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What If Your Customers Are Aiming at a Different Target?

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 10:16:51 GMT

Your company knows what it wants to sell. But how well does it understand the progress its customers are trying to make?

Imagine an archer being asked to hit a bullseye while wearing a blindfold.

You can have the finest bow in the world. You can spend hours perfecting your technique.

But you still don't know where to aim.

That's how an awful lot of B2B companies develop their messaging.

The executives agree on what makes the business special. Marketing writes the website. Sales gets a new presentation.

Everyone admires the result.

Nobody has asked the customers where the bloody target is.

The bullseye is the buyer's problem

The closer your message gets to the centre of the target, the more clearly a buyer should recognise their own circumstances.

At the bullseye, the company understands what was happening when customers started looking for something different.

It knows what they were struggling with, why the problem became important and what made them willing to consider changing.

That understanding shapes the language on the website and the conversations salespeople have.

Further out, the messaging becomes more general.

You get familiar industry problems, broad claims about improving performance and promises that could belong to almost any supplier.

By the time you reach the outer rings, it's all about the company.

Its products. Its capabilities. Its technology.

The sort of language that makes perfect sense to the people who built the business and leaves buyers wondering whether anyone understands their problem.

I've analysed more than 1,000 B2B websites

Over the past year, I've analysed more than 1,000 B2B software and services websites.

The sameness is striking.

Different companies selling different things to different customers, using almost identical language.

Innovative platforms. Seamless integration. End-to-end solutions. Trusted partners.

Swap the logos and you'd struggle to tell many of them apart.

The website is often where the problem becomes visible.

But the same language can find its way into sales presentations and customer conversations.

A buyer arrives with a particular problem.

The salesperson arrives with the company's story about its products.

And they can spend an hour talking without getting much closer to understanding each other.

The people who bought can tell you where to aim

Here's where I'd start.

Speak to customers who recently chose your company.

Ask them to take you back to what was happening before they started looking.

What had become difficult enough to do something about?

What had they tried?

Why did they decide the time had come to change?

What alternatives did they consider?

And why did they choose you?

Listen to the words they use.

You may discover that something your marketing barely mentions was central to their decision.

You may also find that a feature the company considers a major advantage wasn't particularly important.

One interview gives you one buyer's account. Several interviews can help you identify patterns worth testing.

Those findings give you a much better basis for deciding what your messaging should say.

Then see whether your salespeople can use it

A good message needs to survive contact with a real customer.

Can your salesperson recognise the situation the buyer is describing?

Can they ask questions that help the buyer explain what is happening and what it means for the business?

Can they resist the temptation to open PowerPoint and start pitching before they've understood the problem?

The whiteboard provides a visual scaffold for a story that helps the buyer see themselves in it.

A good story captures the frustration of the current situation, the consequences of leaving things as they are and the possibility of making progress.

It has an emotional dimension because buying decisions involve people. People who worry about getting it wrong, who have to persuade colleagues and who want to achieve something that matters to them.

The drawing gives the story structure. It helps the salesperson build it in conversation with the buyer, rather than deliver a rehearsed pitch at them.

And because the story is visual, the buyer has something they can remember, explain to colleagues and use to continue the conversation when the salesperson has left the room.

But the story has to be grounded in what customers actually experience.

Give someone a whiteboard and a lousy product pitch, and they'll deliver a lousy product pitch with a marker pen.

Take another look at your target

Open your homepage and read the first few lines.

Would a recent customer recognise the circumstances that made them start looking for help?

Would they hear something that resembles their own buying decision?

Now ask one of your salespeople why your last five customers chose you.

Then ask the customers.

If the answers are different, you've got some useful work to do.

Before you spend more time polishing the message, find out where your customers are telling you to aim.

At Whiteboard Storytelling, we use customer buying stories to help B2B salespeople have better conversations. If your team is still leading with the product pitch, let's talk about what your customers can teach them.

Your 2027 Sales Kickoff Has One Job: Change What Sellers Do

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:26:26 GMT

Why a great sales kickoff isn't enough, and how to turn your sales story into conversations buyers value.

Every year, companies invest heavily in their sales kickoffs.

They bring hundreds of sellers together, unveil new strategies, introduce products, celebrate success and send everyone home energised.

The presentations are polished. The speakers are inspiring. The atmosphere is electric.

Then Monday arrives.

Sellers return to their customers, their pipelines and their familiar ways of working.

And much of what they heard at the SKO stays at the SKO.

The problem isn't the event. It's what happens afterwards.

If your 2027 Sales Kickoff is going to deliver a return, it needs to change what sellers do when they're in front of buyers.

That requires more than a compelling presentation.

It requires a story grounded in customer reality, a way for sellers to learn it, and a process that helps them own it.

1. Start With Why Customers Buy

Most sales kickoffs begin inside the company.

Leadership defines the strategy. Product marketing develops the messages. Sales enablement builds the presentations.

The assumption is that the company already understands why customers buy.

But what happens when we test that assumption?

My approach starts with customer interviews, drawing on Jobs-to-Be-Done thinking developed through my work with Bob Moesta.

We explore what was happening in customers' lives and businesses before they bought.

What triggered their search for something different? What alternatives did they consider? What nearly stopped them? Why did they ultimately choose this solution?

Only then do we examine how the company positions and sells its offering.

The two stories are often poles apart.

Customers describe the problems they were struggling with, the changes they needed to make and the progress they wanted to achieve.

Meanwhile, the sales team may be busy explaining products, features and capabilities.

That's the gap we close.

We use what we've learned from customers to build a sales story that starts where buyers are, not where the company's product presentation begins.

The company's story is not the one customers want to hear.

