If you want to be different from your competitors, build your credibility with prospects and customers, and get your audiences more engaged in your presentations, Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals
As the title of the book indicates, the authors urge salespeople to can their slides and conduct their presentations interactively using a whiteboard.
There are some strong arguments for getting away from slide decks:
- As I’ve written before, senior level executives (and probably everyone else) often dread having to sit through the standard sales deck, with its reams of slides displaying the “company history” and walls of words. If you show up and do something different, they will definitely pay attention.
- Some salespeople are just projector operators. They show up, connect the laptop, and read off the screen a presentation that someone else put together. If you could train a monkey to operate the projector, or better yet, just email the slides in advance, you would deliver equal credibility and value at a much lower cost.
- Sustainable agreements are much more likely when the customer is actively engaged in telling you their story and building the solution with you. The design of most presentations fosters a transmit-only approach and discourages questions and interactivity.
Whiteboard Selling shows how to encapsulate a large slide deck into a single whiteboard that builds the story you need for particular stages in the sales cycle, including qualification and discovery, why change, competitive comparison, making the business case, and closing. That’s a particular strength of the book—it’s as much about effective sales process as it is about presentations.
In their words, “it should be a cohesive visual that tells a singular story within a defined space”. This phrase neatly captures the two principal advantages of the whiteboard approach. It allows you to build a story with your customer while also harnessing the power of visuals. You’ll know you succeeded when the customer insists on saving what’s on the board so they can sell the idea internally.
Even if you don’t want to take the drastic step of getting rid of your slides entirely, the discipline of going through the whiteboarding process would definitely sharpen your thinking and your delivery.
Some people reading this review might shudder at the thought of unleashing your sales force onto the world armed with nothing but colored markers. How do you ensure quality and consistency? Have no fear; the book is actually written with sales and marketing managers as its audience, and devotes substantial space to the process of designing, training and implementing a whiteboard approach in your sales organization. As such, it’s not really a “how-to” for individual sales professionals, although any reasonably intelligent and experienced salesperson could probably design their own.
While the general approach outlined in the book makes excellent sense, I would guess that the challenge—and effectiveness—of rolling out the process to the entire sales force is not as straightforward as the book makes it appear. In fact, the close scripting required to ensure a consistent message would seem to detract from the flexibility and natural flow that effective sales conversations require, possibly defeating the purpose.
Maybe the ideal approach combines the best of both approaches. Ironically, the authors advocate using PowerPoint to design the whiteboard templates to begin with. That got me thinking: why not combine both approaches? Tablets running MS Office could be used to project slides, and the presenter could write and draw on the slides just as with a whiteboard. It’s worth finding out, and I plan to experiment with the approach and write about it in upcoming posts.
When using an analogy, you have to think more than one step ahead
You know how those Viagra commercials show you how wonderful life is with their drug: with virile types driving big trucks or couples lounging in an outdoor bathtub? Right after those scenes comes the disclaimer that tells you about the risks you run when you use the wonder drug.
This article is the disclaimer. So far, I’ve written about how powerful analogies can be in your presentation, but you do run risks when you deploy that “perfect” analogy. After all, persuasion is a two-way street, and your audience may not passively sit there and accept what you’re selling. You may be so focused on getting your chess pieces into position to attack your opponent that you overlook the danger to yourself. Any time you decide to use an analogy to dramatize of support your proposal, you run several risks:
They may shoot down your analogy. In 1988, Dan Quayle was debating Lloyd Bentsen in the Vice-Presidential debate. Quayle tried to defuse concerns about his youth and inexperience by pointing out: “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Bentsen replied: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Many analogies seem to fit so well that you take it for granted they will be accepted without argument by your listeners, but be prepared in case someone in the audience tries to show that the analogy does not apply.
They may turn your analogy against you. Your listeners may accept the analogy but point out a different lesson from it. For example, the story above made the point that an opponent may crush your analogy. But someone could weaken that analogy I used above by pointing out that the Bush-Quayle ticket actually won.
