Whiteboard Selling

Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Wiley, 2013

15 min read

10 take-aways

Audio & text

What's inside?

Use dynamic whiteboard selling to establish a creative partnership with your prospect.

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Editorial Rating

Qualities

Innovative
Applicable

Recommendation

When a speaker sets up a PowerPoint presentation, often that’s the cue to take a quick nap, because slides are passive. Interactive selling with colorful markers and a whiteboard grabs attention. Consider your sales presentation audience: With so much product and sales data available on the Internet, salespeople are targeting higher-level executives in prospect organizations to offer them solutions to long-term problems. This requires a more sophisticated pitch and a dynamic, conversational style. Sales experts Corey Sommers and David Jenkins explain why whiteboard selling works so well in this setting. They offer useful illustrations and worksheets to clarify their message and to provide hands-on training. getAbstract recommends their colorful, well-designed workbook to sales professionals who want to grab their buyers’ attention and to managers who are ready to dump the projector, turn up the lights, and allow their salespeople to draw, interact with clients and think on their feet.

Summary

No More Slides

Salespeople can develop a dramatic visual and interactive conversation with their prospects by using a whiteboard and drawing simple shapes and arrows as they give their sales narrative. Sales representatives now find themselves presenting to increasingly senior leaders at prospect companies, so they must appeal to these executives’ broader, more complex view of their business. Sharing stories that show your firm’s success in solving problems like theirs clarifies their needs and demonstrates how you can help.

Slides are boring and adding or deleting one is difficult if you have to adjust during your presentation – for example, if you suddenly learn that the CEO is going to sit in on your pitch. Modifying simple, live illustrations as you create them is much easier. Moreover, people simply don’t retain information presented on slides; they usually recall only the first and last three slides they see. Training sessions in which one slide presentation follows another don’t convey information effectively and seldom teach the conversational skills salespeople need to use when closing. Use whiteboard training instead.

Telling the Story

When...

About the Authors

Corey Sommers is vice president of whiteboard strategy at Corporate Visions where David Jenkins is a consultant in sales best practices. In 2007, they co-founded WhiteboardSelling, which is now a division of Corporate Visions.

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S. F. 10 years ago

I confess to being a convert to Whiteboard selling. It does take practice and confidence but the power of creating a story with a customer should not be underestimated. This book is a great help when introducing the technique to the sales force and I would encourage every sale professional to have at least one whiteboard in their sales toolkit, it is such a great way to connect with your customer.

Corey Sommers and David Jenkins