Visuals are important in B2B sales, and leveraging whiteboards does have some key benefits over "Death by PowerPoint" presentations. However, traditional whiteboarding and whiteboard selling doesn't always delivery with issues of drawing capability, low adoption, and failure to capture customer intelligence. This whitepaper discusses the benefits and challenges of whiteboarding / whiteboard selling and suggests several key potential improvements.

1. ValueStory® Delivers where Whiteboarding Fails
Ever wonder what’s happening when you have
your back to your audience for most of the
engagement?
Delivering a provocative presentation is
important, but when you have your back to the
room for most of a whiteboarding session, how
much are you really connecting to and engaging
with your prospects?
ValueStory facilitates a more interactive
engagement. Instead of putting you in the
front of your room with
your back to the
audience for most of
the presentation,
ValueStory puts you
next to your prospect.
You sit on the same
side of the table, and
interact with dynamic
storytelling, surveys,
assessments and calculators.
Ever try to whiteboard via an online meeting?
Whiteboarding via an online meeting is a
challenge as the drawing tools within most online
meeting tools are difficult to use, and are not
very good. ValueStory makes it easy to present
professional drawings, animations, surveys, diag-
nostic assessments, benchmarks and calculators
dynamically and interactively in on-line meetings.
Ever try to get whiteboarding to reflect differ-
ent value messages for different roles, and for
different industries?
There are now 40% more stakeholders in every
deal. It is more important than ever to deliver
value messaging and justification that is relevant
and that resonates with each decision maker.
What is valuable to an operations manager is
dramatically different than what matters most
to a financial manager, IT manager or sales /
marketing executive.
Unfortunately, it is
almost impossible to get
the whiteboard content
and skills beyond com-
municating a few simple
insights, initial concepts
and generic value
messages. This may
work for the first five
to ten minutes of a meeting, but beyond that
your sales executives are on their own, and
often revert back to PPT presentations for the
rest of the meeting or follow-up. As a result, the
prospects are left less than fully engaged.
ValueStory can contain a wealth of storytelling
and justification content, intelligently recom-
mending and presenting the right value story-
telling, insights and benchmarks, as well as cost
Interactivity
Some Sales teams have dumped PPTs and moved to whiteboard-based
presentations. This has improved customer presentations, providing more
personalization of the content, and more emotional connection to the
messaging. However, Whiteboards are passé and present significant
challenges to delivering expected sales success.
Unfortunately, it is almost
impossible to get the
whiteboard content and skills
beyond communicating a few
simple insights, initial concepts
and generic value messages.

