Keep your Hands Clean, Messages Relevant, and Solutions JustifiedWhy ValueStory® Delivers where Traditional Whiteboarding Fails

Some Sales teams have dumped PPTs and moved to whiteboard-based presentations. This has improved customer

presentations, providing more personalizationof the content, and more emotional connection to the messaging. However, Whiteboards are passé and present

significant challenges to delivering expected sales success.

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 traditional 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.

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 justifi-cation that is relevant and that resonates with each decision maker. What is valuable to an operations manager is dramati-cally different than what matters most to a financial manager, IT manager or sales / marketing executive.

Interactivity

Why Whiteboarding Doesn’t Work

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 traditional whiteboard presenta-tions 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 traditional 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? Your presentations need to evolve: you learn from each engagement, your buyers evolve, your solutions advance and your competition steps it up. Unfortunately, with white-boarding, 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 sto-rytelling 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.

There are now 40% more stakeholders in every deal.It is more important than ever to deliver messaging relevant to each

decision maker.

Why Whiteboarding Doesn’t Work

When the traditional 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 traditional 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-grow-ing 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).

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.

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 challeng-es, 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.

IntelligenceEver try to manage whiteboards with your sales portal & enablement tools? You invested in a sales portal / enable-ment solution to help organize and in-telligently recommend the right content to present to prospects. 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.

ValueStory collects amazing insights about who is being

engaged and what is being presented in each

engagement.

Insights

The ChallengeSecurity risks

Procuring, managingand auditing

Gaps in Access

Gaps in TechnologyCoverage

TraditionalApproach Costs

Cost of SecurityManagement

Current LicenseSpend

Piecemeal DesignsGaps in coverage, multiplevendors for support

HeterogeneousDifferent management tools &tech for each point product

Constrained AccessSecurity managementcomplexity

Unplanned PurchasingShadow purchases

Why Whiteboarding Doesn’t Work

ValueStory can help organizations evolve from traditional whiteboards to more provocative, role / industry specific conversations.

ValueStory helps guide your sales reps to the right conversation fuel for each customer engagement, with customer-facing visual storytelling, dynamic provocative insights and personalized financial justification; All

while collecting vital usage information to drive adoption, and customer intelligence from each customer engagement.

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 DemoVisit alinean.com to learn more and schedule a demo

Download ValueStoryValueStory is available online as an HTML5 application, and as a native app through the Apple App Store.

Learn MoreVisit the Frugalnomics Survival Guide at alinean.com to learn more about value marketing & selling best practices.

Alinean empowers B2B vendors to better connect, engage and sell to today’s economic-focused buyer via the development and delivery of value messaging, interactive sales / marketing tools and sales training. Alinean-powered value storytelling, financial justification and ROI / TCO creates more compelling value-focused conversations and proposals — generating more demand, challenging the “do-nothing” buyer into action, 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.