2. Build a Story Sellers Can Use in a Conversation

Once we understand why customers buy, we can develop a story that connects their circumstances to the value the company delivers.

This is where whiteboard storytelling comes in.

A well-designed whiteboard makes a complex proposition understandable by revealing the story step by step.

Instead of presenting everything at once, sellers build the picture as the conversation develops.

They explore the buyer's situation, introduce relevant insights, discuss alternatives and connect the ideal solution to what matters to buyers.

I've seen this work with some extraordinarily complex propositions.

For Siemens, I developed a whiteboard story around COMOS, its industrial engineering and operations platform.

The challenge was helping sellers make a complex business problem understandable, one step at a time, while inviting the buyer into the conversation.

The whiteboard wasn't a presentation. It was a framework for a conversation.

That's an important distinction.

We don't want sellers memorising a drawing and reproducing it, no matter who's sitting opposite them.

We want them to understand the story well enough to adapt it. In this case, the whiteboard is a scaffold to install the story into the salesperson.

3. The Whiteboard Is a Learning Mechanism, Not the Destination

When I started developing whiteboard selling programmes, the goal was to move sellers away from dependency on PowerPoint.

But today, my ambition goes further.

SLIDES → WHITEBOARD → CONVERSATION

First, sellers learn the story.

Then they practise explaining and drawing it.

Eventually, they internalise the story well enough to have the conversation naturally, without relying on slides or a whiteboard.

We're developing two capabilities.

Conversational competence: Understanding the story, explaining it clearly and asking relevant questions.

Situational fluency: Recognising what's happening in the buyer's world and adapting the conversation accordingly.

A seller might meet a buyer who's only beginning to recognise a problem.

Another might be comparing alternatives.

A third might be struggling to build internal agreement.

The same memorised pitch won't serve all three.

The goal is to help them know what to say, when, and why.

And that takes practice.

4. A Workshop Isn't Enough Either

There's another challenge with relying on the SKO to launch a new sales story.

People forget.

Even when the story is compelling and the workshop engaging, sellers return to demanding customers, crowded calendars and competing priorities.

What happens three weeks later?

How does someone revisit the story? What about the seller who missed the event or joins six months afterwards?

This is why I increasingly see whiteboard storytelling as part of a wider learning system.

An animated version can introduce the narrative before the SKO, reinforce it afterwards and support onboarding long after the event.

I saw the potential of this approach back in 2012.

I developed a complex client virtualisation whiteboard for HP. Working with TruScribe, we turned it into an animated video for onboarding and sales enablement.

The important lesson: a story developed for a sales conversation should become a reusable learning asset.

Today, that opens up broader possibilities.

A buyer-grounded story can support live workshops, animated learning, product launches, partner enablement and ongoing onboarding.

But there's a limit.

Watching a video doesn't make someone conversationally fluent any more than watching a cooking programme makes someone a chef.

Sellers still need to practise, receive feedback and learn to adapt.

Animation supports understanding and recall. Workshops develop conversational competence. Coaching builds adoption.

These aren't competing approaches. They're complementary parts of the same learning process.

5. Make the SKO the Beginning, Not the End

Too many sales enablement programmes measure success at the point of delivery.

How many sellers attended?

Did they enjoy the workshop?

Did they complete the training?

Those measures tell us very little about whether anything changed.

The real test comes afterwards.

Are sellers opening conversations differently?

Are they exploring customer problems more effectively?

Are they adapting their stories to different buying situations?

Are managers reinforcing the new approach?

I think about the desired outcomes in three stages:

OPEN BETTER

Start conversations around the problems and circumstances buyers recognise, rather than leading with product capabilities.

EXPLORE BETTER

Ask questions, uncover the buyer's situation and use the story to develop shared understanding.

ADVANCE BETTER

Help buyers understand their options, build confidence and move towards a decision.

That's what sales activation should achieve.

And it requires reinforcement beyond the event itself.

Managers need to observe conversations, provide feedback and encourage sellers to use the story in the field.

A story that isn't used has no commercial value.

6. A 60-Day Sprint to Make Your 2027 SKO Count

You don't need a year-long transformation programme to get started.

But you do need to work backwards from what sellers should be doing differently after the event.

Here's how I'd approach the first 60 days.

Days 1–15: Discover the Customer Truth

Interview 6-10 recent customer champions.

Understand their buying triggers, alternatives, anxieties and decision criteria.

Compare those findings with the company's existing positioning and sales messages.

Identify the gaps.

Output: A clear understanding of why customers buy and the story sellers need to tell.

Days 16–30: Build the Story

Develop the buyer-grounded story.

Create the conversational whiteboard and supporting customer-hero-stories.

Plan how the story will be introduced, practised and reinforced.

Where appropriate, begin developing an animated version for repeatable learning.

Output: A story designed for real buyer conversations, with a practical learning plan.

Days 31–40: Activate at the SKO

Demonstrate the story.

Help sellers understand its structure and practise using it.

Use role-playing and realistic buyer situations to move beyond memorisation.

Introduce visual learning assets where available.

Output: Sellers who understand the story and have begun developing the confidence to use it.

Days 41–60: Reinforce and Embed

Make the story easy to revisit through animation and other learning materials.

Equip managers to coach it.

Observe how sellers use it in real conversations.

Certify competence within 30 days of the SKO.

Gather feedback and refine what isn't working.

Output: Evidence of adoption, practical improvements and a foundation for continued reinforcement.

A full animation may need a longer production window, so its timing should be planned around the programme rather than forced into the sprint.

The important point is that learning and reinforcement continue after everyone goes home.

7. The Real Return on Your Sales Kickoff

A successful SKO isn't measured by the energy in the room.

