The Best Time to Sell At The Whiteboard

Unless you’ve been in the distant wilds and away from business presenting for some time, you are familiar with selling at a whiteboard. Discover what most experts won’t tell you: the very best times to appeal to you audience and sell more with less effort. Today’s PowerPoint saturated audiences are kinder and more forgiving to presenters who are willing to pick up a marker and relate directly in a seemingly off-the-cuff manner. The only question is: when? What’s the very best time to sell at the whiteboard? By the way, ‘selling’ is a loose term that applies to pitching ideas, collaborating on solutions, recommending your proposal, as well as more classic sales situations. Modern audiences are desperately seeking involvement and stimulation. There’s nothing quite like solving problems together, hashing out ideas, and making decisions—with the presenter at the whiteboard, drawing while the audience watches. Selling interactively can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line. People love contributing ideas. They feel included and engaged when their ideas are ‘published’ on the board. And they tend to come to consensus faster and easier when ideas are displayed visually. Turns out, there may not be a ‘best’ time to sell at the whiteboard. Because it is so remarkably versatile. If just one of the times you use a whiteboard in your sales presentations, your investment will be paid back a hundred times over or more. Remember, our audiences want interaction. Our audiences are overloaded with dull, boring slide presentations. When you run to the whiteboard to show ideas, you show more than the content of your topic. You show enthusiasm, care and passion. These are wonderful traits that inspire trust and confidence. In you. In your products and services. In your organization. So, back to the question. What’s the very best time? If pressed to a wall and forced to choose, I’d say this. Interaction. When you want to skyrocket interaction, head to the whiteboard. It is hands down the fastest way to get people involved. Particularly focus on areas of your presentation where people tend to get confused or distracted. Perhaps it’s when you show a lot of data. Or display the bowels of your technology solution. Think about this for a second. If your audience gets confused or distracted, what do they do? They check out. They go silent. More often than not, they check email, voice mail and respond to non-urgent requests. In other words, at these critical junctures, you lose their attention. As a sales presenter, you must be on high alert, somewhat like a master athlete. You must sense every turn and twist of the terrain. You must have all your mental, visual and kinesthetic acuity on high. If you even get a whiff of something not going your way, you must respond instantly. Sounds just like a sales presentation. When you want to make an instant course correction, head to the front of the room. Grab a marker. Sketch out your complex solution in easy-to-understand pictures. Just like that you’ll have people paying rapt attention. While your topic may be educational, informational, persuasive, or inspirational, every presentation has critical moments like these. Interested in top results for whiteboard presenting? Check your next presentation. Transform a trouble spot into a powerful opportunity. Have an interactive conversation—sketching ideas while the audience watches.