Date post: | 20-Aug-2015 |
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Hello and welcome, thanks for joining us for this Webinar, “Visual Confec<on that Sell”. I’m Mark Gibson I’ve worked in various B2B sales and marke<ng leadership roles for more than 30 years at companies including For the past two years, since reloca<ng back to USA, I have consulted with Whiteboard Selling, developing whiteboard stories and training thousands of people in visual storytelling technique. The idea for this Webinar came interest expressed in a recent blog post I created. Actually the name of this Webinar should read, “Understanding how Visual confec<ons can help salespeople communicate”, but no-‐one would show up with a <tle like that. It’s salespeople that sell, but visual confec<ons can help salespeople own their value proposi<on and communicate it more effec<vely.
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This Webinar will run about 16 minutes or so. My goal is for you to understand what visual confec<on are and why they are important sales aids and finally how to create them. Have you ever had a Gotomee<ng or Webex with an important prospec<ve customer and you just couldn’t get both par<es to work? Well it happened to me. I had developed a visual confec<on to show how it could help their sales team tell their story. The first 20 minutes were wasted as we tried mul<ple video conferencing tools and browsers….nothing worked, no visual communica<on. With 10 minutes leX I generated a .pdf of the image I had created and emailed it to the prospec<ve client. With 5 minutes remaining before he had to leave for another mee<ng, he received my email. I talked him through the visual confec<on, validated his issues and closed with next steps and got another mee<ng….he was interested….this took 3 minutes. Now for mee<ngs over the Internet, I refer people to the many high quality visual confec<ons on my Website and I engage the buyer in discussion. I want to give you the formal defini<on of a visual confec<on and show you some examples of visual confec<ons before we get into the why and the what of visual
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This image is a visual confec<on, its our big-‐idea story; it’s fairly self evident and it comes from the back of my business card.
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Edward TuXe’s Defini<on: Visual Confec<ons should be transparent, straigh_orward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conven<onal This illustra<on from Wikipedia, is Charles Minard’s map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign and is feature in Edward TuXe’s book, Beau<ful Evidence. Emeritus Professor Edward TuXe of Princeton and Yale Universi<es is acknowledged as world’s leading analyst of graphic informa<on. This map is a masterpiece in sta<s<cal graphic representa<on, and it’s also a visual confec<on. The numbers of men present are represented by the widths of the colored zones at a rate of one millimeter for every ten-‐thousand men; they are further wrieen across the zones. The pale brown designates the men who enter into Russia, the black line those who leave it. Across the boeom from right to leX is another graph of the temperature on their retreat. Maps are great visual confec<ons
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Here’s a visual confec<on form you might be more familiar with, the Infographic. This one about the ROI of inbound marke<ng for lead genera<on.
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Finally, Websites are visual confec<ons, or at least they could be if you remove the meaningless smiley faces and stock imagery and replace them with images that mean something to the visitors you are interested in aerac<ng.
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Unfortunately for many salespeople, this is what they are given to go to market with….a PowerPoint presenta<on loaded with bullets. Most salespeople struggle to figure out how to convert their PowerPoint presenta<ons into meaningful conversa<ons with buyers. Instead of conversa<ons, salespeople are leaning on PowerPoint to tell their story and nothing kills a conversa<on faster than PowerPoint bullets According to Forrester, 88% of buyers don’t want presenta<ons from salespeople, they want conversa<ons with salespeople who know what they are talking about and can bring insight to the table
Buyers aren’t interested in your features and benefits either, yet this is what a majority of product marke<ng teams arm their salespeople with today. Buyers are interested in capabili<es and the value they can get from using your products. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Recent research by Aberdeen Group found that 53% of best in class companies iden<fied “crea<ng more meaningful conversa<ons” as a top priority for increasing and sustaining revenue in an uncertain economy. Visual confec<ons can help to capture your unique story and to empower salespeople to tell it in more meaningful conversa<ons with buyers.
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Visual confec<ons are important selling tools, although up un<l recently have been given scant aeen<on. A big advantage in a well thought out visual confec<on for sales is that its scalable. From a 7 second back of the business card “I get it” -‐ to a 3 minute tradeshow-‐floor conversa<on in this example, I can communicate a lot of ideas in a short space with a visual confec<on, a picture is worth a thousand words.. Visual confec<ons can convey meaning without a talk track. In the process of crea<ng a visual confec<ons for clients we create a messaging architecture which can be used to create congruence in both marke<ng and sales communica<on. Do your sales conversa<ons mirror the messages on your Website?
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Here is an excerpt from a recent inbound marke<ng proposal we sent to a customer, with our partners Kuno Crea<ve. Visual confec<ons are great in proposals and help buyers to cut through the clueer and get a mental picture of what you mean. Visual confec<ons can communicate your big ideas to large numbers of stakeholders way beeer than proposals with just words. Visual confec<ons that are well thought out can be used an infinite number of <mes; within Websites, in proposals, in mee<ng summaries, customer communica<on and on paper whiteboards or the back of a napkin in front of prospects to convey meaning.