It's measured by what happens when sellers return to their daily routine.

Do they understand why customers buy?

Can they explain the value of what they're selling in language buyers recognise?

Can they adapt their conversations to different situations?

And are they doing it?

That's where the return comes from.

Customer interviews help establish the right story.

Whiteboards make it understandable and conversational.

Animation makes it accessible and repeatable.

Workshops, practice and coaching help sellers internalise and use it.

Your 2027 Sales Kickoff shouldn't be where you present the sales story.

It should be where your sales team starts learning to own it.

Book a 20-minute call to discuss your product/solution/platform launch.

𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗦𝗞𝗢 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:35:56 GMT

Sales kick-offs are good at creating a moment.
The strategy is unveiled. The positioning is revealed. The messaging launches. Everyone leaves excited.

𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀.
A salesperson joins a customer call, opens the laptop and starts presenting.
What happens at SKO stays at SKO.
The real test is what they can do the next day.
Recognising a story when somebody presents it is easy. Retrieving it opposite a customer is hard.

𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗴𝗮𝗽.
#Whiteboard-storytelling helps close it.
Psychologists call it the drawing effect. Research shows we remember what we draw better than what we write. Drawing ties meaning to image and movement. You cannot watch your way into a story. You have to do it.

𝗦𝗼 𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝗞𝗢, 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗶𝘁.
Give them a whiteboard story. Have them draw it and explain it to a colleague. Swap. Play the customer. Interrupt. Challenge an assumption. Ask the question that should not arrive until slide 23. Run it again.
Nobody cares whether they can draw. The aim is familiarity.
And the story starts in the customer's world.
What is happening? What are they struggling with? What have they tried? What happens if nothing changes?
Only then: where do we fit?
Customers arrive for different reasons.
One needs to cut costs. Another is integrating an acquisition. Another has outgrown its operating model.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿'𝘀 𝗷𝗼𝗯 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲.
In a first meeting, you learn very little while you're presenting.
Buyers want to talk about their problems, not your products.
The best sales meetings are conversations.
Customers have an irritating habit of not following the deck. They ask awkward questions. Jump ahead. Take the conversation somewhere unexpected.
Sometimes they ask the presenter to stop.
A seller who only knows the deck has a problem.

𝗔 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 have a problem when the buyer takes them off script.
This is the part sales and enablement leaders miss.
The whiteboard is how sellers learn the conversation. They don't need it forever.
In a whiteboard storytelling workshop, they'll see it, say it, do it and draw it up to ten times.
Then comes the bit that matters.
Have them do it another ten times after SKO and then certify competence.
With each repetition, they rely on the whiteboard less, until the structure is theirs.
SKOs usually measure energy, attendance and feedback scores.
I would add one test.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗱𝗼 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝗞𝗢?
Can they use the new story?
Without the slides.
Eventually, without the whiteboard.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿𝘀.

Planning to Hire a Dinosaur to Train Your Sales Team?

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

b2b sellling training

Planning to Hire a Dinosaur to Train Your Sales Team?

Modernise your sales training by focusing on buyer validation over outdated qualification frameworks to build trust and shorten sales cycles.

Mark Gibson

Jul 23, 2025

Solution Selling. SPIN. BANT. MEDDPICCS

If your new sales trainer is planning on teaching frameworks built in the '90s, you're not preparing your team for today's buyer — you're handicapping your team before they even start.

The Real Issue: We're Still Training Qualification When Buyers Need Validation

The fundamental problem? SOLUTION SELLING, SPIN, BANT, and MEDDPICCS are all obsolete tools designed for a world where sellers controlled information flow.

However, today's buyers utilise LLMs to research vendors before even scheduling a meeting. When 67% of the buying journey happens before a prospect ever talks to sales, they don't need you to qualify them — they need you to prove you're worth their time.

In the first 10 minutes, they're asking:

Do you understand our business?
Can you help us?
Do we trust you enough to share real information?

Traditional frameworks train reps to extract information. Modern buyers want reps who demonstrate insight and earn the right to deeper conversations.

💥 In 2025, buyers won't tolerate:

Sales interrogations disguised as "discovery"
Qualification frameworks when they need competence signals
Rigid playbooks that ignore their context
Reps who follow frameworks instead of creating value through their interaction

Today's buyer wants a conversation that creates value from the first meeting — not a qualification checklist.

That means your training must be built on:

✅ Why your best customers decided to switch to you

✅ What created urgency and commitment

✅ Where trust was built — or lost

✅ Conversations that reflect buyer priorities, not seller processes

At Shift90, we train sales teams to lead with customer truth, not company pitch decks.

Our GTM enablement begins with Switch Interviews — revealing the emotional triggers and business pain points that drive decision-making, not what buyers think they should say during a sales call.

Then we design message architectures, deal narratives, and meeting frameworks based on what real buyers need to hear to move forward.

Teams trained on customer truth experience significantly shorter sales cycles and higher close rates because they're building trust from the very beginning, rather than trying to qualify their way to it.

🎯 Don't run your next sales kickoff on 30-year-old assumptions.

b2b sellling training

Whiteboard StoryTelling Trumps Powerpoint for Sales Enablement

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

whiteboard selling

Whiteboard StoryTelling Trumps Powerpoint for Sales Enablement

Death by Powerpoint is a familiar a phrase that I am sure every reader of this blog has both heard. WhiteboardSelling is changing Sales culture

Mark Gibson

Sep 11, 2010

Death by PowerPoint is a familiar a phrase that I am sure every reader of this blog has both heard and experienced...well near-death anyway. If you are interested in PowerPoint best practices you can read a blog I wrote earlier this year.

What happened, how did we get here, and what can we do to change?