This points out the danger of falling in love with your own analogy; you see its beauty but may be blind to its weaknesses. Listeners who are opposed to your idea are going to be much more objective and may bring to mind other details about the source analogy that are just as important. Every analogy is going to have differences as well as similarities, and you can count on listeners to point those out. Here’s an example of someone trying to use an analogy to sell a new concept, from the movie Jurassic Park:
Dr. Hammond: All major theme parks have had delays. When they opened Disneyland, nothing worked.
Dr. Malcolm: But. John. If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.
They may counter with a stronger analogy. You see this all the time in the Sunday morning news shows where competing experts debate some pressing international question. One may bring up WWII to urge that we stand up to an aggressor nation, and the other will counter with the specter of Vietnam.
“Pressure-test” your analogy. As with anything else you put into your presentation, spend some time considering the opposing point of view. It will help strengthen your arguments and you might even learn something that will improve your proposal. Put yourself in the position of a skeptic and try to poke holes in your own analogy, and then come up with answers to those counters. In Quayle’s case, Bentsen was expecting the Kennedy analogy; if it was that obvious to the opposition, Quayle’s handlers should have anticipated his reaction.
If you’re going to use a story, research it to get all the facts, because the part that you remember is only a small part of the entire story. When I thought of the analogy contained in the Dan Quayle story, I did not automatically think focus on the fact that Quayle did, after all, win the election.
Other articles in this series:
How Analogies Help Sell New Concepts
How to Select the Right Analogy
Don't take the first one off the top
It’s generally easy to come up with an analogy to describe or support a concept you’re presenting; our minds are steeped in analogies, which is why so many of them may easily come to the surface. But you can usually improve on the first analogy that comes to mind. Here are some suggestions for choosing just the right one:
- Decide the main point
- Find the right balance between familiarity and novelty
- Test it for weaknesses
Decide the main point. Every situation can be superficially compared to others in different ways. If you want to find the analogy that gets your audience to see your point immediately, you must first be clear in your own mind what that essential point is. Once you do, it acts as a quality filter: just the process of distilling down to key words will activate your imagination and bring better analogies to mind.
Find the right balance between familiarity and novelty. Make it familiar to the audience, but not too familiar. The idea has to be something they will immediately recognize and pay attention to—if it’s familiar, they will recognize it, but if it’s too familiar they won’t pay much attention.
So many analogies are so commonly used that they become what Douglas Hofstadter calls “banalogies”—barely registering in our minds when we hear them.[1] It’s ironic that people who urge us to be more creative can’t think of a better analogy than “thinking outside the box”. Honestly, do you envision a box in your mind when you encounter that phrase?
You have to dig deep. In my own experience, it’s easy to come up with an adequate analogy quickly, but a really compelling or specific analogy takes time. Memory is like a t-shirt drawer: the ones you wear all the time always get put back in on the top, so you use them more often. The most common analogies are always at the top of your memory, and you have to dig down to the bottom to pull up one of the less common ones. The less common ones are more likely to capture the audience’s attention. Memory is also capricious: focusing hard on finding the right analogy doesn’t always work immediately, so if you prepare early by writing a rough draft and then set it aside, better ideas bubble up later—often when you’re thinking of something else.
At the other end, sometimes analogies fail because they don’t make sense to the audience. At the very least, they should be relevant to the culture and even the age of your listeners. Because so much of the training I do is overseas, I’ve developed an awareness of how much of what we say contains references to things in the US that others don’t relate to, especially our sports. Also, as time goes on I find that audience members are getting younger every year, and many of them don’t understand the references I make to TV shows or music that may have been popular before they were even born! I was once brought up short in a training class when I compared presentation structure to a newspaper article, only to be reminded by one of the younger attendees that many people under 30 never read a newspaper.
So what’s the best way to find the right balance? Make it personal, local and timely. You can make it familiar and unique by choosing an analogy that is special to them, perhaps from their own business environment. I knew a salesperson who was selling cellular service to the Michelin plant in South Carolina. When the purchaser said he did not see much difference between the various carriers, she said she understood because she had trouble distinguishing between brands of tires. She further went on to say that there are clear differences if you are willing to look beneath the surface. You can also compare the decision you are asking them to make to a similar one they already have made. Either of these require research, but it pays off many times over in credibility.
