varied from 6-12 months and in one case, 18 months, with a lot of head shaking, groans and frowned expressions from responders.

This was a very unscientific poll and in some cases the product marketers did get sell-through earlier from a few of the top reps, but in general it took a lot longer than they expected to produce the revenue.

In a more detailed conversation, I spoke this week with a prospective client running sales operations in the medical software field, regarding their planned sales training and certification program.

I asked if they had introduced any new products in the past year and if they had issues in getting sell-through.

He mentioned that they did introduce a new product in their November sales training event last year, that they believed was a clear winner for clients and had a high value proposition that was easily understood.

This is his response, " We introduced the product with a strong message and clear value-prop into a market we are represented in strongly. Unfortunately we have only achieved 40% of the $3.4M we expected to sell in the first 6 months after introduction".

I asked if he could describe their product introduction process....does any of the following sound familiar?

THE OLD WAY OF PRODUCT TRAINING

1. "Our Product Management team had worked for months to create and package the new product, ready for training at the Kick-off in November.

2. At the event, the product was presented in a PowerPoint presentation, followed by a demonstration. This was followed by presentation on use cases and ROI impact analysis. It was a strong launch.
3. Subsequent regional training and group Webinars were held to ensure the sales team understood the product.
4. Product management created supporting PowerPoint presentations, .pdf's and created a resource center in Salesforce.com to support sales efforts.
5. The Website product messaging was consistent with the sales collateral."
I then asked what went wrong and why he felt they had they fallen so far short after such a strong launch.
"Some of the sales guys have gotten it and are doing well with the new product. The majority are not hitting their numbers, and these reps have a tendency to rely on PowerPoint to do the selling and their conversations are all around product instead of getting the business conversation on the table."

If the old (current) way of product training doesn't work, what does?

Having been through many of the traditional product training events described above in my career, and for the past six months, experiencing the new way of product training with some of the smartest sales enablement teams in the industry, I have some good news.

Instead of frustration in product management andsales enablement at salespeople doing their own thing and disappointing new product sell-through, there is a much better way of introducing new products.

GET THE SALES TEAM TO DO THE PRODUCT TRAINING

In our typical Visual Storytelling training session, each person will either see the Visual Confection, or whiteboard presented up to 10 times and give the presentation a minimum of six times each in the training session.

They will be able to meet new clients the next day, engage buyers around their issues and use the visual confection in a conversational style.

They won't be perfect, but with practice they will quickly gain confidence and after 20 repetitions their confidence will leap as they will "own their story".

If you want the sales team to learn a new product and get them to sell it quickly, then get them to DO the product training. 

If your sales team is cold calling, you might try this technique

I read a lot of books written by other sales training professionals and attend professional development courses every year. When I find an idea that I think will work I'll try it.

This year's, top sales performance problems that sales leaders are investing in solving are - ability to show benefit/value, closely followed by differentiation from competitors.