When To Pitch The Analogue Way

BBC Future and Capital magazines have no place in a taxpayer funded ‘news’ site.

Still, while they exist for now, and if you can stomach the sadly merely surface level slant of most pieces, there is the occasional coffee break read available with some merit.

One such musing pondered why analogue design still endures.

Here’s its pair of most relevant paras to selling;

Choosing to use analogue processes and products permits design with minimum distraction and interference ­­– no Instagram checking, no emails, no pinging sounds to interrupt the process. Its results are far from perfect or polished, but they also don’t tend to get bogged down in details, such as the precise shade of blue the font should be, when you really just need to write the text or get doodling.
This is why the ‘back of a napkin’ sketch remains so powerful, why whiteboards are a mandatory feature within any innovative workspace, and why even Silicon Valley companies such as Google require their designers to take courses on how to sketch their ideas on paper as the first step when they are designing anything new on their websites. Design is a fluid process, and too often software is an obstacle in the way.

Without doubt one of the most consistent skills that I sharpen with salespeople (and surpringly often introduce anew) is how to draw out ideas to prospects.

This is nearly always unplanned. It’s just that solution sellers when in the presence of a potential client seem often unused to the action of taking a blank sheet of paper, or stand at a flipchart or whiteboard, and begin to ‘sketch’ meaning.

How about this for a manifesto, transposing our domain onto the tech observation above;

solution sales operations should require their salespeople to take courses on how to sketch their ideas on paper as the first step when they are pitching anything to prospects

Follow?

Whiteboards ought indeed be “a mandatory feature within any innovative” Sales space. One that is actively used to rehearse engaging prospects, and not simply for to-do lists or departmental notices.