When I started selling at Control Data Corporation, we were taught to present from 35mm slides on slide projectors like the one shown. Most companies would have corporate slide-decks and multiple product presentations, (they're in the round thingy on top of the projector) .

The big advantage of the 35mm slides was that everyone in sales and marketing essentially told the same story. Most decks would come with every slide conceivable, with the only flexibility for the individual being the slides you excluded from your presentation; for a really important client presentation, custom slides could be made at great expense.

The biggest disadvantage with 35mm slides apart from the lack of client interaction was that the room usually needed to be darkened for best display and often participants would fall asleep...especially if the presentation followed a 2 cocktail lunch.

Another disadvantage for an unlucky presenter was an attack of clumsiness caused by pre-presentation nerves, where the slide carousel would somehow slip from the hands and spill onto the floor releasing the complete deck just prior to the presentation. Now in panic mode, the presenter may have experienced an attack of fumbling and involuntary loss of motor control of the hands and temporary lack of sanity, trying to sort the slides into the right order in the carousel and start presenting.

PowerPoint Hegemony

In 1987, Microsoft acquired "Presenter" as it was known then; it was renamed PowerPoint and a hegemony grew in its wake. Not much has changed in presenting since the 35mm slide days though, other than the technology glitz and of course customizability; now a saleperson may have as many versions of the corporate and product slide-deck as they do prospects.

I remember making an initial call at Ericcson in Texas a few years ago; we walked into the meeting room and the only thing on the table was an LCD projector, it was running hot and awaiting our PC connection (and an expectation of the customary company pitch and feature-benefit dump)...we turned it off and had a productive opening meeting.

Buyers now cringe when a salesperson plugs in an LCD projector as the expectations from hundreds of prior presentations hit a negative anchor in the brain. A 2006 survey published in the Wall Street Journal* conservatively estimated that $252 Million in lost productivity occurs every day due to bad PowerPoint presentations. The reasons given in the survey why presentations were not well received;

The speaker read the slides to us	60.4%
The text was so small I couldn't read it	50.9%
Full sentences instead of bullets	47.8%
Slides hard to see because of poor color choice	37.1%
Moving flying text or graphics	24.5%
Annoying use of sounds	22%
Overly complex diagrams or charts	22%

Presentation Goals

I think our goals when making a sales presentation should be as follows;

Telling our value creation story in an engaging way, with the buyer central to our story,
To create understanding of our complex technology and processes,
To convey to the buyer how we can help them achieve their goals and why they should do business with us,
To discover more about the client condition, the issues they are struggling with and their priorities,
At every client interaction, we are attempting to qualify if the buyer is ready to advance in the sales cycle.

Enter the Whiteboard

Whiteboards aren't new, they have been around for over 30 years, however I was immediately interested when I heard of WhiteboardSelling. I had an Ah-Hah moment in the demonstration as I found a sloution to the problem I had been struggling with for a couple of years, – to find a way of extending messaging templates created in our client Messaging Architecture workshop into repeatable sales enablement tools that salespeople would love to use.

WhiteboardSelling incorporates a natural and structured approach to presenting ideas through visual storytelling, that helps overcome common sales performance problems often sighted in sales performance surveys;

They lack basic presentation skills,
They are unable to articulate the value proposition,
They are shaky on competitive knowledge,
They are forgetting to reference sell,
They lack the natural ability to consistently close for the next steps.

WhiteboardSelling Sales Enablement empowers everyone on the sales team to engage buyers in conversation around their issues and to tell their value creation story–with the buyer fully engaged and their problems at the center of the story.

WhiteboardSelling incorporates three phases in the methodology;

A Messaging Workshop, for developing a compelling message on a whiteboard, either from existing material or where this does not exist, to help create it.
An Enablement Symposium, where sales teams are trained in WhiteboardSelling and where they learn the to tell the visual story through role-playing.
A Certification Process, where individuals present using the Whiteboard and are critiqued by their managers, either in a classroom or over the Internet.

All three phases are underpinned by a WhiteboardSelling Workbench, hosted as a secure Software as a Service solution, that makes the whole process repeatable and the messaging tune-able over time.

I was so impressed with the demonstration and customer presentations that I accepted the invitation to become a WhiteboardSelling Affiliate and have begun the training and certification process.

If you are interested in learning more about WhiteboardSelling, please download the WhiteboardSelling Whitepaper.

If you are stuck with Powerpoint and cannot change the status-quo, you may find the advice in the death by powerpoint presentation of value.

* Jared Sandburg, "Cubicle Culture", Wall Street Journal Online, November 2006

whiteboard selling powerpoint whiteboard enablement training

What story are you telling about change?

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

sales enablement

What story are you telling about change?

Visual storytelling is 70,000 years old, it predates language. Can your sales team tell a why change story in a way that engages emotions, and informs?

Mark Gibson

Oct 19, 2022

This charcoal drawing by Susan Krough from San Jose is a prize-winner, entitled "The Letter."

I stopped in front of this artwork at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA. – riveted by the image, and wondered what was in the letter the young man is running to deliver, who is the woman, where is she going, and what had happened to arrive at this moment.

No words are needed, you can create your story in your own mind, but the image is powerful and it conveys tension, desperation by the young man, and the yearning of the woman to receive it. I guarantee it is not a bank statement.

This is visual storytelling at its best, meaningful, emotive, and engaging.

Visual storytelling has an enthusiastic mainstream audience with marketers and creative practitioners in B2C businesses for selling a plethora of products and services. Less so in selling B2B technology and services, although early adopters are embracing new tools and techniques to help convey value and engage emotions.

