Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals

Chapter 8

The Major Whiteboard Types

If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer-animated films for your children in the backseat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.

—John Lasseter

So far in this book we have showcased the stories of real salespeople and their experiences with PowerPoint and whiteboarding. Part of the power of whiteboarding is the power of stories. There are plenty of other books that sing the praises of storytelling. Using stories, especially visual stories, creates a shared vision and helps to sell more and bigger deals, faster. But using whiteboards to tell stories is just part of the picture. An effective sales whiteboard needs to be more than a narrative—it should also be a discussion framework that supports a two-way knowledge transfer. This discussion framework builds out step-by-step, while still allowing for situational fluency if the discussion changes course. It has predesignated areas to capture customer meeting objectives, feedback, and next steps. This “discussion map” is critical to keeping the dialogue moving to create a shared vision and progress the sales cycle.

In this section, we will describe at a high level the key whiteboard types. In later sections we'll describe the basic design points of a whiteboard and the associated content.

The Whiteboard Army Knife

We identify ...