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Using visual confec<ons to train salespeople to tell their story and communicate value is a quick and powerful way of genng message ownership across a sales force. Message ownership is power. When salespeople know their story, its like body armour, they can go into any customer situa<on with confidence and engage, like our knight ready for baele. Confidence opens the door to beeer buyer engagement and with rapport and trust established, opportunity for discovery improves. Beeer discovery leads to beeer qualifica<on and salespeople who qualify effec<vely, sell more than those that don’t. So visual confec<ons can help you reduce sales ramp <me through message ownership and they can help you grow sales faster than exis<ng methods.
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Now lets examine how we create visual confec<ons, But before I do, I want to share a story with you. I was referred to a prospec<ve client by a business colleague and agreed to meet them for lunch. There were several people at the lunch table when I arrived. In advance of the mee<ng, I prepared a high quality visual confec<on to emphasize how I thought the prospect could transform their sales and marke<ng performance. On the way to the mee<ng, I stopped at Kinko’s and printed it on high quality A-‐3 paper. During lunch, the conversa<on came around to sales and marke<ng performance and aXer we had established rapport and trust, I produced the visual and talked them through it. This served to bring the economic buyer a long way up the learning curve around how they could transform marke<ng and sales performance and he had an Ah Ha moment.
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So how to construct a story using a visual confec<on? The star<ng point for my visual stories is with the buyer. Start by asking who the audience is for your story. • What are their issues, what’s happening in their industry, with compe<<on, in
their company, anything you can find out about the audience that could be relevant and important to the buyer.
• Figure out why its important and what is important and their priori<es. • Understand what alterna<ves exist – what if they do nothing? How will that
impact them? Remember doing nothing is where up to 35% of forecast deals end up today, no decision.
• How can you help, specifically – how can they use your stuff. • Why should they care? • And finally why should they buy from you. If you brainstorm all of these ques<ons out, you will have the basis for a story. But before you get to tell your visual story, you have to engage the buyer.
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As men<oned, Visual storytelling starts with the buyer. The goal is to engage the buyer in conversa<on around their issues and have your stuff – your capabili<es and the value that using them creates in the buyers context – unfold naturally in conversa<on. We develop role based persona’s that examine what buyers are trying to achieve and the internal and external barriers they are facing. We need to understand their constraints and the implica<ons of change in their organiza<on and the risks involved. We also need to understand where our buyers are spending <me online and the industry issues they are aeuned to…and their ideal customer.
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Next we brainstorm the Messaging Architecture. This starts by developing an understanding of your capabili<es that are relevant to solving the buyer’s problem. By brainstorming out all of the relevant capabili<es, we can sort them into like groups and abstract the posi<oning pillars. Posi<oning pillars help you posi<on your capabili<es in the market versus your compe<<on. Once we have grouped Win themes under the appropriate Posi<oning Pillars, its <me to abstract the Big idea, which is a short meaningful sentence containing your posi<oning pillars. Now we are ready to start to build our visual confec<on
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I like to use a blank A-‐3 sketchbook to capture ini<al ideas. The process I use is to cram as much material I can on that sheet, make notes, underline, sketch images that come to mind and jot things down. I tend to group ideas in chunks of related context. I write down all the buyer issues in red, and use them to convey the core ideas around product usage What industry issues are relevant – get the on paper Are there any visual metaphors that come to mind – I always do an image search around key phrases to see if I can adapt any ideas. Crea<ng Visual Confec<ons requires intellectual effort discipline and persistence….and it takes mul<ple itera<ons to eliminate extraneous ideas and dis<l the idea to its simplest form. When you have captured enough ideas, move to your chosen graphical design tool and begin to create your visual confec<on and visual story flow. You might find our Visual Storytelling Webinar of use in developing your story
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Here is a completed visual confec<on that I used at a recent tradeshow. It was very effec<ve and cost $60.00 to buy the materials and draw it out. I used it for 2 days and it paid for itself handsomely. Can you see how visual confec<ons can be used to capture the buyers issues and enable salespeople to have more useful sales conversa<ons. Can you see how the messaging capture and alignment process can help both sales and marke<ng tell the same story? And can you see how message ownership is the big payoff for salespeople?
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Lastly aXer you have created your final visual confec<on, it’s <me to train the sales team. In the words of John Medina in Brain Rules, You need to prac<ce to remember and remember to prac<ce. Itera<ve role-‐playing is the way to go, using all of the senses, talking, seeing, hearing, doing, interac<ng for maximum impact on memory reten<on. The principle is Supra addi<ve integra<on applies here, -‐ that is, the impact of mul<-‐sensory learning on the whole learning experience is greater than the sum of the individual parts. AXer the storytelling workshop, salespeople need to remember to prac<ce ….and sales managers have a role here to mentor and develop storytelling skills in the field. Deliberate prac<ce is uncomfortable, but worth the effort. Most salespeople take six months to a year to master their story; what would it do for your business if your sales team could master it in two weeks? We wish you well in crea<ng visual confec<ons and highly recommend the Edward TuXe Workshop and the four books in the Visual Explana<ons series.
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Finally our visual storytelling Webinar concludes with a call to ac<on. I hope you found it useful and learned something useful about visual confec<ons We can help you translate your PowerPoint into a simple, yet powerful and compelling visual story and help everyone on your team master it. Please give us a call or click on the URL and complete the feedback form.
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