"Why Change" Storytelling

In most B2B SaaS selling situations today, the salesperson's job is to help the buyer to envisage a new way of operating that will produce a better outcome by using your products or services. This involves helping the buyer to understand the limitations of their current way of doing things and the impact the status quo is having on their business.

How do tell someone their baby is ugly, when it's theirs?

I suggest the use of pictures that help the buyer to understand where they are relative to their competition in the marketplace and to tell stories about how people in other companies just like theirs have been negatively impacted by not changing. Ultimately the buyer must convince themselves of the need to change and the value of the future state and then they must convince others to buy into the idea of change. This is not about the product, it's about the value of a new way of doing things.

A Call to Action

The presentations you are asking salespeople to give to customers are unlikely to convey the same emotional punch as "The Letter"

If your sales team has not learned the art of storytelling and adapting their listening to the emotional needs of their buyer, then they are underperforming.

If you need help creating visual aids that help buyers understand the need to change and the "why change" stories that connect emotionally to what buyers really care about, send me an email and we can discuss it.

If you would like to see what's new in my World, visit Whiteboard-Storytelling or you could book a free consultation.

BOOK A FREE CONSULTATION

sales enablement visual storytelling

How Much Does a Whiteboard Story Cost to Create?

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

consultative selling

How Much Does a Whiteboard Story Cost to Create?

Discover the cost factors and storytelling methods for creating effective whiteboard stories to enhance sales interactions and customer engagement.

Mark Gibson

Jan 29, 2025

People ask me this question when they are curious about creating whiteboards, and the truth is that it depends on your purpose and your desired outcome.

In this article, I discuss various whiteboard types, their purpose, and the process of creating a whiteboard story. Let's start with why.

Why Whiteboard Storytelling Works

It transforms static presentations into interactive dialogues.
Helps salespeople, presales engineers, and customer success professionals position themselves as competent, trusted advisors by visually aligning solutions with customer needs.
Simplifies complex ideas into digestible visuals that resonate with decision-makers.

Whiteboard Hierarchy

At the top level is the "solution", "Service", or "platform" whiteboard.

This story shows the company's unique vision and how its combined offerings solve customer problems.

The next level is a "product" story. This is quite specific and can be technical. It describes how using the products creates customer value.

A "vignette" is at the lowest level. It describes how a product use case solves a specific problem.

Whiteboard Storytelling Purpose

Question:

Do you expect salespeople to use elements of the whiteboard story in front of customers instead of relying on PowerPoint? Or,
Do you expect salespeople to learn and know the story using pictures and stories to elevate retention, gain confidence, and use elements of it contemporaneously in conversation?

If you answered yes to both, you are correct. Situational fluency is the primary purpose of creating a whiteboard story and immersing participants in intensive roleplay.

Nothing fosters message ownership faster than immersive whiteboard storytelling workshops.

After completing a whiteboard storytelling workshop, salespeople, SEs, marketers, and customer success teams can engage buyers in conversations rather than presenting at any point during the customer lifecycle.

Certification, which occurs a month after the workshop, ensures message ownership and that everyone practices telling the story in their way to attain conversational mastery.

Salespeople can use a whiteboard, flip chart, A-3 paper or Visual Confections to tell elements of their story in the time available and let the customer do most of the talking.

Visual confections are powerful in conveying complete visual stories when time is short. They are helpful for inside sales teams when the buyer is remote.

Outcomes of "Why Change" Stories vs "Why Me" Stories.

The outcome of a "Why Change" story is a new perspective for the buyer. Typically used early in the buying cycle, "why change" stories are designed to disrupt status-quo thinking.

This is the A->B step, where A is the buyer's current perspective, and B is a desired new perspective, i.e. "we must change".

We use "Why-me" stories when the buyer is in position "B" and they know they have to change. This is the B-C step when the buyer appreciates a new perspective and positions you as the best alternative.

"Why Me" stories position your solution or service vs alternate approaches and set the criteria for objective comparison. They introduce your company, use customer hero stories to explain why your product or service is superior and create customer value.

Whiteboard Development Methodology

Voice of the Customer Message Acquisition

The best whiteboard stories start with deep customer insight.

We use Customer Switch Interviews to deeply understand the motivations, decision-making processes, and struggling moments that lead customers to switch from one solution to another and what caused them to choose you over competitors.

These interviews focus on mapping the customer’s buying journey, from identifying a problem through passive looking to actively exploring alternatives.

Then, trade-offs are made to reach a decision.

However, our interest extends further to comprehending the implementation and the new service's impact on the business.

The elements of each interview dossier are abstracted to create a messaging architecture for reuse across the company.

Creating the Narrative

Our methodology uses three steps to achieve a whiteboard story that connects with customers and creates impact.

1. The Positioning Canvas

We construct a Positioning Canvas, a technique from April Dunford in Obviously Awesome.

The Positioning Canvas aligns teams around a clear, differentiated value proposition.

It enables businesses to stand out in crowded markets by making their strengths obvious to their ideal customer.

This encapsulates positioning on one page, facilitating alignment across marketing, sales, and product development teams. The process positions products effectively:

Understand best-fit customers: Focus on those who love your product to identify its unique value.
Identify competitive alternatives: Determine what customers would use if your product didn’t exist.
Highlight differentiators: Pinpoint what makes your product unique and valuable compared to competitors.
Define the problem you solve: Articulate your ideal customer's struggling moments that your product addresses.

2. Conversational Storyboard

We again use elements from April Dunford, this time from the book Sales Pitch.

