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.

1. ValueStoryDeliversWhereWhiteboardingFails
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,Whiteboardsarepasséandpresentsignificantchallenges
to delivering expected sales success.
Interactivity
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, diagnostic assessments, benchmarks and calculators dynamically and
interactively in on-line meetings.

2. Ever try to get whiteboarding to reflect different 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 communicating 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 recommending and presenting the right value storytelling, insights
and benchmarks, as well as cost 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 consistently deliver your
value messaging?
Despite training and certification, the majority of sales reps still have difficulty
delivering whiteboard presentations that are readable, drawing key concepts
and delivering your value messages effectively and consistently.
ValueStory evolves your engagements from markers and a whiteboard.
ValueStory leverages modern tablets and captivating on-line meetings,
providing automated 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 prospects 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, data-
driven 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 presentations and get the field to
adopt the new content?
Yourpresentationsneedtoevolve:youlearnfromeachengagement,yourbuyers
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 justification are used in engagements, providing an easy
way to automatically update and evolve engagement value storytelling and
justification without requiring each sales executive to relearn and retrain.

3. 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 communicates 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 data-
driven 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).
Intelligence
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, successes, 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.

4. Ever try to manage whiteboards with your sales portal & enablement tools?
You invested in a sales portal / enablement solution to help organize and
intelligentlyrecommendtherightcontenttopresenttoprospects.Unfortunately,
whiteboards cannot be managed within your sales portal / enablement solution.
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 execution, 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.
Next Steps
For more information visit NoPPT.com
Download the ValueStory App now
Requires an iPad2 or greater
About Alinean
Alinean empowers B2B vendors to fight Frugalnomics and sell to today’s economic-focused buyer via the
development and delivery of value selling and marketing tools. Alinean-powered interactive white papers,
ROI / TCO calculators and ValueStory™ App create more compelling value-based engagements and proposals
—generating more demand, challenging the “do-nothing” buyer into action, accelerating sales cycles and
increasing deal size.
Leading B2B firms leveraging Alinean tools include: HP, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, OfficeMax, IDC/IDG, AT&T,
BMC Software, Siemens, NetApp and SolidWorks.
Learn more at the Fight Frugalnomics™ Resource Center http://fightfrugalnomics.com, or by visiting
http://alinean.com, or calling 407.382.0005.
© Copyright 2013 Alinean, Inc. All Rights Reserved