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See if this sounds familiar.

You’ve spent hours prospecting, you execute a discovery call, and then you’ve earned the right to a face to face or web meeting with your prospect. When you add up the time spent to get to this point, it’s substantial.

Here’s the problem. If you’re like most sales professionals and rely on PowerPoint to anchor the conversation, the prospect will only remember about 10% of what you say (John Medina, Brain Rules). If that’s the case, you just spent hours so that your prospect can forget 90% of what you said. That’s not a very good return on your time.

Now look at it from the prospect’s point of view. They meet with sales professionals all the time. I can only imagine what’s running through their minds. They get to sit through PowerPoint after PowerPoint and likely are being asked the same questions over and over again as the try to pick the right solution.

Pretty boring. Worse yet, all the sales conversations sound and look the same.

What does the prospect really want? According to Forrester Research, 88% of executive decision-makers want to have a conversation, not a presentation, for sales-related meetings.

With that as a backdrop, what if you could improve sales performance with:

• 50 percent higher lead conversion rate
• 29 percent shorter time-to-productivity
• 15 percent shorter sales cycles

You can. According to Aberdeen research, these results can be realized through the use of Whiteboarding.

Here’s why:

• A visual anchor to the conversation increases the retention rate to over 65% (John Medina, Brain Rules).
• The progressive disclosure of content appeals to people’s curiosity and makes a lasting impression. White boards are superior to PowerPoint presentations, which lower levels of listener engagement and focus.
• The element of novelty. At the moment, few sales professionals use white boards in their business deals, making this a powerful means of communication as it piques listeners’ curiosity. If you are different, you are more memorable.
• The interactive nature of white boards. Stimulate people’s attention by asking for their active contribution while you are creating the white board; Collaborative work is always easier to remember, and more deeply engaging and meaningful for all participants.

If all of this is true, why don’t more sales professionals use Whiteboarding? It comes down to one huge hurdle: complexity. Most of the current approaches to whiteboarding are too complicated. If you look at the books, blogs, and videos on how to whiteboard in sales presentations, it’s enough to scare off even the most seasoned sellers.

So what’s the answer? Keep it simple and follow these tips:

1. Start with the end in mind. What’s the most important Value Position you want your prospect to remember? Is it freedom to spend more time on more important projects? Increased efficiency? Reducing complexity? Find the central theme to the value you provide.
2. Build a sales conversation from the prospect’s point of view that spotlights your Value Position. It’s easier to create a whiteboard when you already have the storyline.
3. Pull out a clean sheet of paper and start drawing the story.
   • Use simple elements like geographic shapes, stick figures and graphs. This ensures that anyone can recreate the whiteboard, including your prospects and customers.
   • Use different colors and spatial orientation to create contrast in the whiteboard. Contrast “this is what your world looks like today” with “this is what your world could look like with our solution”. Colors: red is bad, green is good. Spatial orientation: down is bad, up is good.
   • Look at the finished whiteboard and check to see that it conveys the simple theme of the story. For example, if moving your prospects from a complicated world to a simple world, anyone looking at the visual should be able to quickly see this in the whiteboard.
4. Whiteboarding is iterative. It will take several iterations before you find the final version. Use team members to help you with feedback.

Give whiteboarding a try. I’d love to hear your results.

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I understand it can be difficult to know where to start when creating a Sales Conversation Roadmap. That’s why we’ve created a “Cheat Sheet” that you can download HERE.

If you’d like some help in increasing your revenue by closing more deals, reach out and let’s find a few minutes to chat on the phone. You can email me at dkurkjian@mastermessaging.com.