We have adapted the storyboard in the following ways:

Market Insight: The story begins with a unique perspective or insight about the market that resonates with your audience. This establishes credibility and frames the customer’s situation in a way that highlights the importance of your differentiated value.
Alternative Approaches: Discuss the competitive alternatives or approaches customers might consider to solve their problems. We highlight the pros and cons of the options and place them on a matrix to create an opportunity to outmanoeuvre competitors when wrapping up your story.
Sets the perfect world solution criteria: Based on insights gained from customer switch interviews regarding what customers prioritise in an ideal solution, you establish the objective criteria for an evaluation that will position you as the optimal choice.
Introduce your Company and Solution: Introduce your company and product, connecting them directly to how your offering addresses the specific challenges your ideal customers face.
Tell a customer-hero story: This 120-150 word story is the proof prospects need of the impact of your solution and creates a buyer vision of how they could succeed in implementing your technology.
Differentiated Value: Focus on what sets your product apart and summarise the elements of value in your service or solution that differentiate your offering.
Objections: Anticipate common objections and use best practices to resolve them
The Ask: What are the commitments you want from the buyer upon completion of the conversation, and what are the next steps you agree to implement?

3. Whiteboard Story

The final step is to create the whiteboard story. We use the elements of the conversational storyboard and positioning canvas to create a compelling whiteboard story.

An excellent whiteboard story elevates the skills of all participants in conducting face-to-face or virtual meetings with clients and includes:

The whiteboard narrative embeds formal meeting opening techniques, including a portfolio opening—where we offer the prospect a variety of problems to identify that may resonate—and a sales prologue, a method designed to build trust and elicit the questions buyers want resolved in the meeting.
Insight and Challenges are extracted from the Conversational Storyboard and Messaging Architecture.
Place alternative approaches on a Positioning Matrix and explain the pros and cons of each approach. (Salespeople need to know these)
Perfect World Criteria extracted from the storyboard influence thinking and combined with the positioning matrix serve to reframe the conversation around the ideal solution/service.
Customer Hero Story just 2-3 bullets each on the situation, complication, turning point and resolution that capture emotions and impact of change.
Differentiated Value to round out the story and place yourself on the positioning matrix.
Call to Action
Objection Resolution technique is embedded on each page where common objections might occur.

Use Color Strategically with different colours to convey meaning:

Black: Market trends and framework.
Red: Current pain points or challenges.
Green: Your solution and its value/impact.
Blue: Proof points or next steps.

Factors Affecting Whiteboard Story Costs

Commercial Insight for "Why Change" Stories

Messaging that conveys commercial insight is necessary for a "why-change" whiteboard story.

Unfortunately, it is scarce or non-existent in most companies.

Commercial insight requires a dedicated team effort to develop a detailed understanding of how customers derive real value from using your products/services.

Few companies have the appetite for creating it because it is intellectually challenging. Creating commercial insight is the most significant contributor to the cost of whiteboard creation.

Most companies have value-messaging frameworks created by product marketing, which can be used in the whiteboard story to ensure the language on the whiteboard is congruent with corporate standards.

"Customer Hero" Stories

Every company with happy customers has created .pdf case studies about their customers' use of the product/service.

Unfortunately, in most of these stories, vendors take to chest-pounding. The product/service or company is the story's hero, not the customer.

Start by Interviewing your best customers.

The "customer hero" story uses the "hero's journey" storytelling format. It starts with the situation before the buyer changed it, i.e., the status quo, the buyer's emotions, and the trigger event that made them want to explore solution options.

There are complications in every significant acquisition involving process change. These are myriad, including pressure from a lack of funding, competing ideas, technology favouritism, regulatory pressure, and incompetent buyers causing frustration.

The zenith in the story arc of the hero's journey is the turning point. This is the lightbulb moment or ah-ha moment when the buyer grasps your vision of a future state where their problems are solved, or as Nancy Duarte calls it, a glimpse of their "future bliss".

The story concludes with the resolution. Change is complete; the organisation has transformed, derived the impact promised in the solution, and is living happily ever after.

Solution Complexity

Solution complexity adds to the cost as it can create a need for additional development and review cycles to ensure the technical team approves the final version of the story.

"Why-Me" Stories

These stories tend to be solution or service stories, and in most cases, the marketing team has messaging that the whiteboard creation team can reuse.

The best "why-me" stories extract deep insight from the Customer Switch interviews around how customers use the product or service to create impact and include a "who-we've-helped" story for a similar buyer or industry embedded in their structure. When customer win stories are in the form of corporate chest-pounding, as described above, they will have to be redeveloped and can add cost.

The Bottom Line

Whiteboard development costs range from $10,000 for a basic whiteboard to $65,000 for a complete messaging development process, a prerequisite for creating the why-change whiteboard story.

consultative selling challenger selling storytelling whiteboard storytelling JTBD

Demand Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta - Book Review

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

demand side sales

Demand Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta - Book Review

Bob Moesta’s book, “Demand Side Sales-101” extends “Jobs-to-be-done” thinking into an easy-to-apply framework that will change how you think about selling

Mark Gibson

Mar 6, 2023

I hadn’t heard of Bob Moesta’s work until Mark Littlewood, CEO of The Business of Software, recommended I watch a couple of videos from last year's UK conference.

I knew of Bob’s long-time collaborator and mentor, Clayton Christiansen, author of “The Innovators Dilemma” and numerous other publications, and his famous quip about why people buy a ¼” drill. They don’t buy it because they need the drill, they buy it because they need a ¼” hole somewhere.

Bob and Clay created a seminal theory about why people buy any material good or service that is considered a purchase, called “Jobs to be Done.”

The theory states that people hire products to make progress in their lives and to get the outcomes they seek. This theory is important for sales and marketing professionals to learn and consider in their go-to customer approach. Buyers don’t care about your product features and benefits, they care about overcoming problems, making progress, and getting things done at work, at home, and at play.