2. and value justification quantification for each
prospect and their unique perception of value.
Ever try to get your sales reps to draw your
whiteboards so they don’t look like chicken
scratches – so that they effectively and consis-
tently deliver your value messaging?
Despite training and certification, the majority of
sales reps still have difficulty delivering white-
board presentations that are readable, drawing
key concepts and delivering your value messages
effectively and consistently. ValueStory evolves
your engagements from markers and a white-
board. ValueStory leverages modern tablets and
captivating on-line meetings, providing auto-
mated drawings with simple gestures. This takes
the pressure off the sales rep, while providing
compelling content.
Do you wonder how whiteboarding is perceived
when the competition is engaging your pros-
pects with iPads and delivering great online
engagements using modern selling tools?
Modern sales teams require modern tools.
How modern do you look when your hands
are covered in marker ink? ValueStory is a
modern selling tool for modern sales teams and
customer engagements, evolving traditional
PPT presentations into provocative, datadriven
engagements, combining the best of value
storytelling and financial justification. Keep your
hands clean, your messages relevant, and your
solutions justified.
Ever try to quickly update whiteboard pre-
sentations and get the field to adopt the new
content?
Your presentations need to evolve: you learn
from each engagement, your buyers evolve, your
solutions advance and your competition steps it
up. Unfortunately, with whiteboarding, getting
presentation updates baked, communicated and
adopted by the field is easier said than done.
ValueStory automatically assures that the latest
versions of your value storytelling and justifica-
tion are used in engagements, providing an easy
way to automatically update and evolve engage-
ment value storytelling and justification without
requiring each sales executive to relearn and
retrain.
Insights
Ever try to add value quantification to
your whiteboarding?
Today’s buyer is more skeptical and frugal
than ever before. Beyond a few one-size-
fits-all “grabbers”, whiteboarding fails
to connect with the rational part of the
decision making process that enables you
to overcome the skepticism and financial
focus of today’s prospect.
Unlike whiteboarding, ValueStory commu-
nicates value messages with compelling
and personalized insights, benchmarks,
quantification and financial justification
unique to each prospect - everything
needed to make your proposal a priority
with today’s more frugal buyer. The
tool includes interactive and datadriven
benchmarks and insights via surveys,
diagnostic assessments, and cost / value /
TCO calculators.
When the whiteboard session is over,
what is your critical leave-behind?
Many stakeholders will not be in the
meeting or be accessible. At the end of the
whiteboard session, what does your team
do? Take a photo of the whiteboard
and email it to the attendees? Present a
one-size-fits-all version in PDF?
Unfortunately, whiteboarding doesn’t
create a “leave-behind” report capturing
the personalized presentation, and fails to
provide the tools to share the presentation
with the ever-growing number of other
decision-making stakeholders who were
unable to attend.
ValueStory produces a completely
personalized PDF of the engagement,
including all of the presented value
storytelling, survey / assessment responses
and benchmarks, financial justification,
customized drawings and notes.
The PDF can be instantly emailed to the
prospect at the end of the meeting, and
is easily shared with other stakeholders.
Tracking can be included to determine
if the prospect views the PDF, or forwards
it to others (including details of who they
forwarded it to).
ValueStory Delivers where Whiteboarding Fails

3. Ever try to collect customer intelligence from a
whiteboard?
With whiteboards you miss a great opportunity
to collect customer intelligence from each
engagement, which if captured could improve the
understanding of customer challenges, success-
es, trends and priorities, and be leveraged to
provide dynamic insight into future prospects.
ValueStory collects amazing insights about who
is being engaged and what is being presented in
each engagement - customer intelligence that
is tied back to opportunities (via the optional
salesforce.com AppExchange application) to
help you understand what specific engagements,
positioning, value messages and quantification
are most / least effective.
Ever try to manage whiteboards with your sales
portal & enablement tools?
You invested in a sales portal / enablement
solution to help organize and intelligently recom-
mend the right content to present to prospects.
Unfortunately, whiteboards cannot be managed
within your sales portal / enablement solution.
Intelligence
ValueStory Templates can be managed within the
sales portal / enablement solution just like any
other document, recommended intelligently for
the right selling solution. The ValueStory player
is also integrated within several mobile selling
solutions, providing for point-and-click execu-
tion, single identity / access management and
integrated usage reporting.
Ever try to link what is being done with your
whiteboarding with the opportunities in CRM?
With whiteboards, it is impossible to know or
verify what is being delivered in the field. And, it
is critical to know which opportunities have been
engaged using your whiteboard, and what the
reaction was.
With ValueStory and the optional AppExchange
application, ValueStory engagements and usage
are captured and tracked with the opportunity.
Key data and intelligence are saved in the
CRM system – information about exactly what
personalized ValueStory content was presented,
who was presented to, a copy of key metrics /
benchmarks and insights, the PDF report, and
tracking on whether the follow-up PDF was
opened / forwarded by the prospect. 
Schedule a Demo
Visit alinean.com to learn
more and schedule a demo
Download ValueStory
ValueStory is available
through the Apple App Store
Learn More
Visit the Frugalnomics Survival
Guide at alinean.com to learn
more about our strategies
Alinean empowers B2B vendors to better connect, engage and sell to today’s economic-focused buyer via the development and delivery of interactive value
marketing and selling tools. Alinean-powered value storytelling, financial justification and ROI / TCO solutions create more compelling value-based conversations
and proposals — generating more demand, igniting buying decisions, accelerating sales cycles, increasing deal size and improving competitive win rates.
Leading B2B firms leveraging Alinean tools include: HP, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, OfficeMax, IDC/IDG, AT&T, BMC Software, ADP and SolidWorks.
ValueStory Delivers where Whiteboarding Fails