Corporate Visions Acquires WhiteboardSelling

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev., Sept. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Corporate Visions, Inc., the leading sales and marketing messaging company, today announced that it has acquired WhiteboardSelling®, a sales enablement tools company. This move expands Corporate Visions' business and strengthens its reputation as the leader in helping companies differentiate their marketing and sales conversations. 

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Joe Terry, Corporate Visions' CEO, said: "This acquisition is a significant part of our strategy to grow both organically and inorganically. It also expands our global presence with talent, experience and clients. And, it continues to solidify our leadership position in the marketing and sales messaging, tools and skills category." 

Corey Sommers and David Jenkins co-founded WhiteboardSelling in 2007 with a mission to help marketing and salespeople use hand-drawn visual stories instead of documents and slides to sell expensive solutions to educated buyers in competitive markets. To date, the company has created over 500 whiteboards for more than 50 companies and trained more than 50,000 salespeople around the world. 

"By becoming a part of Corporate Visions team, we have the opportunity to accelerate the growth of our whiteboarding concepts and capitalize on the intense interest in these solutions significantly faster than we could on our own," said Sommers. "Our solution aligns perfectly with Corporate Visions' focus on differentiating customer conversations because it helps marketing develop messages and tools that the field will actually use to tell a better story. It also gives salespeople a simple, repeatable process so they can gain greater confidence that they can create a differentiated experience in the buying cycle."

The effectiveness of visual storytelling is rooted in brain research, which reveals that a person's "old brain," is responsible for making decisions; however, that part of the brain does not have the capacity for language. In order to get customers and prospects to want to change and to choose your company or solution, you need to leverage the power of visual storytelling, which is exactly what the WhiteboardSelling solution aims to accomplish.  

"88 percent of executive-level buyers believe it's important that a sales pitch is framed as a conversation, as opposed to a prepared PowerPoint presentation," said Scott Santucci, principal analyst and research director at Forrester Research. "WhiteboardSelling's methodological approach for helping salespeople deliver more interactive conversations is a powerful complement to Corporate Visions' messages, tools and skills offerings. Whiteboarding provides a proven approach to presenting complex and abstract information in a simple, concrete way, which drives a more natural sales conversation."

Because the WhiteboardSelling solution creates visual tools and teaches sales teams how to use visual storytelling to engage customers and prospects in a compelling way, it will become an integral part of Corporate Visions' customer conversation system moving forward.

"WhiteboardSelling is a perfect fit with Corporate Visions' focus on differentiating customer conversations," said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer for Corporate Visions. "Whiteboarding is really a process of building differentiated messaging, putting it in a differentiated tool, and differentiating the delivery of that story, whether it's over the Web or in person."

By leveraging the WhiteboardSelling solution and the power of visual storytelling, Corporate Visions customers will be able to  more effectively loosen the "status quo," otherwise known as "no decision," when they are trying to create an opportunity. It can also help more clearly distinguish the differences in their solution from a competitor's and it can better visualize the implementation process or business case when trying to close a deal.

The acquisition was officially completed on August 30, 2012. For more information about what this acquisition means for the market, please view this Brainshark presentation.

About Corporate Visions, Inc.

Corporate Visions, Inc. helps global business-to-business companies create more sales opportunities, overcome the status quo, and win more deals by improving the conversations sales representatives have with customers. Companies engage Corporate Visions in three key areas:

• Developing differentiated messages that concentrate on customer needs;
• Deploying tools that support critical steps in the buying cycle and that salespeople will actually use; and
• Delivering sales skills training that teaches salespeople how to tell their story in a way that is impactful, engaging and memorable.

Corporate Visions helps clients such as ADP, Dell, Dow Jones, GE and Oracle align marketing and sales with a repeatable methodology for creating unified, sales-ready messages that lead to winning conversations with customers. For more information about Corporate Visions visit www.corporatevisions.com or call 775-831-1322 or 800-360-SELL.

SOURCE Corporate Visions, Inc.