Bob Moesta is an engineer, innovator, author, thinker, and entrepreneur. In his career, he has helped thousands of people launch more than 3,500 products, everything from candy bars to household detergent to motor vehicles and SaaS software.

Bob Moesta’s book Demand Side Sales-101 extends “Jobs-to-be-done” thinking into an easy-to-apply framework for sellers and marketers to understand where customers are in their timelines and what they are up against when making buying decisions. Warning: Reading it is like taking the red pill in the movie The Martix. You can’t go back once you have read it.

Bob has had considerable exposure to traditional technology marketers and “Supply-side” thinking that obfuscates a product’s functional, social, and emotional value to consumers. Supply-side thinking comes with personas, demographics, and psychographics as well as the company-branded strapline, value prop, product features, and benefits, all content that marketers and salespeople package and spray liberally at “ideal customer” targets.

Whereas “Demand-side” thinking attempts to understand a buyer’s context and how, when, where, and why, they might hire a product to make progress.

When marketers and salespeople understand where buyers are in their timeline to change and the opposing four forces that accompany every decision to change, more meaningful communication becomes possible.

The Four Forces Model

The Four Forces Model conceptualizes the two forces that push a decision forward; the struggling moment, and the pull of the new, and the two forces that block; the habit of the present, and the anxiety of the new. When marketers and salespeople understand these fundamental forces they can communicate and connect with buyers in ways that create new possibilities.

“Marketing’s job is helping to prepare people to change” – this is a phrase from Bob’s talk about the book and it’s a profoundly different way of thinking about marketing communication.

Here's a simple test you can run on your website to see how well your core marketing messaging is aligned with helping your buyers overcome their struggling moments and the outcomes they seek. Add the words, "Now you can"... If your website is all about the product and not the outcome your buyers want, it's a clunk. For example, applying this to my Website, you get, With Why Change Selling, Now you can Design and Master Critical Sales Conversations to Improve Engagement, Build Pipeline, and Boost Win-rates.

The Buyers Timeline

The Buyer’s Timeline is another interesting perspective on the buying process. Bob makes important points about when and how to demo products as the buyer advances from first thought to first use, as the context of the demo and viewing audience change.

Making Progress in Your Sales Career

Selling is hard and seemingly gets more complex every year. That’s why salespeople must adopt a lifelong learning philosophy to stay current and relevant in a world where salespeople who create no value are disintermediated from the process.

The future of selling as a profession is consultative, and the required skillsets to compete in the arena are increasing in breadth and depth every year.

Bob Moesta’s book helped me look beyond the surface structures that buyers present and dig for their how and the why—the causation. It helped me understand the social, emotional, and functional jobs they are trying to get done that are causing them to want to speak with me. It also helped me understand the events that drive the purchase process, where they are in their timeline, and the blockers that cause deals to end in no decision.

Bob reminded me that the most important skills to master in selling (and life) are language and communication, and to listen intently to the language buyers use when they open their conversation to truly understand where they are coming from, their struggling moments, and the impact it has on them and those around them.

I strongly recommend reading Bob Moesta’s book, Demand Side Sales 101, and then reading Bob’s next book, Learning to Build… in that order.

demand side sales

Why Change Whiteboard Storytelling Workshop

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

consultative selling

Why Change Whiteboard Storytelling Workshop

This article is part 2 and explores a proven technique for activating channel sellers in a 1-hour virtual or in-person visual storytelling workshop

Mark Gibson

Apr 10, 2024

Part 1. of this article, Activating Direct and Channel salespeople, lays the foundation for a transformative approach to sale and channel activation—a proven technique that captures your compelling “why change” story in a whiteboard visual story. Combining multiple stories in a compelling hero's journey narrative that resonates with partners and customers effectively engages your direct and channel partner sales team and elevates their skills for more successful engagements.

Part 2. Whiteboard storytelling workshop

Why whiteboard storytelling?

If you are familiar with the power of whiteboard storytelling, you can skip this explanation.

Whiteboard storytelling sessions are an effective way of training salespeople because they help to convey complex information using simple pictures and stories.

According to the NeuroLeadership Institute, storytelling significantly helps us pay attention and cut through distractions, which is particularly important in our distraction economy.
When we see or hear a story, the neurons in our brain fire in the same patterns as the speaker’s, a process known as “neural coupling”.
This process occurs across many brain areas, including the motor and sensory cortices and the frontal cortex.
These networks are nurtured and solidified by anticipation of the story’s resolution, involving the input of your brain’s form of candy, dopamine.
When we experience an emotionally charged event or hear a story of the same nature, certain parts of our brain release excess dopamine, making it easier to remember something with greater accuracy.
Whiteboard imagery uses primary colours black, red, green and blue with universal meaning and simple line drawings that convey ideas and are easily understood, as is the cave art of 50,000 years ago.

Running a Whiteboard Storytelling Workshop

As the revenue champion, you will engage and build the partner relationship and set up the initial channel training sessions.

If your reseller channels partner has an active enablement team, they may offer to help and become trainers to spread the load.
It is ideal to create a video preview of the whiteboard story and load it into their LMS so salespeople can preview it before the event.

The Whiteboard Workshop Sales Kit

The following are in-person or virtual training prerequisites and must be available before a virtual or in-person training event.

A video of the complete whiteboard presentation (10 mins. max).
A storybook with the whiteboard build, matching narrative, objections, responses, and discovery questions.
A transparency flipbook with just the visual story that builds the story in a logical sequence.
A visual confection of the completed whiteboard image printed on a folded A-3 sheet of paper is a powerful way of telling your story and captivates attention.
A PowerPoint version of the visual story that matches the transparency build.

