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Why You Need to Get Whiteboarding Now!

10/11/2016

 
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Let's be honest, sales presentations, unless they're really well produced (think an Apple product launch), can look and feel boring, mass-produced and, most-importantly, impersonal. Its getting harder and harder for Sales and PreSales to communicate a personalised message in an increasingly visually cluttered and noisy world.

For Sales and PreSales, we're trying to ensure we get remembered, differentiate ourselves from our competitors, establish credibility and trust. I think sketching out a vision, story or idea right in front of your audience is way more of a 'performance' than rolling out your 'authorised' deck of company slides. If you've got a 'visual' audience, and many of them will be, as soon as you get a pen out you'll have captured their attention. As Dan Roam (see later) says, '...the spontaneity and roughness of hand-drawn pictures make them less intimidating and more inviting...nothing makes an image clearer then seeing it drawn out-step-by-step'.

Sketching ideas or storytelling on a physical or (as we'll see) digital whiteboard is super engaging. If you're also combining discovery with explaining an idea or jointly working through a problem then the fluidity a whiteboard offers for visual trial and error is unparalleled. And if you're 'weaving' a story about the business problem your prospect doesn't realise they have, or jointly architecting a Cloud future incorporating your solutions, sketching will make it seem way more interactive, collaborative and, very importantly, personal.
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Right...what do you need to get started.

​How to get started... just a pen or a pencil...

You don't even need a whiteboard. Dan Roam's magnificent book 'The Back of a Napkin' gives you the skills to visually solve problems and sell ideas literally on the back of a napkin. The book gives you a visual 'language' to use when sketching an idea or exploring a problem.
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If you don't have the attention span for a guidebook (that's what smartphones have done to us!) or you want to start with something simple then try this 10 minute, 5 part 'Mastering the Whiteboard' online course from Rex Hammock at SmallBusiness.com
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​How to get started...just a pen stylus...

Increasingly we're having to present across the web or work virtually. In the USA, for example, because of the vast geography, virtual presentations are 'becoming the norm' not the exception. So how do you sketch / whiteboard in something like WebEx, GoToMeeting? (...many other web conferencing tools are available). You could have a camera on your physical whiteboard or flipchart and there are lots of electronic whiteboards available, but they're expensive and not really portable; you'd would need to set up a static 'virtual studio'.


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Probably the cheapest and most portable way of creating a digital whiteboard is to use the built in whiteboard tools of WebEx (for example) and get yourself a Wacom CTL-490 Intuos graphics pen tablet [about £50 in the UK; that's mine covered in fingerprints in the photo]. The writing area is about A5 size (1/2 US Letter). Plug it into your laptop USB port, load the driver and off you go...start sketching. It works like a mouse but comes into its own as a digital writing surface. PowerPoint recognises when you use the pen / stylus on the Intuos tablet surface and pops up a new menu called 'Ink Tools'. [Top Tip: Configure the shortcut for the lowest pen / stylus button (nearest the nib) to be 'Ctrl-Z' Undo; you'll thank me later].
I hope I've got you excited about whiteboarding and sketching. I'd love to hear how you use sketching and any top tips you can share.
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To finish off, I was recently coaching a tech company on how they could use sketching to tell stories in the sales process. Here's my before (start) and after (end) digital whiteboard sketch I used to explain Big Data and Hadoop in 2 minutes; starting with an elephant (Hadoop), a pig (Apache Pig) and a lightning bolt (Apache Spark).
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​Don is the Founder of Winning Skills Ltd. Talk to Don about building Presales organisations, best-practice PreSales skills and processes and how to build the perfect 'Wow' demo. Let's connect on LinkedIn or talk at don@winningskills.co.uk

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