People ask me this question when they are curious about creating whiteboards, and the truth is that it depends on your purpose and your desired outcome.
In this article, I discuss various whiteboard types, their purpose, and the process of creating a whiteboard story. Let's start with why.
At the top level is the "solution", "Service", or "platform" whiteboard.
This story shows the company's unique vision and how its combined offerings solve customer problems.
The next level is a "product" story. This is quite specific and can be technical. It describes how using the products creates customer value.
A "vignette" is at the lowest level. It describes how a product use case solves a specific problem.
Question:
Nothing fosters message ownership faster than immersive whiteboard storytelling workshops.
After completing a whiteboard storytelling workshop, salespeople, SEs, marketers, and customer success teams can engage buyers in conversations rather than presenting at any point during the customer lifecycle.
Certification, which occurs a month after the workshop, ensures message ownership and that everyone practices telling the story in their way to attain conversational mastery.
Salespeople can use a whiteboard, flip chart, A-3 paper or Visual Confections to tell elements of their story in the time available and let the customer do most of the talking.
Visual confections are powerful in conveying complete visual stories when time is short. They are helpful for inside sales teams when the buyer is remote.
The outcome of a "Why Change" story is a new perspective for the buyer. Typically used early in the buying cycle, "why change" stories are designed to disrupt status-quo thinking.
This is the A->B step, where A is the buyer's current perspective, and B is a desired new perspective, i.e. "we must change".
We use "Why-me" stories when the buyer is in position "B" and they know they have to change. This is the B-C step when the buyer appreciates a new perspective and positions you as the best alternative.
"Why Me" stories position your solution or service vs alternate approaches and set the criteria for objective comparison. They introduce your company, use customer hero stories to explain why your product or service is superior and create customer value.
The best whiteboard stories start with deep customer insight.
We use Customer Switch Interviews to deeply understand the motivations, decision-making processes, and struggling moments that lead customers to switch from one solution to another and what caused them to choose you over competitors.
Then, trade-offs are made to reach a decision.
However, our interest extends further to comprehending the implementation and the new service's impact on the business.
The elements of each interview dossier are abstracted to create a messaging architecture for reuse across the company.
Our methodology uses three steps to achieve a whiteboard story that connects with customers and creates impact.
We construct a Positioning Canvas, a technique from April Dunford in Obviously Awesome.
The Positioning Canvas aligns teams around a clear, differentiated value proposition.
It enables businesses to stand out in crowded markets by making their strengths obvious to their ideal customer.
This encapsulates positioning on one page, facilitating alignment across marketing, sales, and product development teams. The process positions products effectively:
We again use elements from April Dunford, this time from the book Sales Pitch.
We have adapted the storyboard in the following ways:
The final step is to create the whiteboard story. We use the elements of the conversational storyboard and positioning canvas to create a compelling whiteboard story.
An excellent whiteboard story elevates the skills of all participants in conducting face-to-face or virtual meetings with clients and includes:
Use Color Strategically with different colours to convey meaning:
Messaging that conveys commercial insight is necessary for a "why-change" whiteboard story.
Unfortunately, it is scarce or non-existent in most companies.
Commercial insight requires a dedicated team effort to develop a detailed understanding of how customers derive real value from using your products/services.
Few companies have the appetite for creating it because it is intellectually challenging. Creating commercial insight is the most significant contributor to the cost of whiteboard creation.
Most companies have value-messaging frameworks created by product marketing, which can be used in the whiteboard story to ensure the language on the whiteboard is congruent with corporate standards.
Every company with happy customers has created .pdf case studies about their customers' use of the product/service.
Unfortunately, in most of these stories, vendors take to chest-pounding. The product/service or company is the story's hero, not the customer.
Start by Interviewing your best customers.
The "customer hero" story uses the "hero's journey" storytelling format. It starts with the situation before the buyer changed it, i.e., the status quo, the buyer's emotions, and the trigger event that made them want to explore solution options.
There are complications in every significant acquisition involving process change. These are myriad, including pressure from a lack of funding, competing ideas, technology favouritism, regulatory pressure, and incompetent buyers causing frustration.
The zenith in the story arc of the hero's journey is the turning point. This is the lightbulb moment or ah-ha moment when the buyer grasps your vision of a future state where their problems are solved, or as Nancy Duarte calls it, a glimpse of their "future bliss".
The story concludes with the resolution. Change is complete; the organisation has transformed, derived the impact promised in the solution, and is living happily ever after.
Solution complexity adds to the cost as it can create a need for additional development and review cycles to ensure the technical team approves the final version of the story.
These stories tend to be solution or service stories, and in most cases, the marketing team has messaging that the whiteboard creation team can reuse.
The best "why-me" stories extract deep insight from the Customer Switch interviews around how customers use the product or service to create impact and include a "who-we've-helped" story for a similar buyer or industry embedded in their structure. When customer win stories are in the form of corporate chest-pounding, as described above, they will have to be redeveloped and can add cost.
Whiteboard development costs range from $10,000 for a basic whiteboard to $65,000 for a complete messaging development process, a prerequisite for creating the why-change whiteboard story.