Your 1-hour session starts now!

Whiteboard storytelling workshop

Start the storytelling workshop by explaining what is about to happen, why the story is structured as it is, how the hour will evolve, why sellers need to give it their best shot and explain the competition and prizes for the best two roleplays.

Immersion and spaced repetition are proven techniques to build long-term memory, and we use these techniques in the whiteboard storytelling workshops.
The most effective whiteboard storytelling workshops will engage participants in role-playing the story as either the buyer or the seller, where they will see, say, draw and do the whiteboard story up to ten times in an hour. This technique is proven to build memory retention.
Multiple visual storytelling techniques are employed in a fun way to engage salespeople and build long-term memory.
A useful way of capturing the completive spirit of salespeople and reinforcing the story is to provide a prize for the best whiteboard storyteller and select the top two candidates to compete in a final roleplay for worthwhile first and second prizes.

Post Workshop Reinforcement

In the whiteboard storytelling workshop, participants will see, say or do between 8-10 repetitions of the story. From experience, we know that any speech, talk or whiteboard story must be practised at least 20 times before it sticks so that the speaker knows the script and flow and doesn’t have to think about what comes next.

Salespeople can practice their delivery using video rehearsal or with peers.
With practice, salespeople can confidently use any story's elements at any point in a sales call.
Post-workshop certification is where sales managers and an LMS are required for competency certification.
Reinforcement of key stories each month for the following quarter is important in combating Ebbinghaus’s forgetting effect.

Capturing feedback from the field

The top performers in the direct/channel team will likely engage and adapt what they have learned in the workshop.

It’s essential to capture what works, share the success of early adopters and what salespeople learn from each opportunity and use it to improve the story.

Are you ready to activate a channel to help accelerate growth? If so, using the whiteboard story we built in Part 1. in immersive whiteboard storytelling workshops combined with field reinforcement can supercharge your channel activation efforts and elevate your direct team's skills.

Learn more about whiteboard storytelling

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The Three Essential Pieces to Make Your SKO 2026 Successful

mark@whiteboard-storytelling.com (Mark Gibson) — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:48:47 GMT

salescraft

The Three Essential Pieces to Make Your SKO 2026 Successful

Essential strategies for SKO 2026: build customer-led stories, activate them across teams, and maintain momentum with a GTM Agent for lasting impact.

Mark Gibson

Oct 20, 2025

If you're planning SKO 2026, you’re likely focused on the experience: venue, sessions, speakers, and agenda. But three core pieces are usually missing from your plan. They are: a go-to-market strategy rooted in customer truth; and a mechanism to activate the story across the team and a GTM Agent that keeps the story alive. Without them, even the most well-produced SKO fails to deliver impact.

1. A Go-to-Market Story Rooted in Customer Truth

Most sales and marketin narratives are built from the inside out. They start with the product, move to value propositions, and end with a pitch. They sound fine in a workshop — but they collapse under buyer scrutiny.

To drive deals, your message needs to start with how your customers think, not how you want to sell. That means:

Understanding what triggers buyer action
Capturing the internal language used to justify decisions
Addressing objections before they arise

We call this customer truth, and it comes from structured buyer interviews, not guesswork in a messaging room.

The Before/After Gap: From Features to Customer Truth

Before (Product-led):

"We're a tech partner of choice for retail leaders. We support global retailers to expand and grow their market share through AI-driven, data-enabled, omnichannel solutions and custom enterprise applications."

After (Customer-led):

"A global payments company was expanding into new verticals. They needed senior developers immediately. Traditional hiring would take months—but their market windows wouldn't wait. Now their team is so seamlessly integrated that internal employees can't tell who's a contractor and who isn't."

What Changed:

Before talks about what the vendor has: AI-driven, data-enabled, omnichannel capabilities.

After talks about what the customer escaped: hiring delays killing strategic expansion.

Before lists technologies and solutions.

After shows the moment everything broke and the moment it got fixed.

Before is about the vendor.

After is about the customer.

The struggling moment makes it real. The outcome makes it credible. The anonymity makes prospects see themselves in it.

That's the gap most 2026 SKO plans will miss.

2. A Mechanism to Activate That Story Across the Team

Even the strongest narrative fails without activation. Most SKOs deliver slides and sessions. Few install the capability.

To make change stick, you need:

A story format that teams can rehearse in real scenarios
Cross-functional alignment from Sales, CS, and Marketing
Tools to reinforce the story well after SKO week ends

The most effective method we’ve seen? Whiteboard storytelling activation — where every team member learns to visually guide buyers through the logic of change, using customer-led stories they believe in.

In the process, each participant will see, say, draw, listen and roleplay the multiple embedded stories in the whiteboard story up to ten times in the space of a couple of hours. Customer-facing teams can now use the new message when they make their next call or customer meeting.

3. A GTM Agent That Keeps It Alive

SKO isn’t the finish line — it’s the start of a new motion. That’s where the GTM Enablement Agent comes in.

This AI-powered system transforms your buyer insights into a live resource your team can use every day. Sales reps match prospects to proven customer patterns. Marketers generate content from real buyer language. Leaders base decisions on evidence, not hunches.

Customer truth becomes operational — not archived.

SKO 2026 Is a Commercial Bet

If you're spending more than £100,000 on your SKO to get everyone in a room, the only number that matters is what happens next. Do behaviours change? Do stories stick? Does the message convert?

Without these three pieces — a buyer-led story, a mechanism to implement it, and an Agent to keep it alive — SKO is just theatre.

Let’s help you make it the turning point your GTM needs.

DM me or write SKO in the comments for the Shift90 2026 SKO Sprint Playbook.

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