For added impact, try to find an analogy that will resonate emotionally as well as cognitively. If you compare it to something that they have strong feelings for, the emotions evoked will attach themselves to your idea as well. One of the best ways is to tap into how they see—or want to see—themselves. For example, at one of my clients, I train their engineers in selling techniques. Because some engineers find selling distasteful, I show how selling is like engineering in certain ways, especially when viewed as a problem-solving exercise.
You especially need to consider using an analogy when referring to numbers. Some numbers needed for business presentations are either so large (billions of dollars of revenue) or so small (Six Sigma quality means 3.4 defects per million), that they are difficult to put into human perspective.[2] Numbers also need to be placed in the proper context to be understood. Steve Jobs was once asked by a reporter how he felt about the fact that Apple’s market share was “stuck” at 5%. Jobs replied: “Our market share is greater than BMW or Mercedes in the car industry.”[3] With one analogy Jobs put the number into context and also compared apple favorably to two well-respected brands.
Test if for weaknesses. Because every situation is different, no analogy is perfect. You have to watch for unintended effects, which is important enough to consider in the next article of this series.
Other articles in this series:
How Analogies Help Sell New Concepts
[1] Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander.
[2] Here’s an excellent example that brings the numbers of the national debt down to human scale.
[3] From The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, by Carmine Gallo.
It's like a horse, only different
In Part 1 of this series, we saw how analogies can play a central role in persuasive business presentations. We’ll develop that thought further in this article by considering how analogies can make it easier for your audience to accept the change you are trying to sell.
In view of the constant change and relentless innovation of today’s economy, one would think that getting people to accept new ideas is easy, but in fact anyone trying to convince someone else to accept a new idea faces three tough obstacles to gaining acceptance. First, the more different something is, the harder it is to understand. Second, our minds prefer the comfort of the familiar and assign greater weight to risk in the risk/reward calculation. Finally, we don’t like being told what to do.
Any one of these obstacles can be poison for your presentation, but the antidote to all three is an apt analogy.
Analogies make things easier to understand. You can’t persuade others if they don’t understand what you’re saying. The mind learns by relating new information to existing information structures, and if you’re presenting highly technical information or introducing a new product that is different from anything the audience is used to, you can save a lot of explanation by building off what they already know. How would you describe a zebra to someone who has never seen a horse?
Analogies also make concepts easier to understand by helping the audience filter out all the relevant information and get to the heart of the matter.
Finally even when your audience totally gets it, the success of your implementation will likely depend on their being able to get additional buy-in from others in their organization. A compelling analogy will arm them with an easy-to-remember message to take to their internal stakeholders.
Analogies reduce perceived risk by making new things seem more familiar. The old saying that familiarity breeds contempt is usually not true. We gravitate toward, and prefer, what is familiar to us. The decision to try something new always involves a mental struggle between risk and reward. Any time we consider something new, whether it’s a product or an idea, we have to contemplate leaving the safety of the familiar for the opportunity of the unfamiliar. If the concept is too different, it’s likely to be dismissed without even giving equal time to considering its benefits.
Evolution is easier for most of us to handle than revolution. Analogies, by definition, work by comparing a new situation to something more familiar. When Apple first came out with a graphical user interface, they could have gone in virtually an infinite number of directions, but they chose to make something completely different seem like something very old and familiar by giving us a “desktop” with which to work.
An analogy lets the decision maker have their cake and eat it too. It provides a safe base in their mind from which they can explore new opportunity.
Analogies lower resistance to your message. As kids, anytime my mother told me something was good for me, I would automatically determine not to like it. Most adults haven’t outgrown that tendency toward reactance, which is why sometimes trying to teach or to sell the benefits of a new idea can backfire if you try too hard. As Churchill said, “I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.”
As I mentioned in my previous post, analogies, once implanted, work below the level of consciousness to guide the search for information and to bend the stream of thought into a certain direction. The analogy plants itself in the mind and the audience member’s mind does the rest. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the target audience has a better comprehension of product benefits when the detailed information is left out.[1] It’s like a joke: if you have to explain it, it’s not funny.
